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The main obstacle to starting a university? It's expensive, has massive administrative overhead, has a cold start / reputational problem, and they are academics

The main obstacle to starting a university? It's expensive, has massive administrative overhead, has a cold start / reputational problem, and they are academics not business people or administrators. The annual operating budget for the University of Toronto is $3B. Certainly you can start smaller, but the cost of starting a competitive university from scratch would be astronomical. Coursera has raised $450M in capital, just to build an online university (unaccredited I believe). Tyler Cower is not a billionaire, as far as I know (he's a college professor). But let's say you do that, and you build lecture halls and labs. And you get whatever accreditation is needed to be a "real" degree granting program and do top tier research. Then what? You need to go get students. With your brand new university nobody has heard of. And students want to go to university that looks good on their resume, mostly. So how do you build that reputation? Finally, what are you really doing differently? When you say you let them do research "unobstructedly", research appears to rely on grants. Student tuition covers ~65% of the University of Toronto's operating budget (this is a very well regarded university with a lot of foreign students they are able to extract exorbitant tuitions from). So you still need to fund the research. You need to pay the professors and their lab assistants and post docs or whatever. Since you can't cover it with tuition (your school is worse than existing schools cause it's new) you have to get grants, so you're back to the same problem as before. Does this university have a new business model for funding research and operations besides tuition and donations / grants? I'm not trying to be a downer, but there's a reason all these top universities are like, 100 years old. The entrenchment is real.

closedloop129 4y ago
If I start it then those problems exist. However, the starting point is that academics have to suffer >funding bureaucracies, which eat nearly half of researcher time which should motivate some academics to come up with a better system. A network of academics with published papers has already established their reputation. Parents and recruiters in companies who studied the same field can evaluate the background and can assure their children that it is solid. Such an university doesn't have to be started in a void. The internet allows for something like a kick-starter evaluation to check for demand. Only when there is enough demand is there a need to rent or buy buildings. For a student, it is not without risk to start with that university. However, like every startup, there is a possibility for high reward when the self-selected academic network creates an exceptionally productive scientific environment. *edit: With a reputation for solid scientific research, is it necessary to spent time on research grants? Wouldn't companies come knocking to research their tough problems?

closedloop129 4y ago

If I start it then those problems exist. However, the starting point is that academics have to suffer >funding bureaucracies, which eat nearly half of researcher time which should motivate some academics to come up with a better system. A network of academics with published papers has already established their reputation. Parents and recruiters in companies who studied the same field can evaluate the background and can assure their children that it is solid. Such an university doesn't have to be started in a void. The internet allows for something like a kick-starter evaluation to check for demand. Only when there is enough demand is there a need to rent or buy buildings. For a student, it is not without risk to start with that university. However, like every startup, there is a possibility for high reward when the self-selected academic network creates an exceptionally productive scientific environment. *edit: With a reputation for solid scientific research, is it necessary to spent time on research grants? Wouldn't companies come knocking to research their tough problems?