= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
IlyaShpitser comments on Why are Harvard's alumni so wealthy? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (47)
It might be worth comparing Harvard and Oxford (Oxford occupies a similar power law position in the UK, but some covariates differ in a possibly instructive way -- Oxford has a medieval college system which makes it harder to coordinate investments, and UK is relatively small). Harvard's endowment far outstrips all the Oxford colleges put together.
My general impression is that Oxford is more closely associated with political power than financial power. Cambridge has a far larger endowment than Oxford and in fact it's equivalent to some of the US Ivy League schools. But Christ Church, Oxford alone has had as many Prime Ministers among its alumni as Cambridge in its entirety.
Cambridge's Endowment: £4.9 billion
Oxford's Endowment: £4.03 billion
You need to add in the endowments of the colleges as well. The richest college at Cambridge (Trinity) has an endowment of about $1.5bn; whereas the richest college at Oxford has only about $300m.
Cambridge's total colleges endowments is 2.8 and Oxford's 2.9. But the figures above already include this.
Another major difference: Harvard is (if I'm correct?) incredibly expensive, whereas Oxford (at least for British students) costs the same to attend as any other British university and all fees are paid upfront by the government, with the loan repaid latet only under certain conditions. Obviously there is also further help for students from low income families, but I assume Harvard must have something like that too?
Harvard is expensive, but there is a lot of aid for those who cannot pay, and it is not unduly expensive compared to other american universities that aren't nearly as rich. Lately even public universities in the US have gotten very expensive.
It is true that the fee structure is another big covariate.
Jonah suggests that Harvard is no more expensive than American public universities. One of Larry Summer's projects was to increase financial aid and to make it more transparent. If he had remained president, I think it would now be significantly cheaper than its competition.
No he didn't. He compared Harvard to Berkeley. Berkeley is another elite institution. The cost of attending a university depends on its status, not whether it's public or private.
What leads to your belief that about the cost of universities? The costs are quite opaque.
Private schools all have the same nominal tuition. The most elite ones have the biggest endowments and appear to me to give more financial aid. Less elite ones do try to lure students away from elite schools with merit grants, but I think that merely allows them to match the price of elite schools for the very few students that they are able to lure away, not undercut the price.
They didn't used to. The prices have become more similar. When I attended Loyola, it cost half as much as an elite college. Now it costs about the same. This is very strange, and I wonder what allows non-elite private colleges to charge so much now.
Anyway, I see his point was sort-of valid, because Berkeley has a much lower nominal tuition. It seems somehow I missed that on my first reading? But this is not especially helpful, because most states don't have state colleges with elite standing. All I can think of off-hand is Berkeley and U of Michigan. People from out-of-state must pay much higher tuitions, which are (last I checked, years ago) scaled to the school's status.
Does it?
The numbers in this newspaper article from 2013 suggest that (1) Cambridge has a substantial advantage over Oxford in total alumnar wealth (as opposed to number of wealthy alumni/ae) and (2) there are other rivals not all that far behind. I wouldn't want to make a large bet that there isn't a power-law distribution there, but it certainly doesn't seem much like the alleged US situation with Harvard alumni/ae twice as rich as any other university's.
[EDITED to add: It appears that these numbers come from the same organization as the Harvard ones.]
Right, in the UK they call it "Oxridge." But if you plot the histogram it will probably look like the power law also.
I've always heard it as "Oxbridge."
It doesn't look like the same power law. The #alumni figures for UK universities go 401, 361, 273, 127, 106, 99. The figures for US universities go 2964, 1502, 1174, 889, 828, 658, 581, 568. The US figures drop hugely from #1 to #2 to #3. The UK figures don't.
(If you pretend that Oxford and Cambridge are in fact a single university, then you do get a nice power law fit with a much more negative exponent than for the US figures. But, as it happens, they are two different universities.)
That is interesting (although we would have to do a goodness of fit test).