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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

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Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#51

Post by cycrutchfield »

barry-cotter wrote: post #50
cycrutchfield wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not going to happen because the rankings racket rates them based on their exclusivity.

The tax code and federal funding is a very big stick to hold over universities to get them to do what you want. If the federal government can force US states to change their drinking laws through highway funding they can do whatever they please. Remember, the constitution restrains the government exactly as much as it wants to be restrained.

States already do this with their public universities, that’s why they are generally considered less prestigious despite the education being basically the same. Not sure why private universities seem to get a free pass.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#52

Post by quadrifoliate »

xbar wrote: post #25

Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players. Here's the solution: 1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies. The quality of the educ…

From sources like this [1], it looks like the cohort of high school graduates is usually between 3 and 4 million. So that means the total college-eligible cohort is 12 - 16 million.

Let's say 25% (a fourth) of them end up attending this magical national public college. That's a 3000000 / 10000 = 300:1 ratio of students to teachers. That's a lot of students per PhD to handle, for a $100k salary with greatly reduced career prospects in academia, since they are not doing any research.

By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse.

Feel free to point out a flaw here, but I don't think this plan will work. Basically, you'll end up doing a MOOC site, but those...already exist?

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[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/12/15/what-do-new-p...

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#53

Post by wins32767 »

It's not endowments that makes elite universities elite, it's a combination of social cachet, alumni networks, and brand. Cambridge, Oxford, and Sorbonne have been elite universities for centuries, and it's not mainly from their endowments. It's because if you are [smart|powerful], you want to go to a school with other [smart|powerful] people and you know [smart|powerful] people will be going there. A larger marketing budget isn't going to get people to look at a resume and pick the University of Phoenix over Harvard.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#54

Post by a2tech »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #52
xbar wrote: post #25

Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players. Here's the solution: 1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies. The quality of the educ…

From sources like this [1], it looks like the cohort of high school graduates is usually between 3 and 4 million. So that means the total college-eligible cohort is 12 - 16 million. Let's say 25% (a fourth) of them end up attending this magical national public college. That's a 3000000 / 10000 = 300:1 ratio of students to teachers. That's a lot of students per PhD to handle, for a $100k salary with greatly reduced ca…

No post body was provided.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#55

Post by jjeaff »

zeusk wrote: post #7
ajross wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We literally just handed out trillions minted out of thin air. It's so weird to see memes like this persist. No, no we didn't. Those spending bills were financed via deficit spending: they were loans. All spending bills are loans. The treasury department raises money by selling bonds. Every deficit dollar the government spends is a dollar it takes in from some investor somewhere who wanted to park money in US treas…

Because when the Federal Reserve buys those treasuries, you're creating money out of thin air (QE).

Notably, it's a temporary creation. As those bonds get paid off, along with interest, the fed must either roll that money over to buy more, or simply disappear it off their balance sheet. Which is part of what they are doing now with Quantitative Tightening or QT.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#56

Post by somethoughts »

projektfu wrote: post #36

It would make a lot of sense for the top schools to expand like they did in other countries. Oxford and Cambridge have 12,000 undergrads each. University of Toronto has 44,000. Harvard and Princeton have about 5,000 each and Stanford has like 8,000. The US has more top schools, perhaps, than other countries, but not as many seats, I think.

I think one of the keys issues is the US News ranking criteria. US News took the easy way out with respect to two significant components of the score [1].

- Endowment per student - bonus points for amassing the largest treasure per fewest students

- Selectivity - bonus points for excluding people before they come in which has no bearing on the effectiveness of the school itself in educating

Also a large percentage weight is given to academic peer ratings of the schools prestige which itself is a feedback loop of when US News used to reward pure selectivity (i.e. lowest acceptance ratio per applicants).

The endowment component of the score should be capped so as not to reward stockpiling.

An additional component of the score should be based on the student body of the school system (higher # of students in the school system is better) should also encourage the development of systems of universities (i.e. multiple campuses. The UC School System would rank much higher - as well as it could lead to the development of Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Cornell/Stanford/etc. School Systems.

Interesting piece - How to Game the College Rankings

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeast...

[1] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-...

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#57

Post by harmon »

pcmoney wrote: post #19

Its not like those schools are demonstrably better its that those schools are exclusive and provide social connections to elite social classes. The whole point of them existing is to be exclusive more than it is to educate.

I disagree. I went to a "tier 3" school for undergrad and then "elite" schools for post-graduate education. The difference in course and instruction quality, experience level of the professors, student ambition, and caliber of student between the classes of schools was night and day. The "mediocre" undergrads I met during my post-graduate education were as good as the best people I went to school with for undergrad.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#58

Post by inter_netuser »

derbOac wrote: post #34
jjeaff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any proof that the elite connections make any difference on average. The Dale and Krueger study in fact found evidence that there was no statistical difference in lifetime income for ivy league grads vs less elite schools when controlling for factors like sat scores. In fact, they compared people who were accepted but did not go to an ivy league vs those who did go. Other subsequent studies by…

I don't know. Just as one example, I've seen here on HN ads for positions that explicitly mention (in not so many words) that they're only looking for grads from elite colleges. The UK just codified this into visa law. Income is a fuzzy thing, and distinct from opportunities. I'm always looking for empirical data to bear on a question, so the studies you're mentioning are important. But at the same time I'm sort of s…

> The UK just codified this into visa law.

Really? Is there a list?

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#59

Post by inter_netuser »

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #21
bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a top tier school would be hard with a large pile of money, but would be a lot easier if you started with a large pile of money and Harvard . This is an argument against the article. But the article's plan could be used as a threat. Use it or lose it, expand your enrollment substantially or we'll tax your endorsement away.

Creating a top tier university with a big pile of money would be trivial. Match every grant dollar for dollar, provide lab space and free tuition for 30 years and you’d have the most productive faculty and the best students overnight. It would just cost 10s of billions.

Precedent exists (minus students)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#F...

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#60

Post by derbOac »

inter_netuser wrote: post #58
derbOac wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. Just as one example, I've seen here on HN ads for positions that explicitly mention (in not so many words) that they're only looking for grads from elite colleges. The UK just codified this into visa law. Income is a fuzzy thing, and distinct from opportunities. I'm always looking for empirical data to bear on a question, so the studies you're mentioning are important. But at the same time I'm sort of s…

> The UK just codified this into visa law. Really? Is there a list?

Effectively, yes. The list isn't given directly, but is defined indirectly, explicitly in terms of other lists.

The university has to be in the top 50 of two or more of certain ranking lists (which are specified):

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/may/30/visa-schem...

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