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Stanford has a $40 billion endowment for 8k undergrads. UCLA has a $10 billion endowment for 34k undergrads. Naturally, the class sizes will be much larger. The

Stanford has a $40 billion endowment for 8k undergrads. UCLA has a $10 billion endowment for 34k undergrads. Naturally, the class sizes will be much larger. The UC system does not put 100% of students at UC Berkeley and UCLA, they distribute it across several campuses and distance education and maintain a leveling system that helps promising research talent be in the room with experienced researchers Despite rising costs, a college degree is still a positive lifetime investment for students (not to mention the positive externalities educated populations have on society at large). The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure HYPSM choosing to share land, curriculum, expertise, and administrative infrastructure through network'd partnerships would lead to massive economies of scale and a broad reduction of educational costs. Another way to think about this - is one city of 1 million people more efficient to run per capita than 10 cities of 100k people? The answer is a resounding yes due to urban scaling. Colleges are effectively mini-cities "I think that you fundamentally misunderstand the markers that make an in-person education higher quality" -> I founded an in-person college with regional accreditation that had a lot more 1:1 and small group teacher time than HYPSM and an average starting salary on par with CS grads from these schools. Our alumni have gone on to become YC founders and can be found at most top tech companies and startups It is a choice to value exclusivity for exclusivity's sake (eg. withholding JSTOR data from students of colleges who can't afford those costs). The best institutions (eg. YC, Apple) care a lot more about what you can build than what school you got into at age 17

141205 8mo ago
"The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure" I would like to see a source on this: your claim appears ungrounded when considering American colleges.
- DesaiAshu 8mo ago
  It is generally understood in the industry that around half of universities are in significant debt / financial distress (started prior to Covid // the demographic peak // recent DoE cuts). Graduate underemployment is also quite high due to a lack of alignment (or perhaps slow alignment) of degree programs to career outcomes https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-papers/2024/wp24-20.pdf https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-... https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/aug/jobs-degrees-underemployed-college-graduates-have https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/aug/jobs-degrees-... Ideas for solutions here: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604299.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604299.pdf
  - fc417fc802 8mo ago
    Can we take a minute to consider that degrees aren't supposed to be aligned to career outcomes to begin with? That's what vocational schools are for. Somehow academia became conflated with both a job training program and an adult daycare service and (at least in the US) the result is a confused, inconsistent, expensive mess whose exact purpose isn't clear.
    - bpt3 8mo ago
      You want them to go back to being finishing schools for the wealthy, as they were before Hopkins (funnily enough) founded the first institute in the US that would be seen as a form of a modern university today? For people who aren't financially independent, education is a means to an end. Pretending that's not the case or worse, shouldn't be the case, is absurd to ask of anyone running a school and highly damaging to society in general, and the mix of "vocational training" and "classic academia" provided by most US universities seems to work extremely well.
      - fc417fc802 8mo ago
        You're putting words in my mouth. I merely pointed out that they have a very confused mission thus I think it is not surprising that there is dysfunction. We have vocational trade schools. We have professional guild schools (medical, dentistry, etc). At least some subset of students attends school with the intention of becoming professional researchers (ie pursuing a PhD, then a postdoc, then finally general employment). I think it would be reasonable to expect undergraduate institutions to set unambiguous goals for each program. Students should know what they are signing up for. It would be fine to graduate with a certain amount of time spent explicitly on general education and a certain amount spent explicitly on vocational training with a specific target. If you claim that education is a means to an end then what of (for example) history majors? I think the bachelors diploma itself is what became a means to an end much to the detriment of "pure" academia. The CS program at my undergrad spent time teaching us how to use version control. That's fantastic for a professional programmer but how does that have anything to do with CS as an academic pursuit? You can literally do much (perhaps all) of actual CS with nothing more than a pen and paper.
econ 8mo ago
The solution is to hoard ideas, organize them, review them and experiment. I for example suspect that giving students more time for everything would improve results. I have nothing to show for this but it would be good science to run the experiment. Unless of course there are better sounding ideas that should be tried first.

141205 8mo ago

"The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure" I would like to see a source on this: your claim appears ungrounded when considering American colleges.

DesaiAshu 8mo ago
It is generally understood in the industry that around half of universities are in significant debt / financial distress (started prior to Covid // the demographic peak // recent DoE cuts). Graduate underemployment is also quite high due to a lack of alignment (or perhaps slow alignment) of degree programs to career outcomes https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-papers/2024/wp24-20.pdf https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-... https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/aug/jobs-degrees-underemployed-college-graduates-have https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/aug/jobs-degrees-... Ideas for solutions here: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604299.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604299.pdf
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  Can we take a minute to consider that degrees aren't supposed to be aligned to career outcomes to begin with? That's what vocational schools are for. Somehow academia became conflated with both a job training program and an adult daycare service and (at least in the US) the result is a confused, inconsistent, expensive mess whose exact purpose isn't clear.
  - bpt3 8mo ago
    You want them to go back to being finishing schools for the wealthy, as they were before Hopkins (funnily enough) founded the first institute in the US that would be seen as a form of a modern university today? For people who aren't financially independent, education is a means to an end. Pretending that's not the case or worse, shouldn't be the case, is absurd to ask of anyone running a school and highly damaging to society in general, and the mix of "vocational training" and "classic academia" provided by most US universities seems to work extremely well.
    - fc417fc802 8mo ago
      You're putting words in my mouth. I merely pointed out that they have a very confused mission thus I think it is not surprising that there is dysfunction. We have vocational trade schools. We have professional guild schools (medical, dentistry, etc). At least some subset of students attends school with the intention of becoming professional researchers (ie pursuing a PhD, then a postdoc, then finally general employment). I think it would be reasonable to expect undergraduate institutions to set unambiguous goals for each program. Students should know what they are signing up for. It would be fine to graduate with a certain amount of time spent explicitly on general education and a certain amount spent explicitly on vocational training with a specific target. If you claim that education is a means to an end then what of (for example) history majors? I think the bachelors diploma itself is what became a means to an end much to the detriment of "pure" academia. The CS program at my undergrad spent time teaching us how to use version control. That's fantastic for a professional programmer but how does that have anything to do with CS as an academic pursuit? You can literally do much (perhaps all) of actual CS with nothing more than a pen and paper.

econ 8mo ago

The solution is to hoard ideas, organize them, review them and experiment. I for example suspect that giving students more time for everything would improve results. I have nothing to show for this but it would be good science to run the experiment. Unless of course there are better sounding ideas that should be tried first.