[ThrowawayR2]

> "The genuinely radical Ivy League option — spending their vast endowments to sharply increase student numbers — is unlikely to be entertained."

This is often said but doesn't seem to be realistic if one digs into the numbers.

Endowments aren't one big slush fund that the university can use however they want; they are a collection of individual donations, many of which can only be used in accordance with the donor's wishes. These are called restricted endowments. Harvard is cited as having the largest total endowment and their latest financial report (https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy22_harvard_fin...) on page 12 shows that 70% of their total endowment are restricted endowments with 20% of the total already composed of restricted endowments that are specifically for financial aid. In theory, the 30% of the total endowment that is unrestricted could be redirected to financial aid, increasing the amount of financial aid by 1.5x from endowment revenue only (the overall increase would be much less than 1.5x since financial aid comes from other sources as well) but it's unclear what other impact that would have on university operations.

tl;dr 1) universities are already using some of their endowments to help students, 2) there are legal limitations on how much more of their endowments they can use to help students even if practical considerations are ignored, 3) if they did so, it wouldn't be enough to "sharply" increase student numbers, and 4) people should really dig into things instead of repeating hot takes from internet pundits at face value.

[photonthug]

70% of 53 billion is restricted, but presumably they still make significant money from interest/investment on that money. And IDK, but I assume it's all tax-free too, since the alumni probably wrote a big chunk of the tax code. Are these profits considered part of the endowment too and with similar restrictions? If unrestricted, is the available student aid commensurate with that, or does it disappear into operations and/or dean salary?

[ThrowawayR2]

Given that interest/investment revenue from restricted endowments is the entire point of the donation, yes, that revenue is restricted.

As for tax treatment, why not just google it yourself instead of assuming? In the US, a tax was added under the Trump administration on revenue from university endowments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_tax#Federal_changes_...

[photonthug]

Well I don't really enjoy researching tax law, just criticizing it ;) But it does look like my intuition was pretty reasonable here. The endowments have been taxed for 6 of the 387 years of since the university was founded. Not that I really want to see that money going to the government.. this also won't necessarily help anything unless it's actually going towards to student-aid.

[tnecniv]

I am paywalled from the article, so maybe I’m misunderstanding the quote you pulled due to lack of context, but you also can’t just double the acceptance rate over night. Even if you could admit more students and cover their tuition, you run into a number of issues, e.g.:

1) Students have to live somewhere. More students living off campus will drive up apartment rent in the area. You can build dorms to increase the housing supply for students and reduce the demand for off campus apartments, but that requires large building projects.

2) Similarly, increasing the student population means more class rooms, teaching labs, and possibly larger lecture halls for the most popular classes (e.g., calculus courses taken by every STEM student). That means more building projects.

3) You need to hire more faculty. While you might be able to get away with adjuncts or postdocs teaching a few things, people that want to go to these schools want to have the opportunity to interact and learn from the top experts in their field, i.e. faculty professors. Expanding the faculty is not an easy thing to do overnight. Even if the will is there to grow, departments are highly selective when it comes to hiring. The person you are hiring is joining the university potentially for life. Moreover, if you choose wrong and deny them tenure, the result blows back on the department. Hot tenure track candidates get many offers, and they don’t want to risk moving somewhere and building a lab for 5-7 years only to be denied tenure and having to move their life elsewhere (they’ve already done that quite a bit throughout their student and postdoc days). Moreover, those candidates need to be courted with resources like spaces for their research lab, so, again, more construction is needed.

4) Where do you build all these buildings? Many of the Ivies are located in major cities (e.g., Boston, New York, Philadelphia). There isn’t a lot of open space to build big new buildings. Moreover, while they often own buildings adjacent to campus and lease them to businesses and tenants, decimating a city block to displace these people in favor of building more lectures or residential halls is a bad look politically and a hard sell to local governments. These schools already draw complaints from the locals about their expansion gentrifying areas and driving locals out through the resulting rise in rents and taxes. Even suburban Princeton has been rapidly consuming their green spaces lately to build new facilities. An option might be to start opening separate campuses, but that’s unappealing to their prospective students.

[inglor_cz]

Maybe there could be a Harvard Lite online academy that wouldn't need any extra buildings and just a little staff, but supply very high quality courses.

Also, it could be available to English-speaking people worldwide, including places like Africa, where wider availability high-quality education could make a huge difference - wouldn't that be a win for anyone who is concerned about social justice?

[tnecniv]

A lot of these schools have been putting their content on services like Coursera for a while now. I think that’s generally a good thing, but it can’t replicate every aspect of being an on-campus student (no teaching labs for example), and I’m skeptical as to how online degrees that some schools offer (I know Penn recently started an online version of their LDS program) will be viewed the same as a traditional degree by employers

[photonthug]

> An option might be to start opening separate campuses, but that’s unappealing to their prospective students.

Is it really unappealing to students though? Or is it just unappealing to abstracted others (like some alumni/profs/admins) that are much more interested in university "prestige" than actual education and education-opportunities?

[tnecniv]

I think it will be unappealing for a lot of them. Think about some of the logistics. Let’s assume the second campus is nearby but not super close, so perhaps there’s a 20 minute shuttle ride. What do you put at the new, second campus?

Do you isolate some departments there? That has the advantage of students not having to take the shuttle back and forth for random classes since students in those departments will take most of their classes there, but that makes it a pain for them to take electives on the main campus and separates. If they move into off-campus housing, it’s probably going to be close to the second campus and can isolate them from the broader student community. It also makes it a bigger pain for students in other departments to take electives there. Do you just put dorms there? That removes the issue of going back and forth for classes, but separates them from the main campus life.

Some people may not care about the commute, true, but for a lot of people it will be unappealing. I’ve known graduate students who worked in research-only buildings separate from the main campus and they typically found the situation more annoying than they originally expected. I would expect undergraduates, who tend to care even more about being plugged into the school social environment, would be even more bothered by it. The prestige of these schools is high enough that plenty of students will enroll and deal with it, but their top candidates tend to decide between multiple high-end institutions and these quality of life things can play a big role in their choice.

[photonthug]

> Think about some of the logistics.

Weighing this against the logistics of paying down student debt for a lifetime, I imagine lots of students would prefer a 20 minute shuttle ride for a few years if they can cut tuition in half by building outside of historical campus, or outside of the city center.

[4cao]

> I am paywalled from the article [...]

Just a technical note: by HN guidelines, the submission URL must point to the original source but I also linked to a mirror that bypasses the paywall in a parallel comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603895

(Perhaps I should've labeled it "paywall bypass" instead of just "mirror" but I can't edit that post anymore.)