You don’t need to shell out that much money to fart around and pretend to read a textbook like most kids in college are doing.
Big waste.
Colleges love the JC Penny pricing model
It’s 50k but you really only pay 30k! What a steal!
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Everyone can read but that doesn’t make reading worthless.
It makes it pretty worthless as a distinguishing feature to make you appleal to employers.
Although proofreading is a good skill to have.
Sure, but if everyone can do it…
I’m not worried if a ton of other people can do what I do. There’s plenty of opportunity out there.
I’m not worried about it either - unless people have to get into crippling debt in order to get degrees that don’t really help them much.
Mostly agree, but my Indian college roommate was pretty steamed about the impact to medical school admissions, including at public universities. Under AA it is extremely difficult for Indians to get into medical school… significantly harder than for whites.
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It’s not that easy. Adding more students to a medical school, for example, requires both having more professors (and there’s a shortage of doctors right now) as well as more space to put them (more classrooms, more offices, more parking, etc.) The room where they take gross human anatomy only has so much space for so many tables holding so many cadavers and the refrigerators where they store the cadavers only hold so many. Medical schools are aware of their limited space and they work very closely with the students they have to ensure that none drop out. My physician friend commented to me that it’s harder to get out of medical school than it is to get in. The school does not want their precious spot going to waste so they protect it.
Dorm space is another issue. Harvard is insanely difficult to get into (not just their medical school, but all of their graduate programs and even moreso their undergraduate school) and despite their expansion from Cambridge into nearby Allston, there’s just not a lot of unused land available. Students are crammed into dorms with 4 students living in spaces initially designed for 2 students. Housing in Cambridge is both expensive and scarce. You can’t just “print more copies of Homer” when there is no physical space to put the students. And many professors have had their offices relocated from Cambridge to Allston which did not go over well with the affected profs.
And yes, I realize there’s some circularity going on here.
Yeah I’m not buying the Harvard too cramped argument. That hedge fund masquerading as a school can build a skyscraper if they want.
The new buildings in Allston are much taller than the ones on the original campus in Cambridge. I don’t think they can (and they certainly don’t want to) tear the old buildings down due to the historical significance. And in some cases they are able to cram more in the old buildings than they would new due to changes in building codes.
There’s big resistance every time they go to do anything. It’s not a simple process.
Freakonomics podcast #501 is about this. Prestigious schools apparently keep admissions low because their customers value the scarcity.
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Eh, Harvard was adding space like crazy, including secretly / anonymously purchasing a lot of stuff in Allston to add to their campus. I think I read they were adding a million square feet of building space a decade prior to the Allston purchases.
What I see is admissions increasing at a rate slower than applications but higher than the population growth of the US. So they are getting ever more selective, but still growing. And probably a lot of the application growth is overseas applicants, although that’s speculation on my part. I’m not sure how the acceptance rate among US applicants is changing or the spots going to US applicants compared to US college-age population is changing.
It’s not trivial to just add more students.
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Needing to go onto campus to get a degree is passe imo
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Harvard is one of the richest institutions in America, I’m sure they can open campuses elsewhere away from their main campus.
On a different note, we shouldn’t make colleges more available and free. We should make colleges unnecessary. This whole needing to go to college thing exacerbates the income inequality.
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That’s because Indians are overrepresented in medical school and so, necessarily, some other groups are underrepresented. Affirmative action supposes this is a “problem” that needs to be fixed. In some naive sense, it’s good that Indians are relatively more interested in joining the medical profession than other groups. We need doctors after all! It’s similar to how women are overrepresented in achieving college degrees relative to men and have been for many years. According to affirmative action proponents, or at least implied by their actions, the latter is “good” while the former is “bad.”
This kind of disparity makes it difficult to take affirmative action seriously as a policy or overarching philosophy. It’s an affinity movement for favored minorities, but not all. Throw it in the trash.
a think a good chunk of democrats also think that affirmative action is garbage.
but once again, the ones in office are a bit detached from their base.
My take on affirmative action is that it’s basically looking at top universities/med schools and saying: “It’s way too Asian in here”, which is obviously screwed up
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What I find strange is that we don’t look at the ethnic consumer breakdown of other goods. Like if we found out that Armenian Americans purchased 80% of iron ore would we do anything to even things out? I don’t think so. Why don’t we just make more education so everyone can have some?