Maybe Google and Microsoft should use some of their lucre to found a new top tech university to take admissions pressure off the other competitive schools whose rates are being pushed lower every year.
Besides, we need a new need-blind university to foster opportunity.
Like, how much did Olin spend on theirs?
Google Soka University of America. This relatively unknown institution has an endowment per capita that can easily contest that of Princeton.
iirc, Olin had $400 million which was all the benefactor left for his estate and the executor’s decided that the U would fulfill they way he would want his money to be used.
Keep in mind Olin has 300-350 students and Soka has around 400 students.
Those colleges also do no real research, and offer only a few majors. It does much more social good to donate to an already established university’s facilities, scholarship chairs, etc than it does to create a university from scratch. It’s also far easier to get top professors in an in demand field like some STEM and business fields to agree to come to an established, respected university than one whose future is largely unknown.
Since most R&D heads of major companies aren’t idiots, they recognize that spending $10 million at a decent research university will almost certainly result in a far higher payout to the firm investing $30 million trying to establish a brand new liberal arts college. Additionally, if a major corporate donor to a particular department at a not so well funded school wants to advise the departmental planning committees regarding changes in how undergraduates are educated, most of the time the committee will take these recommendations seriously.
Finally, why should a company care about how low a particular university’s admissions rate is? Unless there was real evidence that prospective CS/ engineering students were actually being denied the opportunity to study the fields because a few top schools are competitive, what sort of sense would it make in establishing another highly competitive school? These companies are well aware that in almost all states with competitive flagships, there are also second tier engineering schools. The only exception I can think of is Georgia, which means there are 49 other states where a good but not great student can study the field he wants to while capitalizing on in state tuition.
Google, MS, FB etc find it much more cost effective to lobby DC for never ending H1-B visas to fill their hiring needs.
FYI, the Gates family has donated to Duke (and Harvard, as well as probably other leading universities) with tremendous generosity. For example, the French Family Science Center (http://www.architect.duke.edu/projects/completed/French.html), which is named to honor Melinda French Gate’s (Duke '86, Fuqua '87) family, is a major, capstone facility opened on Duke’s West Campus several years ago. Of course, this philanthropy is in addition to the Gate’s Family Foundation’s unprecedented global support for various initiative, especially health care.
To respond to the initial question, I really don’t believe a price could be accurately calculated; there simply are too many variables. However, I suggest the “brick and mortar” investment – although huge – would be inconsequential when compared to the costs of attracting first-class intellectual capital to any new university. Top faculty and administrators require competitive compensation and will not leave their existing jobs without facilities, research assurances, staffing, and so forth that meet their requirements. @whenhen’s points are spot-on.
There is a very top tech school co-sponsored by Cornell University (I believe they beat out Stanford and MIT for this honor) and Technion, the top Israeli tech college. It’s about 2 or 3 years old and is doing amazing things thus far. It’s temporarily housed in the Google building in Chelsea and will be moved to Roosevelt Island when the building is complete. It is being backed both by some of the wealthiest and brightest techies in the world and has amazing administrators and professors.
@amtc: I could easily be incorrect, however Technion a New York City branch of Cornell, not an independent university (similar to Cornell’s excellent and long-operating Medical College(s) in Manhattan)?
And we must remember that not least among the factors that push admissions rates lower every year, is that certain populations of students are routinely applying to more colleges and universities than in the past. Imagine for a moment that there are only 10 top institutions, and 10 students applying, and each student is admitted to only one. The admissions rate is quite different if each of those students applies to only one institution (%100 admission rate), or to all 10 (%10 admission rate).
Hmmmm…I guess one conclusion from that might be that it’s not really harder than ever to get in college, it just appears to be?
It is not that hard to get into a four year college. For example, Mississippi has 5 schools with CS majors that are good enough to get ABET accreditation (not necessary in most cases, but an indication that the major is not a very low quality one or an IT/MIS major masquerading as a CS major). But the frosh admission standards are not very high, according to http://admissions.msstate.edu/freshman/requirements.php .
Even in California, where people complain about how hard it is to get into UCs, there are non-impacted CSUs that will admit California residents based on https://secure.csumentor.edu/planning/high_school/cal_residents.asp .
However, what people really mean about “harder to get into college” is that it is harder to get into a desirable college, where “desirable” tends to be correlated with selectivity and well-known-ness.
Of course, completing a CS major is another story. The students who barely got into less selective schools may encounter a difficult time in CS if they do not turn around their study habits.
Georgia Southern does not count as a less selective school offering CS and engineering in Georgia (for those who cannot get into GT or UGA)?
So, while all the attention is focused on when Stanford or Harvard will drop below the 5% admissions rate, the truth is that more students than ever have access to a college education?
Access is probably dropping due to cost increases, although actual enrollment may be steady or increasing as some students who may have chosen to forego college in the past now attend college because bachelor’s degrees are increasingly becoming the minimum credential in many jobs.
For those who are not tightly constrained or shut out by cost, it is not really harder to get into a college, but the fewer choices available due to increasing selectivity at some of them means that many students will have fewer choices than they would have had in the past.
@ucbalumnus thanks for letting me know about Georgia Southern. For some reason I was under the impression that they only did engineering technology.
Really? What about the low cost of the 2-year CC transfer option? It’s hard to see how that isn’t open to just about anyone with a desire for education.
Of course, the Administration’s proposal to make it ‘free’ would change everything, I guess…
Many community college systems or individual schools are inadequate for students who want to pursue engineering. When I lived in Wyoming, a state with only one four year university, the nearest CC topped out at Calc I and rarely offered any physics courses beyond first semester physics. I’ve heard similar stories from CC transfers from rural Oklahoma.
So, you’re saying that an engineering hopeful might have to up and eventually go to the big city?
Same thing at the community college where I lived in my 20s. It offered pre algebra, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, precalculus (slow and fast sequence)… but only 1 semester of calculus. I remember that it struck me because I was trying to help a younger student who needed a more advanced class - there was none. Same thing for Physics. Same thing for foreign language, computer science, English (literature)…
In some states, cc’s are primarily for job retraining and remedial education. They may offer some classes similar to 1st year or 1st semester in college but don’t cover all the classes freshmen and sophomore would get at a 4 year public university.
In order to become an engineer (or prepare other majors, such as math or foreign languages) one would have to be admitted to, and get sufficient funds for, a 4 year college that offers such majors.
That’s why I’m not sure the “free community college” idea is a good one - in theory, it is, but in reality, it’d be better if it applied to the first 2 years of any public college AND didn’t affect state funding. But before we get to that, how about to reinstate state funding to pre-2008 levels? That’d be a good start.
As for starting a new college… How about buying out one of the small colleges that struggle to survive, and revamp it by investing into it, with generous need-based aid and so forth?
Olin is an interesting experiment though. Isn’t it going to grow, ultimately, but its time?
Florida Polytech is another new university, but strictly speaking it’s a new college and not a new college, since it’s the Florida Public System’s newest addition, like UC Mercer was for California.
Regarding investing millions to impact undergraduates’ curriculum, I believe that’s what the Koch brothers have been successfully doing for a couple years now.
I’m not sure buying an existing college is a good idea. You might be buying it’s baggage, too.
Seems like you could build a bang-up campus for a couple billion. Another billion would get you 500 endowed chairs. That seems like a pretty good start.