Harvard could easily accommodate 20,000 undergrads given the size and quality of its applicant pool.
Increasing the class size would be good.
But Danny Rubin isn't going to be able to teach screen writing to 120 kids instead of 12, even if he actually wanted to. RJ Tarrant can't expand his personal Classics section beyond 15.
And the undergraduate animal transplant surgery class (12-15 students)? How, pray tell, will that scale? If you wanted to 10x the size of the class... I don't know if there's a single place on Earth that conducts 10 transplants, human or large animal, in one building, at the same time.
Not everything can be scaled. Not even "not scalable" things can be scaled with money, even a lot of it.
A more interesting conversation is why nonetheless billionaires do a bad job at education, despite (not because of) all the money. I think this thinking is part of it. It also shows a lack of understanding of what makes Harvard special. It's not just "brand management."
Do you know how coveted any tenured faculty position is? Anywhere, let alone at Harvard?
Harvard could dectuple the number of faculty positions, and still turn away a dozen promising qualified academics for every position it fills.
I didn't go to Harvard, but I did attend a comparable fancy lad finishing school. The notion that there's any sort of magic compared to, say, Texas A&M doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The real difference is that the reputational capital of an Ivy League school. Which means that a bunch of impressive people will bend over backwards to become associated with the school.
Which in turn makes the institution itself prestigious. Which then attracts the next-generation of impressive people. Like a social status perpetual motion machine.
You wouldn't complain if NCSU had this reputation. You're just saying this because you didn't get into those elite schools. "Bring them down". Move on.
The solution is simple: hire more faculty, build more and taller buildings. Build more dorms. They can afford it. And if their mission was education, they would do it.
Agreed. To do this correctly would take long term planning on the scale of decades most likely; growing the faculty from within and providing the necesarry resources to develop them. But it is possible and the elite universities should be moving this way.
For Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League, "growing the faculty from within" really means "actually granting non-world famous people tenue." The Ivys are notorious for not granting tenure to people who come up through the ranks.
The academic job market is so tight in most fields that random universities in the middle of nowhere get hundreds of applicants for a single tenure-track job. If you go back 100 years ago you would find that Harvard was a lot less selective (there were far fewer academics), but it was still elite.
Overall, society isn't putting enough money into research. Elite universities hiring more faculty would be a great thing, in my estimation.
Comments
Increasing the class size would be good.
But Danny Rubin isn't going to be able to teach screen writing to 120 kids instead of 12, even if he actually wanted to. RJ Tarrant can't expand his personal Classics section beyond 15.
And the undergraduate animal transplant surgery class (12-15 students)? How, pray tell, will that scale? If you wanted to 10x the size of the class... I don't know if there's a single place on Earth that conducts 10 transplants, human or large animal, in one building, at the same time.
Not everything can be scaled. Not even "not scalable" things can be scaled with money, even a lot of it.
A more interesting conversation is why nonetheless billionaires do a bad job at education, despite (not because of) all the money. I think this thinking is part of it. It also shows a lack of understanding of what makes Harvard special. It's not just "brand management."
Do you know how coveted any tenured faculty position is? Anywhere, let alone at Harvard?
Harvard could dectuple the number of faculty positions, and still turn away a dozen promising qualified academics for every position it fills.
I didn't go to Harvard, but I did attend a comparable fancy lad finishing school. The notion that there's any sort of magic compared to, say, Texas A&M doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The real difference is that the reputational capital of an Ivy League school. Which means that a bunch of impressive people will bend over backwards to become associated with the school.
Which in turn makes the institution itself prestigious. Which then attracts the next-generation of impressive people. Like a social status perpetual motion machine.
Exactly. The only path forward to preserve the essence of America is to grind the gears to a halt
You wouldn't complain if NCSU had this reputation. You're just saying this because you didn't get into those elite schools. "Bring them down". Move on.
The solution is simple: hire more faculty, build more and taller buildings. Build more dorms. They can afford it. And if their mission was education, they would do it.
Agreed. To do this correctly would take long term planning on the scale of decades most likely; growing the faculty from within and providing the necesarry resources to develop them. But it is possible and the elite universities should be moving this way.
For Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League, "growing the faculty from within" really means "actually granting non-world famous people tenue." The Ivys are notorious for not granting tenure to people who come up through the ranks.
You can’t just hire more top talent. “Elite” is “best”, not “more”.
The academic job market is so tight in most fields that random universities in the middle of nowhere get hundreds of applicants for a single tenure-track job. If you go back 100 years ago you would find that Harvard was a lot less selective (there were far fewer academics), but it was still elite.
Overall, society isn't putting enough money into research. Elite universities hiring more faculty would be a great thing, in my estimation.
You absolutely can hire more top talent.