It would be easier if we could just block comments from green users. I get that it loses ~.1% of authors who might have made an account to comment on a blogpost of theirs that was posted here. I'd rather have that loss than have to deal with the 99.9% of spam.
Google and Apple didn't go through ten funding rounds like today's startups do. Apple had one angel and three rounds, Google had one angel and literally just an A round after that; then retail investors could capture all the upside. Now there's way more time for private investors to pick the bones clean before it gets dumped on the public.
I think you're both right. Those were great opportunities, but the proportion of such opportunities which are made available to retail traders has greatly diminished over time.
There's a great chart out there somewhere (I couldn't find it) which breaks down the impact of private equity on the availability of such opportunities in public markets. It showed a dozen or so companies (like Google, Apple, Uber, Stripe, etc) and broke down their market cap gains into two parts, "pre IPO" and "post IPO" gains. Of course, the pre-IPO gains were only available to private equity (or, at best, accredited investors), whereas the post-IPO gains were available to retail traders as well.
"Older" companies like GOOG & AAPL were much more likely to have experienced that vast majority of gains after their IPOs, meaning retail investors could have made big money by betting on them early. Meanwhile newer companies (like Facebook, Uber, Stripe, etc) were much more likely to have yielded the vast majority of their gains before their IPOs, meaning retail investors didn't have the opportunity to benefit from big returns.
I suspect that the reason those "newer" companies were able to have the majority of their gains reaped pre-IPO was that during that time period, it was easy to acquire capital from investors without resorting to public market IPOs, where as the era of google and apple have not got the same level of private investment.
And i think it has to do with low interest rates. During the google early years, it is difficult to obtain low-cost loans (for private investors that is). Therefore, public markets look like an easier path for companies to raise money.
The "newer" companies in your list are mostly post-GFC, during a period of ultra-low interest rate. This makes money easy for private investors to obtain, and so companies have an easier time getting funding from those private sources. The IPO is realistically not a funding mechanism, but an exit mechanism for those early private investors.
If you're familiar with Ray Kurzweil's work, I wonder whether this phenomenon might be related. Kurzweil notes that better technology begets better technology in a self-reinforcing and ever-accelerating cycle of technological advancement. His thesis implies rapidly evolving capital requirements. Massive amounts of nimble private capital, secure in the hands of highly competent people with relevant domain expertise, may well be an important precondition for continual acceleration.
Survivorship bias and the corporate finance world of today is completely unrecognizable from the world of Google and Apple. Just look at the resulting performance of the SPAC craze
Even for good assets there's a price you shouldn't pay. People are joking(?) about triple-layer SPVs where you can get pre-IPO exposure but at higher-than-IPO price.
Neglect laws are written too broadly, giving too much discretion to CPS to decide what constitutes neglect or inadequate supervision. There have been a couple cases IIRC in Florida where parents were arrested for letting their kids walk/play in parks alone, albeit these were very young children.
Outside of that, there's increased traffic and the US as a whole is way too car centric. Suburbs are horribly designed, and we prioritize moving cars instead of moving people, and any kind of infrastructure design that might slow down traffic, reduce the need to drive, or mildly inconvenience a driver gets shot down.
There is a very real danger of getting killed by a distracted idiot in a car, and that risk is much higher today. I commute on I5 every day for work and every single day I see multiple people, going 80MPH watching tiktoks on their phone on the dash mount, or obviously looking down texting. I can't blame anyone for not wanting their kids running around the neighborhood when we can't even be responsible enough to pay attention when we are driving 2 ton death machines.
If nothing else the _perception_ of it is enough to have had a chilling effect, my own parents were concerned and affected by it enough to tell me where not to play outside so that I wouldn't be seen by randoms.
I'm sorry, the "Karen" drove onto your private road to interrogate your kid?
These things don't happen on a liberal/conservative axis in my experience.
I've lived all over the place, though not as much with kids, and have had none of these issues (including having mixed race kids who look much more like their other parent than me).
You really need to look at why you're living where you do.
What I find extraordinary is y'alls bullshit theory that it is extraordinary to claim the CPS apparatus wasn't used more before when it didn't even exist until like ~1974, and before then as a much different process.
As usual, just blame the victim, then complain they don't provide evidence knowing full damn well child and family welfare services complaints are sealed and hidden from public oversight. This is how vampires with these theories operate, first they make it illegal to get the records, then they make it illegal to even find out who the accuser is, then when you call them on it they say "ha ha, you don't have the evidence, that we made it illegal for you to get!" The whole system is designed to evade oversight, so what we are all left with is anecdotes that we have about our own childhood being so much different than the ones our children have after interactions with the authorities that have placed these restraints. But of course when you share them, they are only used against you by persons such as yourself (judging me for where I live, as if it's not going on all over the US). So people are reluctant to even share the anecdotes, and by law you generally cannot get the formal records (think of the children!) of these encounters nor the names of the accusers so basically they designed the whole legal structure to enable the muh citation crowd to be able to always pretend like the other side is just hiding from the evidence.
( If you look, at say, the problems with child abuse physicians in cahoots with CPS systematically victimizing families of children with brittle bone disease for instance, we basically had to wait for enough parents to tell their anecdotal stories of losing their kids until lawyers really started to step up to defend these cases as we now know doctors and CPS will systematically accuse children with multiple breaks of being victims of abuse, even when there is zero evidence the parents or child were inflicting an amount of force that would break healthy bones. The individual cases can't be scrutinized to bring these things to daylight because they're all sealed under child welfare laws, hence we just had to wait for a bunch of "extraordinary stories" with weak evidence to be told until someone finally believed them and others from society could step up to help these victimized families).
Personally I find it absolutely fucking hilarious that as much or more CPS induced restraint existed ... before CPS did.
>Yeah, except the now redacted comments didn't indicate that was the case which is why I was asking more questions.
Lol you responded to my comment saying it was an easement which meant I was not able to gate it. Although frankly your tone of questioning seemed to be more directed towards alluding I was a liar, than a genuine interest in the road.
> What I find extraordinary is y'alls bullshit theory that it is extraordinary to claim the CPS apparatus wasn't used more before when it didn't even exist until like ~1974, and before then as a much different process.
You seem to have replied to the wrong post.
> As usual, just blame the victim, then complain they don't provide evidence knowing full damn well child and family welfare services complaints are sealed and hidden from public oversight. This is how vampires with these theories operate, first they make it illegal to get the records, then they make it illegal to even find out who the accuser is, then when you call them on it they say "ha ha, you don't have the evidence, that we made it illegal for you to get!" The whole system is designed to evade oversight, so what we are all left with is anecdotes that we have about our own childhood being so much different than the ones our children have after interactions with the authorities that have placed these restraints. But of course when you share them, they are only used against you by persons such as yourself (judging me for where I live, as if it's not going on all over the US). So people are reluctant to even share the anecdotes, and by law you generally cannot get the formal records (think of the children!) of these encounters nor the names of the accusers so basically they designed the whole legal structure to enable the muh citation crowd to be able to always pretend like the other side is just hiding from the evidence.
I'm not blaming anyone. Your experience is so wildly different from anything I've seen or heard living in many different areas across the US that I'm interested to hear more about it, and then you go on a tirade that has virtually nothing to do with the topic at hand instead of providing any remotely relevant information.
> Lol you responded to my comment saying it was an easement which meant I was not able to gate it. Although frankly your tone of questioning seemed to be more directed towards alluding I was a liar, than a genuine interest in the road.
I don't have a gate on the private road to my house either, yet no one drives down it to interrogate my kid about my whereabouts.
Is it a neighbor who also shares the private road? If so, that makes some sense but it sounds like you need to have a discussion with them. Why didn't you trespass them if not?
If this Karen calls CPS because they were trespassing and weren't aware that you were nearby, so what, other than wasting some taxpayer dollars? Has anyone ever had their kid taken by the state because of a claim like this? Since the answer is no, why are you so freaked out about it, way beyond being annoyed at this Karen (who does sound annoying in this story)?
Like I said to the other person, it's a series of extraordinary claims that frankly make almost no sense, and then you rant about tangential topics when asked for more detail. It doesn't make your anecdote more believable.
But it's not rare at all. It really just sounds like you haven't had reason to pay attention to this before and now don't want to accept it's become a thing. A google search for "cops called on kids playing alone" results in a never-ending series of stories like this. I think most of them are from people with your perspective being caught by surprise.
I have kids, and I know hundreds of parents across large portions of the country. None of them have these issues.
A person driving down a private road and threatening to call CPS because they can't see the parent is not rare?
And the parent poster didn't just say someone threatened to call the cops, they said that they would be jailed in two very specific circumstances where jailing him would have led to very negative consequences for the arresting parties in anything beyond the immediate term.
Many people are stupid, and do stupid things like calling the cops for no valid reason at all. Those people are annoying and can be ignored, and I would not be remotely surprised by any pseudo-anonymous person doing something stupid. What would surprise me is the cops actually responding to the call and making the decisions that the other poster claimed, with a few exceptions where I would be much less surprised.
Since he only responds to questions with tangential rants, we'll never know for sure what happened.
Who do you think your target customer is? Curious to know if you think the money is in short form, traditional YouTube videos, or even movie studios one day.
Great website btw. The onboarding was very pleasing
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.
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
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.
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
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I don't see what other conclusion can be drawn from your statement.
> 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.
I agree that undergraduate institutions should be required to set unambiguous goals for each program, but what are done with the many, many attendees who have no goals for themselves beyond "go to college and get a job when I'm done"? I think there is value in having these multi-faceted institutions that are a combination of finishing school, classical academic study, and vocational training that can (and do) produce sufficiently educated and mature adults who can independently function in society.
That is the mission of the undergraduate portion of the Arts and Sciences school at basically every college/university. Professional schools have a slightly more specific mission.
> If you claim that education is a means to an end then what of (for example) history majors?
Excellent question, and it's one for the history department to answer. Maybe things stay as they are now and it's a home for the many people who don't have specific career goals while attending college, and that is their goal.
> I think the bachelors diploma itself is what became a means to an end much to the detriment of "pure" academia.
"Pure" academia only exists for those with a patron (which could be themselves), which is non-existent at any meaningful scale.
> 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.
Good for them, because anyone applying their CS knowledge in any capacity needs to know that.
If you want to go major in purely theoretical CS at a place that offers only courses that are effectively a specialization of a math major, there is value in it but the department offering them has to answer the same questions as the history department.
It seems we largely agree. For example I wasn't criticizing the CS program at my undergrad, simply observing the mismatch between the label on the tin and what was actually inside.
Observations of inconsistencies, dysfunctions, and similar are not necessarily calls for any particular course of action.
> I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I don't see what other conclusion can be drawn from your statement.
I merely observed that many of the issues people point out can be traced back (at least IMO) to having a set of confused and inconsistent goals. I wouldn't expect it to be a particularly controversial observation to anyone who's had significant contact with US academia within the past few decades.
> what are done with the many, many attendees who have no goals for themselves beyond "go to college and get a job when I'm done"?
They probably don't belong there. Most of them only attend because you need a diploma to land a job. Not because the education is particularly useful to the job, but rather because of what diplomas historically signaled about a candidate before everyone had them. Now it seems to just be a holdover (ie we require them because we've always required them and at this point everyone worthwhile has one). At least that's my (admittedly quite cynical) view.
I'm all for a more educated populace but if that's what we want then we should directly implement that.
I notice that you didn't address my remark about "adult daycare service". The presence of directionless "students" attending only to tick a box has serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. Add in student loans that can't be discharged and you've created an absolutely bizarre and (IMO counterproductive) set of economic incentives.
> I notice that you didn't address my remark about "adult daycare service". The presence of directionless "students" attending only to tick a box has serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. Add in student loans that can't be discharged and you've created an absolutely bizarre and (IMO counterproductive) set of economic incentives.
I didn't, because it seemed like a cheap insult. I don't know that directionless students have serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. They can have serious negative impacts on themselves due to student loan debt and a lack of a financially viable skillset when they stop attending college (with a degree or not).
What do you propose people who are 18 - 22 or so do to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives? And I'm not defending the status quo, which certainly can be improved.
Classes and more importantly practices get watered down to accommodate them. The situation gradually looks less like university of the 1950s and more like highschool.
Loans that can't be discharged removes lender hesitancy thus removes some degree of downward price pressure from the market. Institutions then have an incentive to capture this money due to the sheer quantity of it - ie not to let marginal students wash out. Hence the changes.
They even start attempting to attract based on amenities rather than prices. I won't belabor the subject. Others have written about it in incredible detail over the past several decades.
> What do you propose people who are 18 - 22 or so do to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives?
I don't know but bending what were once rigorous academic programs to accommodate them seems like the wrong answer to me. Do these people see any real benefit from taking on debt rather than working for that period? It seems to me the "benefit" is the diploma and that the requirement of a diploma to apply for a job is most often an arbitrary one these days.
As a thought experiment. Is there any particular reason an AA wouldn't have sufficed for the jobs that don't require specialized knowledge?
> Classes and more importantly practices get watered down to accommodate them. The situation gradually looks less like university of the 1950s and more like highschool.
Fair, though the solution there is to just flunk them out.
> I don't know but bending what were once rigorous academic programs to accommodate them seems like the wrong answer to me. Do these people see any real benefit from taking on debt rather than working for that period? It seems to me the "benefit" is the diploma and that the requirement of a diploma to apply for a job is most often an arbitrary one these days.
I'm not convinced this is happening at the scale you think it is, but higher education is an arms race to some extent and you'd need to get all parties to agree to de-escalate, but only for the ones who don't get much value out of the experience (a group that is somewhat hard to identify a priori).
> As a thought experiment. Is there any particular reason an AA wouldn't have sufficed for the jobs that don't require specialized knowledge?
For the jobs, probably not. I still think a portion of the "college experience" is just maturing, which I agree could be done while working in theory but there is some personal opportunity cost there.
It's not an easy problem or one that can be solved individually IMO. Something like mandatory public service could be an answer, but I don't have high hopes of that being enacted.
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 see the value of the students, it just seems like an odd thing for a government to subsidize via NIH/NSF funding. We don’t really have anything analogous to that in Canada and it just seems awfully weird that it exists in the US without the “it’s older than the country” excuse that Oxford/Cambridge have.
>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.
>Their problem is, as the elite-ness of the students goes down, the pace needs to drop.
Only if the school mandates a quota of passing grades. Not sure about HYPSM but anecdotally at my (Canadian) alma mater no such quota existed: the pass rate for 3rd year fluid dynamics was in the 40% ballpark, for example.
I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but neither do you. Students at universities ranked similarly to Michigan absolutely do spend a significant amount of time studying on the weekends, especially if they’re not business majors. And MIT has parties and pranks, too.
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.
I totally agree. Folks here seem to be under some misapprehension that elite = better education. Based on my experience earning my PhD at a public R1 and then working as faculty at a selective private institution, this is not the case. For starters, just consider the incentives for grade inflation at a private vs a public institution. Harvard has famously out of control grade inflation.
My public alma mater was a tremendous force multiplier for upward mobility. Many of my peers were first generation college students. They’re now scientists, doctors, and engineers. Few of them will become famous—they mostly just make the world tick.
My current private institution concentrates already wealthy people. These folks mostly go out and become consultants. They’re consumed with the idea of becoming “thought leaders.”
Which one really provides more value? I have strong opinions.
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.
I used to have a view of a baseball field out my office window until they rolled up the astroturf to start construction of the new computing and information science building.
They got some money to build a really nice fan-friendly facility off-campus. Still the thing about baseball is that the season is early in the year and starts before the weather is comfortable for home games so they spend the first half of the season going to away games down south, far enough away that they're probably buying airline tickets instead of riding the bus the way that Ivy League (or ECAC) teams usually ride the bus to go to other Ivy League (or ECAC) schools.
If it wasn't for Lacrosse we wouldn't have anybody using our football stadium in the spring and hey, Lacrosse is both a men's and women's sport. (At Cornell we're lucky enough to have two football teams to keep it busy in the Fall)
Critics would say that Lacrosse is a boon to rich students since poor students don't go to high schools that have Lacrosse and it largely escapes the notice of the marginalization-industrial complex because those folks are aware that there is an industry in SAT test prep and not so aware that there is Lacrosse.
It’s an open secret that “expensive ancillaries” like polo, crew, equestrian teams, etc, are a sneaky way to have supposedly blind admissions while making sure that the incoming class still contains just the right number of students who can pay full tuition. Smart people are not all that rare.
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.
I know you are making a joke, but for people who may not understand: The point is that well regarded Universities in the USA are generally old relative to other institutions in the USA. So Stanford has a pretty campus on land that was purchased when hardly anyone lived in Palo Alto. Now that land is absurdly valuable.
As in the article, it changes how you might use the land. A grove is a beautiful place to go and read or relax. But if you could replace that grove with a structure worth of hundreds of millions of dollars it changes things.
It's the deed that's old; in the case of Columbia it's that it holds the northern half of the Anglican church's glebe[1] in Manhattan (Columbia is the largest private real estate owner in NYC), which is not only held tax-free but generates significant money for the University.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, this is a silly argument. Go walk around the neighborhoods near MIT and you’ll see company after company that intentionally positioned themselves in proximity to the campus. Many of those companies are also MIT spinoffs.
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