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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35090 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I'd say it's even worse if the tax payer is mostly paying for a bunch of administrators who provide little public return on the student education (the ostensible point of the subsidies). If people want to spend their own money on something I think wasteful that's their business, when most of the money is coming from the public purse, that's getting much closer to theft.

I of course agree that using tax dollars poorly is to be avoided. But I think the OP was making a bigger point: how can you possibly quantify value in this instance? What are the requirements for a school admin to be "fiscally efficient"? Who decides that? More importantly, if we could somehow determine this, would Harvard be the worst offender?

I think this is much more complicated than it appears.

It's an institution of higher learning, does it improve test scores, student knowledge retention, and from the perspective of federal aid, does it improve the economic prospects of those who didn't go to university, are graduates starting more businesses that employ more people; is the research producing more patents, incubated businesses or public goods in proportion to the administration growth?

Harvard as the premier university in the nation is important because it's setting standards that many other universities will try to imitate, so even if they aren't the worst offender in nation, they should be the focus due to their position as a vanguard. With great power comes great responsibility.

Agreed. Going by your assessment, Harvard passes that test with flying colors.

It's not does Harvard excel at this, it's is Harvard with more administrators doing proportionally more of all of that stuff than they were with fewer administrations, the competition is previous Harvard not third tier land grant university.

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