There's a great student op-ed about _a_ proposed solution (firing the deans): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...
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
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.
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?
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.
It's a small city, so a lot of people have experiences with real estate held by Hopkins.
They tore down a building less than twenty five years old to build a fancier one with fewer actual teaching spaces. There are many "temporary" Quonset huts around here twice that age. This institution is the top recipient of federal research funding. Their fiduciary responsibility with our tax dollars appears to be in name only.
It's not how I would choose to use $250M+ of my money, but it appears to have nothing at all to do with federal funding (nor would it even if the building was financed by the school, but especially not in this case).
"Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related.
I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and contracts bring in more than $4.5 billion per year.
But that deal has also shifted. Duties have changed and often many of the academics do not get to do much research, instead being managers of grad students who do the research. Being a professor is a lot of work and it is a lot of bureaucratic work.
I'm not sure why you're complaining about researchers. Think about the system for a second. We've trained people for years to be researchers and then... make them managers. Imagine teaching people to program, then once you've decided they're fully trained and good programmers we say "you're free to do all the programming you want! But you have to also teach more programmers, grade their work, create their assignments and tests, mentor the advanced programmers, help them write papers, help them navigate the university system, write grants to ensure you have money for those advanced programmers, help manage your department's organization, and much more." This is even more true for early career academics who don't have tenure[0]. For the majority of professors the time they have to continue doing research (the thing which they elected to train to do! That they spent years honing! That they paid and/or gave up lots of money for!) is nights and weekends. And that's a maybe since the above tasks usually don't fit in a 40hr work week. My manager at a big tech company gets more time to do real programming work than my advisor did during my PhD.
I'd also mention that research has a lot of monetary value. I'm not sure why this is even questioned by some people. Research lays the foundation for all the rest. Sure, a lot of it fails, but is that surprising when you're trying to push the bounds of human knowledge? Yet it is far worth it because there are singular discoveries/inventions that create more economic value than decades worth of the current global economy. It's not hard to recognize that since basically the entire economy is standing on that foundation...
[0] Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you don't have a lab full of graduate students who need to graduate.
Teaching graduate students. Most undergraduate teaching is done by "adjuncts" who do not do research.
Salaries are a mixed bag. Scientists who want to continue doing research in the private sector also give up much larger paychecks. Many work in facilities that are barely nicer than sweatshops.
Disclosure: Adjunct for one semester, 30 years ago.
If you want the best teachers you can always go to Liberal Arts Colleges where this isn't really an issue.
I went to a small liberal arts school for an undergrad degree in STEM, and to a R1 research university for graduate work.
The absolute best classes at the big-name research university were about as good as the average class at my small undergrad. The classes at the small school were of distinctly better quality: more engaged teachers, more engaging work, and simply higher quality teaching.
i've seen so many "our tuition pays your salary so you you need to XXX" type rants I've seen from disgruntled students/parents over the years and i've always bit my tongue when it comes to setting the record straight.
Teaching mostly by TA, not Faculty.
Not a "college".
The author's electricity bill went up and his cat got stolen in part because his colleagues working under the university incentive systems (i.e. don't publish stuff that pisses off the interests that fund your lab) created work that legitimized those policy decisions so that those decisions could be made and the funding interests, whatever they may be, could benefit from them.
One wonders if there are similar incentives in the university ranking, administration and consulting that legitimize the university's otherwise questionable decision to engage in these seemingly irresponsible ventures.
Nobody is waterboarding the money down their throat. They can say no. The actual question is: why don't they?
Not to take away from your point - I agree and the current fall makes it more tangible.
It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20
Building 20 was razed to build the Gehry-designed, donor-named Stata Center (incorporating a donor-named Gates "tower"). Breaking with MIT tradition of calling buildings by number, IME most people call it by donor name. (Gehry's reflective surfaces could blind biologists in building 68 across the courtyard, at least before the donor-named Koch building was installed nearby.) Stata has its merits, but I think grad students who punched a hole in the wall would be in trouble.
I agree with your main point, but see a different cause, though. The problem is that parents and students use these reports as a bellwether for identifying prospective schools. Campus visits (short visits) where you see what the campus looks like, but don't actually learn what its about is the second problem.
There is too much PR and not enough focus on substance in higher education, just like there is in many, many, many areas of life in the United States today.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/lord-of-...
> The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza.
These days, I think often about the historical turn of events in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where the reign of the adhocracies started by taking over buildings like Convocation Hall (mid-lecture) at University of Toronto...
I always assumed that the research being done at these schools was done by top tier scientists with grad students who cared deeply about the research, had excellent attention to detail and impeccable scientific process.
From talking to my friend, I realized:
- most of the grad students were people who didn't want to get a corporate job
- they wanted to extend their college experience as long as possible
- the absolute lack of discipline and rigor they showed to their experiments was astounding
- the lead academic was usually someone passionate and dedicated and often had to "herd cats" to get anything done ON TOP OF coordinating funding, lab space etc
Really opened my eyes to "how the sausage is made" when it comes to research.
No King of Siam needed when the executives running the place competently wield their foot guns.
https://www.motorious.com/articles/highlights/don-bolles-car...
But it had the same problem. They spent a fortune on the physical plant and never had the foot traffic to justify it.
Standards seem to be falling everywhere...
"In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune..."
Here is Johns Hopkins' problem in a nutshell. Taking money from billionaire "philanthropists" and global organisations to put an intellectual veneer onto their vested interests. Johns Hopkins has done this in a number of areas.
What kind of "stronger global democracy" would this be? There is no global democracy and no global government, yet. How interested are shipping magnates in democracy as opposed to plutocracy?
(EDIT: Even if a few B-school professors have real-world business management skills, why would the university listen to them? They're just employees, and they're not nearly expensive enough to be credible.)
What they are-- first foremost-- is academics and fad surfers.
The concept (and aims) of university faces the same headwinds of any business based on intellectual property in America: artificial moats of IP law.
China's manufacturing success partially stems from the government's inability to enforce IP law.
Thankfully, ideas want to be free, and LLMs give us the best-yet UI to information.
To me, Hacker News is a university. It's a place where I come to learn (from thousands of "teachers") and these "teachers" are actually also students, learning as well.
Qatar $7.7 billion
China $6.4 billion
Saudi Arabia $4.7 billion
These countries are not making donations to support democracy and freedom.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-b...
I got an ad the other day for a school (a mostly reputable one). They were talking about their award winning dining hall food... and the photos are over the top.
Borrow a pile of money, to help fund a pretty campus, and get a degree with limited job prospects, then wonder why you're drowning in debt for decades seems to be the trendy thing to do.
he said something like "seems like we're all expected to make a decision based on how nice the weather was when we visited and the architecture... and I don't care about either one."
somebody made a conscious decision to turn college into a little utopian island divorced from reality to quell protests. students get their own on-campus entertainment venues, sports teams, luxurious dorms and dining halls, rec centers and gyms, on-campus health services. for some students this is designed to keep them content and docile, but for others its designed to let them learn about the injustices of the world while being quarantined away from it so they cant affect change.
and the most insidious part of it is that they're the ones paying for it (with interest!). by the time they are kicked out of this little cocoon, they're saddled with enough debt that they have no choice but to grind away at a job they hate for a few decades
From the 1950's to the 1990's there was basically no way to avoid standing in the lines, everyone was in it together and you just had to stand in the lines. Then in the 1990s they added FastPass and you could, if you were clever and planned a bit, skip some lines but you were still going to be standing in lines with everyone else, and they were free and reasonably fair process. Then in the 2010's they started to do book ahead FastPass and if you were staying in a hotel on site you could book all the good times for all the rides, to try and encourage hotel stays. And now with Lightning Lane's they are incentivized to make the line process so onerous to get you to fork over $25/person/ride to skip them. And that's where we are today: an enshitified product that is designed to give a good experience to the very wealthy, while making it worse for everyone else.
And that's the same path we've gone in entertainment, in housing, in education, in healthcare, in so much of modern American society.
Sorry, didn't mean to distract from the serious topic at hand.
I learned a new word today!
Of course, the university lost its way quite some time ago. Indeed, education in general has. But if we focus on the university, the basic question we should be asking - one that should inform all of our decisions and actions - is "for the sake of what?".
What is the university for?
If you ask most people, perhaps especially since the War when university attendance exploded, the answer will likely be "to get a job". So, the university, it is supposed, is primarily an institution centered around career training and preparation. Indeed, if you grew up during the last half century, you might have grown accustomed to hearing a certain negative encouragement to attend university, namely, that if you wish to avoid working at McDonald's - which is taken to be the worst fate imaginable - then you must have a college degree. This was an unquestioned iron rule that insinuated a certain conception of the primary purpose of unviersity education. In communities dominated by blue collar workers, the university was sold as one's ticket out of the ostensibly dreary world of manual labor into the ranks of the white collar professional classes.
(Gen Z begs to differ; interest in the so-called trades has increased by 1500%.)
Now, assuming university education is job training, we might wish to ask whether they are effective at this task, especially given the astronomical costs of tuition to which students are yoked after graduation. Here, the answer is far from clear and one suspects negative for most graduates.
Even so, the concept of university-as-job-training-center itself is a debasement of the original purpose of the university. The primary purpose was historically embodied by the liberal arts, which is to say, the free arts. These are opposed to the so-called servile arts. Guess into which "job training" fits best. The liberal arts as originally taught were not the liberal arts as we imagine them today. The foundation of what you might call undergraduate education was the trivium and the quadrivium. The first taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric in order to prepare students to be able to reason, evaluate arguments, and to make arguments themselves. It freed a person by developing basic intellectually competence. In the second, students were taught arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Despite what are for us today some strange names, these prepared the student for quantitative reasoning: quantity as such, quantity in space, quantity in time, and quantity in space-time. From there, students continued onward to study philosophy, medicine, theology, law, and so on. The purpose of these liberal arts was to produce a free man, free because he is enabled to pursue the truth.
Even the so-called research university demotes the primary function of the university by making pedagogy a kind of afterthought or concession. Eduating students is secondary; the primary aim of faculty is research.
Of course, people used to attend university at the age of 14, the age at which we typically enter secondary school, so the boundaries have shifted, but I would nonetheless argue that education - and especially the university - should return to its roots as an intellectual community of faculty and students oriented toward producing free human beings capable of seeking the truth. Research should take place in dedicated institutes. Students are a long way from research anyway, which in any case tends to be specialized. The trades should be taught in trade schools and institutions focused on producing competence in those areas. Institutional function should be clear so that an institution can acheive its end successfully instead of trying to be everything and nothing. Focused study of specialized academic fields should be postponed until postgraduate study.
