alt Hacker NewsAm I misunderstanding your post?: you're implying that HYPSM increase their matriculation by ten times? These "elite" colleges,—one of which I've attended for graduate school,—have serious issues already with becoming degree mills; degrees have depreciated enormously in value over the last several decades: consider the collapse in being able to find a tenure track research position, even from one of these colleges. If we wanted elite colleges to provide the benefits that they are supposed to; then we would, if anything, want to reduce matriculation.
Stanford,—and I would hazard a guess many other HYPSM schools,—are already minting out too many students; this is especially true when it comes to non-PHD masters degrees, which are essentially an unbecoming cash cow for departments. Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours; increasing matriculation would only lead to more auditorium-sized classes that are run by lecturers or postdocs—these classes are essentially at the same level as trudging through online material.
Your proposed "solution" would have a Procrustean effect: I can't speak for Chinese or Indian universities, but while schools like UC Berkeley, UT Austin, University of Michigan, et seq... have good reputations, they have a noticeably lower reputation than the ivy leagues and certain private colleges like Stanford, MIT, and Caltech—and a worse reputation for being degree mills.
If you think that Stanford having 180,000 students matriculated will give everyone a quality education, then I think that you fundamentally misunderstand the markers that make an in-person education higher quality. The only benefit that would come of it would be popping the degree bubble and prematurely ending the current moribund trajectory that universities are on; where they are already treating degrees as if they were artificial-scarcity NFTs, rather than providing the actual scarcity that is access to,—and direct training from,—high-level researchers.
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>Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours
I don't agree with this at all. Quality of education imho comes from being surrounded by fellow elite students so that the pace of the syllabi can remain high.
lower tier universities have excellent faculty, they are selected from applicants from the elite universities as well as excellent students from lower tier universities who have floated to the top. Their problem is, as the elite-ness of the students goes down, the pace needs to drop.
Not trying to be a jerk, but we see the same thing in athletics, elite athletes are significantly above the next tier, and so on. the worst professional team can beat the best college team, because the worst professional team is still made up of the cream of the college teams, with experience (i.e. more education) added on.
at a lower tier university, a dedicated student can still work in labs if they want, but as you move down the tiers you simply get fewer autistics and more partiers. University of Michigan is an excellent univeristy, but do you think the students are studying on weekends, like they do at MIT? no, they're not.
As I understood the grandparent post, the idea is that a highest-level university should 10× its student throughput, and 9 other, lower-level universities would be made redundant by that.
This would make sense if all what an elite university did were providing elite-level education. Of course exclusive schools provide other benefits, often more valuable for the target audience than the education proper: a highly filtered student body, networking and bonding with the right, upwardly mobile people (either mega-talented, or just smart kids of rich and influential parents), a luxury-grade diploma that few can afford. Maybe you could theoretically 10× Stanford or MIT, but likely not Yale.
I mean, is the goal of an elite college to educate? Or is the benefit to sift through the population and pluck out its masters?
I don't really care that UC has a lower "reputation" than Harvard or Stanford. The fact is, the UC system has produced more fundamental research and more actual value for the population and the world at large than Harvard or Stanford. Even if a UC degree is not quite the "golden ticket" that an Stanford degree is.
Concentrating individuals into a smaller and smaller elite benefits them and only them. The U.S. has done this with capital allocation in its economy and it has and will continue to be a century long arc bending toward utter disaster.
What do we actually care about here? Education?
Pretty much agree but may I also add that Santa Clara County would probably not allow Stanford to increase its student body by any real sizeable amount due to restrictions in traffic, building, parking, etc, etc.
I don't think they're suggesting we reduce the amount of faculty. They're suggesting that you ask all the faculty to share less space, increasing the efficiency of the real estate holdings. Also by reducing the number of schools, you reduce the amount of expensive ancillaries.
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