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I hate it when people try to change the meaning of words. Cartel means collusion. Collusion means people doing deals. Is there any evidence that guys from Harv

I hate it when people try to change the meaning of words. Cartel means collusion. Collusion means people doing deals. Is there any evidence that guys from Harvard meet with guys from Yale and guys from Princeton and collude on something? Exactly on what are they supposed to collude? On who they are going to admit from the incoming cohort of applicants? How exactly could that happen? Each university gets thousands of applications. Are they going to rank them and say "I get this guy, you get this other guy, and yours is slightly better than mine, so you owe me one next year"? That's a nice conspiracy theory, but you can't keep this type of things secret.

tnecniv 3y ago
Clearly they’re a cartel because they colluded to form their own sports league that doesn’t give athletic scholarships (that’s all the Ivy League is after all). Jokes aside of lot of the complaints are kind of nonsense. For example, the article laments that their admitted class size doesn’t track the population. Setting aside the fact that they’re private institutions and can target whatever size they want, there’s a lot of bottlenecks to growing class sizes. Besides having to build new facilities (not just dorms but new lecture halls, especially larger lecture halls for big intro classes), these schools like to tout a student to instructor ratio. That means hiring new faculty, and these schools don’t just take anyone as faculty. A department trying to hire new professors will just wait a year if they weren’t satisfied with the crop of applications they got the previous year. They’re willing to wait to get a quality person because that person is potentially a member of the department for the rest of their career.
rapjr9 3y ago
This is how I understand the collusion argument made in the article: The Ivy's could collude on managing their endowments. Having a large pile of money to invest is a form of power, you may have some limitations on how you invest the money, but you can favor one player over another (as Bill Gates does). Gifts to universities often come with strings attached, requiring they be used for specific purposes. This is a pure exercise of power, unrelated to the academic mission of the schools. In some sense the school becomes a front for the power exercised through the endowments. The collusion also does not have to be explicit, they can collude by watching what the others do and doing the same. I once asked my boss when I worked at an Ivy League school why didn't they admit more students when there were so many applicants? They'd have to build more dorms, but they were already building an enormous number of structures and they owned lots of land. He said those students could just go to school elsewhere, go to a state college, the school had no obligation to teach them. So by keeping the school elite-oriented and limiting enrollment, essentially the mission to teach was lost. The school wasn't there to teach people who wanted to learn, they were there to teach only the best of the best. Combine that with admissions driven by donations. Their mission becomes propagating the elite, not building a better world through education. They don't want to expand their capacity to teach, they want to increase their ability to control power.

tnecniv 3y ago

Clearly they’re a cartel because they colluded to form their own sports league that doesn’t give athletic scholarships (that’s all the Ivy League is after all). Jokes aside of lot of the complaints are kind of nonsense. For example, the article laments that their admitted class size doesn’t track the population. Setting aside the fact that they’re private institutions and can target whatever size they want, there’s a lot of bottlenecks to growing class sizes. Besides having to build new facilities (not just dorms but new lecture halls, especially larger lecture halls for big intro classes), these schools like to tout a student to instructor ratio. That means hiring new faculty, and these schools don’t just take anyone as faculty. A department trying to hire new professors will just wait a year if they weren’t satisfied with the crop of applications they got the previous year. They’re willing to wait to get a quality person because that person is potentially a member of the department for the rest of their career.

rapjr9 3y ago

This is how I understand the collusion argument made in the article: The Ivy's could collude on managing their endowments. Having a large pile of money to invest is a form of power, you may have some limitations on how you invest the money, but you can favor one player over another (as Bill Gates does). Gifts to universities often come with strings attached, requiring they be used for specific purposes. This is a pure exercise of power, unrelated to the academic mission of the schools. In some sense the school becomes a front for the power exercised through the endowments. The collusion also does not have to be explicit, they can collude by watching what the others do and doing the same. I once asked my boss when I worked at an Ivy League school why didn't they admit more students when there were so many applicants? They'd have to build more dorms, but they were already building an enormous number of structures and they owned lots of land. He said those students could just go to school elsewhere, go to a state college, the school had no obligation to teach them. So by keeping the school elite-oriented and limiting enrollment, essentially the mission to teach was lost. The school wasn't there to teach people who wanted to learn, they were there to teach only the best of the best. Combine that with admissions driven by donations. Their mission becomes propagating the elite, not building a better world through education. They don't want to expand their capacity to teach, they want to increase their ability to control power.