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Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

(news.mit.edu)
736 points gnabgib | 2 comments | 20 Nov 24 16:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.41s | source
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araes ◴[20 Nov 24 18:26 UTC] No.42196753[source]▶
Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1]

UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.

BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitting in their safe little haven while East and South is wounding murder land with overlapping murder / wounding statistics. (12k from 2014-2023, 190/100000 urban) [3] Northwestern and the violence everywhere South in Chi-town is maybe a personal second choice. ($13,700,000,000, +74%, 26.9k, 280/100000 urban) [4][5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

[2] (Guns, Philadelphia) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...

[3] (Location, UPenn) https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+of+Pennsylvania...

[4] (Guns, Chicago) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...

[5] (Location, Northwestern) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Northwestern+University/@4...

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rs999gti ◴[20 Nov 24 20:08 UTC] No.42197616[source]▶
> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.

Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues? This is Philadelphia's problem, the university is just a business operating in the city.

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Spivak ◴[20 Nov 24 20:54 UTC] No.42198004[source]▶
UPenn is a land-grant institution, they are not "just a business" they were given land and money specifically to serve the public good. They're why we have engineering degrees, the government specifically wanted institutions that taught practical marketable skills and to do research in those fields.
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blackhawkC17 ◴[20 Nov 24 21:01 UTC] No.42198071[source]▶
> They were given land and money specifically to serve the public good.

Their duty is to deliver education. It's not solving political problems meant for elected officials (and the population at large).

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dleary ◴[20 Nov 24 21:15 UTC] No.42198194[source]▶
If their duty is to deliver education, why are they sitting on a $20B hoard?

Presumably they could spend a little bit of that to deliver some more education, couldn’t they?

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blackhawkC17 ◴[20 Nov 24 22:11 UTC] No.42198649[source]▶
They spend $9 billion annually on exactly that. This "hoard" can, checks notes, fund barely two years of operations.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...

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1. WitCanStain ◴[21 Nov 24 10:04 UTC] No.42202712[source]▶
Interestingly, according to the report in your link, UPenn pays over 3 billion dollars in salaries, but it has around 1,400 faculty for ~10,000 students. This means that either the instructors are fabulously well paid, or that the vast majority of money is going somewhere else. And indeed according to [0] just 4.64% of salaries are paid to instructional staff, with 23.9% or 2078 of paid employees being management staff. So if I am reading this correctly, they have far more administrators than actual academics, which is rather incredible. Incidentally, according to the same link the median percentage of salaries paid to instructional staff is 30% for similar doctoral universities.

[0] https://datausa.io/profile/university/university-of-pennsylv...

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2. araes ◴[21 Nov 24 23:26 UTC] No.42209739[source]▶
Thanks. Had not actually looked at the numbers of Philly that in depth. Unfortunately, has personally started to be such cynicism it's often expected there's usually a massively lopsided overhead of administrators with moderately paid academics and money that appears to vanish.

Harvard really did a number on my belief in American academia, and then finding out that students in Columbia were complaining they had to read made me not want to look at those types of statistics very often.

Anyways, appreciate the work of actually delving into the payscales, teacher / administrator ratios, and allocation of funding. Also, the https://datausa.io/ site's another interesting one to add to the list of public available dataset visualization, plotting, and summarization websites.

Actually, quick check from a different direction at least seems to support some of the Philly issues. Violent Crime rate per county on datausa.io: https://datausa.io/map?measure=E1cxD&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7C...

Death by Homicide is also interesting lateral, although Mississippi apparently has a huge issue all over the state. Many 25+ / 100,000 areas: https://datausa.io/map?measure=ZfwdDB&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7...

Unfortunately, website seems to trigger alot of Network Errors on the map portion of the site.