Reply #19: Right back 'atcha [View All]

[Ravenseye]

Prestige comes from a variety of things, and isn't immutable. Sure there are a top tier like the Ivy League schools and a few others, that will likely never drop too far as prestige goes, but that isn't because of the people they matriculate, but a general meme that they are 'great' in regular society.

Take Notre Dame for instance. Their prestige is very high. People consider it a great school. It has an insanely high name recognition, possibly higher than even Harvard's. Yet educationally it's not all that great. It's rankings are amongs the general public colleges, and even below some of those. It's prestige and rankings come from a 'belief' that it's a good school. Also people love it's football team, and for some reason a good football team translates for many into 'good school'.

As far as prestige and it's relation to endowments, it's generally the reverse. Endowments are grown, which then generate more prestige. The school gets more money, and then has more to spend. It's a slow process, but a number of schools have shown growth from middle of the pack universities to scraping into the upper Tier. For instnace The University of Pittsburgh was a mid ranked school 15-20 years ago, nothing much. It's ranking is much higher now (Newsweek ranked it 10th nationally in a recent article...of which of course Harvard was 1st. ;) ) They did it through numerous ways, but one was to grow their endowment and use it to improve their facilities, and encourage research. Their prestige growth had little to do with the rich families, and in fact Pitt still accepts a wide range of students, much wider than places like Harvard.

And many of these schools DON'T need to charge tuition. Even the smaller liberal arts colleges have endowments of more than a million per student. Even meager savings earings would generate nearly 50k per student in interest alone. Then think about schools like Harvard who have endowments of 25.9 BILLION which is close to 4 million per student. Their endowment alone in a savings acount would generate twice the amount they get in tuition every year, and I guarnatee you they're not dropping that money in common savings account. They're earning a good percentage on it.

You're right though. It is all about the money. Harvard, and all other nonpublic universities, are businesses. Their job isn't to correct the problems of the public educational system in this country, but to generate the best product they can, which will in turn help drive their endowments larger. That's their business. It's not charity work.

The problem is with our public schools, and the fact that a poor school district can be a curse on a kid, while a rich school district is a boon. That's a problem. It shouldn't matter where you live in this country you should have an equivalent level of education. Instead our system curses the people who don't live in 'good' school districts. That's what needs to be changed, not how a private organization decides to dole out their money.

You're right though, and I never claimed that needy students weren't being left out in the cold.