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Some interesting points, but this one: "In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it

Some interesting points, but this one: "In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen. That is remarkable stinginess. Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable, conferring a lifetime of social capital and prestige." Isn't the reason Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable precisely the limited supply of them?

maudineormsby 17y ago
Maybe, but shouldn't they be valuable because it's graduates have proven themselves to be well educated and well balanced people? Should education be valuable because there is so little of it?
- deleted 17y ago
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- kakooljay 17y ago
  Exactly... just like doctors should earn a lot of money because their skills save lives, not because professional associations conspire to limit the number of doctors.
- arihelgason 17y ago
  The question is how well does quality education scale? What I found most valuable during my university days was easy access to great professors. Many of my peers learned more outside the classroom in this way than during lectures. With more students it becomes difficult to foster this type of one to one relationship. Those less motivated to get to know professors become more likely to fall by the wayside.
  - maudineormsby 17y ago
    True but I think the article's point was that you could maintain the same professor-student ratio and increase class sizes if you have the billlions that Harvard had. Instead they spent the money to make them seem more prestigious.
    - req2 17y ago
      You could maintain the same professor-student ratio, but you wouldn't be able to retain the same professors. If Harvard expanded, it would be less able to maintain the 'superstar professor'-professor ratio because other colleges would be able to court the professors away with offers of greater access to better facilities and bigger corner offices with better grad student support.
nkassis 17y ago
I guess but at the same time the article points out that due to some lesser qualified students getting entry because of ivy school reason, many very qualified students get left out. And frankly, Harvard's rep would increase if they had more students achieve success. A larger class size could aid in that.
- natrius 17y ago
  Those "lesser qualified" students still end up being pretty successful. Rich people tend to stay rich. Admitting rich kids isn't hurting their reputation, and most legacies I met at my school were fairly indistinguishable intellectually.
eob 17y ago
Perhaps, but I think there is a much more practical and likely reason. It's just one that won't sell magazine articles: Harvard exists in a finite amount of space. Anyone who lives in Cambridge knows that Harvard, like many other city-schools, has expanded to the absolute borders of its property lines. It literally has nowhere else to go, which is why it is now buying property across the Charles river in Boston across from HBS. While it is always fun to criticize "elite schools" for their snobbery, I would suggest that the administration of Harvard actually had a rather simple decision: keep harvard at the scale and size that has proven successful for decades upon decades, or build a satellite campus to hold new students so it can grow it's size. A dimension of a university that is hard to put a dollar amount on is community. While building a satellite campus in Boston is possible, I think this would seriously damage the community, and thus output, of the school by dividing it into two disjoint locations. Anyway.. I just think it's easy to get mad at a school like Harvard for not accepting more students. But in reality, they simply are a school built a long time ago for a certain amount of students and can't realistically grow much larger.
- jbellis 17y ago
  > Harvard exists in a finite amount of space. True, but that's not the limiting factor in this time frame. From TFA: "Granted, it would cost money to teach more students. The university would need to invest in land and buildings and professors. But that's precisely what the university spent the endowment on. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone expanded by more than 125 positions over the past decade and increased spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. The university gobbled up nearby land and erected a collection of handsome new buildings, creating over six million square feet of new space since 2000 alone."
- cpr 17y ago
  Those are not exactly disjoint campuses--the new one (part of Allston, not Boston) is just across the Charles from the other. (Admittedly, a good distance from center to center, but Harvard (including Radcliffe) is already 2 miles from end to end. (I know, because I used to have to race from one to the other between classes at times.)) The real scandal with the Allston campus is that Harvard was buying it up piece by piece (most of it was admittedly pretty useless--train yards and trucking distribution points) using front corporations for the past 2-3 decades. Only recently did they come out and admit what they'd been doing. I suppose there's some argument that they had to keep things quiet while buying, in order to discourage speculators from competing with them. Now Allston is faced with a huge tax loss, though Harvard does voluntarily pay a property tax fee of $80M a year to Cambridge (or used to). That's probably a lot less than the commercial value of that land, but the non-commercial value of Harvard's central presence in Cambridge is hard to calculate.
dschobel 17y ago
The value is a function of the scarcity of the degree, the quality of the professors and the amount of resources. Since the last variable has gone up with no decrease in the scarcity there's more value for fewer people, proportionally, than there was a decade ago. The author argues this just further raises the walls surrounding an already fortunate class (because, let's be honest, if you get into Harvard, you're either talented as hell or extraordinarily well-connected).
frig 17y ago
Yes and no -- there's a chicken-and-egg aspect. If a Harvard education was useless -- and Harvard alums to a one all room-temperature iq, slackjawed mouthbreathers -- it wouldn't matter how scarce the degrees are, as they'd be valueless. Once you assume a particular level of educational quality and/or other 'intrinsic' value (here 'intrinsic' == everything other than the pure scarcity premium) it is of course the case that ceteris paribus the degree becomes less valuable the more people have it. But even then not entirely: if you cut the class size too small the consequent diminishment of the alumni network might take away more than the increased scarcity gave.
- elblanco 17y ago
  The "quality factor" of elite degrees has little to do with the education and a lot to do with who you can network with. Consequently, people think Harvard is the place to go not because they think Harvard grads have the prestige of being particularly smart (like say MIT grads have for CS or Julliard for music) but for being particularly well connected - something that everyone else has to bust their hump to build up happens by default at a place like this. If the startup community (and well established, famous former startups like Google) only recruited from state polytech schools, those would be the hot schools to attend. Consequently, no-name schools like New Jersey Inst. of Tech would suddenly be full of startup minded people. If those schools suddenly started charging $50k/yr for tuition and boarding (instead of the in-state tuition), that would select for people with money or access to money. Make the admission process highly competitive and selective (GPA >3.8, SAT >1400 or parents donate a library wing). Now NJIT is full of startup minded tech people with money. Add that up and you achieve the same thing that Harvard does for MBAs and Lawyers. Well connectedness with people who have the means to approach and achieve what they want. There is no doubt that the education one receives at these places is also adequate to the task. Otherwise money, connections and no brains results in dumb ideas like Internet connected toasters and Flooz.com
  - cpr 17y ago
    The value of connections is definitely real. My class ('76) was one year ahead of Gates ('77), and included Scott McNealy (Sun founder), Trip Hawkins (EA founder), Tim O'Reilly, John Quartermann (sp?), and others. (Not that I knew any of them well. Gates I knew casually from chatting before/after class, and Trip was the roommate of a friend from San Diego.)
algorias 17y ago
Scarcity doesn't add to the value of the degree. It multiplies it. The more the degree is worth by itself, the more restricting it increases its value. There's a balance point somewhere in the middle.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Harvard sells exclusivity, period.
patio11 17y ago
Isn't the reason Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable precisely the limited supply of them? Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable because Harvard does not have to maintain the polite fiction that all individuals are equally gifted. As a result, other institutions which have to maintain the polite fiction that all individuals are equally gifted, but which would prefer to get the ones more gifted than others, look for the Harvard label.
- isamuel 17y ago
  I'm confused. Institutions which prefer people educated at elite universities aren't "maintaining a polite fiction." They're using a proxy for quality. They'd admit as much. It's imperfect, and they'd admit that too, but I don't get the "anti-anti-meritocracy" sentiment here. When firms go recruiting at elite universities, they say it's because they want the best of the best. They don't say "all individuals are equally gifted." This strikes me as a total misunderstanding of why educational credentials are valuable. I agree with the original poster, though. The "clubbiness" of elite schools is part of what gives them value.
  - deleted 17y ago
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    - mojonixon 17y ago
      It's the Chronicle of Higher Education, written for academics. I suspect most faculty, Harvard faculty included, do not wish to be intellectual caddies for the rich kids at the country club.
      - deleted 17y ago
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        unalone 17y ago
        You're spouting some fine bullshit. Suggesting that Harvard could expand to handle more students than it's handling now isn't "socialism". It's rational unless you're suggesting either that there aren't more brilliant students now than already go to Harvard, or that there aren't more brilliant professors now than already teach there. If both those are false, which they are, then Harvard can be seen as wasting its endowment on non-practical things rather than both growing and helping a larger community than it is now.
tlb 17y ago
Yeah, it's kind of like saying "De Beers has so much money, why don't they use it to mine more diamonds so everyone can wear some." It is the scarcity that makes them valuable. Despite having gotten a lot out of Harvard, I have not been whipping out my checkbook when they ask for alumni contributions, because it's hard to see how even an extra billion would make any students' lives better.

maudineormsby 17y ago

Maybe, but shouldn't they be valuable because it's graduates have proven themselves to be well educated and well balanced people? Should education be valuable because there is so little of it?

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
kakooljay 17y ago
Exactly... just like doctors should earn a lot of money because their skills save lives, not because professional associations conspire to limit the number of doctors.
arihelgason 17y ago
The question is how well does quality education scale? What I found most valuable during my university days was easy access to great professors. Many of my peers learned more outside the classroom in this way than during lectures. With more students it becomes difficult to foster this type of one to one relationship. Those less motivated to get to know professors become more likely to fall by the wayside.
- maudineormsby 17y ago
  True but I think the article's point was that you could maintain the same professor-student ratio and increase class sizes if you have the billlions that Harvard had. Instead they spent the money to make them seem more prestigious.
  - req2 17y ago
    You could maintain the same professor-student ratio, but you wouldn't be able to retain the same professors. If Harvard expanded, it would be less able to maintain the 'superstar professor'-professor ratio because other colleges would be able to court the professors away with offers of greater access to better facilities and bigger corner offices with better grad student support.

nkassis 17y ago

I guess but at the same time the article points out that due to some lesser qualified students getting entry because of ivy school reason, many very qualified students get left out. And frankly, Harvard's rep would increase if they had more students achieve success. A larger class size could aid in that.

natrius 17y ago
Those "lesser qualified" students still end up being pretty successful. Rich people tend to stay rich. Admitting rich kids isn't hurting their reputation, and most legacies I met at my school were fairly indistinguishable intellectually.

eob 17y ago

Perhaps, but I think there is a much more practical and likely reason. It's just one that won't sell magazine articles: Harvard exists in a finite amount of space. Anyone who lives in Cambridge knows that Harvard, like many other city-schools, has expanded to the absolute borders of its property lines. It literally has nowhere else to go, which is why it is now buying property across the Charles river in Boston across from HBS. While it is always fun to criticize "elite schools" for their snobbery, I would suggest that the administration of Harvard actually had a rather simple decision: keep harvard at the scale and size that has proven successful for decades upon decades, or build a satellite campus to hold new students so it can grow it's size. A dimension of a university that is hard to put a dollar amount on is community. While building a satellite campus in Boston is possible, I think this would seriously damage the community, and thus output, of the school by dividing it into two disjoint locations. Anyway.. I just think it's easy to get mad at a school like Harvard for not accepting more students. But in reality, they simply are a school built a long time ago for a certain amount of students and can't realistically grow much larger.

jbellis 17y ago
> Harvard exists in a finite amount of space. True, but that's not the limiting factor in this time frame. From TFA: "Granted, it would cost money to teach more students. The university would need to invest in land and buildings and professors. But that's precisely what the university spent the endowment on. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone expanded by more than 125 positions over the past decade and increased spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. The university gobbled up nearby land and erected a collection of handsome new buildings, creating over six million square feet of new space since 2000 alone."
cpr 17y ago
Those are not exactly disjoint campuses--the new one (part of Allston, not Boston) is just across the Charles from the other. (Admittedly, a good distance from center to center, but Harvard (including Radcliffe) is already 2 miles from end to end. (I know, because I used to have to race from one to the other between classes at times.)) The real scandal with the Allston campus is that Harvard was buying it up piece by piece (most of it was admittedly pretty useless--train yards and trucking distribution points) using front corporations for the past 2-3 decades. Only recently did they come out and admit what they'd been doing. I suppose there's some argument that they had to keep things quiet while buying, in order to discourage speculators from competing with them. Now Allston is faced with a huge tax loss, though Harvard does voluntarily pay a property tax fee of $80M a year to Cambridge (or used to). That's probably a lot less than the commercial value of that land, but the non-commercial value of Harvard's central presence in Cambridge is hard to calculate.

dschobel 17y ago

The value is a function of the scarcity of the degree, the quality of the professors and the amount of resources. Since the last variable has gone up with no decrease in the scarcity there's more value for fewer people, proportionally, than there was a decade ago. The author argues this just further raises the walls surrounding an already fortunate class (because, let's be honest, if you get into Harvard, you're either talented as hell or extraordinarily well-connected).

frig 17y ago

Yes and no -- there's a chicken-and-egg aspect. If a Harvard education was useless -- and Harvard alums to a one all room-temperature iq, slackjawed mouthbreathers -- it wouldn't matter how scarce the degrees are, as they'd be valueless. Once you assume a particular level of educational quality and/or other 'intrinsic' value (here 'intrinsic' == everything other than the pure scarcity premium) it is of course the case that ceteris paribus the degree becomes less valuable the more people have it. But even then not entirely: if you cut the class size too small the consequent diminishment of the alumni network might take away more than the increased scarcity gave.

elblanco 17y ago
The "quality factor" of elite degrees has little to do with the education and a lot to do with who you can network with. Consequently, people think Harvard is the place to go not because they think Harvard grads have the prestige of being particularly smart (like say MIT grads have for CS or Julliard for music) but for being particularly well connected - something that everyone else has to bust their hump to build up happens by default at a place like this. If the startup community (and well established, famous former startups like Google) only recruited from state polytech schools, those would be the hot schools to attend. Consequently, no-name schools like New Jersey Inst. of Tech would suddenly be full of startup minded people. If those schools suddenly started charging $50k/yr for tuition and boarding (instead of the in-state tuition), that would select for people with money or access to money. Make the admission process highly competitive and selective (GPA >3.8, SAT >1400 or parents donate a library wing). Now NJIT is full of startup minded tech people with money. Add that up and you achieve the same thing that Harvard does for MBAs and Lawyers. Well connectedness with people who have the means to approach and achieve what they want. There is no doubt that the education one receives at these places is also adequate to the task. Otherwise money, connections and no brains results in dumb ideas like Internet connected toasters and Flooz.com
- cpr 17y ago
  The value of connections is definitely real. My class ('76) was one year ahead of Gates ('77), and included Scott McNealy (Sun founder), Trip Hawkins (EA founder), Tim O'Reilly, John Quartermann (sp?), and others. (Not that I knew any of them well. Gates I knew casually from chatting before/after class, and Trip was the roommate of a friend from San Diego.)

algorias 17y ago

Scarcity doesn't add to the value of the degree. It multiplies it. The more the degree is worth by itself, the more restricting it increases its value. There's a balance point somewhere in the middle.

elblanco 17y ago
Harvard sells exclusivity, period.

patio11 17y ago

Isn't the reason Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable precisely the limited supply of them? Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable because Harvard does not have to maintain the polite fiction that all individuals are equally gifted. As a result, other institutions which have to maintain the polite fiction that all individuals are equally gifted, but which would prefer to get the ones more gifted than others, look for the Harvard label.

isamuel 17y ago
I'm confused. Institutions which prefer people educated at elite universities aren't "maintaining a polite fiction." They're using a proxy for quality. They'd admit as much. It's imperfect, and they'd admit that too, but I don't get the "anti-anti-meritocracy" sentiment here. When firms go recruiting at elite universities, they say it's because they want the best of the best. They don't say "all individuals are equally gifted." This strikes me as a total misunderstanding of why educational credentials are valuable. I agree with the original poster, though. The "clubbiness" of elite schools is part of what gives them value.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - mojonixon 17y ago
    It's the Chronicle of Higher Education, written for academics. I suspect most faculty, Harvard faculty included, do not wish to be intellectual caddies for the rich kids at the country club.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
      - unalone 17y ago
        You're spouting some fine bullshit. Suggesting that Harvard could expand to handle more students than it's handling now isn't "socialism". It's rational unless you're suggesting either that there aren't more brilliant students now than already go to Harvard, or that there aren't more brilliant professors now than already teach there. If both those are false, which they are, then Harvard can be seen as wasting its endowment on non-practical things rather than both growing and helping a larger community than it is now.

tlb 17y ago

Yeah, it's kind of like saying "De Beers has so much money, why don't they use it to mine more diamonds so everyone can wear some." It is the scarcity that makes them valuable. Despite having gotten a lot out of Harvard, I have not been whipping out my checkbook when they ask for alumni contributions, because it's hard to see how even an extra billion would make any students' lives better.