[lapcat]

Harvard is private social club, a glorified country club posing as a school. The entire purpose of the institution is to perpetuate the disparity of wealth and power in society. The selectivity and exclusiveness is essential, the raison d'être of Harvard. This is the only thing we need to understand about it.

[koolba]

More importantly while there’s nothing wrong with operating a private social club, doing it with public tax dollars and claiming it’s anything but a private social club is ridiculous.

[HyperSane]

And one that rich people can just buy there children access to. Jared Kushner's dad donated $2 million to get his son into Harvard.

[dehrmann]

This made the scandal where celebrities were photoshopping photos of their kids doing prep school sports a little awkward. The rarely reported detail was that they were paying $200k bribes because they weren't actually rich enough to make $2M bribes directly to the schools.

[pclmulqdq]

The price has gone up a lot since then. I hear it's now over $10 million for a seat, possibly as high as $50 million.

[hnburnsy]

And they like to keep the club exclusive...

>In the 16 years since, although the number of applicants to the College has more than doubled, the size of Harvard’s undergraduate population has remained relatively constant. This year, the College admitted 2,037 students to the Class of 2020; in comparison, 2,035 students were admitted to the Class of 2004.

IMO when your non taxable endowment gets large but your undergrad population stays the same maybe part of the endowment should become taxable.

[mauvehaus]

You realize they're in the middle of Cambridge, MA, right? It's not like there's a bunch of empty land around the campus to just make the school bigger.

Acquiring non-Harvard land in Allston met with some backlash owing to how they went about it (sneakily, to avoid getting put over a barrel on price).

Building up rather than out would require knocking down buildings that range from historic to merely very old.

Suggesting that Harvard should just take more students as the number of applicants grows sort of ignores the constraints they operate under.

Non-affiliated former Boston resident.

[hnburnsy]

Don't many universities have branches elsewhere? Would students choose not to go to Harvard if the campus was in say New Jersey? Would the quality of education be inferior outside of Cambridge?

I've heard some schools even have online offerings, crazy.

[cabalamat]

They could very easily set up a new campus a few miles away.

Also I doubt there are any truly "historic" buildings at Harvard -- universities that really have historic buildings predate the USA by multiple centuries.

[mauvehaus]

Like Harvard? Which was founded in 1636. It's no Oxford, but the buildings are historic in the context of the USA, which is the context that matters for purposes of this discussion.

And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare. Traffic sucks, and public transportation is, on a good day, adequate[0].

Getting between the new science center in Allston and Harvard Square is about a 20 minute walk (hustling). Driving might shave 10 minutes off of that. Or it could add that much and more, depending on the time of day.

Harvard's med school is in Longwood, which presumably only works because the med students live off campus anyway and don't have to get to the main campus on a regular basis.

[0] See https://universalhub.com for examples. You're unlikely to have to look back more than a week.

[cabalamat]

> And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare.

Fine, have a separate standalone campus, maybe on the west cvoast. Or just shift everything to the new campus. They could easily do this if they wanted to. They don't want to.

[inglor_cz]

"public transportation is, on a good day, adequate[0]."

In a world where NIMBYs weren't the most important people on the scene, building a tram (streetcar) line between those two campuses would be a working solution. High capacity, intervals can be adjusted to the needs of the school, no traffic jams on the track.

And Harvard sits on an enormous warchest, it could cover the costs handily.

But pushing such a construction project in contemporary atmosphere would take longer than landing on the Moon.

[hnburnsy]

Also IMO stop taking Pell Grants, Federal aid, and pay taxes on their endowments and these schools can admit whoever they please.