7 ms·

Stanford, Duke, Rice, … and Gates?

33 points by dhimes 17y ago

Locke1689 17y ago
This seems to be a university with a focus on the education of undergraduates. However, that is not the primary (maybe not even secondary) purpose of most universities. Most top universities in the US are research institutions and their professors are hired for their expertise in their field, not their teaching skills. Are there problems with this approach? Undoubtedly. However, I don't think just throwing Gates's money at the problem will solve anything. If you want to hire top professors you also have to have benefits they wouldn't get at other schools. Salary may do it, but I have a feeling that most professors are in it for the research opportunities anyway.
hughprime 17y ago
While I'd like to see a new, well-funded private university show up (preferably in Portland) the specific ideas here seem to be a combination of "vague" and "bad". Frinstance: "Nor would you sequester faculty members into departments organized around academic disciplines... Gates's programs would cross traditional disciplines, organized around goals for what students need to learn." What does that mean, exactly, in practice?
- dhimes 17y ago
  You could, for instance, combine the teaching of physics with calculus, or linear algebra with computer programming, all integrated into one badass class with coordinated assignments.
stuff4ben 17y ago
Intriguing! I wonder how a student from Gates U. would be accepted in the job market? Would there be a bias like there is today towards technical schools like ITT Tech and others? Or would the clout of Gates be enough to overcome that? I think it would be a great way to preserve the Bill Gates legacy though which might appeal him.
- joshfinnie 17y ago
  Now that you mention it, it does sound like an glorified trade (tech) school. I think the idea of having people with phd's teach at university is more for the critical thinking one gets out of class and not so much for their knowledge. When you get to the phd level, you are very specialized anyways and probably forgot most of intro to circuits (though you have to teach it anyways). University gives students the knowledge to think on their own, not sure you'd get that from Gates U.
  - gaius 17y ago
    Microsoft Research suggests that Gates is perfectly well aware of the value of traditional academia.
mnemonicsloth 17y ago
High-quality college credentials are the key to opportunity in the modern economy. Really? I don't suppose it can be argued that they are. But it's far from clear that they should be, or even will be. The field of post-secondary education is ripe with opportunities for new methods and technology. It's sad that someone tasked with studying this state of affairs can do no better than the stultified credentialism and admissions-essay mindset that afflicts the present system.
- Alex3917 17y ago
  Not only does the author have no understanding of educational theory, I don't think they have any actual understanding of Bill Gates either. As if he would stop trying to cure malaria to start some some U.S. college.
  - arfrank 17y ago
    I just read the article and I don't recall seeing him saying anything specifically about where it would go. He alludes to Seattle, and it is apparent that his words do lend to a US based institution, whats to say that Gates shouldn't do this somewhere else. Why not build it somewhere where its 10X cheaper to build and run, then do the research he's already funding "in house" as competition to the other researchers.
yef 17y ago
No, focus on pre-college education. As funny as it sounds, we don't need another top-flight university (which would cost billions alone) as much as we need better education in our local schools.
- ctbarna 17y ago
  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is already working on making better high schools. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/topics/Pages/high-schools.aspx http://www.gatesfoundation.org/topics/Pages/high-schools.asp...
- TheElder 17y ago
  A few things that would help right away, uniforms and tiers. Three or four tiers would do. Slow, average, bright. I understand the mixing of students of different abilities, but I think it does more harm than good.
  - unalone 17y ago
    What does more harm than good is the fucking standardization of education, to the point where we assume that all children learn the same and if one has a different route to learning he's dull or disabled or disadvantaged. I mean, yes, he's disadvantaged, but only because the system we're in is so concerned with monitoring kids and determining who's bright and who's not bright, with such an ass-backwards system that it very frequently puts the wrong people in the wrong places. When I was seventeen years old, I took the best class of my life. It was a science fiction/fantasy literature class elective, half a year long. I'd had the teacher the year before for AP English, and I assumed that perhaps the class might be as good if I didn't have to deal with the out-and-out retards that came with the subject of science fiction. We had the violent kids who fantasized about being evil dictators, the obsessives who didn't know when to shut their mouths... All the "special" kids who I'd stopped seeing in the eighth grade when it was determined I was better than them and shouldn't have to spend my time dealing with them. (Like dealing with the typical honors student is any less frustrating.) Instead, our teacher barged ahead from the first day, without stopping for anybody or anything. The stuff he was teaching was alien to all of us: Propp's hierarchy for fairy tales was first on the list. He'd give us a book and a set of short stories a week and expect us to finish it all. While we read perhaps eight books all year in my IB English class, we got to at least ten in the sci-fi course, all in half a year, and we weren't dealing with bullshit sci-fi, we were dealing with the stuff that's complex and heavy enough to qualify as Serious Literature in my book. How he achieved it: He had no lesson plans, he gave no tests, he did nothing but talk, using the things we were reading as a frame of reference. He'd do research so that he knew more than any of us (he crammed for Asimov, who I know inside and out, and came up with things I hadn't heard of before), and everybody just talked. There was no monitoring, no belittling, no talking down, just an hour-long conversation every day, with four big projects that determined our grade - but the projects were freeform; we could decide how to handle them. I wrote prose and poetry; three kids made a documentary; a bunch of the kids I'd detested went into Garry's Mod and recorded a pantomime; other kids made large cardboard replicas of alien figures and devised their own SF worlds. Again, these were not honors kids. They were kids I'd thought were too stupid to read. But they handled the courseload as well as anybody, and left with a pretty hardcore understanding of how sci-fi works. I have never had much success in school. I'm the kid who got placed in all honors courses because teachers realized I was a faster learner than their other students, but who spent his time in school refusing to get much schoolwork done. Before I discovered art school, which cared more for my portfolio than for my GPA, I was at a good public school, which in the minds of friends going to good private schools was a shithole. I endured a year of snide comments and mockery from people I'd gotten along with who were more-than-delighted to remind me that society had determined my "place" was in a public school with no famous alumni. Now that I've transferred to an excellent art school, all the comments are something along the lines of "Can I have a tall latte with milk?", which was funny about twenty years ago. I find it unbearably offensive that society makes attempts to "rank" students. Yes, people are different, and learn differently, but those are strengths unless decided otherwise. I know a lot of people whose lives were ruined by well-meaning administrators who assumed children were shitty brats who needed disciplining and straightening out. What would help right away was a system that made an attempt to welcome diversity, not just in appearance (seriously, screw uniforms, they're fixing the wrong problem) but in character and style.
zck 17y ago
This idea seems contrary to Gates's goals. He's said that he wants the money he's giving to charity to be spent in his lifetime. Endowing a school would necessarily prevent this goal.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- joechung 17y ago
  Just to name a couple: The Foundation endowed $20 million to Duke University (University Scholars program). He also endowed $10 million to the University of Washington in his mother's memory (Mary Gates Scholars program).
caffeine 17y ago
I'd like to see Gates U. really be "Informal U." Experts in various areas organize little seminars of variable lengths and talk about whatever they want to talk about. Students find people who know what they want to learn, and ask them to teach it. Each professor publicizes the list of reading you need to really understand before you can work with them - and informally organize a discussion group for the students they know are working through it. So you're forced to plan in advance, you spend time reading the fundamentals of a field, discuss it with people, and perhaps write something to show you know what you're doing, before the prof. lets you in on his project. You plan your sequence of projects in order to get a) recommendations from interesting people and b) an interesting sequence of reading and work that fits together well. All the project work is either a) commissioned by industry or b) destined for direct publication. Ideally, most students do a bit of both. This is College by UROP - you work with a few professors every year on projects, and you need their recommendation to progress into the following year. In your final year, you do a serious piece of independent work, perhaps with others. The referees you've had form a committee who judge your work. Quite simply, it needs to be published in a quality journal, or sold to industry, in order for you to graduate (i.e. you actually have to do something useful for somebody) (edit: I just noticed this is basically just graduate school. Sooo, yeah ... Gates U. should be grad school for undergrads.)
ggchappell 17y ago
There are some fine ideas here, but the writer doesn't really seem to understand money. > There would be no tenure, obviously. I assume you never thought it was a good idea at Microsoft —why have it here? I have problems with the tenure system myself, despite having tenure at a university. However, we must realize that it's not just some silly idea someone dreamed up one day. Tenure has real economic value to those who get it. The standard deal for professors at many universities is somewhat low pay, made up for by serious job security. Thus, tenure is, in part, a way of saving a university money. So if you throw out tenure, and you want to get something other than bottom-of-the-barrel teaching, then you need to pay people more. But the writer says: > Who would work at Gates University? Anyone who could do a great job. Maybe professors will have Ph.D.'s, maybe they won't. If a really smart person drops out of college, founds a phenomenally successful business, and decides to turn toward education as a way of giving back, he or she would be welcome to apply for a job. So, not only have you put yourself in a position of having to pay people more, you also want to get away from people who just like to teach, and instead hire people who have proven themselves to be very good at making money. Well, go right ahead, but understand that these people are going to require enormous salaries. Where is that money going to come from? > For-profit universities, meanwhile, are surging into the online market. Some provide valuable services, while others are ripping off students and taxpayers. But on some level they all want to provide as good an education as necessary for as much tuition as possible. Gates University would provide as good an education as possible for as much tuition as necessary, .... And that's going to be an awful lot.
byrneseyeview 17y ago
Sounds like Olin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Engineering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Eng...
- _pi 17y ago
  Except not a trade school. Olin is bit heavy on entrepreneurial ventures though.

33 points by dhimes 17y ago

This seems to be a university with a focus on the education of undergraduates. However, that is not the primary (maybe not even secondary) purpose of most universities. Most top universities in the US are research institutions and their professors are hired for their expertise in their field, not their teaching skills. Are there problems with this approach? Undoubtedly. However, I don't think just throwing Gates's money at the problem will solve anything. If you want to hire top professors you also have to have benefits they wouldn't get at other schools. Salary may do it, but I have a feeling that most professors are in it for the research opportunities anyway.

hughprime 17y ago

While I'd like to see a new, well-funded private university show up (preferably in Portland) the specific ideas here seem to be a combination of "vague" and "bad". Frinstance: "Nor would you sequester faculty members into departments organized around academic disciplines... Gates's programs would cross traditional disciplines, organized around goals for what students need to learn." What does that mean, exactly, in practice?

dhimes 17y ago
You could, for instance, combine the teaching of physics with calculus, or linear algebra with computer programming, all integrated into one badass class with coordinated assignments.

stuff4ben 17y ago

Intriguing! I wonder how a student from Gates U. would be accepted in the job market? Would there be a bias like there is today towards technical schools like ITT Tech and others? Or would the clout of Gates be enough to overcome that? I think it would be a great way to preserve the Bill Gates legacy though which might appeal him.

joshfinnie 17y ago
Now that you mention it, it does sound like an glorified trade (tech) school. I think the idea of having people with phd's teach at university is more for the critical thinking one gets out of class and not so much for their knowledge. When you get to the phd level, you are very specialized anyways and probably forgot most of intro to circuits (though you have to teach it anyways). University gives students the knowledge to think on their own, not sure you'd get that from Gates U.
- gaius 17y ago
  Microsoft Research suggests that Gates is perfectly well aware of the value of traditional academia.

mnemonicsloth 17y ago

High-quality college credentials are the key to opportunity in the modern economy. Really? I don't suppose it can be argued that they are. But it's far from clear that they should be, or even will be. The field of post-secondary education is ripe with opportunities for new methods and technology. It's sad that someone tasked with studying this state of affairs can do no better than the stultified credentialism and admissions-essay mindset that afflicts the present system.

Alex3917 17y ago
Not only does the author have no understanding of educational theory, I don't think they have any actual understanding of Bill Gates either. As if he would stop trying to cure malaria to start some some U.S. college.
- arfrank 17y ago
  I just read the article and I don't recall seeing him saying anything specifically about where it would go. He alludes to Seattle, and it is apparent that his words do lend to a US based institution, whats to say that Gates shouldn't do this somewhere else. Why not build it somewhere where its 10X cheaper to build and run, then do the research he's already funding "in house" as competition to the other researchers.

yef 17y ago

No, focus on pre-college education. As funny as it sounds, we don't need another top-flight university (which would cost billions alone) as much as we need better education in our local schools.

ctbarna 17y ago
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is already working on making better high schools. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/topics/Pages/high-schools.aspx http://www.gatesfoundation.org/topics/Pages/high-schools.asp...
TheElder 17y ago
A few things that would help right away, uniforms and tiers. Three or four tiers would do. Slow, average, bright. I understand the mixing of students of different abilities, but I think it does more harm than good.
- unalone 17y ago
  What does more harm than good is the fucking standardization of education, to the point where we assume that all children learn the same and if one has a different route to learning he's dull or disabled or disadvantaged. I mean, yes, he's disadvantaged, but only because the system we're in is so concerned with monitoring kids and determining who's bright and who's not bright, with such an ass-backwards system that it very frequently puts the wrong people in the wrong places. When I was seventeen years old, I took the best class of my life. It was a science fiction/fantasy literature class elective, half a year long. I'd had the teacher the year before for AP English, and I assumed that perhaps the class might be as good if I didn't have to deal with the out-and-out retards that came with the subject of science fiction. We had the violent kids who fantasized about being evil dictators, the obsessives who didn't know when to shut their mouths... All the "special" kids who I'd stopped seeing in the eighth grade when it was determined I was better than them and shouldn't have to spend my time dealing with them. (Like dealing with the typical honors student is any less frustrating.) Instead, our teacher barged ahead from the first day, without stopping for anybody or anything. The stuff he was teaching was alien to all of us: Propp's hierarchy for fairy tales was first on the list. He'd give us a book and a set of short stories a week and expect us to finish it all. While we read perhaps eight books all year in my IB English class, we got to at least ten in the sci-fi course, all in half a year, and we weren't dealing with bullshit sci-fi, we were dealing with the stuff that's complex and heavy enough to qualify as Serious Literature in my book. How he achieved it: He had no lesson plans, he gave no tests, he did nothing but talk, using the things we were reading as a frame of reference. He'd do research so that he knew more than any of us (he crammed for Asimov, who I know inside and out, and came up with things I hadn't heard of before), and everybody just talked. There was no monitoring, no belittling, no talking down, just an hour-long conversation every day, with four big projects that determined our grade - but the projects were freeform; we could decide how to handle them. I wrote prose and poetry; three kids made a documentary; a bunch of the kids I'd detested went into Garry's Mod and recorded a pantomime; other kids made large cardboard replicas of alien figures and devised their own SF worlds. Again, these were not honors kids. They were kids I'd thought were too stupid to read. But they handled the courseload as well as anybody, and left with a pretty hardcore understanding of how sci-fi works. I have never had much success in school. I'm the kid who got placed in all honors courses because teachers realized I was a faster learner than their other students, but who spent his time in school refusing to get much schoolwork done. Before I discovered art school, which cared more for my portfolio than for my GPA, I was at a good public school, which in the minds of friends going to good private schools was a shithole. I endured a year of snide comments and mockery from people I'd gotten along with who were more-than-delighted to remind me that society had determined my "place" was in a public school with no famous alumni. Now that I've transferred to an excellent art school, all the comments are something along the lines of "Can I have a tall latte with milk?", which was funny about twenty years ago. I find it unbearably offensive that society makes attempts to "rank" students. Yes, people are different, and learn differently, but those are strengths unless decided otherwise. I know a lot of people whose lives were ruined by well-meaning administrators who assumed children were shitty brats who needed disciplining and straightening out. What would help right away was a system that made an attempt to welcome diversity, not just in appearance (seriously, screw uniforms, they're fixing the wrong problem) but in character and style.

zck 17y ago

This idea seems contrary to Gates's goals. He's said that he wants the money he's giving to charity to be spent in his lifetime. Endowing a school would necessarily prevent this goal.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
joechung 17y ago
Just to name a couple: The Foundation endowed $20 million to Duke University (University Scholars program). He also endowed $10 million to the University of Washington in his mother's memory (Mary Gates Scholars program).

caffeine 17y ago

I'd like to see Gates U. really be "Informal U." Experts in various areas organize little seminars of variable lengths and talk about whatever they want to talk about. Students find people who know what they want to learn, and ask them to teach it. Each professor publicizes the list of reading you need to really understand before you can work with them - and informally organize a discussion group for the students they know are working through it. So you're forced to plan in advance, you spend time reading the fundamentals of a field, discuss it with people, and perhaps write something to show you know what you're doing, before the prof. lets you in on his project. You plan your sequence of projects in order to get a) recommendations from interesting people and b) an interesting sequence of reading and work that fits together well. All the project work is either a) commissioned by industry or b) destined for direct publication. Ideally, most students do a bit of both. This is College by UROP - you work with a few professors every year on projects, and you need their recommendation to progress into the following year. In your final year, you do a serious piece of independent work, perhaps with others. The referees you've had form a committee who judge your work. Quite simply, it needs to be published in a quality journal, or sold to industry, in order for you to graduate (i.e. you actually have to do something useful for somebody) (edit: I just noticed this is basically just graduate school. Sooo, yeah ... Gates U. should be grad school for undergrads.)

ggchappell 17y ago

There are some fine ideas here, but the writer doesn't really seem to understand money. > There would be no tenure, obviously. I assume you never thought it was a good idea at Microsoft —why have it here? I have problems with the tenure system myself, despite having tenure at a university. However, we must realize that it's not just some silly idea someone dreamed up one day. Tenure has real economic value to those who get it. The standard deal for professors at many universities is somewhat low pay, made up for by serious job security. Thus, tenure is, in part, a way of saving a university money. So if you throw out tenure, and you want to get something other than bottom-of-the-barrel teaching, then you need to pay people more. But the writer says: > Who would work at Gates University? Anyone who could do a great job. Maybe professors will have Ph.D.'s, maybe they won't. If a really smart person drops out of college, founds a phenomenally successful business, and decides to turn toward education as a way of giving back, he or she would be welcome to apply for a job. So, not only have you put yourself in a position of having to pay people more, you also want to get away from people who just like to teach, and instead hire people who have proven themselves to be very good at making money. Well, go right ahead, but understand that these people are going to require enormous salaries. Where is that money going to come from? > For-profit universities, meanwhile, are surging into the online market. Some provide valuable services, while others are ripping off students and taxpayers. But on some level they all want to provide as good an education as necessary for as much tuition as possible. Gates University would provide as good an education as possible for as much tuition as necessary, .... And that's going to be an awful lot.

byrneseyeview 17y ago

Sounds like Olin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Engineering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Eng...

_pi 17y ago
Except not a trade school. Olin is bit heavy on entrepreneurial ventures though.