"The pending purchase rankles some Westminster faculty and alumni, who question what a longtime maker of steel spans knows about running an elite school whose choirs sang with maestros Leonard Bernstein, Arturo Toscanini and Seiji Ozawa."
I think that sentence provides some insight into the deal. As China becomes wealthier, their aspirations will be elevated as well. There's a lucrative opportunity here where the prestige of an American institution can be used to attract family who have the means and aspirations for their children to be acquainted with cultures and arts other than the ones they are born into.
It's kind of funny to hear people complain about a former steel company taking an interest in music education given the prestige that Carnegie Hall holds in American culture.
> Xu Guangyu, chairman of Beijing Kaiwen and a choral singer in college...
> Westminster’s odd couple may not be such a mismatch, given Xu’s background as a choral singer at Peking University. In the early 1980s, his high-school music teacher in Beijing took students to performances of operas “Carmen” and “Madama Butterfly,” and the ballet “Swan Lake,” he said.
At the very least the buyer does appreciate the art involved.
> At the very least the buyer does appreciate the art involved.
Reminds me a little bit of when Jim Beam, and all of its associated brands, was purchased by Suntory, from a long line of face- and soul-less international holding conglomerates.
Suntory is a family-owned company that has the distinction of being the first distiller of whiskey in Japan over a hundred years ago.
A few people whined and moaned, but I suspect that most bourbon drinkers are happy to see a major distillery back in the hands of people that care about whiskey.
The rich never deserve the benefit of the doubt; if they need their side of the story told, they can, and do, pay for it to be told as sympathetically and skillfully as possible. We are only to look on with as much discernment as possible.
Even without these institutions arts universities of all kinds are overflowing with children from Chinese rich families. It's already a huge, wealthy market. It's just not as funny as a Chinese math genius, so fewer people outside these schools talk about it.
Yes, this is important to realize. I work in a fairly reputable design studio, and we take in interns every year. This year, all of our applicants were Asian students from overseas (mostly PRC) attending art/design schools in the US. In many cases, they do seem to come from wealthy backgrounds (eg went to private high schools abroad, etc). That was definitely not the case 5 years ago.
The only ones who can attend art school anymore are kids coming from very wealthy backgrounds.
> given the prestige that Carnegie Hall holds in American culture.
Carnegie Hall wasn't built by the Carnegie Steel Company was it? It seems totally reasonable to separate the aspirations/interests of the owner of a company with the company that he used to make the money.
>"The pending purchase rankles some Westminster faculty and alumni, who question what a longtime maker of steel spans knows about running an elite school whose choirs sang with maestros Leonard Bernstein, Arturo Toscanini and Seiji Ozawa."
First, that's quite racist.
Have they ever questioned what do the US analogous of "longtime makers of steel spans" and ex-robber barons that have been their patrons, and which have dedicated buildings and schools and auditoriums named after them, know about elite schools?
Vanderbilt, for one, was a poorly educated steamboat and railroad tycoon.
Hear that "pop"? It's the student-debt-driven education bubble springing a leak and starting to deflate.
Thanks, Bush 43, for your legacy in this when you "reformed" the bankruptcy laws to make it impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. That set educational institutions free to raise their rates to ludicrous levels: it took away the incentive for student lenders to push back.
It took away lenders' incentive to say such things as "$126,000 is too much debt for a special education teacher. She'll never be able to pay it back. We won't lend it to her to give it to you. Reduce your tuition, and cut your administrative overhead."
Institutions with some cachet, like Westminster, will get rescued. Others will just collapse.
I had a bad year last year and the couple before. I defaulted on my student loans, they got sold off, and it just so happened that I was in a group of sold off student debt that didn't get the information sold to the new organization handled correctly so for me and a couple hundred thousand delinquents had their student loans lost in the mail.
It's completely unfair that mine went away and people that are upside down and have been "playing the game" are still in the slog, but it by a wide margin the most fortuitous thing that has ever happened to me.
It was an episode of Last Week Tonight a few years ago. They noted that you can not buy individual debt, just large blocks of it. So HBO let them buy a large block of it and they told everyone they wouldn't be collecting.
The standard argument for why student loan debt survives bankruptcy is that otherwise students would declare bankruptcy on graduation. At least with our current system, where bankruptcy is wiped from your record after 7 (or 10) years this would be a good move for most students.
Canada solved this in the most obvious way possible:
> If you file bankruptcy in Canada a federally guaranteed student loan is only automatically discharged if the date of your bankruptcy is more than seven years from when you ceased to be a student. This rule was created to prevent student from incurring huge student loans, and then graduating and immediately going bankruptcy.
Or just look at how other countries do it - in UK your payments for the student loan are taken automatically from your salary each month(10% of anything above 20k/year - so if you make less than 20k/year you don't pay anything), but if there is any outstanding balance after 20 years it's automatically forgiven. No need to declare bankrupcy since if you can't pay it back there is simply nothing to pay. If you have a job it's paid back automatically without the employee having to do anything. If it's paid off in 20 years = great. If not = no big deal, you just get a letter saying that your outstanding balance is now zero.
I guess that system is possible because all loans are provided by the Student Loans Company which is ran by the government - and tuition is capped at 10k/year, so it doesn't matter what or where you study - the cost is exactly the same.
>The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program forgives the remaining balance on your Direct Loans after you have made 120 qualifying monthly payments under a qualifying repayment plan while working full-time for a qualifying employer.
Small correction: current loans are written off after 30 years, not 20.
Also worth noting that loans can still be sold off by the SLC (though remain managed by the SLC, so probably makes little if any difference to the individual), and government ownership hasn't completely stopped the use of questionable tactics (e.g. debt collection letters purporting to be from "Smith Lawson & Company").
There are better ways to counteract that. Off the top of my head - if you declare bankruptcy to evict student loans, you are ineligible for retirement account contributions like IRA and 401ks for the 7-10 year window. Additionally you take a 5% tax increase for the duration of that window.
Not allowing people to put money in retirement accounts just means the govt has to support those people that much more when they get to old age, instead of them supporting themselves and getting tax revenue from the withdrawal.
And a %5 tax increase sounds like a pretty good deal. For most people it's going to be $25-$50k total, and you have no bill due when your unemployed.
I don't know if it wouldn't work out better for everyone but the lender. People paying student onerous student loans, like myself, already aren't putting money into retirement accounts because the banks are taking it all.
If I could just cut out student loan payments the money would go towards paying down any outstanding debt or towards buying a house/condo which would help me not need support in retirement. The tax advantaged retirement funds are nice but many people with student loan debt it's like telling them they have won't have to pay taxes on any yachts they buy. Technically nice, but practically useless
Being on the government dole in the US is not an outcome anyone would plan for. You're lucky if you can heat your apartment (if you even have your own) and eat processed cheese on what you'd be getting.
Also, many (most?) student debts are less than $25k, and unpayable huge debts should never have been approved in the first place. The latter clause is the whole point of this anyway.
> if you declare bankruptcy to evict student loans, you are ineligible for retirement account contributions like IRA and 401ks for the 7-10 year window.
That's something that a large percentage of people do anyway. What a strange and poorly-thought-out suggestion.
It's also a sure fire way for the public to have to spend even MORE on social programs since you'll be even more likely to reach retirement with zero money.
What good could possibly come from intentionally banning someone from saving for retirement?
>Off the top of my head - if you declare bankruptcy to evict student loans, you are ineligible for retirement account contributions like IRA and 401ks for the 7-10 year window. Additionally you take a 5% tax increase for the duration of that window.
Why don't we just do that for everyone, and make higher education free. This works for the absolute majority of students. Provide an opt-out for the few that can pony up the cash up front.
You could probably turn education free by reducing the defence budget by a few percentage points.
One of the reasons I'm happy to be European. Education is free in most countries. It makes no sense to burden young people with a load of debt when starting out.
> You could probably turn education free by reducing the defence budget by a few percentage points.
According to https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=75, in the 2014–2015 school year U.S. colleges & universities spent $536 billion; the 2014 defense budget was $526.6 billion[0]. We could spend our entire defense budget and still not cover our higher education bill.
I'm not sure this is the best number to use. This is what is currently spent, it is not how much we would need to provide a free higher level education option. The entire department of education budget is 70 billion [0]. Using Pennsylvania as a baseline, they have approximately 185 million planned for public education[1]. Let's round that to 200mil and multiply it by 50. This gives us a ballpark spending of 100 billion at the state level. So let's approximate 170 billion spent on K-12 and higher education last year.
We were able to fund our entire K-12 system and give money to public universities for under half that 536 billion figure. So yes, we may not be able to cover our current higher education bill with the defense budget. However, what we are currently doing is not the best or cheapest system. Someone could definitely come up with a free higher education proposal for half of that 536 billion figure. The system needs reformed badly. Everyone knows the costs of higher education are out of control. Using it as the baseline isn't fair IMO.
It's a double whammy as they say in US because, students that can't find a job are both liable for student debt and also have to pay for health insurance.
I would too! I just think it’s important to understand that “free college” is only half the story and to recognize maturely that you’re making tradeoffs.
Right. That would have the correct feedback to properly represent what a poor investment investing in students actually is (not a good investment). This would cause interest rates for student loans to be much higher and there would be more rigor in who is allowed a loan.
You say that like declaring bankruptcy is painless. That was not the case before George Bush's reforms. It certainly would not become the case again -- lenders' job is to predict this behavior.
There is a reason it's not bankruptable. If it was, lenders would not loan to students.
And if, like now, the government backed the loans and they were dischargeable, it would create a death spiral of companies encouraging loans to no end with tons of students accepting them, knowing that they can just file bankruptcy right after graduating.
You act like the concept of bankruptcy is something lenders have no concept of. No, what would happen is that lenders would become more selective about lending. A mediocre high school student planning to get an underwater basketweaving degree for $40k a year? Yeah, probably not a good investment from a lender. And you can go the opposite direction to create equally obvious investments for lenders.
There's an even better side effect of this. There is no real and inherent reason that university prices have skyrocketed out of control. It's mostly a consequence of government removing all economic concerns for students. That of course sounds nice, but they also simultaneously removed all economic concerns from universities who can, and do, charge arbitrarily large sums and justify it by increasingly reckless spending. This a recurring problem when messing with the market - we create unforeseen problems, though in this case this should have been very foreseeable!
By returning to market forces universities would be obligated to themselves also take economic matters into consideration with their decisions. Too high of tuition and fees are unlikely to get paid off, thus unlikely to produce much in the way of loans, and thus generally not economically viable. Similarly there would be less of an incentive to grow programs that do not substantially improve the ability of students to create a comfortable life for themselves.
Basically we would start on a path back towards the world some baby boomers seem to think we still live in where somebody with a bit of hard work could put themselves through college with a part time job graduating not only debt free but with a enough of a nest egg put aside to have a nice down payment for their first place.
Good! Lenders should not lend to students whom they do not reasonably believe will be able to pay. Serfdom should be outlawed. Hopefully one day these debts are struck down under the 13th Amendment.
> I don’t really understand how there can exist any debt that can’t be bankrupted, apart from federal treasuries.
Because it's debt to get a degree. I don't agree necessarily but the idea is that students would get large loans, go to schools, get a degree, then declare bankruptcy.
I think the GP comments makes a good point that large loans would be harder to get if all of the sudden they knew bankruptcy option is going to considered after graduation.
So the taxpayer who didn't go to college and instead went to work because he lacked either the interest/ability or money to do so at the time, should be left holding the bag on the default of the person who irresponsibly took out too big a loan for a worthless degree? Yeah, great alternative.
No, the debtor should eat the default, and the lender, with insight into aggregate market conditions, should take their default rates into consideration when advising institutions on pricing.
This is the "systemic fairness" argument, also known as the "moral hazard" argument. It's a fair point.
But my original point (I wrote the top-level comment to which you're responding) was this: Taking away ALL risk from the .edus and the lenders took away a really important part of downward tuition-price pressure. Easy student loan money means escalating student fees.
Who should "pay" if a schoolteacher can't pay her Salem State College loans? Good question. The college who charged so much ought to be on the hook, at least partly. The same goes for the lender, taxpayers in the community where she teaches, and she herself.
Who should pay if an investment banker can't pay his Harvard Business School student loans? Is it a different kind of question? That is hard to know in general.
Without the ability to bring student loans to bankruptcy court, there's no legal way to address these questions of fairness. That is not sustainable for student debtors, colleges, or the society at large.
I didn't mean that to sound as bitter as it probably did, but I'm glad I got the point across.
What's often left out of these amateur discussions we have is that education loans are non-collateralized debt. There's no asset of any value to repossess, and except for a few specialized programs where you owe a few years in the military or troubled school or free health clinic, not even a pledge of the very thing this loan is supposed to return value on, i.e. the person's own labor productivity. (And even in those cases, if the person reneges and suddenly becomes liable for the cost of their education again, they're still probably eligible for the same kind of forbearance and forgiveness programs being pushed for the more general student-loan indebted population.)
That's a (if not the) key reason this kind of debt isn't dischargeable.
If you want to be fair at this point the college's and banks should be eating the default. The information assymetry is massively on their side and the college's have done nothing to try and use their money efficiently while the banks have seemingly given up on doing their job of making sure the investment is worthwhile.
Unfortunately that might make our entire economy collapse as we've let the student debt bubble get so large. We'll likely have to all shoulder some of the pain, regardless of how fair it is
They made the loans under the condition that they are not dischargeable and that the government would pay in case of default. You can't retroactively change the rules.
Why not? You totally can. It's not some fundamental law of nature that regulation can't be changed after some time. The loans were made under the assumption that they are not dischargeable, at that time someone could attempt to estimate what's the probability that the laws would be repealed or modified in some time horizon. That probability is going to be > 0. Is that risk large enough to change the business case for making the loan in the first place?
You could, but, in the U.S., ex post facto law is unconstitutional. Lenders have correctly gauged the odds of this provision of the U.S. constitution changing to be near zero.
This would be an ex post facto change. The government wouldn't be retroactively making the lenders guilty, it'd be a change in regulations. If this change was unconstitutional then you'd have situations like a company with a contract to dump industrial waste into a river going "oh sorry, I made this contract based on the regulations back then, so it's unconstitutional for you to make me stop polluting"
If you had a contract that was contingent on your ability to dump your waste in the river, and then a law was passed forbidding the dumping of waste, you would of course have to stop polluting, but your contract would be null and void as well.
Non-bankruptable student loans aren't "regulations" they are specific contracts between students, lenders, and the US government.
You can't get blood from a stone either and that appears to be the only alternative the lenders are seeking. The many of these loans are bad, they were for more money than the education provided in income. If they don't become dischargeable or just get written off the system is going to collapse
If the student defaults, the lender still gets paid. The government steps in and pays them. The debt is then essentially owed to the government rather than the lender.
I think a lot of people share your point of view. That's your right, but then there should be no surprise when eccentric politicians get into office after enough voters who are continually on the losing end by having not gotten involved in these bubbles are sick and tired of being fed this line.
I agree. There needs to start being punishments for leaders of these institutions who put our society at risk over pure greed. The institutions might need to be saved atm but if everyone on charge gets away scot free then it's just going to degrade people's belief that our system is worth having
Federally guaranteed student loans totaled $122,500,000,000 last year [1]. Subsidies create artificial demand and push prices upward. They take away the student's incentive to say those same things of the price that you're ascribing to lenders. Traditional college isn't necessary for everyone.
You make it sound like tuition wasn’t already increasing at unsustainable rates before GWB. Or that people are just now foolishly pursuing degrees without factoring in ROI.
That's because tuition costs were not increasing at unsustainable levels before GWB (and technically the big debt explosion almost entirely happened during the Obama terms). University costs were extremely reasonable in the US prior to the year 2000. They were hilariously cheap compared to today.
As so nicely represented by the explosion in student debt:
> University costs were extremely reasonable in the US prior to the year 2000.
Remember that I knew a few people who managed to both work and go to school at the same time and pay the tuition with the salary. So they took longer to graduate (5-6 years) but graduated debt free. It was a state school in mid West not a fancy private school or anything like that.
I will say that the slope of the curve gets a bit steeper after 2000, so perhaps you’re on to something to a degree, but to say that college costs weren’t increasing at unsustainable rates prior to Bush is laughable. And with everything, perspective is key. I started school in 2000, and what you consider reasonable my dad balked at (because it was roughly 3-4x what he paid 25 years prior).
> As so nicely represented by the explosion in student debt:
There is more to this than just the raw tuition value to consider: far more people are attending college than in years past (far more than should really be doing so, honestly). A graph that normalizes against student population would be much more interesting (otherwise your graph doesn’t tell what portion of the increase is due to tuition explosion versus student population explosion).
A long time ago, college costs actually were not increasing at all. Based on the graphs I'm seeing in a couple of sources, there actually was a period from roughly 1965 to 1985 where college costs in the US were more or less at a sustained level.
From the 1940s to 1960s, college costs were rising some, and from 1985 to 2003 costs also increased some. But the rate of increase after 2003 definitely is higher.
Both sources are blaming things other than student loans for rising costs. I will say the second link is intriguing, in that it postulates that state education budget cuts play a responsibility in rising costs. This might go hand in hand with the student loan balloon: basically, the cost of college is shifting heavily to the individual student, but in a very poor manner if the end goal is an attempt at meritocracy via education. I agree that demand might play a role too (the first link sort of implies this).
It would be interesting to compare tuition cost history in the United States to other countries, which as far as I know do not follow our funding model. (For some reasons this was not easy to quickly Google.)
I fundamentally agree but...student loans were made impossible-to-discharge-in-bankruptcy via the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978. This has been a looooooong time coming.
This is the same argument constantly used to justify violating a country's own values:
"If we can't build a church in Saudi Arabia, you shouldn't be able to build a mosque in our country."
Thing is, it's Americans selling this land. So compromising on those freedoms just to align yourself with bad policies a country is following that sound wise.
>This is the same argument constantly used to justify violating a country's own values...
I think you are conflating two separate issues, nations vs individuals. If an individual wants to buy land and happens to be Chinese, who cares? But this is the Chinese Government buying land in the US.
It's not the same thing, so different rules should apply.
Let's take this to the extreme to see how bad it could unreasonably get. What would happen if a single foreign government (for the sake of argument, run by a dictator for life) bought all the land in the US...? Or even less crazy, a majority of the movie production companies (or used their market share to force government paid censors to be at the filming and have editorial rights), colleges (or controlling interest in them), news companies, or valuable land (no need to buy deserts), etc ... seem far fetched?
Not only that, but businesses as well. A friend and I came up with a pretty obvious idea on something we could ship to China, only to figure out we were landlocked unless we essentially took on Chinese partners. We launched another venture aimed at the US population where Chinese citizens freely compete against us, honestly it sucks that we can't do the same.
Perhaps Mexico is a better example; they restrict the ability of Americans to buy Mexican land within X distance of the border or within Y distance of a coast.
Yes, but for the right to use that house or condo, they don't need to pay property taxes, whereas most of the rest of the world you have to pay rent (property taxes) to the government. If you have to pay vast sums of rent to keep it, do you really own it?
Letting rich landlords accumulate land without paying any taxes on it is how you get feudalism. I don't think most people want to live in a feudal society, do you?
Maybe you didn't see that his premise is that no one in China can own land outright. But you are right concentration of land ownership is problematic for a crowded country like China and it was one of causes for the peasant revolution.
That's true, you definately want some property taxes in cities and urban areas. but, i don't see the harm of near 0 taxes in rural areas with little land demand.
Except in a small number of locations, the US doesn’t exactly have a land shortage. Nor a particular shortage of small liberal arts schools with sketchy financial situations.
Use our freedom to implement a fair trading system. We are free to buy and sell here, but not in China. China takes advantage of us because of this, and up till now, we have had no recourse accept "trade wars".
Instead of a trade war with tariffs and accusations and bickering, why not remove all possible complaints and treat others as they want to be treated?
Use Chinese rules for the Chinese. Completely and utterly balanced trade. If they don't like it, they can change their rules to be more free, and they get more freedom to buy here.
How would the Chinese government complain to the international community about the US applying their own rules to land ownership? How could anyone complain? It would be the height of hypocrisy, so they wouldn't.
So why not use our freedom as the ultimate bargaining tool to create a balance in the world? Other countries could do the same to us, and we couldn't complain either. It seems there has to be a game theory equation to explain this, it can't be the first time it's been considered.
Why do you think the US would stay the same if it became closed like China? What makes you think that the freedom is a liability?
You're essentially advocating to reverse decades if not centuries of policy that justified US foreign policy actions, because the US assumed moral high ground on several geopolitical fronts. IMO it would degrade the USs standing on several policy issues. "trust us, we're the good guys." no longer works. I'm sure China and Russia would love to park their navy outside of Florida in international waters because the US does similar things.
It's time for the US to start reciprocating trade behavior. Just look at those agriculture tariffs that nearly everyone else is using.
No eyes are in fact lost. The US increases the amount of goods it produces domestically and reduces the amount that it imports (ideally buying less consumer junk from China), which is entirely feasible now that China's manufacturing costs are nearly as high as the US. Or alternatively, the US trades with more open partners (eg where the US can properly own assets & businesses), or chooses partners that are strategically a better fit (such as Vietnam, where trade is booming with the US).
It's already agreed that it's as objective a moral standard as one could be.
Jesus was only referenced as a rhetorical flourish. I prefer Kant's articulations, but the Jesus books include a not necessarily religious moral philosophy.
Society cannot hold together, when people make exceptions for themselves, or play the 'you did it first, so it's o.k. for me' game. That indicates an absence of moral principles.
We're now, apparently, starting to do that. It has been heating up for years, pre-Trump. We currently appear to be in a total freeze on allowing China to buy US technology assets. Which is exactly what we should be doing, until they allow US companies to operate similarly in China.
[2016] "One of the companies that first brought silicon to Silicon Valley — Fairchild Semiconductor International — said it would remain in American hands after rejecting a takeover offer worth about $2.5 billion led by Chinese state-backed buyers. Instead, Fairchild embraced a smaller bid from an American rival on Tuesday, citing concerns that federal regulators might reject the Chinese deal."
Nobody can buy land in china, but Microsoft was granted a long term lease on some nice prime real estate in zuongguancun that HR at the time of our move bragged had already made Microsoft a lot of money in land appreciation.
Second, there are two sides to a deal. The parent's plan will penalize the seller as well the buyer, both buy reducing demand and by taking away the best deal.
That's a problem with all trade restrictions. If your country won't buy from others, why will others buy from you? Only North Korea tries to go without trade to a large extent and even they smuggle goods.
What is "fair", really? It may not sound fair to those property owners who want to sell and bought the land on the hope that they can sell it some day.
I think we should prevent any foreign country from buying our land in general tbh. Land is literally the country itself and while it's good for capital owners, the past 10 years show that foreign real estate investment seems to be decreasing QoL of the people that live here by jacking up rents and home prices.
Given how regressive/repressive many universities have become this is really scary. With that being said it is not entirely surprising given the amount of Chinese investment going into the us with things such as this https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/16/how-china... . It is getting more brazen by having them buy our universities and is the perfect Trojan horse. As it is, our universities, which used to be institutions that valued free speech, open inquiry etc. are becoming places with strict speech codes, repression of dissenting ideas and places where due process is thrown out the window. The US education bubble needs to pop, but if it is bailed out and propped up by foreign interests (who's interests are not direct profit from the venture) there could be a lot of other negative consequences for the US beyond stealing IP. To continue to be innovative we need generations of people to be able to critically think about things, not a mass of indoctrinated people.
> "Xu Guangyu, chairman of Beijing Kaiwen... runs K-12 schools in China and said Westminster could provide the knowledge to help upgrade arts education for his students."
There you have it. The Chinese company is buying the college specifically for the purpose of using their intellectual property. Is this not the same thing they have been doing buying US businesses? Purchasing the know-how that they lack to gain a competitive edge, while preventing MNCs from competing fairly in the Chinese domestic market?
It's a smart strategy and seems to be working. Not fair though, and shouldn't be allowed.
US does the same, no? Think of all the Chinese researchers, athletes and business people who immigrated to US and brought their knowledge and resources to America.
In the end, the more countries and firms compete on expert knowledge, the better it is for knowledge workers.
No, the US doesn't do the same. You're comparing two very different things. Property is/can be owned, people are not and should not be. China & the US do not own their people or their brains, even if they'd like to.
Both countries technically allow people to move to and work in them, from other nations. It's practically impossible to become a citizen of China as a foreigner. The US grants a million green cards per year.
China almost entirely disallows outbound technology/IP/property/asset tranfers. That's the overwhelming point of contention.
How is it possible that any colleges are cash-strapped with the tuition they are charging these days? It boggles my mind - they must be incredibly mismanaged.
I haven't seen any reports, but my impression is that many universities have cut loose many permanent professors, hiring masses of part time, super low wage adjuncts. At the same time gold-plated administration and facilities costs have increased much faster than inflation along with textbooks and tuitions. It's a massive devaluing of the actual education with super-inflation on the trappings of education.
Literally describes my last uni to a T, it was a new state uni. I left before finishing my degree because all the good professors left after their first year, leaving some very blatantly unqualified professors behind. Most (but not all) of the replacements are adjuncts. Also, I got a job in my field, which made it easier to leave.
My favorite example to give to explain their hiring problem is the professor of a webapp development class, a computer science professor, who was completely dumbfounded by ES6 syntax and closures and taught straight from the W3 Schools website. Literally came into class, plugged in his laptop, opened W3 Schools and started reading. I ended up tutoring a lot of people for that class, and typically had to dispute all my test grades by proving that my (handwritten -- he was that type) code worked.
That is to say, he was simply not qualified to teach that class. Not even close. We didn't even get anywhere near finishing all the material, we never even wrote a single webapp in that class. We didn't even get close to that point.
However, the building is gorgeous. And also sunk so far in the first year that they had to bolster their drainage considerably. This is Florida, by the way. Rain is a way of life here, and they didn't plan for it. After the recent hurricane, the building was damaged, but they can't do a whole lot to fix it because the architect owns a copyright on the building. It's a damn shame that if the damaged parts fail, it will be a huge disaster because directly under them is the glass-filled roof over the student commons.
Feel free to guess the school if you like, it should be easy. But I have nothing more to add.
E: Wait, I do have one more thing to add. I worked in a lab with grad students, ostensibly as a tech but since I was already experienced with the stuff we were doing (mostly development), I was instead tasked with real R&D. Except all of my work just ended up on a table to be used as a marketing tool during the ten tours that stopped to gawk at us every day. None of it ever went anywhere. And now that lab is going unused. So basically all that money just went completely wasted.
He didn't even teach from the MDN website? W3 Schools is terrible, at least MDN has much better documentation...
On a more serious note though: I recently graduated from a private university in upstate NY (probably wasn't worth the tuition, but as an 18 year old I wasn't very informed past "the culture of this school seems great!", and it admittedly worked out), and they have similar issues.
I worked with a few students who helped with setting up websites and the like for some of the higher-level administration, and it's an absolute sham how much money goes into administrative positions, sports, and shiny new dorms instead of academic programs and necessary infrastructure (anybody else's class enrollment done via a 1980s mainframe that crashes every enrollment period for hours?). Because their tech infrastructure was so bad, I actually once got to see some of their salary information... and let me just say, you've got to go a long way down the list of top salaries before you get to somebody who's set foot in a classroom in the past 10 years. And who doesn't have an MBA.
Admittedly anecdotal, but I wonder if some state schools have visible budgets where we could look into this stuff.
In both cases, professors aren't the highest paid, but they do show up in the top 5. Not that this is exhaustive or necessarily representative, but it shows that for at least these two schools, it's not terrible. The gap between the highest paid and the highest paid professor is substantial though.
What's more disconcerting, is looking at the highest paid in public schools vs the highest paid teachers. Again, this data is only for Washington state [3]. Sorting by highest total compensation, the highest paid teacher shows up at 234th highest paid. Next highest paid teachers are at 1,804, then 2,235, 2,294 and sporadically thereafter.
Given the average salary data [4], it's pretty clear that Washington state public schools are overrun by administrators. I suspect that exchanging most administration for teachers that have the same existing teacher pay would go a long way to bringing the student/teacher ratio to more appropriate levels, reducing teacher stress and increasing student outcomes. Or maybe we could get more teachers and raise their pay.
I believe reducing the student/teacher ratio will allow teachers to handle a lot of the stuff administration already does, which, if true, would demonstrate how administrator's aren't just not needed, but are actively detrimental to a good school.
>permanent professors are tenured or tenure track and are very hard to 'cut loose'
Hahahaa. Hahahaaa. Ha.
Tenure-track professors are simply denied tenure in the end of their glorious $50K/year 6-year stay.
Hard to fire a tenured professor? You aren't thinking big, my friend. Shut down the entire department. Who[1] needs[2] physics[3], after all[4]?
That's not to mention the obvious solution - eliminate tenure altogether[5].
Think that's hard to implement? Time is on your side then (if your side is the side that wants to ruin academia for good). Simply let the academics retire (or die out), and never open tenure-track positions[6]. When someone leaves the department, replace them with an adjunct.
For every linked reference, I could also provide personal anecdata. And as far as problems in academia go, I didn't even scratch the tip of the iceberg.
There is a category of full-time professor that is not tenured. At least there once was such a category ... one migh even opine that most professors should be in that category.
Well, the typical story is that the money is going to an overabundance of administrators, construction boondoggles, and institutional vendors. There's a lot of profit-taking that happens in academics, and administration is always going to slim faculty and programs at the expense of pet projects and personal priorities. Faculty lost control of the academic enterprise to professionalized administration, and there does not appear to be any chance of a reversal.
The same reason it costs 1 billion dollars to build 1 mile of railroad track. Nonprofits pay premium to get anything done. Tenure and administration costs are through the roof at these schools.
Where I attended, they relocated whole buildings to different locations on the campus. One was a historic Women's Studies building. They spent a week putting a truck bed under it, then moved it uphill on a Friday morning as I walked to class. A month later they were building another building where it originally stood.
The next summer they completely demolished and rebuilt half of the student dorms - 4 buildings.
In the past 10 years, while tuition has doubled twice and their sports teams won championships, they also rebuilt half of the campus. It doesn't look like the place I attended.
Letting China control American universities may give China an opportunity to influence intellectual thought about the role of China in the world, and the abuses it has committed at home. There are multiple reports about China using money and influence to limit the free speech of students [1,2], and is consistent with reports that China is heavily investing in international propaganda[3].
Since all Chinese companies are partially owned by the Chinese Government, and ultimately controlled by the Chinese Govrrment they all should be blocked from purchasing anything in the U.S. we would never sell anything to the Russian government, or the German govt. etc.
It’s foolish to test their companies as independent from the government.
The Mitsubishi Estate Company of Japan plans to walk away from its almost $2 billion investment in Rockefeller Center, the Hope diamond of world real estate.
They are about to take a huge loss on an old Park Avenue building in NYC. They made out on HK plots they sold. Heaven knows what will happen when they start unloading mainland properties.
Interesting to see how much the NYC property will go for. I don't think the regulators are that concerned about HNA's properties in China. Domestically it is a zero sum game. Their loss would be someone else's gain, as long as solvency of the banks is not threatened.
Are these colleges accredited? And if so, will they still be accredited and reviewed just as they were when they were wholly owned by the University?
It smells weird that a foreign state-owned company wants to buys a US college. Maybe they want the land, or maybe its all about that tuition money. The China sees that we Americans are stupid enough to pay $30-40k per year to go to a private music college, and they want a cut of that.
Or most likely, they do it for the real or perceived immigration benefits. An accredited educational institution in the US can issue F-1 student visas, and these can be converted to OPT, H-1B, Greencard, and ultimately a US Citizenship. That's probably what would attract wealthy families to send their kids to an unknown no-brand college that is clearly owned by a Chinese company.
I wonder what it might mean if extrapolated into China eventually buying the lions share of houses, farms, companies, infrastructure, educational institutions..
What would be the outcome?
It’s sort of weird that such buyup isn’t seen as a national security issue.
The US acquired practically zero infrastructure in Europe over the last 70 years and practically zero of Europe's farming output. Europe as a whole is notoriously protective of its farming, both in terms of ownership and tariff protection.
Trains/rail, bus systems, power generation, power distribution, telecom - US companies own an extroardinarily tiny share of those things in Europe overall.
Verizon + AT&T are worth ~$420 billion and are giant, wildly profitable businesses. Why don't they own most of Europe's telecom industry, which is mostly dominated by numerous far smaller companies? Because it doesn't work that way. You can't just go into a dozen European nations and buy up all of their telecom, the government roadblocks to doing that make it impossible. Instead, it's Softbank (Japan) that owns Sprint (#4), and it's Deutsche Telekom that owns T-Mobile that is the #3 telecom carrier in the US.
It refers to an American Investor buying up a European company, destroying it in some way (e.g. by using its voting power to force the company to sell all its assets and take on lots of debt, then pay out all that to the investor), and then letting the company go bankrupt.
It’s been a common scheme of American investors in Europe in the 2000s, and has destroyed many local companies, which in turn meant that their marketshare was afterwards taken over by American multinationals.
It was such a common incidence that it became main topic of political debates for a while.
In the 1980s, people assumed that Japanese companies would eventually own everything in the US. You can see this in the pop culture of the time, namely in Back to the Future 2, where they go to 2015 and Marty works for a Japanese company.
I have no idea if China is in a fundamentally different position than Japan was in the 80s, but just something to keep in mind when prognosticating doom and gloom about a "Chinese takeover".
>I have no idea if China is in a fundamentally different position than Japan was in the 80s,
It is. Its economy is much bigger, it is not a democracy and, most importantly, today's China is much more expansionistic than post-1945 Japan ever was.
As far as Japan's position in the 80's, they were in a massive bubble through most of the decade all the way up to '91. When the bubble burst Japan was stopped dead in it's tracks. The 90's are called the 'Glacial era' or 'Lost decade' of Japanese economic development.
Time will tell if China is in a bubble and if so when it will pop.
A lot of espionage recruiting goes on through academics, so I'm wondering if this isn't just a good opportunity to open avenues for spies to be sent over.
That name change alone makes me immediately suspicious of this company:
- From: Jiangsu Zhongtai Bridge Steel Structure Co
I think that would really depend on the university. I doubt the Chinese government would care to plant spies in US choir societies versus let’s say sending students to Georgetown with direct recruitment feeds to Capitol Hill.
Sure, although if you own the university (also, this is near Princeton), it probably makes the job easier. Unless Georgetown is run by the Chinese already.
Japanese companies bought into US real estate, infrastructure, corporations etc. in the 90s then had to relinquish much of it at cut rate prices. Same will happen here I imagine.
Westminster has a towering presence in the choral music world. At one point, the plan was to shut down the college entirely, so this purchase is definitely an improvement. It will be interesting to see how the college evolves after the acquisition.
American colleges have an anti-asian bias. I, for one, don't blame the Chinese for buying up the system so that they get decide who comes through the door now.
I don't think it's an anti-Asian bias but more of a pro-diversity bias. Colleges often want a good mix of ethnic groups such that having 60% Asians when the US population is about 8% Asian won't get them the mix they want. Whether the goal of "diversity" is more important than the "fairness" of raw merit is a complex moral and philosophical debate.
After years of looking at this phenomenon your post finally made something click in my head. We've decided that birth rate is the primary measure of your merit. The more babies you have the more people that look like you we're going to allow into universities and good jobs. So weird...
Perhaps it may end up that way in some cases, but that's not the intention. Art & Music universities often feel that diversity increases creativity, and they are in the creativity biz: the more (perceived) creativity that flows out of the U, the more they can hike tuition.
Having one group heavily- or over-represented may be seen as going against that goal. It's not necessarily personal against Asians. They may not want too many whites either.
But proportional to birth rate is arbitrary. If we decide there's 10 "races" why not try to force representation to be at 10% each? Wouldn't that be even better for diversity? If your race has a lower birth rate maybe we should give you a little boost by making sure you get a college education and a good job.
I do think that for the Chinese owner, they're either very interested in music, see something we don't see, has children attending that college or is involved in a very clever money capital outflow plan as Chinese overseas investment and major currency outflow is heavily monitored and restricted by the Chinese govt:
I guess they see tuition inflation as a guaranteed revenue stream. Certainly they have experienced this firsthand as much of Asia sends their offspring for a US ‘education’.
This might be my favorite paragraph in a news article ever:
"Beijing Kaiwen Education Technology Co. agreed in February to pay $40 million for Westminster Choir College, an affiliate of Rider University that trains students for careers as singers, conductors and music teachers. The announcement came just weeks after the government-controlled Chinese company changed its name from Jiangsu Zhongtai Bridge Steel Structure Co."
Bridge steel -> Music education. Now that's innovation!
It is apparent that there is Chinese influence on this board.
Look at the commenter's history for some of the comments on China related news. This is interesting. China is known for manipulating information and spreading propaganda.
I hope HN cracks down on comment manipulation related to Chinese government news stories.
Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.
We always look for evidence when people are worried, and we take action, such as banning accounts, when we find it.
Frankly, though, the greater danger—orders of magnitude greater—is users' tendency to assume that other users must be astroturfing, or shills, bots, or spies, just because they hold opposing views. The truth is that HN is divided on divisive issues, just like society at large, all the more because it is a majority international community.
That is why the site guidelines ask you not to post comments like this. The attempted cure is more toxic than the seeming disease.
I have read the rules, and I simply did not think of this at the time of the comment. I posted in haste.
I certainly don't have the data to demonstrate a valid concern, this was an assumption.
The rules mention we should "email you" if we are concerned. Out of curiosity, if you did find manipulation in the data, would you share it with individual who emailed you about the concern?
These people are most likely Americans, of Chinese descent. They are probably also 2nd or 3rd generation Americans, like yourself. They went to American schools and universities. They speak perfect English. They vote. They are patriotic. And they pay their taxes.
These people have no connection to the China government. They probably don't have any more close relatives that even live in China. So their connection to their ancestral home lands have been severed. They are by definition, Americans.
Now, yes, there may be some people in Silicon Valley, who are Chinese nationals, and who are working with an H-1B visa. I don't know the numbers breakdown.
But, I think you need to make a distinction between the two types.
I looked at this a couple weeks ago. The numbers depend on how you measure 'user' and 'location'.
Silicon Valley: 5% - 14%;
US: 32% - 56% (including SV);
Europe: 28% - 35%;
Canada/Australia/New Zealand: 7% - 8%;
India: 2% - 7%;
China: 0.5% - 3% (including Hong Kong). From European countries, the UK is 5-8% (of the HN total), Germany is 4-7%, France is 1-3%. The Dutch and Swiss are stereotypically stable at 2% and 1% respectively.
These ranges include measures like logged-in-ness. If you only look at total users then SV is less than 10%, and the US comes out less than 45%—or even as low as a third, depending on what's specifically measured.
I think that sentence provides some insight into the deal. As China becomes wealthier, their aspirations will be elevated as well. There's a lucrative opportunity here where the prestige of an American institution can be used to attract family who have the means and aspirations for their children to be acquainted with cultures and arts other than the ones they are born into.
It's kind of funny to hear people complain about a former steel company taking an interest in music education given the prestige that Carnegie Hall holds in American culture.