Posted on 04/12/2011 6:10:39 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.
I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money.
Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. There’s a famous story about PayPal’s March 2000 venture capital round. The offer was “only” at a $500 million-or-so valuation. Nearly everyone on the board and the management team balked, except Thiel who calmly told the room that this was a bubble at its peak, and the company needed to take every dime it could right now. That’s how close PayPal came to being dot com roadkill a la WebVan or Pets.com.
And after the crash, Thiel insisted there hadn’t really been a crash: He argued the equity bubble had simply shifted onto the housing market. Thiel was so convinced of this thesis that until recently, he refused to buy property, despite his soaring personal net worth. And, again, he was right....
(Excerpt) Read more at techcrunch.com ...
“I've read that the Harvard endowment is so big that they could provide free education at the current size in perpetuity and never run out of money. I question ‘never’, but none the less, they must have some serious money.”
You are, indeed, absolutely correct. In fact, the Ivies generally don't need much by way of tuition money to run themselves.
This is why, as I pointed out in a previous post, the Ivies don't actually charge most folks very much money.
My household might generally be called upper middle class. When I did the financial aid estimator for Princeton (my son is thinking of applying there), I found that Princeton considered by Estimated Family Contribution (the portion they'd want me to pay for tuition, room and board, and books) of about $12K - $14K. Just for kicks, I plugged my numbers back in, but with a family income of over $200K. The EFC came back at only around $30K (Princeton tops $50K for tuition, room and board, and books).
You gotta either have a very large amount of annual income or a lot of financial assets outside your retirement accounts to have to pay sticker price at an Ivy.
And they don't include student loans anymore as part of their financial aid. All grants.
The better the college into which you can get, the cheaper it will be.
sitetest
Well, I guess there's no problem, if you want our business, legal, and cultural sectors to be dominated by a lot of talentless hacks who got there because of who their parents were.
Sort of like they are now.
The flaw in your argument (and Mr. Thiel’s) is the idea that most folks pay sticker price to go to an Ivy.
As I've written in two other posts, that just isn't the case.
Even households with income of well over $100K regularly receive substantial financial aid from the Ivies.
As for the “Harvard Number,” if YOU will google it, you'll find that most folks say that this is applied to a small percentage of incoming freshmen. At one site, I read that perhaps 100 freshmen out of 1800 are from families that make such donations.
The rest of the kids are getting in through the regular application/admission process.
And as I said, unless your family is fairly well-off, they aren't paying $50+K per year for you to go there.
We're looking at schools right now for my son, and it's a bit of a dilemma. If he gets into the Ivies in which he has some interest (and he stands a reasonable chance), they will likely be the cheapest schools to which to send him.
It will likely be cheaper to send him to Harvard or Princeton than to Hopkins or Notre Dame. In fact, the only school on his list that would likely be cheaper would be the University of Maryland, College Park.
Going to an Ivy DOES open doors; it is an excellent credential to get one’s foot in the door, especially in more high-powered jobs in larger or more elite organizations. Obviously, after that, you have to show you can do the work to progress.
And going to an Ivy is, for most folks, cheaper than going to most other private, or out-of-state public universities.
sitetest
What I want is completely irrelevant. I want Mike and Ikes to be good for me, but meanwhile back in the real world...
Sort of like they are now.
As it has ALWAYS been.
Then you’re paying Harvard for access, not education.
Education is cheap.
Certification is expensive.
Networking is really expensive.
http://ocw.mit.edu - full MIT curriculum online for free. Get busy.
They’re paying Harvard for an education, and access, and the prestige that comes with the brand name. It’s a free market. If someone doesn’t think it’s worth it, they don’t have to pay.
Flat out falsehood.
Bush made no such decree. The non-dischargeability of student loans was federal law before Bush. In 2005 Congress enacted new legislation which extended that status, but even that was federal legislation enacted by Congress and signed by Bush - far from a decree.
Only Obama acts by decree.
Sorry, but your simply asserting something doesn’t convince me.
So you don't think that it might be worthwhile to begin exploring options for "opening the field" up a bit to more meritocracy than we currently see?
Mark me down in the “Destroy” the whole thing camp. We might save a tiny bit, or some concepts, but really the whole has to be destroyed, imo.
I agree - but unfortunately, self-education doesn't give you a piece of paper with an expensive name on it that acts as a passport into an elite law firm or whatnot.
If self-education (i.e. the absolute extreme that we could get in meritocracy) were enough, we wouldn't even need colleges, except for some of the "hands on" things that most people couldn't afford (like scientific instrumentation, etc.)
I must admit - I am biased towards autodidacty myself. I've learned enough about a number of fields (most completely unrelated to my profession) to be able to talk competently with people who are experts in these fields. This was due to my having a broad range of interests, as well as the ability to teach myself AND seek out access to the tools and information that provided the needed knowledge.
My main issue with the whole "Harvard thing" is that the selecting that goes on generally is not based on merit. Therefore, the "elite" that is perpetuated in our country is increasingly non-meritorious. We can see this, if nothing else, by looking at many of the people who run our legal, political, business, etc. sectors. Many of them, frankly, are putzes. That's not healthy for the country, in the long term. Merely shrugging and saying "well, that's just the way it is," as some on this thread are doing, is merely going to cause us to fall more deeply down that hole.
What Harvard does is their business. I couldn’t care less. And anyway, you can’t change human nature. And that’s what we’re talking about here.
I totally agree with your points. Those are the points I thought the article would make. Instead it was a bunch of egalitarian rubbish.
The Ivy’s had to start giving more financial aide because they were loosing the Middle Class who provided their best students. Minorities and the Rich were dominating their admissions and they were loosing the best kids who didn’t have the money to attend. Our youngest son fell in this group..he got accepted at three big name schools,but no financial aide was available to us, so he accepted a full scholarship at a second ranked school. Worked well for him..he is now getting his Phd and has never paid a dime for tuition.
What am I “simply asserting”?
Thanks,
sitetest
My kid is just completing his first year at a community college and will transfer his credits for his last two years.
The considerations for this were:
1. From my experience, the community college does just as good at teaching the basics as the university.
2. There is no way I am going to permit him to saddle himself with thousands of dollars of student loans just to get an "education." That is financial stupidity.
So you agree.
At Harvard you’re paying those princely sums for the education (free), attention (quality tutoring fees), certification (exam costs), access (pay to play), and prestige (very expensive).
When you go to an high end restaurant, do you complain that the water and bread was too expensive? that’s all you need for a basic sustaining meal; it’s the Surf & Turf and Merlot ‘85 served on quality china by a fawning waiter in a romantic atmosphere that you’re paying the 3-digit tab for.
“The things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand.” - Steely Dan
I agree with everything you just said. Made me hungry though for some bread and butter and red wine :-)
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