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This always barks up the wrong tree: why, as Peter Thiel asked, haven't colleges with decades or centuries long track records of successful graduates been inter
by lr4444lr 3y ago
This always barks up the wrong tree: why, as Peter Thiel asked, haven't colleges with decades or centuries long track records of successful graduates been interested in expanding their student body 2,3 or even 10x over a phase in period to scale up the gifts its institution brings to the world?
For most people, outside of technical training, scarcity of "high quality" education is either artificial, or education is more about signaling competitive success by mere admission to these "elite" institutions rather than anything actually learned.
- petesergeant 3y agoMany are at least somewhat space constricted. It’s not like there’s ready zoned growing room in Cambridge MA, Cambridge UK, or Oxford UK
- paxys 3y agoThe blocker for every major university expanding its enrollment is student housing. There's no space to build more dorms, and housing policies in all such cities actively blocks such efforts (look up Berkeley for a recent example of this). They all want to accept more students. There's simply no space to keep them.
- lr4444lr 3y agoYou'll have to pardon me if I find it highly dubious that given the option to attend with no guarantee of student housing for a secondary set of matriculants that thousands upon thousands more would not still _jump_ at the opportunity - even if they had to commute dozens of miles a day.
- HDThoreaun 3y agoPublic universities want to accept more students. Private ones don't, the exclusivity is the point.
- twic 3y agoSo, firstly, because that assumes that a successful university has some sort of secret sauce that makes it better at education than others, which it can apply to more students. They don't. Everyone knows how to run a university. Success is basically a coordination game, where you win by owning the point where the top 0.01% of students and top 0.01% of academics want to go. By definition, that doesn't scale. Secondly, they have. It's now quite common for UK universities to have spin-off campuses a long way from their original sites: https://www.lborolondon.ac.uk/ https://www.lborolondon.ac.uk/ https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/currentstudents/study-abroad/international-campuses/china-malaysia-campuses.aspx https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/currentstudents/study-abroad/in...