9 ms·

It would be interesting to compare the utility of one large $100 million+ grant to an institution like MIT, Yale or Harvard that is already well-endowed, compar

It would be interesting to compare the utility of one large $100 million+ grant to an institution like MIT, Yale or Harvard that is already well-endowed, compared to a hundred different million dollar grants to institutions across the USA or the world, where the money might arguably be more effectively used or sorely needed. The counterpoint would be that the money could support fundamental research that eventually results in a much larger payoff to the world at large, but I'm not convinced that this outweighs the benefits of funding hundreds, or even thousands of students/scientists in less prominent schools who might go on to make such discoveries themselves. Of course, all this assumes that donor's primary aim is to make the largest possible impact, when in all likelihood it's motivated more by an affinity for the school, or in the case of other donors, prestige from having their name on the walls.

hertclef 9y ago
Highly relevant to your comment is episode 6 of Malcomb Gladwell's Revisionist History Podcast [0]. In the episode, Gladwell asks the president of Stanford whether there was any amount of money he would turn down because he thought it would better spent somewhere else. He replied, somewhat evasively, that no, there wasn't really an sum large enough. It's a truly incredible interview to listen to. I highly recommend the three part series about college education that makes up episodes 4,5,6 of the season 1. But, if you have the time, I think the entire podcast is excellent while noting that I am not a huge fan of Gladwell's books. [0] http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  > asks the president of Stanford Interesting tidbit: the president of Stanford at the time was John Hennessy. Take any modern CPU, and you'll probably find that much of its internal architecture is built on work by Hennessy and his group at Stanford. He is arguably the greatest computer architect of all time.
  - deepnotderp 9y ago
    He's definitely a powerhouse, but I think Patterson is a stronger contender for that title.
    - Cyph0n 9y ago
      They would definitely both be among the very top candidates to receive such a title.
      - thanksgiving 9y ago
        Any time someone brings up Stanford, I want to scream patent troll. If you sell to a patent troll, you are a patent troll. http://news.stanford.edu/2015/02/23/haber-patent-trolls-022315/ http://news.stanford.edu/2015/02/23/haber-patent-trolls-0223... Shame on you, Stanford! What a sorry college.
    - dekhn 9y ago
      Fortunately they collaborated and wrote a book on the subject!
      - deepnotderp 9y ago
        *THE book :)
- kbenson 9y ago
  > He replied, somewhat evasively, that no, there wasn't really an sum large enough. Which, of course, is his job. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that he has an entirely separate point of view in private when being candid. That said, my immediate reaction to reading the first sentence of the GP comment was to think of that same Revisionist History episode. I'm excited that the new season is beginning soon. I will temper that with a caveat that I think Malcom does push his agenda and narrative fairly hard in those podcasts, but that does make for a really compelling story. If you can separate the facts from the portions it feels like he's omitting, you'll likely get more out of the podcasts, but I find the exposure to new ideas particularly fun and useful. I especially liked the Moral Licensing episode, which I only listened to for the first time a few months ago. It's particularly fun to listen to that one and realize that his specifics were all wrong, but the generalities and basics still match perfectly with the new Political reality that was only 6-12 months int the future from that recording (regardless of whether you believe in the premise). I'm being particularly vague on purpose here, because I truly believe that episode was at least twice as as entertaining and memorable because of that situation, and I don't want to ruin it for anyone. That episode was so good, it's probably worth a re-listen now if you listened to them as they were released.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- tptacek 9y ago
  I don't have much to add to this beyond another strong recommendation that you listen to that 3-part series; it's the strongest work he's ever done in any medium.
  - canes123456 9y ago
    I just remember 2 episodes. While it was entertaining, one episode lacked any intellectual rigor at all. It seems like Gladwell can't understand the counterarguments at all and chooses to cut out most of them with out realizing. One obvious thing he misses is the moral hazard of rewarding poor performing schools. Also, the real question is why donate to universities at all? There is no real reason why universities can't support teaching purely on tuition. University can easily charge on a sliding scale based on need and SAT scores. If they want more kids to go to college, they can give to scholarships directly. Giving to university directly just promotes spending them on outspending each other on other axis for attention...
    - tptacek 9y ago
      The "obvious" point you're making in your second graf is one Gladwell agrees with.
      - canes123456 9y ago
        Is the second reason one he actually agrees with? Does he consider the second order effects? He thinks giving more to poor schools would be a "good" thing. All it would do is cause more schools to try to fight for prestige and donations. We have 15ish schools were their number one goal is to find ways to get donations. What would happen if 150ish school expected to be able to get huge sums of money as donations? Many would change their focus away from education and what students what to donors. I think it likely to increase tuition and decrease enrollment. Top 15 schools need to be selective to be the best. If the 100th best school want to look like it getting better it needs to become much more selective.
jfv 9y ago
MIT is known for having a good financial aid program and a large endowment (MIT's is around a third of Harvard's!) could improve that even further. I can imagine that being very impactful in the long term.
- demosthenes111 9y ago
  Financial aid is just rebranded price discrimination.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    That is literally the term for providing the same product or service at different prices to different markets depending on their perceived ability to pay, yes. You seem to be implying that it's necessarily a bad thing, though.
- nshelly 9y ago
  72% of MIT undergraduates complete their degree with no student debt [1] and the rest are from families in the top 1-5% of income [2]. Thus, if directed at financial aid, this pledge would only help those from high-income families. If the pledge were used to give a stipend, could MIT attract more low-income students to apply and accept their offers? Giving students from high income families a tuition discount likely won't change their decision to attend, hence price discrimination. To maximize charitable impact with respect to financial aid, it could be argued that instead the funding should go toward other schools so that these all-star, low-income undergrads have more opportunities closer to home. [1] http://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html http://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/massachusetts-institute-of-technology https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
  - entee 9y ago
    I personally know several people who were not in that 1-5% who did go to MIT and most definitely have massive student loans. Maybe they do that now, but they definitely didn't in the past.
sigmar 9y ago
>where the money might arguably be more effectively used or sorely needed. Malcolm Gladwell did a great podcast episode on this very topic: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-... Highly recommended.
mowenz 9y ago
It seems like 140 million would be enough to create something along the lines of a MIT OCW or Khan Academy-with-testing-centres to earn degrees. Maybe it's the unrealistic and the naive opimist in me that is saying this--but imagine any person in the world with an internet connection could have access to study for a world-class degree on whatever schedule suits them? Obviously there are challenges involved, and there will always be a place for research institutions, but it seems to me like if anyone in the world could earn a degree equivalent in rigor to an MIT degree that a lot more would. That would help a lot of people and also propel advancements science and tech. It seems most of us in tech learned a lot of our most valuable skills on our own--so in other words, labour-intensive education isn't the only way to do it.
- apersona 9y ago
  But...it's not the degree, it's the knowledge that's important. MIT, Stanford, and a decent amount of other institutions have made their lectures available for free online. Almost anyone can go online now and watch the lectures and do the projects that the students do. How would testing centers and degrees make them better scientists in anyway?
  - mowenz 9y ago
    Because of limited resources. A degree signals knowledge of a subject, ability to commit and see-through to a goal, and of intelligence. It also decreases uncertainty in the outcome of your time investment. >How would testing centers and degrees make them better scientists in anyway? I'm not aware it's even possible to get accepted into a phD program in the sciences without aN undergrad degree.
fsloth 9y ago
"I'm not convinced that this outweighs the benefits of funding hundreds, or even thousands of students/scientists in less prominent schools who might go on to make such discoveries themselves" While it's plausible anyone can discover anything, the only rule of thumb about finding great research is that great researchers generally train great researchers - or, to put another way, it's likeliest to end up doing nobel price worthy research by being trained by a nobel price winner. The other thing is bad schools do not turn magically into good schools by pooling money into them. Improving education requires human intervention by experts - experienced teachers and so on. Money helps, but if you are sitting on a 140 million dollars, you can't just donate it to some struggling place and imagine it will transform it to a better institution. Or, pick random ten laboratories that have done unremarkable research and imagine a grant of a 10 million dollars will improve the quality of their output. I think the only rational choices to well spend such a sum of money is to support established high performers, or, to proactively invest the money. If proactive involvement is not what the donor wanted then I can't really fault his decision to go with MIT. Or, well, if we follow the silly "nobel price winners beget nobel price winners" rule of thumb and use nobel prices as metric of research quality which itself is also silly, there would have been other options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_uni...
- entee 9y ago
  There's a flaw in this reasoning: are Nobel winners actually training people better or do they simply have access to more money? In my experience researchers that get a lot of grants are able to fund lots of projects, which leads to smart people working for you, which leads to big publications, which leads to more grants. Nobel/Lasker/Name-your-prize winners are just some of the people at the top of the grant pyramid. In fact, I'd argue that who wins a Nobel is a bit of a stochastic/political process, there are tons of scientists who made Nobel-worthy contributions that never won one. That said, the outcome ends up being the same. Big/well funded labs tend to be started by smart people who had the advantages at big/well funded labs and the cycle continues, but I think the way things are funded is a big part of how that system works, not the inherent smarts/brilliance of the Professor. Also it's not about pooling money. I think the OP is making a comment on effectiveness for educating people. For example, Cooper Union, an exceptional institution in NY that has a history of training people to an MIT-level for essentially free has come upon hard times and has somewhat abandoned that free-education principle (granted this was due to some financial mismanagement, but a big donor could certainly force changes there). This was an institution that taught many disadvantaged students, particularly from the NY area who couldn't afford MIT and its compatriots. Perhaps the money would have had far more impact there? Or what about offering massive scholarships to people attending community colleges who have a helluva GPA but need help for childcare? $140M is an incredible gift, I can't help but think there are better ways to spend it than giving it to an institute that already gets massive amounts of grant and other money. Maybe a place that could really use it to help those that need it most?
lgas 9y ago
Utility is necessarily subjective. Presumably the anonymous donor decided the best way to maximize their utility was giving it to MIT.
oh_sigh 9y ago
I've thought about this a lot relating to charitable giving, especially because my employer frequently offers 2x match on these kinds of donations. How does one compute 'bang for the buck' for a given donation size? How does one balance small, local socially-good institutions vs large, global socially-good institutions?
- lazerpants 9y ago
  Also, some global institutions do small scale local outreach as well. Despite my employer being a large global research university, we have health clinics in low income areas and provide educational opportunities for low income neighborhoods locally.
avs733 9y ago
Or a single donation of that size to another single school that is far more in need than MIT. for example on could donate it to the Tribal Colleges system and make an unbelievable impact on the lives of many criminally oppressed native communities.
- andrewchambers 9y ago
  There is low level good and high level invent nuclear fusion kinds of good.
peterhadlaw 9y ago
I had this as the essay question on a standardized test (ACT). A ...loaded... question no doubt.
dluan 9y ago
In case you're curious, this has actually been studied recently. Researchers compared funding in US and Canada and found that - science impact is a decelerating function of funding amounts - science impact plateaus around $700k for a lab or project - ancillary impact benefits include more diversity by funding more groups with smaller amounts instead of fewer groups with larger amounts In all of this, science impact is measured in publication rates, citation rates, and most cited articles over a four year period. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0065263 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
- orbifold 9y ago
  Which is a kind of stupid way of measuring things, the detector systems at the LHC were developed by a relatively small number of groups at huge expense over at least 12 years, it took even longer until actual science experiments happened. A concrete example would be the Atlas trigger systems development until Higgs discovery was ~20 years, ultimately they received >50000 citations.
  - mrkgnao 9y ago
    For some reason this reminds me of how hard it is to design unsupervised learning systems that don't hit a measurable payoff for a long time, so they can't easily decide what they did right or wrong. Also, I love your username :)
  - dluan 9y ago
    Anecdotal. A big grant paying off doesn't outweigh all the other countless iterative and great leaps forward that led to the detector which led to the higgs. Those efforts were also funded by small grants, graduate student stipends, or out-of-pocket in pubs and libraries. The reason why they measured impact in that way is because that's what most funding agencies today are speculating in for their decision making processes. And as data shows, most funding agencies are getting it wrong.
    - orbifold 9y ago
xchaotic 9y ago
Whoever made the donation was clearly of an opinion that MIT, being a bunch of smart people can allocate the money better than the donor or other institutions.
exelius 9y ago
Is MIT actually well-endowed? I don't know the answer to this question so it's not intended to be snarky. But there are plenty of schools (my alma mater CMU is one such example) that have mind share but a very small endowment. CMU has made a point of building its endowment over the last few years -- there was a single $250M donation, a few others in the $50-100M range, and calls for much more. Endowments are important to the long-term financial health of an educational system. They help schools borrow money at very cheap rates to fund large infrastructure projects that otherwise would need to be built by donor / grant money alone. A school like CMU with a small endowment ends up having sky-high tuition to compensate (indeed, CMU has the highest tuition in the country across nearly every degree program they offer) and limited scholarship opportunities. They also have to accept a greater percentage of foreign nationals who otherwise might not qualify (and who can usually pay the tuition out of pocket no problem, since the wealthy across the world want at least one degree from a US school on their resume). But essentially, the endowment is a nest egg that the school uses to ensure its long-term survival and academic independence. If you feel your alma mater made you the person you are today, and you want to encourage that to continue into the future, a large endowment gift goes a long way to ensuring its continued existence, independence and prosperity. Agree that there are a few schools that don't really need more (Harvard being the prime example) but the vast majority of schools really do need that much money sitting in the bank. You're donating to a school of thought more than anything else.
- _acme 9y ago
  That's not really difficult to find out. MIT's endowment is the sixth highest in the US. In 2016, it stood at just over $13 billion.
dionidium 9y ago
This is the type of thing I think a lot about. My hometown is plagued by an outrageous crime problem, widespread poverty, and crumbling infrastructure. They just spent $250 million to extend a park over a highway, another $51 million on a trolley for tourists, $24 million to redo a downtown park, and so on and so on. Obviously, the funds for these projects weren't fungible, but taken as a whole, this spending in the face of real problems is profane.
davidf18 9y ago
State Universities are getting underfunded these days. I would like to see a major challenge grant for state universities with major science/engineering schools. For example, donate $140 million if the State increases its expenditures by $140 million above current trends for each of the next 5 years.
- batbomb 9y ago
  They also don't typically operate government labs, which is a good way to pay for infrastructure and facilities and toys.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>It would be interesting to compare the utility of one large $100 million+ grant to an institution like MIT, Yale or Harvard that is already well-endowed, compared to a hundred different million dollar grants to institutions across the USA or the world, where the money might arguably be more effectively used or sorely needed. For example, UMass Boston.
TheRealmccoy 9y ago
in this case, since it was done anonymous,I believe the impact and affinity is the prime motive. rather a firm belief on part of the donor that the only way for his huge sum of money to do any good to this world, is to go to MIT.
TheRealmccoy 9y ago
in this case, since it was done anonymous,I believe the impact and affinity is the prime motive. rather a firm belief on part of the donor that the only way for his huge sum of money to do any good to this world, is to go to MIT.

hertclef 9y ago

Highly relevant to your comment is episode 6 of Malcomb Gladwell's Revisionist History Podcast [0]. In the episode, Gladwell asks the president of Stanford whether there was any amount of money he would turn down because he thought it would better spent somewhere else. He replied, somewhat evasively, that no, there wasn't really an sum large enough. It's a truly incredible interview to listen to. I highly recommend the three part series about college education that makes up episodes 4,5,6 of the season 1. But, if you have the time, I think the entire podcast is excellent while noting that I am not a huge fan of Gladwell's books. [0] http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...

Cyph0n 9y ago
> asks the president of Stanford Interesting tidbit: the president of Stanford at the time was John Hennessy. Take any modern CPU, and you'll probably find that much of its internal architecture is built on work by Hennessy and his group at Stanford. He is arguably the greatest computer architect of all time.
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  He's definitely a powerhouse, but I think Patterson is a stronger contender for that title.
  - Cyph0n 9y ago
    They would definitely both be among the very top candidates to receive such a title.
    - thanksgiving 9y ago
      Any time someone brings up Stanford, I want to scream patent troll. If you sell to a patent troll, you are a patent troll. http://news.stanford.edu/2015/02/23/haber-patent-trolls-022315/ http://news.stanford.edu/2015/02/23/haber-patent-trolls-0223... Shame on you, Stanford! What a sorry college.
  - dekhn 9y ago
    Fortunately they collaborated and wrote a book on the subject!
    - deepnotderp 9y ago
      *THE book :)
kbenson 9y ago
> He replied, somewhat evasively, that no, there wasn't really an sum large enough. Which, of course, is his job. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that he has an entirely separate point of view in private when being candid. That said, my immediate reaction to reading the first sentence of the GP comment was to think of that same Revisionist History episode. I'm excited that the new season is beginning soon. I will temper that with a caveat that I think Malcom does push his agenda and narrative fairly hard in those podcasts, but that does make for a really compelling story. If you can separate the facts from the portions it feels like he's omitting, you'll likely get more out of the podcasts, but I find the exposure to new ideas particularly fun and useful. I especially liked the Moral Licensing episode, which I only listened to for the first time a few months ago. It's particularly fun to listen to that one and realize that his specifics were all wrong, but the generalities and basics still match perfectly with the new Political reality that was only 6-12 months int the future from that recording (regardless of whether you believe in the premise). I'm being particularly vague on purpose here, because I truly believe that episode was at least twice as as entertaining and memorable because of that situation, and I don't want to ruin it for anyone. That episode was so good, it's probably worth a re-listen now if you listened to them as they were released.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
tptacek 9y ago
I don't have much to add to this beyond another strong recommendation that you listen to that 3-part series; it's the strongest work he's ever done in any medium.
- canes123456 9y ago
  I just remember 2 episodes. While it was entertaining, one episode lacked any intellectual rigor at all. It seems like Gladwell can't understand the counterarguments at all and chooses to cut out most of them with out realizing. One obvious thing he misses is the moral hazard of rewarding poor performing schools. Also, the real question is why donate to universities at all? There is no real reason why universities can't support teaching purely on tuition. University can easily charge on a sliding scale based on need and SAT scores. If they want more kids to go to college, they can give to scholarships directly. Giving to university directly just promotes spending them on outspending each other on other axis for attention...
  - tptacek 9y ago
    The "obvious" point you're making in your second graf is one Gladwell agrees with.
    - canes123456 9y ago
      Is the second reason one he actually agrees with? Does he consider the second order effects? He thinks giving more to poor schools would be a "good" thing. All it would do is cause more schools to try to fight for prestige and donations. We have 15ish schools were their number one goal is to find ways to get donations. What would happen if 150ish school expected to be able to get huge sums of money as donations? Many would change their focus away from education and what students what to donors. I think it likely to increase tuition and decrease enrollment. Top 15 schools need to be selective to be the best. If the 100th best school want to look like it getting better it needs to become much more selective.

jfv 9y ago

MIT is known for having a good financial aid program and a large endowment (MIT's is around a third of Harvard's!) could improve that even further. I can imagine that being very impactful in the long term.

demosthenes111 9y ago
Financial aid is just rebranded price discrimination.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  That is literally the term for providing the same product or service at different prices to different markets depending on their perceived ability to pay, yes. You seem to be implying that it's necessarily a bad thing, though.
nshelly 9y ago
72% of MIT undergraduates complete their degree with no student debt [1] and the rest are from families in the top 1-5% of income [2]. Thus, if directed at financial aid, this pledge would only help those from high-income families. If the pledge were used to give a stipend, could MIT attract more low-income students to apply and accept their offers? Giving students from high income families a tuition discount likely won't change their decision to attend, hence price discrimination. To maximize charitable impact with respect to financial aid, it could be argued that instead the funding should go toward other schools so that these all-star, low-income undergrads have more opportunities closer to home. [1] http://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html http://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/massachusetts-institute-of-technology https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
- entee 9y ago
  I personally know several people who were not in that 1-5% who did go to MIT and most definitely have massive student loans. Maybe they do that now, but they definitely didn't in the past.

sigmar 9y ago

>where the money might arguably be more effectively used or sorely needed. Malcolm Gladwell did a great podcast episode on this very topic: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-... Highly recommended.

mowenz 9y ago

It seems like 140 million would be enough to create something along the lines of a MIT OCW or Khan Academy-with-testing-centres to earn degrees. Maybe it's the unrealistic and the naive opimist in me that is saying this--but imagine any person in the world with an internet connection could have access to study for a world-class degree on whatever schedule suits them? Obviously there are challenges involved, and there will always be a place for research institutions, but it seems to me like if anyone in the world could earn a degree equivalent in rigor to an MIT degree that a lot more would. That would help a lot of people and also propel advancements science and tech. It seems most of us in tech learned a lot of our most valuable skills on our own--so in other words, labour-intensive education isn't the only way to do it.

apersona 9y ago
But...it's not the degree, it's the knowledge that's important. MIT, Stanford, and a decent amount of other institutions have made their lectures available for free online. Almost anyone can go online now and watch the lectures and do the projects that the students do. How would testing centers and degrees make them better scientists in anyway?
- mowenz 9y ago
  Because of limited resources. A degree signals knowledge of a subject, ability to commit and see-through to a goal, and of intelligence. It also decreases uncertainty in the outcome of your time investment. >How would testing centers and degrees make them better scientists in anyway? I'm not aware it's even possible to get accepted into a phD program in the sciences without aN undergrad degree.

fsloth 9y ago

"I'm not convinced that this outweighs the benefits of funding hundreds, or even thousands of students/scientists in less prominent schools who might go on to make such discoveries themselves" While it's plausible anyone can discover anything, the only rule of thumb about finding great research is that great researchers generally train great researchers - or, to put another way, it's likeliest to end up doing nobel price worthy research by being trained by a nobel price winner. The other thing is bad schools do not turn magically into good schools by pooling money into them. Improving education requires human intervention by experts - experienced teachers and so on. Money helps, but if you are sitting on a 140 million dollars, you can't just donate it to some struggling place and imagine it will transform it to a better institution. Or, pick random ten laboratories that have done unremarkable research and imagine a grant of a 10 million dollars will improve the quality of their output. I think the only rational choices to well spend such a sum of money is to support established high performers, or, to proactively invest the money. If proactive involvement is not what the donor wanted then I can't really fault his decision to go with MIT. Or, well, if we follow the silly "nobel price winners beget nobel price winners" rule of thumb and use nobel prices as metric of research quality which itself is also silly, there would have been other options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_uni...

entee 9y ago
There's a flaw in this reasoning: are Nobel winners actually training people better or do they simply have access to more money? In my experience researchers that get a lot of grants are able to fund lots of projects, which leads to smart people working for you, which leads to big publications, which leads to more grants. Nobel/Lasker/Name-your-prize winners are just some of the people at the top of the grant pyramid. In fact, I'd argue that who wins a Nobel is a bit of a stochastic/political process, there are tons of scientists who made Nobel-worthy contributions that never won one. That said, the outcome ends up being the same. Big/well funded labs tend to be started by smart people who had the advantages at big/well funded labs and the cycle continues, but I think the way things are funded is a big part of how that system works, not the inherent smarts/brilliance of the Professor. Also it's not about pooling money. I think the OP is making a comment on effectiveness for educating people. For example, Cooper Union, an exceptional institution in NY that has a history of training people to an MIT-level for essentially free has come upon hard times and has somewhat abandoned that free-education principle (granted this was due to some financial mismanagement, but a big donor could certainly force changes there). This was an institution that taught many disadvantaged students, particularly from the NY area who couldn't afford MIT and its compatriots. Perhaps the money would have had far more impact there? Or what about offering massive scholarships to people attending community colleges who have a helluva GPA but need help for childcare? $140M is an incredible gift, I can't help but think there are better ways to spend it than giving it to an institute that already gets massive amounts of grant and other money. Maybe a place that could really use it to help those that need it most?

lgas 9y ago

Utility is necessarily subjective. Presumably the anonymous donor decided the best way to maximize their utility was giving it to MIT.

oh_sigh 9y ago

I've thought about this a lot relating to charitable giving, especially because my employer frequently offers 2x match on these kinds of donations. How does one compute 'bang for the buck' for a given donation size? How does one balance small, local socially-good institutions vs large, global socially-good institutions?

lazerpants 9y ago
Also, some global institutions do small scale local outreach as well. Despite my employer being a large global research university, we have health clinics in low income areas and provide educational opportunities for low income neighborhoods locally.

avs733 9y ago

Or a single donation of that size to another single school that is far more in need than MIT. for example on could donate it to the Tribal Colleges system and make an unbelievable impact on the lives of many criminally oppressed native communities.

andrewchambers 9y ago
There is low level good and high level invent nuclear fusion kinds of good.

peterhadlaw 9y ago

I had this as the essay question on a standardized test (ACT). A ...loaded... question no doubt.

dluan 9y ago

In case you're curious, this has actually been studied recently. Researchers compared funding in US and Canada and found that - science impact is a decelerating function of funding amounts - science impact plateaus around $700k for a lab or project - ancillary impact benefits include more diversity by funding more groups with smaller amounts instead of fewer groups with larger amounts In all of this, science impact is measured in publication rates, citation rates, and most cited articles over a four year period. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0065263 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

orbifold 9y ago
Which is a kind of stupid way of measuring things, the detector systems at the LHC were developed by a relatively small number of groups at huge expense over at least 12 years, it took even longer until actual science experiments happened. A concrete example would be the Atlas trigger systems development until Higgs discovery was ~20 years, ultimately they received >50000 citations.
- mrkgnao 9y ago
  For some reason this reminds me of how hard it is to design unsupervised learning systems that don't hit a measurable payoff for a long time, so they can't easily decide what they did right or wrong. Also, I love your username :)
- dluan 9y ago
  Anecdotal. A big grant paying off doesn't outweigh all the other countless iterative and great leaps forward that led to the detector which led to the higgs. Those efforts were also funded by small grants, graduate student stipends, or out-of-pocket in pubs and libraries. The reason why they measured impact in that way is because that's what most funding agencies today are speculating in for their decision making processes. And as data shows, most funding agencies are getting it wrong.
  - orbifold 9y ago

xchaotic 9y ago

Whoever made the donation was clearly of an opinion that MIT, being a bunch of smart people can allocate the money better than the donor or other institutions.

exelius 9y ago

Is MIT actually well-endowed? I don't know the answer to this question so it's not intended to be snarky. But there are plenty of schools (my alma mater CMU is one such example) that have mind share but a very small endowment. CMU has made a point of building its endowment over the last few years -- there was a single $250M donation, a few others in the $50-100M range, and calls for much more. Endowments are important to the long-term financial health of an educational system. They help schools borrow money at very cheap rates to fund large infrastructure projects that otherwise would need to be built by donor / grant money alone. A school like CMU with a small endowment ends up having sky-high tuition to compensate (indeed, CMU has the highest tuition in the country across nearly every degree program they offer) and limited scholarship opportunities. They also have to accept a greater percentage of foreign nationals who otherwise might not qualify (and who can usually pay the tuition out of pocket no problem, since the wealthy across the world want at least one degree from a US school on their resume). But essentially, the endowment is a nest egg that the school uses to ensure its long-term survival and academic independence. If you feel your alma mater made you the person you are today, and you want to encourage that to continue into the future, a large endowment gift goes a long way to ensuring its continued existence, independence and prosperity. Agree that there are a few schools that don't really need more (Harvard being the prime example) but the vast majority of schools really do need that much money sitting in the bank. You're donating to a school of thought more than anything else.

_acme 9y ago
That's not really difficult to find out. MIT's endowment is the sixth highest in the US. In 2016, it stood at just over $13 billion.

dionidium 9y ago

This is the type of thing I think a lot about. My hometown is plagued by an outrageous crime problem, widespread poverty, and crumbling infrastructure. They just spent $250 million to extend a park over a highway, another $51 million on a trolley for tourists, $24 million to redo a downtown park, and so on and so on. Obviously, the funds for these projects weren't fungible, but taken as a whole, this spending in the face of real problems is profane.

davidf18 9y ago

State Universities are getting underfunded these days. I would like to see a major challenge grant for state universities with major science/engineering schools. For example, donate $140 million if the State increases its expenditures by $140 million above current trends for each of the next 5 years.

batbomb 9y ago
They also don't typically operate government labs, which is a good way to pay for infrastructure and facilities and toys.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

>It would be interesting to compare the utility of one large $100 million+ grant to an institution like MIT, Yale or Harvard that is already well-endowed, compared to a hundred different million dollar grants to institutions across the USA or the world, where the money might arguably be more effectively used or sorely needed. For example, UMass Boston.

TheRealmccoy 9y ago

in this case, since it was done anonymous,I believe the impact and affinity is the prime motive. rather a firm belief on part of the donor that the only way for his huge sum of money to do any good to this world, is to go to MIT.

TheRealmccoy 9y ago