It would be interesting to compare the utility of one large $100 million+ grant to an institution like MIT, Yale or Harvard that is already well-endowed, compared to a hundred different million dollar grants to institutions across the USA or the world, where the money might arguably be more effectively used or sorely needed.
The counterpoint would be that the money could support fundamental research that eventually results in a much larger payoff to the world at large, but I'm not convinced that this outweighs the benefits of funding hundreds, or even thousands of students/scientists in less prominent schools who might go on to make such discoveries themselves.
Of course, all this assumes that donor's primary aim is to make the largest possible impact, when in all likelihood it's motivated more by an affinity for the school, or in the case of other donors, prestige from having their name on the walls.
Highly relevant to your comment is episode 6 of Malcomb Gladwell's Revisionist History Podcast [0]. In the episode, Gladwell asks the president of Stanford whether there was any amount of money he would turn down because he thought it would better spent somewhere else. He replied, somewhat evasively, that no, there wasn't really an sum large enough. It's a truly incredible interview to listen to.
I highly recommend the three part series about college education that makes up episodes 4,5,6 of the season 1. But, if you have the time, I think the entire podcast is excellent while noting that I am not a huge fan of Gladwell's books.
> He replied, somewhat evasively, that no, there wasn't really an sum large enough.
Which, of course, is his job. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that he has an entirely separate point of view in private when being candid.
That said, my immediate reaction to reading the first sentence of the GP comment was to think of that same Revisionist History episode. I'm excited that the new season is beginning soon. I will temper that with a caveat that I think Malcom does push his agenda and narrative fairly hard in those podcasts, but that does make for a really compelling story. If you can separate the facts from the portions it feels like he's omitting, you'll likely get more out of the podcasts, but I find the exposure to new ideas particularly fun and useful. I especially liked the Moral Licensing episode, which I only listened to for the first time a few months ago. It's particularly fun to listen to that one and realize that his specifics were all wrong, but the generalities and basics still match perfectly with the new Political reality that was only 6-12 months int the future from that recording (regardless of whether you believe in the premise).
I'm being particularly vague on purpose here, because I truly believe that episode was at least twice as as entertaining and memorable because of that situation, and I don't want to ruin it for anyone. That episode was so good, it's probably worth a re-listen now if you listened to them as they were released.
Interesting tidbit: the president of Stanford at the time was John Hennessy. Take any modern CPU, and you'll probably find that much of its internal architecture is built on work by Hennessy and his group at Stanford. He is arguably the greatest computer architect of all time.
I don't have much to add to this beyond another strong recommendation that you listen to that 3-part series; it's the strongest work he's ever done in any medium.
I just remember 2 episodes. While it was entertaining, one episode lacked any intellectual rigor at all. It seems like Gladwell can't understand the counterarguments at all and chooses to cut out most of them with out realizing.
One obvious thing he misses is the moral hazard of rewarding poor performing schools. Also, the real question is why donate to universities at all? There is no real reason why universities can't support teaching purely on tuition. University can easily charge on a sliding scale based on need and SAT scores. If they want more kids to go to college, they can give to scholarships directly. Giving to university directly just promotes spending them on outspending each other on other axis for attention...
Is the second reason one he actually agrees with? Does he consider the second order effects? He thinks giving more to poor schools would be a "good" thing. All it would do is cause more schools to try to fight for prestige and donations. We have 15ish schools were their number one goal is to find ways to get donations. What would happen if 150ish school expected to be able to get huge sums of money as donations? Many would change their focus away from education and what students what to donors. I think it likely to increase tuition and decrease enrollment. Top 15 schools need to be selective to be the best. If the 100th best school want to look like it getting better it needs to become much more selective.
"I'm not convinced that this outweighs the benefits of funding hundreds, or even thousands of students/scientists in less prominent schools who might go on to make such discoveries themselves"
While it's plausible anyone can discover anything, the only rule of thumb about finding great research is that great researchers generally train great researchers - or, to put another way, it's likeliest to end up doing nobel price worthy research by being trained by a nobel price winner.
The other thing is bad schools do not turn magically into good schools by pooling money into them. Improving education requires human intervention by experts - experienced teachers and so on. Money helps, but if you are sitting on a 140 million dollars, you can't just donate it to some struggling place and imagine it will transform it to a better institution. Or, pick random ten laboratories that have done unremarkable research and imagine a grant of a 10 million dollars will improve the quality of their output.
I think the only rational choices to well spend such a sum of money is to support established high performers, or, to proactively invest the money. If proactive involvement is not what the donor wanted then I can't really fault his decision to go with MIT. Or, well, if we follow the silly "nobel price winners beget nobel price winners" rule of thumb and use nobel prices as metric of research quality which itself is also silly, there would have been other options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_uni...
There's a flaw in this reasoning: are Nobel winners actually training people better or do they simply have access to more money?
In my experience researchers that get a lot of grants are able to fund lots of projects, which leads to smart people working for you, which leads to big publications, which leads to more grants. Nobel/Lasker/Name-your-prize winners are just some of the people at the top of the grant pyramid. In fact, I'd argue that who wins a Nobel is a bit of a stochastic/political process, there are tons of scientists who made Nobel-worthy contributions that never won one.
That said, the outcome ends up being the same. Big/well funded labs tend to be started by smart people who had the advantages at big/well funded labs and the cycle continues, but I think the way things are funded is a big part of how that system works, not the inherent smarts/brilliance of the Professor.
Also it's not about pooling money. I think the OP is making a comment on effectiveness for educating people. For example, Cooper Union, an exceptional institution in NY that has a history of training people to an MIT-level for essentially free has come upon hard times and has somewhat abandoned that free-education principle (granted this was due to some financial mismanagement, but a big donor could certainly force changes there). This was an institution that taught many disadvantaged students, particularly from the NY area who couldn't afford MIT and its compatriots. Perhaps the money would have had far more impact there? Or what about offering massive scholarships to people attending community colleges who have a helluva GPA but need help for childcare?
$140M is an incredible gift, I can't help but think there are better ways to spend it than giving it to an institute that already gets massive amounts of grant and other money. Maybe a place that could really use it to help those that need it most?
I merely pointed out one plausible statistical strategy for distributing a donation if the idea is to cause an impact and not distribute the funds back to the economy more or less randomly - I have no idea what the underlying mechanism is.
"Or what about offering massive scholarships to people attending community colleges who have a helluva GPA but need help for childcare?"
That's proactive. But, then again, we know nothing on this donor.
"Maybe a place that could really use it to help those that need it most?"
And what place would that be? Who would exactly be those that 'need help most'? Where I'm from government tries to handle the material well being of those who've had the shortest end of the stick in life - no idea what charities would provide the best bang for buck in US.
I would not call spending money on science wasteful in any case.
Two different issues- research labs/graduate training quality vs undergrad lectures and such.
I doubt MIT teachers of basic science are the best in the world. Rather MIT attracts some of the smartest most motivated students in the world. More money won't do much for this.
Research lab funding? I think at it's current steady state more money sent to MIT for research would likely find a useful currently unfunded study or group.
Mark Zuckerberg generously gave 100M to improve the education system of Camden New Jersey. At the time the mayor was Stanford grad Cory Booker, now Senator, and future Presidential material. Camden was and still is a minority shithole of New Jersey. Neither Mark's generous gift nor Cory's public service had a lasting effect. Deeper structural problems. I do not know the answer.
Except the gift was nothing but funding the charter school grift (don't get me wrong, charter schools could work, and in some cases do work, but for the large part, in the US, the charter school movement has pretty much entirely been hijacked by union busters and people who want to profit off the privatization of education).
Exactly. There are plenty of laboratory schools attached to universities, where teaching research is done under the eyes of the public. Those are as a rule doing well but Zuckerberg chose to boost unaccountable charter schools. Glad to see that it went as one would have predicted it to go.
The Ironbound is getting nicer every year. Yesterday I was walking home from the train and there were young people everywhere. Definitely not what I am used to around here.
Granted, the Ironbound could be a totally different city than the rest of Newark.
On the other hand, more money means you can afford to pay for higher quality professors/staff/technology.
I took a "big data" course on Map/Reduce, Hadoop, etc. We had to use VMs on our own laptops because the department couldn't afford to get us temporary AWS instances or similar.
Sure money is not a quick fix for a bad school, but it opens up more opportunities than not.
Good salaries are necessary, but not sufficient to attract top level talent. If the whole environment is mediocre, it won't be able to produce better research or education, regardless of money.
(Speaking as someone who graduated #1 university in Poland, but nowhere near #200 globally...)
Regarding your 2nd point, do those rankings actually provide any useful information? How is it fair to rate an entire university, especially when they offer multiple studies? Shouldn't the ranking be based on discipline e.g. software development, language, *ologies, etc.?
Also #200 out of what? According to this Quora[0] question, there are anywhere between 26,000 and 40,000 universities globally. 200 out of 26,000 puts your university in the top 1%.
This is actually part of the strength of a large gift to a university like MIT. Using the prestige of the university, and the money, you can bring in an entire cohort of capable scientists dedicated to a research area, and achieve scale via a "brain trust" that would otherwise be impossible. Other universities have indeed done this in the past with great success.
I like how the accepted dichotomy in this entire debate here in the comment is either MIT or bad school. There is an in between! There are lots of competent, well managed, and important educational institutions outside of the top 2-3 schools! Maybe once you get to like 30-40 or so, maybe that argument holds more water. But let's not pretend like plenty of state universities aren't great academic institutions.
Which is a kind of stupid way of measuring things, the detector systems at the LHC were developed by a relatively small number of groups at huge expense over at least 12 years, it took even longer until actual science experiments happened. A concrete example would be the Atlas trigger systems development until Higgs discovery was ~20 years, ultimately they received >50000 citations.
Anecdotal. A big grant paying off doesn't outweigh all the other countless iterative and great leaps forward that led to the detector which led to the higgs. Those efforts were also funded by small grants, graduate student stipends, or out-of-pocket in pubs and libraries.
The reason why they measured impact in that way is because that's what most funding agencies today are speculating in for their decision making processes. And as data shows, most funding agencies are getting it wrong.
Pretty much all large scale physics projects have payoff profiles like that and that is probably known to funding agencies, so I severely doubt that funding agencies have truly used this as their measure. That way to measure impact is simply wrong and would have prevented many significant discoveries in high energy physics and astronomy.
ITER, Wendelstein-X, LIGO, Planck, I could go on. In all those cases any results happened >10 years after the funding started or might still only happen in the future. In the case of the LHC, but also many other Detector experiments individual grants to research groups were typically (not just anecdotally) way beyond 700000€.
Are you claiming the impact/$ for the LHC is higher than would be expected from funding many smaller projects?
According to wikipedia the project costs about $9B, but I doubt that includes all supporting efforts and researcher salaries. That would fund 12 thousand of these smaller $700k projects.
I think "impact" as typically defined is a questionable measure of scientific value. There is no other way in which the Higgs could have been discovered except through a concerted effort of thousands of people, the technical and infrastructure work in such a project is both very challenging and expensive and usually pays only off after more than one decade of work.
You are completely missing the point. The detection of the Higgs is not the primary and absolute purpose of humanity. That it takes a massive amount of money and effort is a bad thing and it certainly isn't something we needed to do right now.
If we first invested in research to make building the LHC cheaper, we'd get more benefit for less cost. That's the only reasonable criteria for allocation of resources.
For some reason this reminds me of how hard it is to design unsupervised learning systems that don't hit a measurable payoff for a long time, so they can't easily decide what they did right or wrong.
Is MIT actually well-endowed? I don't know the answer to this question so it's not intended to be snarky.
But there are plenty of schools (my alma mater CMU is one such example) that have mind share but a very small endowment. CMU has made a point of building its endowment over the last few years -- there was a single $250M donation, a few others in the $50-100M range, and calls for much more.
Endowments are important to the long-term financial health of an educational system. They help schools borrow money at very cheap rates to fund large infrastructure projects that otherwise would need to be built by donor / grant money alone. A school like CMU with a small endowment ends up having sky-high tuition to compensate (indeed, CMU has the highest tuition in the country across nearly every degree program they offer) and limited scholarship opportunities. They also have to accept a greater percentage of foreign nationals who otherwise might not qualify (and who can usually pay the tuition out of pocket no problem, since the wealthy across the world want at least one degree from a US school on their resume).
But essentially, the endowment is a nest egg that the school uses to ensure its long-term survival and academic independence. If you feel your alma mater made you the person you are today, and you want to encourage that to continue into the future, a large endowment gift goes a long way to ensuring its continued existence, independence and prosperity. Agree that there are a few schools that don't really need more (Harvard being the prime example) but the vast majority of schools really do need that much money sitting in the bank. You're donating to a school of thought more than anything else.
MIT is known for having a good financial aid program and a large endowment (MIT's is around a third of Harvard's!) could improve that even further. I can imagine that being very impactful in the long term.
72% of MIT undergraduates complete their degree with no student debt [1] and the rest are from families in the top 1-5% of income [2]. Thus, if directed at financial aid, this pledge would only help those from high-income families. If the pledge were used to give a stipend, could MIT attract more low-income students to apply and accept their offers?
Giving students from high income families a tuition discount likely won't change their decision to attend, hence price discrimination. To maximize charitable impact with respect to financial aid, it could be argued that instead the funding should go toward other schools so that these all-star, low-income undergrads have more opportunities closer to home.
I think this would work, but university prestige is often based on scarcity so few universities do. This is the same reason that Harvard has almost the same number of undergrads as they did 50 years ago, despite an endowment 20x the size.
But it is a combination of scarcity and quantity, interestingly.
By any measure that is per-student, Caltech grads for instance are far superior to the average MIT grad.
However, MIT has better name recognition and looks far better in stats like "number of publications in top journals" or "number of Nobel price winning alumni", just because it has five times as many researchers and pumps out five times as many alums every year. So the winning strategy is to get as big as possible - but only as long as the majority of your intake is still in the top half-percent of the bell curve...
That's a pretty broad statement. I can think of a number of measurements where MIT comes out ahead of Caltech - entrepreneurship (measured per-student) would be one particularly relevant to HN.
Cambridge is certainly no where near as expensive as say, New York, so by your logic Columbia should be smaller than it is? A significant portion of a school's ranking (and overall prestige) is the difficulty of admission and the yield, so schools have an incentive not to expend indefinitely (plus there are other advantages of small/medium size).
I personally know several people who were not in that 1-5% who did go to MIT and most definitely have massive student loans. Maybe they do that now, but they definitely didn't in the past.
Agreed, there could be people outside of the top 5% who have loan payments, and those from families earning more than $200,000 who decided not to pay the full amount.
With this pledge, maybe MIT can bump up the free tuition level for those from families earning under $80,000 to $125,000 like at Stanford. The number is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the sliding window of tuition rate. After all for well-endowed, prestigious schools, tuition is unhinged from services received / amount of spending per student.
Financial aid packages often assume a parental contribution before loans and grants are considered. When there is none, it's on the student to cough up the difference or withdraw. There might be more room to help prospective students than you think. (Speaking from personal experience.)
Hmm, don't think I understand your first argument. If 72% of MIT undergraduates graduate without loan debt, this almost certainly includes all of the students (29%) coming from the top 5%.
There are certainly people that are dissuaded from MIT for cost reasons, and money could be used to solve that problem.
No, that doesn't follow. Students coming from the top 5% can have loan debt. The top 5% includes many (mostly?) families that could not afford to pay out of pocket for MIT, and even those that could may choose not to.
That is literally the term for providing the same product or service at different prices to different markets depending on their perceived ability to pay, yes.
You seem to be implying that it's necessarily a bad thing, though.
It seems like 140 million would be enough to create something along the lines of a MIT OCW or Khan Academy-with-testing-centres to earn degrees.
Maybe it's the unrealistic and the naive opimist in me that is saying this--but imagine any person in the world with an internet connection could have access to study for a world-class degree on whatever schedule suits them?
Obviously there are challenges involved, and there will always be a place for research institutions, but it seems to me like if anyone in the world could earn a degree equivalent in rigor to an MIT degree that a lot more would. That would help a lot of people and also propel advancements science and tech.
It seems most of us in tech learned a lot of our most valuable skills on our own--so in other words, labour-intensive education isn't the only way to do it.
But...it's not the degree, it's the knowledge that's important.
MIT, Stanford, and a decent amount of other institutions have made their lectures available for free online. Almost anyone can go online now and watch the lectures and do the projects that the students do.
How would testing centers and degrees make them better scientists in anyway?
State Universities are getting underfunded these days. I would like to see a major challenge grant for state universities with major science/engineering schools. For example, donate $140 million if the State increases its expenditures by $140 million above current trends for each of the next 5 years.
I've thought about this a lot relating to charitable giving, especially because my employer frequently offers 2x match on these kinds of donations. How does one compute 'bang for the buck' for a given donation size? How does one balance small, local socially-good institutions vs large, global socially-good institutions?
Also, some global institutions do small scale local outreach as well. Despite my employer being a large global research university, we have health clinics in low income areas and provide educational opportunities for low income neighborhoods locally.
Or a single donation of that size to another single school that is far more in need than MIT. for example on could donate it to the Tribal Colleges system and make an unbelievable impact on the lives of many criminally oppressed native communities.
This is the type of thing I think a lot about. My hometown is plagued by an outrageous crime problem, widespread poverty, and crumbling infrastructure. They just spent $250 million to extend a park over a highway, another $51 million on a trolley for tourists, $24 million to redo a downtown park, and so on and so on.
Obviously, the funds for these projects weren't fungible, but taken as a whole, this spending in the face of real problems is profane.
Whoever made the donation was clearly of an opinion that MIT, being a bunch of smart people can allocate the money better than the donor or other institutions.
>It would be interesting to compare the utility of one large $100 million+ grant to an institution like MIT, Yale or Harvard that is already well-endowed, compared to a hundred different million dollar grants to institutions across the USA or the world, where the money might arguably be more effectively used or sorely needed.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced that it had received a $140 million pledge from a graduate of the school—with no name, and no strings attached.
An unrestricted gift of that size is rare in higher education, as donors often want a say in how their dollars are spent. Unrestricted donations can be used for things like facilities upkeep, as well as to pursue early-state scientific research.
In the past, MIT has put unrestricted funds toward online learning and Alzheimer’s research, as well as scholarships.
MIT said in a news release Wednesday that it would “invest in daring, high-risk ideas; address some of the world’s most urgent challenges; and sustain support for students, faculty, and the physical campus.”
MIT is in the second year of the public phase of its $5 billion fundraising campaign, and has already brought in $3.4 billion. So far, roughly 20% of that is unrestricted.
“No one has ever made it through life without someone else’s help. As a past recipient of MIT’s generous financial aid, I benefited tremendously from the opportunity to pursue my MIT education and am extremely appreciative of all the ways that MIT has shaped me,” the anonymous donor said in a statement shared by MIT. “I am blessed to be able to give back to the Institute so other students can experience what I did, and so that the Institute can continue to excel in groundbreaking achievements.”
The largest gift to MIT was pledged in 2000, when International Data Group founder and chairman Patrick McGovern Jr. , and his wife Lore Harp McGovern, committed $350 million over 20 years for a brain research institute.
In fact, the vast majority of MIT undergraduates receive financial aid. About a third of MIT undergraduates attend without paying tuition, and over half of undergraduates receive a need-based scholarship (i.e. they are not rich).
>The largest gift to MIT was pledged in 2000, when International Data Group founder and chairman Patrick McGovern Jr. , and his wife Lore Harp McGovern, committed $350 million over 20 years for a brain research institute.
Wasn't the the donation of the majority share in Bose much larger than $350 million over 20 years?
It's a weird context. The Bose shares can't be sold, they receive dividends. So one would want to separate the types of donations for clarification (all cash, restricted stock terms, etc).
Hey! Ya know what HN? It's fucking awesome that $140m was given to one of the finest institutions in the entire world, rather than pissed away like so many other fortunes. I'm sorry it didn't fit [insert pet issue that needs money]. More rich people should do this! And anonymously donated too! Feels good
I think it's definitely nice for philanthropists to give to institutions for higher education. But I also think it's valuable to critically evaluate how the money is spent because there's an opportunity cost to any expenditure.
Wouldn't it be nice if instead of being spent on a new academic facility, or administrators' salaries, that it was instead used to offset tuition or directly fund research?
Are you suggesting the donor should have specified how the money is spent? 80% of the money MIT has raised is restricted to specific uses, but the less sexy things like salaries and office supplies are still required for the organization to run.
I think the suggestion is that MIT has more than enough money (and access to money) and there are less well-funded institutions and causes where $140M might move the needle more significantly.
I'd be curious if one of the unspoken goals is to make people outraged enough by the donation to make donations to smaller institutions. Wishful thinking?
Actually -- and I really hesitate to mention this, but it seems sufficiently intellectually interesting -- has anyone noticed that after the last election cycle, outrage has ceased to matter altogether? United Airlines stock price is up 12% despite their behavior, for example.
I'm not sure outrage has ever mattered much, but internet outrage in particular has gone from "effective when focused" to "this is a normal day." The rise of justice-porn subreddits has fueled this obsession. Everyone has a grudge. In fact, they have multiple grudges categorized by computers and aimed at faceless, nameless ideas.
I'm reminded of 1984. It's so cliche, but remember the "daily hate"? When did we all start falling for this 24/7 outrage cycle?
It's made all the more dangerous by the fact that in nearly all of these cases, the outrage is deserved. In fact, that's what makes it work at all. Everyone's feelings are valid, and the grudges are justified. But what kind of world is it when your grudges are handed to you? Aren't grudges supposed to be personal? I'd rather not have them at all, but a personal grudge is at least better than being told what to think.
Ironically I think this comes from more awareness. I don't think people were aware of how many problems there were in the world. Now anyone with the internet can get informed on hundreds, most with no solution, a solution that is blocked from being implemented, or one so complex that no one can agree on said solution.
This article has a clear slant, but I think it has some serious merit for health, awareness, and activism. Excuse the absolutely horrid title as well.
That's not awareness - awareness, aka mindfulness, is quite a neutral state. I'd define it as recognising things for how they are.
What going on is more like the opposite - not accepting reality; instead trying to fit the facts into an inconsistent (and hence imaginary) worldview. This causes cognitive dissonance which leads to frustration. Outrage is one way people cope with that frustration.
1. I would be careful to paint with that broad of a brush.
2. Awareness can most certainly lead directly to frustration.
Some of it could be that, but there are plenty of issues where they are mostly independent of worldview. The frustration comes from the solution that is not yet known or cannot be implemented. Have that on dozens of big issues and frustration is understandable.
If you're a Nihilist, no solutions are needed or even possible. That's just one obvious counter-example, but in general there is nothing inherently frustrating about any truth (or falsehood).
Frustration is "understandable" but that's because many people do have worldviews that don't match up with reality.
It is if we're only asking for False Dilemmas of (a) give to one of finest institutions in the world or (b) piss it away. There's more than these two options, though. The most world-changing stuff didn't even happen at MIT. I'll go further with a radical claim that the donor would be better off giving it to DARPA based on their track record esp under Strategic Computing Initiative. Maybe with caveat that any results can't be patented and/or must be licensed for FOSS or cheap competition.
After I turned 50 the faculty and administration of MIT got real friendly about alumni legacy grants. Before then they barely gave you the time of day.
There is this perception(not invalid) that more research money should go to the best schools because that would result in more impactful research. I, myself don't quite disagree with that.
But one of the claims for this argument that a huge donation suddenly doesn't turn a bad school into a good one is a strawman argument. Things don't have to be so extreme. There are plenty of middle tier schools specially state schools where amazing research is happening, and there are brilliant researchers who can also make use of that money having huge impact on the world. These schools already have very advanced infrastructure to utilize additional research money.
But as a graduate student in a state school, I might be biased.
I agree with you. It is natural to think that this is a simple problem - give money to the very best university and get the best research. Unfortunately, like many things, it's not quite that simple.
Is there any reason to think that research at MIT has been limited by lack of funding? That seems highly implausible to me. And if the answer is that MIT could hire additional researchers to do more research with that money, those researchers can do the same research with that money at many other schools.
It's not clear to me that giving the money to MIT will result in any more research, and a good chance that it will result in less, because researchers at other universities currently are limited by financial constraints.
> But one of the claims for this argument that a huge donation suddenly doesn't turn a bad school into a good one is a strawman argument. Things don't have to be so extreme. There are plenty of middle tier schools specially state schools
Yeah, but it sounds like you're also making the assumption that state schools don't get endowments either. I'm from a state school and the last campaign we had raised ~$20M. Admittedly, it's not even close to the pledge, but it's not like state schools are getting absolutely no funding either.
>But as a graduate student in a state school, I might be biased.
As an undergrad at a middle tier state school that at times does cool research, I'm with you here. Ivory tower elitism is a hell of a drug, and it just makes me sad.
Does anyone have an account I could use to read this? Wall Street Journal are seemingly trying to limit their audience by shrinking their online reach by charging people to read their content.
I would much rather them show me some adverts at the side than have to pay to read one article by them every month or so.
This should be imitated all around the globe, in this way more research, new jobs and a better society is possible. The National University of Engineering (UNI) needs this such funds. For sure this money will return more Zuckerbergs, Gates, Khan, Bose, OCW, EDX... to the world.
I'm going to have to disagree here - while this donation may be less impactful to MIT than it would have been to XYZ Community College, the graduates and research of MIT will probably have a far larger impact on the world than those of XYZ. I'd expect a greater benefit from pushing the bleeding edge just that little bit farther, if that makes any sense.
Another false dilemma between MIT and XYZ Community College. There's all sorts of Universities and probably some community colleges with teams that are doing great work with way, way less than billions in funding. There's chances for great impact if they likewise get the piles of money MIT has been using to do great impact on top of brand name and connections. It will take time for the smaller players to develop the latter but they can use the former immediately.
I don't think any CCs have the endowment mechanism to create lasting return on a gift that size.
Also, most donors making gifts of that size are interested in both the academic and research portfolios of the institution, since that much money will necessarily go into many different projects across the university.So while a large gift to a CC, if they have the means to administer it sounds great, it probably doesn't feel that compelling to a donor.
Great, an organization that's rich enough to waste money on piles of BS research and toys gets a pledge of money instead of a cash-strapped one with bright people that have lots of potential they can't act on.
I agree. It's why my original comment implied they should donate it to people with potential to do good to great things with it that aren't receiving many donations because they're not MIT or something. The MIT that already has over $10 billion endowment.
So, lets give MIT more money they don't need while smart people everywhere else continue to get anywhere from less to near nothing depending on institution or area.
The counterpoint would be that the money could support fundamental research that eventually results in a much larger payoff to the world at large, but I'm not convinced that this outweighs the benefits of funding hundreds, or even thousands of students/scientists in less prominent schools who might go on to make such discoveries themselves.
Of course, all this assumes that donor's primary aim is to make the largest possible impact, when in all likelihood it's motivated more by an affinity for the school, or in the case of other donors, prestige from having their name on the walls.