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You want to revitalize rural America AND solve this tricky problem of too many qualified kids, not enough spots? Let's bring a new wave of land grant universit
by Hasz 7y ago
You want to revitalize rural America AND solve this tricky problem of too many qualified kids, not enough spots?
Let's bring a new wave of land grant universities. The feds own like ~90% of Nevada, let's put a top tier research university smack dab in the middle of it. Put up some new facilities, draw faculty away from other top tier universities/the rest of the world, and start pumping all these bright, but otherwise undistinguished kids into a place where they CAN distinguish themselves. All that sweet, sweet federal cash flows in, and you can bet people will set up shop around it. For the feds, it's a cheap investment, but one that has paid for itself a thousand times over.
Make it a public bell labs in the desert, then do it across rural America. Huntsville (kind of) did it, why can't we do it again?
- untog 7y agoSorry, you want the government to spend money? No, no, that simply won't do.
- zelon88 7y agoI hear you, but lobbyists will get wind of the money and find a way to divert it into their coffers. "Why should the fed open a school in Nevada when you can just give that money to us (University of Nevada). We promise we'll give x% of the money out in scholarships!" The con continues.....
- humble_engineer 7y agoBut if we invest in research how are we going to give Israel billions of dollars every year?
- pj_mukh 7y agoThis is a fantastic idea. Economists love it too [1] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-16/rural-america-s-revival-begins-on-campus https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-16/rural-...
- thorwasdfasdf 7y agoITs a great idea but if you want people to populate a new town or city you've first got to move some companies and jobs there. Once jobs are there, the people will always follow. How to get companies to move there? Provide tax incentives: companies will do almost anything to get a tax incentive.
- Hasz 7y agoThe University goes first. Nevada has zero income tax, almost no property tax. It's about as business friendly as it gets (no 9 on some random list I found); the problem is it's a barren desert devoid of anything worth doing. You smack a big research university into it, and bam, suddenly construction companies are there, then housing, then food, etc etc. Hopefully some new ventures get spun up by students and faculty, and now we're running.
- starpilot 7y agoThis is desperately needed. We have: 1. An oversupply of newly minted PhD's literally waiting for tenured profs to die so that there is an opening 2. A skyrocketing demand from people looking to go to university, with acceptance rates everywhere dropping. Connect these with building more universities. It might only be possible at the state level, look at how California opened UC Merced in 2005.
- topkai22 7y ago2) Isn't true any more. University enrollement peaked in 2011, and isn't expected to reach that level again for at least a decade or more. There are plenty of accetable state schools with 100% or near 100% acceptence rates. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_303.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_303.10.a...
- Balgair 7y ago> 1. An oversupply of newly minted PhD's literally waiting for tenured profs to die so that there is an opening Wait, a work-relief program for ... PhDs? Surely they are intelligent enough to find some form of employment beyond what Uncle Sam can only provide.
- fzeroracer 7y agoWhat about the bright kids that can't afford to move away? What about the crumbling infrastructure in those rural areas which falls apart if you made any attempt to move people out there? Or what do you do about the poor rural folk you displace through what is essentially extremely sudden government gentrification? Honestly we have plenty of universities, many of which are not Harvard but still have incredible professors and bright students. Instead of building universities in the middle of nowhere, we should take that money to make higher education (whether it's trade or not) free and help fund people move to those universities. This is a far quicker solution than hoping to fix the problem 20-30 years from now when we need a solution today.
- Hasz 7y agoWhen I say middle of the desert, I literally mean it. If you're living on federal land in Nevada, you're doing something wrong. I'm also talking specifically about research universities. I think the debate about cost should be decoupled from this, but I agree -- higher ed should be something you pay for with a summer job, not a decade plus of what amounts to federally enforced indentured servitude.
- topkai22 7y agoA better plan would be to take over a decommishioning military base in the plains or midwest. As someone who lives in Nevada, the infrastructure issues are exterme.
- autoexec 7y ago> Instead of building universities in the middle of nowhere, we should take that money to make higher education (whether it's trade or not) free and help fund people move to those universities. Do we even need people to move to physical buildings? If we improve our internet infrastructure we can offer 24/7 education to everyone anywhere in the country. The idea of forcing students to move to a specific place and attend classes at a specific time every day seems somewhat dated.
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- mogadsheu 7y agoUT Austin, Notre Dame, and U of Chicago, while not all public, are fantastic universities in the deep interior of the country. It’s a great point, although I think it’s already been done. There’s a lot of attention on Harvard in particular but there’s plenty of good education in the country. It’s just become very expensive and too focused on the perceived top 2.
- steelframe 7y agoI got my Master's degree in Computer Science at UT Austin while working an entry-level tech job full time. My company paid my tuition, but it was only $13,000 for the 3 years it took me to finish it, so it wouldn't have broken the bank to pay that myself if I had to. In spite of having no grants, I incurred zero debt and ended up with a degree from a distinguished program where one of the faculty members received a Turing award while I was attending. I currently work at a recognizable big tech company side-by-side with people who have degrees from Stanford, MIT, CMU, and so forth. Many of them wracked up significant student debt to go to their schools, and my career seems to have been at absolutely no disadvantage from having gone to a much cheaper school.
- ladberg 7y agoGoing to school now is MUCH more expensive that it was when you were there. Students now are expected to pay ~3x what you paid to go to an in-state university. If there isn't an in-state one that's good enough though (not everyone has a UT Austin), then they have to pay many times that to go to a public school in another state or a private school.
- vonmoltke 7y agoWhat are you talking about? UT Texas resident graduate tuition for the school of engineering is $5277 per semester for 9 hours. The degree requires 30. That works out to ~18k for the entire course of study. Play with the calculator yourself if you don't believe me: https://tuition.utexas.edu/ https://tuition.utexas.edu/
- bilbo0s 7y agoBecause the first thing that would happen is that people from rural areas would be squeezed out of said university. We've seen it happen in Wisconsin. Which is why we just have a top x% of any high school in Wisconsin gets admitted rule. There are just too many poor people in, say, Milwaukee's suburbs, or Appleton, or LaCrosse. If you have to get in based on strict merit, I would not underestimate the number of, let's call them, "poor urban/suburban whites" who would outperform people in the rural areas. Unless, of course, this school would be only for poor rural people. In which case they wouldn't do it because they'd get sued. If you had such a place, I think admission would have to be like the Iowa/Wisconsin system. Sort of, automatic admission if you're in the top whatever percent of a high school class anywhere in US and pass a trivial test. That way, rural people could never be crowded out.
- notacoward 7y ago> top x% of any high school in Wisconsin gets admitted Does this ever result in parents whose children are "on the bubble" deliberately moving to poor school districts?
- marssaxman 7y ago> The feds own like ~90% of Nevada, let's put a top tier research university smack dab in the middle of it. The feds own 85% of Nevada because it's mostly desert and it's not practical to live there; nobody claimed it during the homesteading era, so it was left to the BLM. There's a whole lot of wide-open sagebrush country striped with the occasional mountain range, and very little water. It would be an expensive place to run a college town, since you'd have to truck in literally everything you needed to live on from somewhere else.
- Balgair 7y agoEducation won't fix America. Nick Hanauer, of Second Ave. Partners, goes into some depth as to why [0], but his thesis is along Piketty's: r>g [1]. Sure, education is a part of the solution, but as biologists say: it is necessary but not sufficient. [0] https://www.realclearpolicy.com/2019/06/12/better_schools_won039t_fix_america_41999.html https://www.realclearpolicy.com/2019/06/12/better_schools_wo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...