

Ask HN:You have $1b to found your own university. What do you do? - biznerd

I love blue sky thinking, I just wanted to hear your thoughts.<p>A friend of mine just left a prestigious auditor job in accounting. I asked him how much of his degree was useful to him. He said that he could have been fine with a class or two and maybe some hand holding for the first six months. That really struck me.<p>How much of getting a degree is just signaling?
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ckluis
I'd focus on skills.

There is an interesting development where a couple states are playing with the
concept of a no-upfront costs for education system, but a % of income for a
period of time. If that could be applied to society at large via a for-profit
private university. I might consider building a university which focused on
marketable engineering/tech skills which collected revenue based on an
increase of salary.

Say you are making 30-40k when you enter and you would be willing to give 10%
of anything above that for 10 years.

It would seem the university would now be directly incentivized to teach you
skills which increase your pay. Moreover they would be more incentivized to
get you a good job/jobs/promotions over the years to create a better return
for themselves. You’d probably end up with a career coach…

just some random thoughts.

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onion2k
_A friend of mine just left a prestigious auditor job in accounting. I asked
him how much of his degree was useful to him. He said that he could have been
fine with a class or two and maybe some hand holding for the first six months.
That really struck me._

Why did you assume he's right?

~~~
biznerd
Because I have a job related to accounting right now. Most of the knowledge is
on-the-job training. How much you can learn in a class room setting is
limited.

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jtfairbank
Project based learning. Students propose projects as a team, relevant faculty
mentor them. For example, to learn web dev a student might propose building a
SaaS app. He would ask relevant faculty to mentor him and peers to work on it
with him (devs, admins, designers, ). The team would elect a leader and have
regular checkins with their mentors. The only job the mentors have is to help
the team succeed. If they want to do their own research or work, then they
should encourage a student to find a team and propose it as a project.

Each student could do 8 projects over 4 years. If one takes off, they're in a
position to take a break and try to make it as a startup. That'd be encouraged
by their mentors, and ownership / IP would be structured to benefit the
students with a slight stake for the mentors and university (< 5%).

This would provide many real world skills (what you're doing in the project,
leadership, working with others, etc). It'd also help the students build a
track record of independence and success.

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smeyer
I'd just give it to my alma mater. I learned a lot in college, greatly
increased my analytic skills, learned from courses, research, and peers, and
believe I came out a smarter and more capable person because of it. I don't
doubt that a better university could be created, but I'm not sufficiently
convinced of any particular idea to want to put my backing behind a new
university. My alma mater has a lot of money, but a billion dollars could
still make a big difference and be used to push them towards new ideas without
starting from scratch.

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JSeymourATL
Rather than wasting $1B on University Level programs... mountains of research
suggests that early childhood initiatives are the best way to chip away at
inequality and reduce the toll of crime, drugs and educational failure. Here's
an interesting project in Tulsa>
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/kristof-
okl...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/kristof-oklahoma-
where-the-kids-learn-early.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

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pskittle
build a online diverse university where you bring people together from
different ethnicities, races, and ages. Get them to work together on problems
they face, faced , or will face. build a future you wanto be a part of.

The eligibility criteria should be based on how effectively you solve a
problem or what you learned from trying to solve it . Not your country of
birth

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FiatLuxDave
There is definitely a bizarre market dynamic in higher education right now.
That doesn't mean that a degree is useless for learning (some more than
others, I'm sure). However, because of the effect of 'prestige' on school
values, there are a lot of undesirable effects on the academic market. It is a
weird economic conundrum that colleges are putting out more producers
(graduated possible professors) than can find work, while at the same time
college prices are rising. It's like farms breeding too many dairy cows and at
the same time there is a milk shortage, because only milk from a few non-
expanding dairies is considered good enough.

Since the perceived value of a degree when it comes to the job market has much
more to do with a school's reputation than it does with the actual educational
accomplishments of the degree holder, what I would do is use the $1 billion to
create a new university which would do all it could to spread the prestige
away from the schools where it is centralized.

In other words, there are only a few Harvards or Cambridges in the world. If
there were 1000 schools of this perceived quality, no one would bother even
knowing their names. You might look one up to see if it was on the 'list of
quality schools'. In theory, accreditation is supposed to be like that. But in
the real reputation market, Harvard and say, Eastern Carolina might both be
accredited schools, but there are significant differences in reputation. I
would gladly wager that the best student at ECU is a better student than the
worst at Harvard, but the Harvard fellow will benefit from his schools
reputation in a way that the ECU fellow will not. And this is why schools with
less prestige cannot offer effective price competition with more prestigious
schools, regardless of actual quality of education per dollar.

This is a problem when it comes to the ever-increasing cost of college,
because the reputation effects keep faculty from just going off and making
their own new college to compete with their current employer. If the Harvard
biology department all took jobs with Example State, this would increase the
prestige of Example State, but the professors would feel more of a loss of
prestige than Harvard would. Even though it's the same department, with the
same professors!

So, I'd hire a bunch of prestigious faculty in a specialized area, to create a
school which could compete with the Ivys for e.g. 5% of their student body.
I'd build reputation for the school by sponsoring contests and conferences
which accentuate the dominant position of the new school in its chosen area.
And I'd aggressively recruit the best students in that area from other
schools, by offering easy credit transfer, better student aid, etc. Until
people in one particular field say, "Harvard? It's not like you went to Fiat
Lux Dave University".

Rinse and repeat (with as many $billions as available), until sanity returns
to higher ed costs.

