“The strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford.
…
The reality is an MIT degree is still worth a quarter of a million dollars in tuition. But is Boston College worth a quarter of a million? I don’t know.”
He then goes ahead and prognosticates that MIT will proceed to dilute its on brand.
To what end, exactly, remains, to me, unclear.
Schools can fix this a little by not accepting transfers into that class. There is bound to be some attrition to the 600. They can get that number down to 550 or close.
@TheVulcan wrote:
Isn’t Galloway using the same logic to explain why HYPMS will be among the only elite colleges returning <60% of their enrollment in the Fall? Because they can get away with it?
By the numbers, haverford only loses about 5-6 students per year. Their deadline to defer is actually a week before classes start though, so it’ll be awhile before we know how many have chosen a leave of absence. My daughter personally knows more than that number from her class alone, so it’ll be interesting to see how they handle it next year.
I am not sure it is the same logic. Being able to adjust in order to withstand a hopefully short-term external disruption is different from intentionally altering the entire business proposition.
I think he begins with stating a few obvious things and then jumps into speculation that is a complete non-sequitur.
@TheVulcan Actually name brand start before in high school itself. Look at HADES boarding and similar top high school in USA. Look how many rich and famous are sending their kids to study in those schools. In one school we saw lot of kids whose parents are among the top of their country ruling or business elites. These students hail from worldwide.
It’s an interesting question. If schools go to all online for any length of time, why do they need to limit their class sizes? There will be a temptation to admit more, grow the class size and get more $, since the physical plant is no longer limiting. It will be very tempting for some schools.
Because, to borrow Warren Buffett’s turn of phrase, when the covid tide goes out and it’s time to return to campus, everyone will discover who’s been swimming naked.
And even before then, well-delivered online instruction is very different from MOOC.
Yeah. But boarding schools don’t go on your CV. Different animal.
Guess what. Investigate many of the labs at any research university and you’ll see big tech names (US based and other), so I don’t see any benefit for the whole “MIT@Google. iStanford. HarvardxFacebook” thing from the company’s perspective or the university perspective (particulalry HYPMS). Not to mention IP conflicts and freedom to research.
Also, Galloway needs to research a little better. Google started in a dorm room at Stanford, and to this day, Stanford owns the patent to the PageRank algorithm that is the basis of Google (yes, Google does have exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University).
That may have been the case in the past, but I bet the numbers will be all over the place in the next few years. People will lose jobs and won’t be able to afford tuition, the students may not want to be in dorms with three roommates, they may want to study abroad and it may not be allow, they may feel that taking classes on line is not worth the tuition. Some who take gap years may never return.
Or they can just stuff the dorms and classes for 2 years and deal with classes of 600. My law school did that. One year they had 100 extra students because they accepted the normal number, expecting the normal number to accept, and ended up with 100 more. That is more than an entire section. Classes and seminars, especially 2nd and 3rd year, were packed. Moot court and clinics could add a few spots but not 25 more. The building didn’t have enough bathrooms or lockers or tables in the library. They dealt with it but it wasn’t easy.
I’m adding a clarification to my own post. Apparently I was not the only one surprised by this loose quarantine, so my friend clarified. The person in the picture was not the quarantined student, but her younger sister. They are both college age and look a lot alike. My friend delivered some food and drinks to her older quarantined child and then went to lunch with her younger child. She did say that it was a team quarantine where they weren’t allowed outside contact, but they could socialize with teammates but not nearly as loose as the original post had seemed to indicate.
@homerdog You ask if schools with limited numbers of kids on campus and lots of testing will make it work - Yes, I think those plans will work. But when those schools look ahead to spring, I think they will be looking to the schools who have lots of testing and everyone back, to assess what is really possible for spring. And of course the most important factor will be how the virus curve is trending overall in the US at that point.
We can’t ramp up testing in the last 4 months?
750,000 to 1mm tests per day. From zero per day. That’s the definition of ramping up. Especially when considered to other nations globally.
Is it enough? No, it needs to keep being ratcheted higher.
I am personally tipping my cap to the medical pros collecting tests for these millions and millions of samples at personal risk every day and the labs technicians processing them non stop. We think students and teachers are at risk from all of this. Thank heavens we have so many brave and unsung people out there. Kudos.
I’m envious of all the US schools with plans for testing. My D will return to the U.K. for school and they have ZERO plans to do any testing. Quarantine yes but that’s a half baked cake with out the testing component. You can’t get a test there unless you’re symptomatic at the minimum. At least in the US we’ve reached that point in our testing capacity. I’ve had asymptomatic friends tested multiple times. You’ll never find that in the U.K.
I understand your desire to defend the current administration every time it’s been criticized. The criticism is that we failed to ramp up sufficiently and timely to keep up with the spread of the virus. To succeed against the virus, we must stay ahead of it, by testing, contact tracing and isolation. We failed miserably and the result is obvious to everyone other than the most partisan.
@1NJParent – To add to your comment above, people are waiting a week + to learn the results of their tests, rendering those results useless for curtailing the spread of infection. The high positivity rate in many Sun Belt states suggests that we need to test hundreds of thousands more per day.
Simply having the test kits is not of any use if we do not have the lab capacity to analyze the specimens and produce the results.
I am pretending to be on the board of a mid tier private college who can’t rely on academic prestige alone to attract students.
I see that that the costs we are investing in to provide a high end residential experience like sports, orchestras and clubs and restaurants don’t provide a net profit to the college.
We decide to cut all those services and put that money instead on hiring more full time professors for the purpose of providing all online “ real time” instruction via zoom. The service will be year round and availability on weekends and evenings to accommodate international students and students who have full time jobs.
We will have both residential ( with a diminished experience to before and now comparable to the academic focused European university’s) and online students.
Why couldn’t this model work out financially to them?
What about the teachers – does the document show what they will have to do to be able to be online-only? Will certain high-risk conditions be approved, but others not? NYS has powerful teacher unions in many places.
I don’t think NYS K-12 will open. NYSUT is very strong and will surely block a reopening. The MA teacher’s union already came out with a long 4-phase reopening that includes not actually teaching anything (not even online) for the first month.