5 ms·

I generally agree with your comment, but it's worth nothing that despite the US population increasing and the number of kids attenting college increasing even m

by harryh 7y ago

I generally agree with your comment, but it's worth nothing that despite the US population increasing and the number of kids attenting college increasing even more the top schools have generally not increased enrollment sizes much at all. It's interesting to think about why this might be so.

pmiller2 7y ago
If you're sitting on a minimum of $3.5B in endowment (Brown), up to $34.5B (Harvard), why would you need to expand? Besides, being "elite" is part of the brand. Start letting everyone in, and the Ivy League becomes just another football conference.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  > being "elite" is part of the brand. Exactly. And what public policy needs to do is revoke the non-profit status of schools that fail to make any effort to expand despite having an abundance of resources and qualified candidates. Harvard could easily accommodate 20,000 undergrads given the size and quality of its applicant pool. That fact that it doesn't spend a penny of its $30 billion endowment doing so reveals that its mission is brand management, not education. And that's perfectly fine. But it shouldn't enjoy a tax-advantaged status predicated on the make-believe that its a philanthropic organization.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Where do you expect Harvard could house the additional 13K undergrads near campus? I live walking distance to Harvard campus and I can tell you that I can't imagine a good answer. (Unstated above is that I believe that undergrad is fundamentally an in-person experience.)
    - dillonmckay 7y ago
      Satellite campus? Buy up existing hotels? The George Washington University has purchased many hotels and condos and converted them to student housing, and that is downtown DC real estate. Works well when you pay no property taxes.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - disjhshava 7y ago
      Doesn't Harvard own a bunch of prime real estate? Tax free, even. How tall is the average building on that land?
  - doctorpangloss 7y ago
    > Harvard could easily accommodate 20,000 undergrads given the size and quality of its applicant pool. Increasing the class size would be good. But Danny Rubin isn't going to be able to teach screen writing to 120 kids instead of 12, even if he actually wanted to. RJ Tarrant can't expand his personal Classics section beyond 15. And the undergraduate animal transplant surgery class (12-15 students)? How, pray tell, will that scale? If you wanted to 10x the size of the class... I don't know if there's a single place on Earth that conducts 10 transplants, human or large animal, in one building, at the same time. Not everything can be scaled. Not even "not scalable" things can be scaled with money, even a lot of it. A more interesting conversation is why nonetheless billionaires do a bad job at education, despite (not because of) all the money. I think this thinking is part of it. It also shows a lack of understanding of what makes Harvard special. It's not just "brand management."
    - HenryKissinger 7y ago
      The solution is simple: hire more faculty, build more and taller buildings. Build more dorms. They can afford it. And if their mission was education, they would do it.
      - ctdonath 7y ago
        You can’t just hire more top talent. “Elite” is “best”, not “more”.
        HenryKissinger 7y ago
        You absolutely can hire more top talent.
        disjhshava 7y ago
        The academic job market is so tight in most fields that random universities in the middle of nowhere get hundreds of applicants for a single tenure-track job. If you go back 100 years ago you would find that Harvard was a lot less selective (there were far fewer academics), but it was still elite. Overall, society isn't putting enough money into research. Elite universities hiring more faculty would be a great thing, in my estimation.
  - cies 7y ago
    > And that's perfectly fine. Under capitalism. :)
  - disjhshava 7y ago
    The US also gives nonprofit status to organizations that do stuff like buy expensive paintings and build megachurches. There's no general requirement that the nonprofits need to be using their money in the highest-utility manner. If such a requirement existed, I don't think elite universities should be the first organizations to crack down on.
- GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
  Endowments really need to go. Put that towards paying for student's education instead of locking it up.
  - pmiller2 7y ago
    Theoretically, endowments are _supposed_ to be paying for students’ education.
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    If endowments go, so do good professors. My wife was recruited by a couple institutions last year. One of our key concerns about one institution was the endowment. Tenure is not nearly as valuable at a institution that is not on strong financial footing.
    - NTDF9 7y ago
      Why are endowments so important for Professors? They're not seeing a dime from that anyway.
      - gnicholas 7y ago
        If a university has a strong endowment, it provides assurance that the operating budget will be buffered against economic downturns. If universities did away with endowments (and did not replace them with mind-boggling amounts of insurance), it would increase the chance that professors' jobs and/or salaries would be at risk. Unlike most jobs, academic positions can last for half a century, so it is reasonable to look far into the future when assessing the desirability of a particular position.
BookmarkSaver 7y ago
It's hard to scale up individual institutions and maintain quality. What needs to happen is a broadening of the definition of "top schools". The issue is that a "top school" is a definition inherently limited in size. The top 10 is the top 10 regardless of whether there are 100 or 1000 schools being considered. Also, regardless of how many people there are, as an entire society we can only agree on a group so large before the "top schools" are no longer actually common knowledge (and thus not a "top school" in many important ways).
- georgeecollins 7y ago
  UCLA is both a much larger and much more highly rated school than it was thirty years ago.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
Only solution I see is reducing their influence as much as possible.
dwoozle 7y ago
They have not increased enrollment but they have massively increased financial aid.
- polyomino 7y ago
  Financial engineering. They set the prices which they pay themselves to appear philanthropic.
munchbunny 7y ago
I think it's because high end education is hard to scale. I've yet to see an alternative to small class and 1-1 teaching (office hours) that reliably produces as good results. So if it's hard to fit in more students per professor, then the issue becomes finding more teachers. I suspect that might be more of a bureaucratic/political issue. Research and teaching are conflated, putting teaching at the bottom of the totem pole and pay scale for most aspiring professors unless you're famous for being good at teaching. Maybe there should be more dedicated teaching openings.
georgeecollins 7y ago
>> US population increasing and the number of kids attenting college increasing even more the top schools have generally not increased enrollment sizes much at all. Also, while they used to serve almost exclusively US students they now accept students from all over the world, making the chances of an average child getting in more remote. My father got into Stanford a long time ago when you could be a local kid at public schools with nothing distinguishing you but good grades and test scores. Now to replicate that feat you need an athletic scholarship, or an amazing personal story, a legacy, or a huge donation. I believe this will begin to erode the concept of elite schools truly representing the most capable. In a previous job we sometimes found that kids who were coming from a good public engineering program were often more skilled at actually writing code than people from some fancy ivy league schools. The fancy schools turned out graduates who were usually smart and very polished. But they didn't necessarily have more of the skills we were looking for. The life experience of DE Shaw himself makes you wonder why he why he values an Ivy League school so much. His biography demonstrates it is not the skills. It is the access and the pedigree.

by harryh 7y ago

pmiller2 7y ago

If you're sitting on a minimum of $3.5B in endowment (Brown), up to $34.5B (Harvard), why would you need to expand? Besides, being "elite" is part of the brand. Start letting everyone in, and the Ivy League becomes just another football conference.

dcolkitt 7y ago
> being "elite" is part of the brand. Exactly. And what public policy needs to do is revoke the non-profit status of schools that fail to make any effort to expand despite having an abundance of resources and qualified candidates. Harvard could easily accommodate 20,000 undergrads given the size and quality of its applicant pool. That fact that it doesn't spend a penny of its $30 billion endowment doing so reveals that its mission is brand management, not education. And that's perfectly fine. But it shouldn't enjoy a tax-advantaged status predicated on the make-believe that its a philanthropic organization.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Where do you expect Harvard could house the additional 13K undergrads near campus? I live walking distance to Harvard campus and I can tell you that I can't imagine a good answer. (Unstated above is that I believe that undergrad is fundamentally an in-person experience.)
  - dillonmckay 7y ago
    Satellite campus? Buy up existing hotels? The George Washington University has purchased many hotels and condos and converted them to student housing, and that is downtown DC real estate. Works well when you pay no property taxes.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - disjhshava 7y ago
    Doesn't Harvard own a bunch of prime real estate? Tax free, even. How tall is the average building on that land?
- doctorpangloss 7y ago
  > Harvard could easily accommodate 20,000 undergrads given the size and quality of its applicant pool. Increasing the class size would be good. But Danny Rubin isn't going to be able to teach screen writing to 120 kids instead of 12, even if he actually wanted to. RJ Tarrant can't expand his personal Classics section beyond 15. And the undergraduate animal transplant surgery class (12-15 students)? How, pray tell, will that scale? If you wanted to 10x the size of the class... I don't know if there's a single place on Earth that conducts 10 transplants, human or large animal, in one building, at the same time. Not everything can be scaled. Not even "not scalable" things can be scaled with money, even a lot of it. A more interesting conversation is why nonetheless billionaires do a bad job at education, despite (not because of) all the money. I think this thinking is part of it. It also shows a lack of understanding of what makes Harvard special. It's not just "brand management."
  - HenryKissinger 7y ago
    The solution is simple: hire more faculty, build more and taller buildings. Build more dorms. They can afford it. And if their mission was education, they would do it.
    - ctdonath 7y ago
      You can’t just hire more top talent. “Elite” is “best”, not “more”.
      - HenryKissinger 7y ago
        You absolutely can hire more top talent.
      - disjhshava 7y ago
        The academic job market is so tight in most fields that random universities in the middle of nowhere get hundreds of applicants for a single tenure-track job. If you go back 100 years ago you would find that Harvard was a lot less selective (there were far fewer academics), but it was still elite. Overall, society isn't putting enough money into research. Elite universities hiring more faculty would be a great thing, in my estimation.
- cies 7y ago
  > And that's perfectly fine. Under capitalism. :)
- disjhshava 7y ago
  The US also gives nonprofit status to organizations that do stuff like buy expensive paintings and build megachurches. There's no general requirement that the nonprofits need to be using their money in the highest-utility manner. If such a requirement existed, I don't think elite universities should be the first organizations to crack down on.
GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
Endowments really need to go. Put that towards paying for student's education instead of locking it up.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Theoretically, endowments are _supposed_ to be paying for students’ education.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  If endowments go, so do good professors. My wife was recruited by a couple institutions last year. One of our key concerns about one institution was the endowment. Tenure is not nearly as valuable at a institution that is not on strong financial footing.
  - NTDF9 7y ago
    Why are endowments so important for Professors? They're not seeing a dime from that anyway.
    - gnicholas 7y ago
      If a university has a strong endowment, it provides assurance that the operating budget will be buffered against economic downturns. If universities did away with endowments (and did not replace them with mind-boggling amounts of insurance), it would increase the chance that professors' jobs and/or salaries would be at risk. Unlike most jobs, academic positions can last for half a century, so it is reasonable to look far into the future when assessing the desirability of a particular position.

BookmarkSaver 7y ago

It's hard to scale up individual institutions and maintain quality. What needs to happen is a broadening of the definition of "top schools". The issue is that a "top school" is a definition inherently limited in size. The top 10 is the top 10 regardless of whether there are 100 or 1000 schools being considered. Also, regardless of how many people there are, as an entire society we can only agree on a group so large before the "top schools" are no longer actually common knowledge (and thus not a "top school" in many important ways).

georgeecollins 7y ago
UCLA is both a much larger and much more highly rated school than it was thirty years ago.

akhilcacharya 7y ago

Only solution I see is reducing their influence as much as possible.

dwoozle 7y ago

They have not increased enrollment but they have massively increased financial aid.

polyomino 7y ago
Financial engineering. They set the prices which they pay themselves to appear philanthropic.

munchbunny 7y ago

I think it's because high end education is hard to scale. I've yet to see an alternative to small class and 1-1 teaching (office hours) that reliably produces as good results. So if it's hard to fit in more students per professor, then the issue becomes finding more teachers. I suspect that might be more of a bureaucratic/political issue. Research and teaching are conflated, putting teaching at the bottom of the totem pole and pay scale for most aspiring professors unless you're famous for being good at teaching. Maybe there should be more dedicated teaching openings.

georgeecollins 7y ago

>> US population increasing and the number of kids attenting college increasing even more the top schools have generally not increased enrollment sizes much at all. Also, while they used to serve almost exclusively US students they now accept students from all over the world, making the chances of an average child getting in more remote. My father got into Stanford a long time ago when you could be a local kid at public schools with nothing distinguishing you but good grades and test scores. Now to replicate that feat you need an athletic scholarship, or an amazing personal story, a legacy, or a huge donation. I believe this will begin to erode the concept of elite schools truly representing the most capable. In a previous job we sometimes found that kids who were coming from a good public engineering program were often more skilled at actually writing code than people from some fancy ivy league schools. The fancy schools turned out graduates who were usually smart and very polished. But they didn't necessarily have more of the skills we were looking for. The life experience of DE Shaw himself makes you wonder why he why he values an Ivy League school so much. His biography demonstrates it is not the skills. It is the access and the pedigree.