[alaxhn]

What is the better path forward? Republican voters led by their representative Trump were unhappy about certain policies and events at Ivy league institutions. Voters have the right to feel this way and elect representatives to carry out their views even if this is not how you feel as a feature of democracy. Proxies of the representatives of the voters reached out to a few institutions requesting changes to be made or else face consequences. The institutions said "we are unwilling to make all of the changes that you would like to see because we think they are not reasonable". The administration's response is now to try and hurt these institutions (Harvard for now) by going after their pocketbook.

As someone with some "right-leaning" views I am indeed very sad that the US is losing our edge as an international destination for higher education but I do want to see major reforms at elite institutions. I don't see a good way to accomplish these reforms without being willing to go after institutions in the only way they really care about (hurting the budget). I think we would reach a better place if we could agree to compromises where the universities concede on the "less important points" (e.g. make an earnest effort to drop everything the right calls DEI and reduce the administration to student ratio back to ~1980 levels) while the right agrees to leave funding and privileges in place but if we cannot compromise then we unfortunately end up in a position that is worse for everyone. I suspect most of the left will blame the right for being unable to compromise while most of the right will blame the right but this is kind of the same theme for every major party-aligned disagreement.

[iambateman]

Btw, I am a University employee who serves (among other things) children affected by parents who abuse drugs.

My organization employs hundreds of people working on everything from low income nutrition education to researching Medicaid expenditure.

We belong to the University, but we don’t have anything to do with undergraduate education.

This is the problem with looking at higher-Ed ratios like that…there are a lot of good things happening at a University which don’t reduce to “teacher in classroom.”

[alaxhn]

I don't have first hand experience with your situation and I would imagine that you believe you are doing a great thing for society and I don't want to disparage thats so I don't intend my comments to speak to your specific institution or situation. I apologize if you see my comments this way.

---

Broadly speaking the spending and staff levels at universities have grown over time while the number of enrolled students have stagnated and tuition costs per student have risen. There is a desire to reduce the per-student cost without providing additional subsidy and a straightforward way to do this is to look at the side of the university that doesn't have anything to do with undergraduate eduction and see where cuts may be made. One clear example of what we perceive as administrative bloat in the recent past was the Stanford Harmful Language Initiative (https://stanforddaily.com/2023/01/08/university-removes-harm...). Every institution makes mistakes but if a tax-exempt and grant receiving institution has the bandwidth to produce something that to the eyes of the right appears to be fairly silly while charging ~$60k for tuition, this does raise some eyebrows.

[iambateman]

I think where we agree is that we need to reduce the social costs of college, one way or another.

But we don’t agree on how that should happen.

The underlying problem as I see it is that there aren’t enough slots for students in schools that are socially viewed as “reputable.” It’s not much different from beachfront property in that way.

We’ve allowed schools to build up a “mystique” for generations that a Harvard education or a state school education was the only ticket to the upper middle class…of course it’s expensive. As long as there are waitlists a mile long at nearly every state school, we will never see meaningful reduction in costs. The other way to fix that issue is to insist they build a plan to enroll 30% more students over 5 years.

[alaxhn]

US College enrollment peaked in 2012 and has been declining every since. It is projected based on demographics to continue declining. I'm not buying that a shortage of slots is responsible for the increased cost. This could be true at select institutions (e.g. Harvard like you mention) but I don't agree that the data supports the overall trend across the board.

[JacobThreeThree]

Replace "Harvard" with "Trump University" in this conversation, and I believe many HN types would have a different opinion of the policies. The argument is, if educational institutions can't be ideologically neutral, why should they get the benefit from grants, tax free endowments, and a tax funded international customer acquisition pipeline? Especially as they become outrageously expensive debt traps, with worse ROIs.

I don't agree with this international student, and other policies, or implementations, and you can't run government like you run a "move fast and break things" startup, which seems to be how the administration is operating.

But, it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, and try to separate Trump's execution from the underlying ideological sentiment.

[tclancy]

Please. They don’t care about higher education. These aren’t old-school white shoe Republicans. These are the people teaching the “truth” about the 2020 election in Oklahoma public schools. If our schools have lost any edge, it’s since Trump came back to power.

[alaxhn]

I am one of "them" and I care deeply about higher education which is why I am very sad that we could not achieve reform without resorting to measures such as threatening the international student admission process. I don't know anything about the people teaching the “truth” about the 2020 election in Oklahoma public schools but if this is happening I agree with you it is very wrong.

"If our schools have lost any edge, it’s since Trump came back to power." I completely 100% disagree with this statement. My partner is an education at a University and remote learning had a huge negative impact on our schools and student outcomes. US academic achievement has been flat for decades despite spending and pupil rations going way up https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf. Public schools in certain areas of the country are a complete failure for every student enrolled https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/at-13-baltim... (I choose an example of a left leaning area but obviously there are right leaning examples as well!)

Let me propose what I see as a couple of common sense reforms. Mandate the availability of pre-k nationwide starting at 4. Increase the school year from 180 days to 195 days by reducing the length of summer. If needed make this optional at first. Allow professors to fail students who have not learned the course material and make it illegal for the department to pressure professors to offer the students a way to pass the course.

[lamp_book]

In what way does this or anything else Trump has done or indicated to do advance the state of education towards the goals of the reform you are talking about?

[alaxhn]

I also don't think I claimed that "Trump has done or indicated to do advance the state of education". His administration has addressed grievances that I agree with but they have not introduced the positive reforms that I would support.

[lamp_book]

Fair enough, but this did read that way to me:

> why I am very sad that we could not achieve reform without resorting to measures such as threatening the international student admission process

[alaxhn]

Oh I see - did you reply to the correct comment initially?

So far Trump's administration has seemed to address perceived grievances that they have with the university administration. In the comment you replied to I outlined some positive reforms that I would personally like to see as someone who cares deeply about education and wants to see a successful system. Trump's administration hasn't and probably won't make progress in this direction. In other words they are saying "don't do X" and aren't saying "Do Y". I approve of their progress on the former and think they are unlikely to make progress on the latter.