It'd be better for this money to go to strengthen technical education (and more importantly, re-educution) in the CUNY system rather than to burnish yet another elites-only institution, but training and re-training ordinary workers isn't quite as flashy or sexy a cause.
There is no correlation between the blog comment you linked to and the statement you're quoting. Your comment boils down to little more than saying "Not true!"
If you want to make the point that bolstering public education is a wasted effort, then think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent public educational system. Go on vacation there, and you'll be surprised, for instance, how well the average person there speaks English. Now compare this to the US or the UK where people usually don't bother learning a second language, and your average shop clerk has a hard enough time communicating in his mother tongue.
> Your comment boils down to little more than saying "Not true!"
My comment boils down to the same point as the blog post: it's very diffiucult to show benefits of any educational intervention, especially long-term benefits. Corollary: it's very hard to be certain that pumping $100M into the City University will have significant positive results.
> think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent public educational system
Finland is somewhat exceptional but European educational systems are otherwise on par with the American one[1]. Except for the top/prestigious universities where Americans dominate and only Britons keep up[2].
I both live and vacation in Europe. The popularity of English here has more to do with Anglosphere's cultural domination than it has with the school system. If you want anecdotal evidence, English is my second language and I learnt it primarily from trashy American television on cable and then the Internet.
Have you looked at the methodology for Times Higher Education rankings? It has nothing to do with quality of education. It's based on reputation. I went to a top 20 school that was utterly mediocre and was ranked highly only because of its research prowess.
America having a lot of prestigious research institutions has nothing to do with the quality of primary and secondary education in the country. Half of the PhDs and faculty members in those top American schools got their primary and secondary education in foreign countries.
And tertiary, too. Plenty of grad-students in American institutions have their undergrad degree from some cheaper place abroad.
Hell, some of us Americans have left America to go do degrees and careers elsewhere, due to its extreme disinvestment in science. One friend of mine to Montreal and quite possibly Germany for his PhD, me to Israel...
Without wanting to sound overly sarcastic, I'd like to point out that if it's "hard be certain" that CUNY would profit from €100m, how can you be certain that the money would benefit Cornell? Heck, following your line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, why don't we just stop funding education altogether?
There is the saying that the US has the world's 50 best universities --- but also the 5,000 worst. While this is an exaggeration, there is quite some truth in it. Just to reiterate my point: if you, as a foreigner, address a bus driver in Oslo in English, he will quite possibly reply in proper English. However, talk to a shopping clerk at Sainsbury's in England, or Target in the US, and you may have to concede that the language they speak is closer to pidgin than English.
Lastly, I'll let you know that I have attended graduate school at a top UK university, a place you have heard of. Interestingly enough, only about a quarter of the grad students were British, and according to the rector this was because many British schools and universities don't educate their students properly. Now you may also know that the UK school system does quite a good job separating the children of the plebs from the children of the rich.
Can you see what I'm getting at? Well, I'll just spell it out for you: a very large part of my fellow students in graduate school earned their undergraduate degree from public universities in Europe, which normally implied the complete absence of tuition fees. Yet, for some reason Britain's own talent found it difficult to compete with them. This mirrors the point another commenter has already made regarding the situation in the US, but since you're from Europe, I thought you might appreciate this perspective.
This is not the only school that Joan and Irwin Jacobs have given to:
And in 1997, the School went through a final name change when QUALCOMM founder and former UCSD engineering professor Irwin Jacobs and his wife Joan Jacobs provided a $15 million endowment for the [UC San Diego School of Engineering], leading to the current name in their honor. The couple later added to the endowment in 2003 with a $110 million gift for scholarships, fellowships, and faculty support.[1]
UC San Diego is certainly not an elites-only institution. The Jacobs family has been very generous to many institutions, and I'm glad to see them helping Cornell NYC get off the ground.
"[Technion President] Lavie noted that both Irwin and Joan Jacobs are Cornell alumni and major Technion donors. In 2010, the couple donated $26 million to found the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Graduate School at the university’s Haifa campus."
I disagree that Cornell is an elites-only institution. Besides, how would you have spent the money within the CUNY system? According to [1], their FY14 budget is $2.154B, so $133M would be a 6% bump for FY14. Any ideas?
Having spoken to administration who work for CUNY Baruch (which is a great school) who formerly worked at NYU, that money could make a huge difference. For instance, $40,000 was apparently practically a rounding error at NYU, while at Baruch the only way to free that up would be to fire someone, essentially.