[rd]

I recently graduated (class of '25), and the thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university.

There's a great student op-ed about _a_ proposed solution (firing the deans): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...

[DesaiAshu]

Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education: 1. Old and expensive to maintain land 2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty) 3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club)

It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very heavy paycuts to remain in academia, but the result of that finger pointing is devaluing education

The right approach - in my eyes - is to share the land Harvard, Stanford, et. al. sit on with 10x the number of students. This simultaneously increases efficiency of the entire P&L while providing a higher quality of education to everyone

As we've seen with the UC system (and the excellence of IITs + Chinese research universities), high density education can be synonymous with top tier research outcomes - Ivory Towers are not needed

[141205]

Am 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.

[impendia]

I got curious, and looked up the Harvard Polo Club. Apparently it naturally faded away as polo declined in popularity, but then was revived in 2006.

I understand that, if you have a current and active polo club running, then you either have to keep it going or run the risk of pissing people off.

But, if I can ask you to speculate, why might Harvard have revived its club in 2006?

[nickwrb]

I can’t comment on the Chinese research universities you mention, but the comparison with IITs is bizarre. They are notoriously extremely selective, and all set in lush, spacious, grounds. I don’t think they back up your point at at all.

[nyeah]

How old is typical university land, compared to the average age of land in the same city?

[bonsai_spool]

> The thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university.

I feel a better question is what entities that are in continuous operation since the 1630s do not resemble a real estate holding company? If you analyze only the extremes of any distribution you'll find weirdness.

[rd]

This is true! I hadn't thought about it like this to be totally honest. It's hard to point fingers at old institutions, especially given they're mostly located in prime real estate locations across the country (Cambridge, Palo Alto, etc.), and it's not really their fault that they need land to operate.

[neutronicus]

That's a common sentiment among non-Hopkins Baltimoreans.

It's a small city, so a lot of people have experiences with real estate held by Hopkins.