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Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

economist.com

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Re: Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

#81

Post by strangeloops85 »

Public schools in the US get a relatively small fraction of their budget from state funding. The distinction between public and private is not as large or substantial as one might imagine.

For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.

Re: Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

#82

Post by lenerdenator »

cg5280 wrote: post #24
steveBK123 wrote: post #9

I am not a fan of the orange man. But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student. All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and…

Many of the "good" universities in general seem more focused on prestige and acceptance rates than they do educating the masses. The Ivies could significantly expand the sizes of their student bodies (and to their credit they do make some content accessible online), but they don't because a lot of the value of a Harvard education is the exclusivity and the social network it gets you into.

And therein lies why a lot of Trump's base has a massive problem with them.

To be fair, the exclusive social network very much includes Trump, but it spent most of the last 50 years bringing itself capital at the expense of Trump's base.

Re: Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

#83

Post by _cs2017_ »

Kapura wrote: post #11

This framing conveniently ignores the question of whether the president should have the authority to single-handedly withhold funding for universities, broadly considered to be one of the foundational pillars of America's strength in the 20th century. While I think it's interesting and answers the specific question it raises, it's wild that the economist has just accepted that the president has dictatorial powers.

"Conveniently" is the wrong word to use here. "Conveniently ignores" implies that the author intentionally disregarded some known facts to make their argument look more persuasive. However, this is not the case here. The article's argument is that a reduction in government funding is very damaging even when it is small relative to the endowment size. This argument would not lose any of its power if the author covered the topic of whether the president has the power to withdraw funding.

(On a side note, the word "framing" is also the wrong word to use.)

One way to phrase your message correctly would be: "This article is about the impact of the president's decision, but I wish it also talked about whether the president has the authority to make that decision in the first place".

Re: Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

#84

Post by lenerdenator »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #42
steveBK123 wrote: post #9

I am not a fan of the orange man. But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student. All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and…

> BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county. Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americ…

> Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.

That can't happen in a vacuum, though.

50 years ago, there was a far narrower gap between the two groups. Now it's expanding. That "no more free lunch" crowd was that "educated coastal elite" of the time. Remember, Reagan was elected governor of California twice.

Re: Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

#85

Post by Interesco »

Papirola wrote: post #64
micromacrofoot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out both Jewish and Muslim students are getting harassed, which isn't surprising at all to anyone paying attention... this was also true before the current israel/palestine conflict https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/29/us/harvard-reports-antisemiti...

you should read this: https://www.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/FINAL-Har...

Is there a specific section you are referring to? It seems to back up their point throughout the document - i.e. on page 262 "Over a half of Muslim student respondents, a quarter of Jewish student respondents and a bit under a half of MENA student respondents do not feel physically safe on campus"

Re: Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

#86

Post by lief79 »

didgetmaster wrote: post #78

It is part of the political reality that we live in. Whichever party is currently in power, will inevitably use that power to promote ideas that are favorable to them and to dissuade ideas that they are opposed to. The same people who are whining about the Trump administration abusing their power by doing these things; were cheering on the Biden administration for doing similar things from the opposite angle. This is…

The last part is accurate, but equating the two is a bit of stretch. The democrats went out their way to do everything by the book. They also generally took the time to understand the systems they were working with.

The current presidency went in with the assumption that everything was wasteful, and didn't take the time to understand what they were cutting. Hence, emergency rehires, judicial blocks on firing, etc.

The amount of noise about it was the same, but the root causes and support are far from equivical.

Re: Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

#87

Post by zanecodes »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #54
steveBK123 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RE: our parents working their way through college, I think two things happened at least, yes. Reagan gutted education spending. But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal lev…

> But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years a…

For the curious, the graphs in question: https://daughternumberthree.blogspot.com/2020/01/graphing-re...

Re: Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

#88

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

nine_k wrote: post #52
Kapura wrote: post #11

This framing conveniently ignores the question of whether the president should have the authority to single-handedly withhold funding for universities, broadly considered to be one of the foundational pillars of America's strength in the 20th century. While I think it's interesting and answers the specific question it raises, it's wild that the economist has just accepted that the president has dictatorial powers.

This is a fair question, but it's being asked a lot already. Let's imagine that completely legitimate circumstances lead to the US Government stopping the stream of grants to the Ivy League universities. How would they cope, given their enormous endowments that generate significant interest? This question is asked much less, and the answer is much less obvious. Hence the value of TFA.

What's the point of such an abstract question? The university's goals and expected resolution for the problem would always depend critically on why the stream of grants stopped.

Re: Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

#89

Post by jasonhong »

steveBK123 wrote: post #41
School-Cotton wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The feds aren’t funding ivies for the purpose of education, they’re funding researchers who happen to work at the ivies to do research.

Multiple people pointing this out, and absolutely right. Some question though of how all the research grants do kind of cross-subsidize the education in a way as it pays for research professors, their graduate staff, etc? Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?

This was recently discussed on Hacker News about two weeks ago.

See this blog post by Steve Blank talking about the rise of research universities and why the USA is a science powerhouse. https://steveblank.com/2025/04/15/how-the-u-s-became-a-scien...

And the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692360

Also, pragmatically, it's a system that has yielded incredible ROI since WW2, in terms of new industries, new companies, jobs, science, economic gains, productivity gains, and national security. The US university system is the envy of the entire world, and it's being targeted for dismantling by very petty, cruel, and incompetent people.

Re: Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?

#90

Post by jmyeet »

People need to understand how the pharmacology pipeline works.

The Federal government provides funds for research. That research finds novel compounds and new treatments. The product of that resaerch then gets transferred to private companies who commercialize it and then make massive profits from it.

Generally speaking, drug companies don't research with one exception: patent extension. A given compound will be patented and then the patent owner will have a monopoly over that for a number of years, supposedly because there'd be no investment otherwise, but that patent will ultimately expire. Except... it doesn't really. It's why over a century later we're still dealing with insulin patents. "Patent extension" is the process where you make a small change to a molecule or a delivery system and then get a new patent, refusing to sell the old. And it can be hard for someone else to produce a generic for many reasons.

Now I have a lot of problems with this system:

1. Any form of patent extension should be illegal, basically;

2. The institutions who actually come up with this should share in the profits. After all, it's the government paying for it;

3. We give a monopoly to these companies in the US where it's illegal to import the exact same product from overseas, which leads to something costing $800 in the US and $5 in France.

But given this is the system we're stuck with, cutting off funding makes absolutely no sense. Why?

1. It's going to dramatically impact drug companies negatively in the future as their supply of new products dries up;

2. It's antoerh element of soft power where the US can use the power to produce certain medicines to influence other countries. Think about what happens if China becomes the source for the world's medicines (personally, i'd be a fan but the purveyors of this policy most definitely are not).

Government research has given us things like the Internet and mRNA vaccines. This is so unbelievably shortsighted.

And why are they doing it? Well, the party of Free Speech is punishing institutions because some of their students made factually correct but mean statements about Israel.

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