The aquifer depletion was caused by irrigated agriculture in the first place. It's pretty rich hearing vineyard owners like the Steinbecks complain about Harvard buying land to take the underlying water. Until very recently [1], profitable vineyards could deplete water under their neighbors' property without limits or compensation. Profitable vineyards could afford deeper wells and larger pumps; if it hurt shallower wells on nearby properties, tough luck. My grandparents' land neighboring vineyards owned by the Steinbecks and others underwent a distressed sale in 2013 because the groundwater had been badly depleted.
The Paso Robles groundwater crisis is just the end-stage symptom of an unsustainable process that has been going on for decades.
Irrigated agriculture came to dominate this region only in the last decades of the 20th century. Relatives on my father's side started dryland farming on a property near Paso Robles in the 1910s. That property enrolled in a well-monitoring program in the 1970s. The trend line was clear by the 1980s: water levels dropping over time. But irrigated crops like grapes were more profitable -- at least as long as growers didn't have anyone pricing or otherwise limiting groundwater withdrawal to sustainable levels. Now the same growers who fought water limits are alarmed that Harvard might take the water they counted on claiming. I hope that it's a wake-up call for growers to support truly sustainable water usage plans, lest they lose at their own game to even richer out-of-state entities.
[1] It appears that there are new limits on groundwater extraction for agricultural use in California, but if I read the article correctly they're not really enforced yet.
If readers are curious about the challenges with groundwater and other common pool resources, Elinor Ostrom's book, Governing the Commons [1] is an excellent resource.
what was interesting to me was the "milkshake" phrase is quoted verbatim from something said by senator Albert B. Hall. He was jailed for accepting bribes to sell US-owned oil reserves for cheap.
I honestly think I wouldn't have a problem with this if they zeroed out tuition for students. That is the glaring absurdity of the Ivy Leagues.
I was in a program that more or less guaranteed some portion of its graduates to be perpetually in debt because the skills imparted, while taught by some of the most brilliant practitioners in the world, did not translate into real world earnings. I hate the idea of college being purely an exchange of money for future earning potential, but programs like mine I think are unethical at cost even as they are virtuous in learning.
Our culture needs non-STEM genius, that keeps the republic alive. Forcing people into a cauldron of debt for it is reprehensible.
"The Harvard College financial aid program requires no contribution from Harvard families with annual incomes below $65,000; asks from 0 to 10% of income for those with incomes up to $150,000; and expects proportionally more from families with incomes above $150,000."
If your family makes <$150k, it sounds like Harvard costs up to about as much as the (public) University of Minnesota charges in-state residents. (Depending on your situation, Harvard may cost substantially less.) If you borrowed half of the $15k annually (the max 10% of $150k income), that's not an insane burden when paid over 30 years.
This seems fairly balanced. Granted they could zero out fees for families further up the income scale, but on the other hand "rich kids go to Harvard free" is maybe not the best use of the money.
You said "college," which means undergraduate in the US.
First: nobody is forced to get a graduate degree. In many fields (like programming), it's nothing like a requirement to earnings maximization. Since grad students already have degrees, they are also free to work and save until they can pay for fees outright or reduce their loan burden.
I don't have total stats in front of me, but it looks like the Law/Medical/Business schools are ~50% of graduate employment at Harvard. Take it as read that these are worth borrowing for.
The other 50% -- AFAIK there is a significant portion of students on fellowships/scholarships of some kind. My guess is very few people are taking on a bunch of debt for a Divinity PhD.
At this point, it's fair to say that Harvard offers better financial value at all levels for its programs than many public universities offer their in-state residents.
> The other 50% -- AFAIK there is a significant portion of students on fellowships/scholarships of some kind. My guess is very few people are taking on a bunch of debt for a Divinity PhD.
It's interesting that so many replies function on these kind of assumptions when I am telling HN my literal experience at an Ivy League postgraduate program. I received two of the available three fellowships one could compete for. They covered less than 5% of tuition overall. Six figures of debt was the norm for my program.
Now of course, as you said, no one is forced to get a degree in humanities or what have you, but my point is that if you make expertise in these fields contingent on massive, insurmountable debt, you impoverish the culture.
>> It's interesting that so many replies function on these kind of assumptions when I am telling HN my literal experience at an Ivy League postgraduate program.
You've hinted at your experience without providing details (even the school or the type of graduate program). I obviously can't comment on your situation because I know nothing about it. I am literally assuming nothing about your experience.
I do know other Harvard grads (both undergraduate and grad programs) and have some insight into their situations. They don't have "massive, insurmountable debt." Anecdata abound.
I think the confusion is that most of us come from a time when the accepted wisdom was that if you didn’t get a full ride in a grad school program you didn’t go. I know that was very common when I came to the end of my undergrad and personally know several people who Didn’t Go for that reason.
As a result the people I know from the time who went on to graduate degrees all had free rides (except the MFAs, who I admit are a mystery to me, and the people who went back for MBAs later).
Why do you need a graduate degree in humanities to make cultural contributions? Many people who have made substantial cultural contributions never earned a graduate or even an undergraduate degree in humanities.
I think cultural contributions means taking powerful positions at culturally significant institutions. This I think is preferred choice of ivy league grads in humanities.
That sounds more like a career goal than a cultural contribution. The grandparent was talking about how our culture will suffer and we will all lose out by not subsidizing humanity degrees. But last I check we seem to be saturated by media with new television programs, podcasts, books, music and other visual arts are constantly being created.
All that I said I do agree we shouldn't be burdening our youth with crippling student debt. But the idea that our culture comes from our humanities departments seems a little absurd and not supported by evidence.
In any halfway decent graduate program the students are paid graduate stipends from teaching assignments and grants awarded to the advisor. That's important! If you are asked to pay for graduate tution, the program is worthless. Corollary: taught Masters programs are worthless, they are moneyspinners for the university,.
Not enough in most cases to make up for the earnings lost during the time spent studying, never mind the tuition. MBAs aren’t worth it outside the top tier. There are fields where a Master’s is a de facto requirement but they’re generally prestige fields where the money is crap in any case, for at least five years after graduation, for people with rich parents or spouses. Think publishing, fashion, art curation or working in the aid industry.
There are also fields where a doctorate is the entry level qualification like biotech, materials science etc. even in the private sector, but that's what happens when a there are more than ten times as many PhDs producer as there are academic jobs for.
Many companies who have tiered hiring packages (many, many employers) by default reward a masters more than a bachelors, and a phd more than a masters. There are quite a few examples (especially at good employers) of a masters being plainly rewarded in writing
A taught Master’s is a great deal if it will help you substantially with immigrating to the US. That explains the demographics of taught Master’s in CS handily.
Yeah, this is the #1 thing people get wrong about STEM grad school. Not only is tuition 100% covered, you get a stipend that's usually 20-30k per year depending on local cost of living. Masters is completely covered too if you go in to a program that's expected to continue on to a PhD, and will as likely as not be covered even for a plain masters in some pure science fields.
It really depends on how well the program/department is funded. Computer Science usually is. I was in a program (Environmental Engineering) where most masters degree students had to pay full price. Grants or graduate student positions wouldn't kick in until year 2. Even then, full tuition was never a guarantee. This was UC Berkeley.
Why do they base it on family income? What if you have wealthy parents but they choose not to spend money on your tuition? Students are adults when they go to college - family background should be irrelevant.
My problem isn't even the family income decision, it's that the universities don't care how many children there are in a given family either.
My parents could've paid for my college education with some sacrifice (I paid for it, but they could have done so financially) if it were just me going to college. But I have two younger sisters, and there's no way they could cover all three of us.
When a large portion of students get their tuition money from their family, then family background can't be irrelevant, because it's relevant by definition.
I wonder if people still get caught in the middle with that - their parents could not have disowned them and could still be in a relationship with them, they just don't think that college is worthwhile or something so they don't want to contribute. But then as you say, what stops all parents pretending they don't think college is worthwhile. Which is why it could be better to not look at the parents income at all.
Financially it also means they have strict quotas on the required wealth of a specific portion of the incoming class, no? They must have a certain number of the incoming freshman class be from families making more than $150,000 a year in order to be solvent.
Like many rich schools, Harvard has had a need-blind admissions policy for decades. This means admissions decisions are decoupled from decisions about who can pay, basically guaranteeing the opposite of your supposition.
Harvard's endowment is ~$40 billion right now. They're solvent.
In this specific case of making a donation large enough to build classroom space / hire professors , the person is increasing the teaching capacity of the school by more than 1, allowing them to attend in exchange helps everyone.
Need blind (probably) works the opposite way people think it does. Instead of putting a quota on low income applicants, it means that the only people who meet the standards are high income students whose parents have the cash for all of the extra curricular activities and tutors etc. My alma mater just moved to a system where they consider income, so they could do affirmative action based on income.
What university is that? It's a good policy, much better than controversial race-based admissions, but still promoting increased admissions among both minorities and poor white students.
Case Western did this, or was considering it. There was backlash from the alumni though - from appearances and description it sounded like it would function as a cap on students with financial need, rather than an avenue for affirmative action.
Yeah it was Case I was talking about. IIRC this was right as I was graduating (2013), and what I said was the line from the administration. The problem is there's no real way to verify what would happen until it's implemented.
Your point is valid, but most Ivy Leagues are need-blind for U.S. citizens (Harvard is need-blind for internationals too) at the undergraduate level and are known for relatively generous financial aid policies [1].
I think these schools are a drop in the proverbial ocean of generating crippling student debt, even for kids graduating from humanities majors.
While, Harvard has some great financial aid policies, the concept of "need blind" applies to a decision to admit, not about the availability or generosity of financial aid (in general).
> I think these schools are a drop in the proverbial ocean of generating crippling student debt, even for kids graduating from humanities majors.
I may have been unclear, but I was talking about my experience in a graduate program, not undergrad.
Obviously the Ivy Leagues are not the only ones guilty here, but my original point was that I have no problem with their giant endowments provided they actually liberate undergraduate and post-graduate students from debt obligations. I think the Ivies could actually become a great model for the U.S. with a little more effort here.
I think we need to rethink the concept of a university from first principles: How much does it actually cost to provide the best education in the world? A sizable library, an old building with empty rooms, and professors? I'd bet you could make instruction 5x better with 5x lower costs than we have today. The real problem isn't building/finding a campus, though, it's figuring out how to make the cheap version of Harvard more prestigious than Harvard itself. Universities run on prestige and people pay vast amounts of money for social signaling (to others and even themselves).
Ivy League undergraduates are paying for participation in the club. Ivy League grad students are paying (in the case of masters) for access to research institutions with top PIs and vast resources, as well as connections in their field.
You need large grants and already renowned professors. I'm guessing that's what is really expensive. The problem we have today is that the gap between academia research jobs and the industry is possibly the widest ever, at least in some professions. Deep learning is just one example, but the generic Data Science trend in the industry has been syphoning people away from research on a larger scale.
Part of the problem is that it isn't just the best education. One person might have the most brilliant idea in the history of mankind, but if enacting it requires collaboration, they'll need a network of people to help them. Smart people, if the idea is counter-intuitive. So any solution would have to include the development of strong ties between the students.
Back when I was in school in the early naughties, it was a given that, if you were a humanities student, your tuition largely subsidized the STEM students, because your degree required virtually no specialized equipment, just a building, a professor, and some administrative overhead.
STEM students required all sorts of wild equipment, some so specialized and sensitive that the buildings had to have extra protections built in so they weren't bothered by vibration or electromagnetic interference from nearby lightrail trains. Their tuition wouldn't cover that.
Of course, the school also splurged on pointless real estate expansions, a relatively empty, but massive, student "union" building, intense administrative overhead, sports stadiums paid for by adding on hundreds to student fees (which of course weren't part of tuition, but you had to pay them anyway), and so forth.
If you're a humanities student, you get the short end of the stick from many different directions- paying more than your education costs to support others, for a degree that will earn substantially less than others, which likely has fewer industries that specifically require your degree (putting you in more competition for said jobs against students with other similar degrees).
Funny I started in electrical engineering and eventually got a degree in physics; don't remember any "wild equipment" -I remember a few diodes, some breadboards and some oscilloscopes from WW-2 era. Pretty sure you could buy all the 'wild stuff' I ever saw as an undergraduate for less than a year's salary and use it for the whole school forever.
Most of the money goes to salaries, and at this point, most of the salaries go to administrators who add no value. There's also a lot of duplication and nonsense in modern curricula; someone could easily do a better job.
It's bad enough the Thiel Fellowship looks pretty good; you have to assume modern college has nothing to do with actually educating people; seems to be more of a codpiece than anything else.
at my school EE had a full semiconductor fab, nuclear engineering had a nuclear reactor, CS had a full networked computer system with 512x512 UI that predated the internet, super computers, astronomy had an observatory etc.
Currently I think they have an offsite particle accelerator in physics, but Im sure they had sensitive measuring equipment of all kinds when I was there.
But that's still consistent with what GP was writing: that expensive stuff is research, not teaching, funded by grants, not tuition. Some students will take a role in experiments running at those facilities, but many will never see those places from the inside.
There is a simple thought experiment to tell research facilities from teaching facilities: if they increased the number of admissions, would they need another particle accelerator?
For large institutions this is completely backwards. Tuition is negligible part of the income - much more comes from grants that are granted mainly to STEM faculty, and that money (through "overhead" payments into a common pot) is then used to subsidize the humanities (and the more theoretical STEM fields which are also fairly cheap).
To be clear, I am not against this: I do want the money granted to my STEM department to be used to subsidize the humanities, because they have their importance as well. However, it is not true that the humanities students "get the short end of the stick" when it comes to subsidizing.
In the last few years most of the Ivy League schools have quietly gone to a complete coverage for students in need of financial aid. Harvard is among those who do. Turns out the problem is now further down the academic scale.
Harvard doesn't care about education, they care about being at the center of the reproduction of the elite class. They're explicit about this. Their admissions and tuition policies reflect it.
And they’re somewhat of an underperformer in that regard. “...its overall natural-resources investments have done poorly.” University funds generally don’t pay well enough to compete for top talent. They shouldn’t be making exotic bets like this.
So if you have Harvard-type money now, you can buy land that will be disproportionately valuable in 20 years when water is a problem. An excellent and unusual example of wealth concentration... with a bit of a Dr. Evil / Lex Luthor vibe about it too!
Somewhat related to California Water: There’s a documentary about California water use in Central Valley by land owners used for pistachios, pomegranates, etc. being crowdfunded right now: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/7331688/pistachio-wars-...
Harvard's average real annual return is 10.2%
(Piketty's book "Capital" p569)
You need a team of very talented investors to get these types of returns y/y
No, the real test is sustained performance over time in the form of an average.
If the S&P 500 falls 10% in a given year, I can hold 100% cash, light 5% of it on fire, and outperform the S&P 500 - that doesn't make it a sound long term strategy.
thats not how taxes work... I am not a lawyer/cpa but if I understand correctly, any investment income harvard receives would be taxed at the normal rate for that type of activity.
By way of further example, and because quite a few universities also do this by "accident" of having land left over after either moving or redoing their campuses, the University of Washington owns approximately 10 acres in downtown Seattle, including (notably for various court cases about where the authority of the university, as a non-political arm of the State of Washington, and municipalities intersect) 4th Ave, a city-maintained street of public use.
Off-topic, but it's very normal for private entities to own public streets in the US. At the time when these areas were platted and lots conveyed, the streets were dedicated to the public use, but were not deeded to the municipalities.
As a general rule, in most US states the adjoining landowners are assumed to have fee simple ownership and reversionary rights to the land underlying the streets. As a public policy matter, courts are loathe to create situations where tiny little bits of land are separately owned and can't be put to productive use. (the strips and gores doctrine.)
For WA, Holmquist v. King discusses this in depth.
University of Chicago opened a building in Hong Kong.†
"Ownership" is hard to speak to, since it's my understanding that nobody "owns" land in Hong Kong, it's just leased from the government for 99 years. Or maybe I'm confusing that with the mainland.
Most controversial are its holdings in Cambridge and Allston, across the river.
> Based on data from Harvard’s building records, Harvard owns 9.56 percent of the land in Cambridge, 5.70 percent in Allston, and 0.27 percent in Boston.
When discussing Harvard in Allston, good reporters should spend the time to deconvolute their holdings. They have lots of campus holdings, and that is growing, but they also own plenty of things that aren't campus. They're the landlord for my auto repair place (Oriental Car King) and for the shopping mall with my grocery store (Brighton Mills). These aren't becoming campus any time soon in anything that Harvard has announced.
I stumbled across a planning map during my time at University of Illinois. It was marked showing 50, 75 and 100 year expansion possibilities. The land supporting 100 year expansion is already owned by the university and leased for commercial use.
Harvard is 200 years older than UIUC. I'm sure they are also planning for 100 years in the future.
What, own land as an investment? Yeah, when you have multibillion dollar investment fund (endowment and other funds), as most major private universities will, you probably have some of it in real estate.
I'm not sure how water rights work in California, but I think in many places on the west (coast) water rights are not transferable to avoid speculation over what--now more than ever--needs to be a public resource.
Freshwater speculation in the future is going to make a lot of people rich, given the current undervalued nature of fresh, clean, drinkable water. The kind that sustains life.
Posting paywalled articles here is just advertisement for a subscription service. Anyone who already subscribed doesn’t need discovery and anyone who doesn’t can’t read the article.
HMC appears to be exploiting Tragedy of the Commons for profit: they'll have the most land and the deepest wells while homeowners run dry as they rush to suck everything they can out of the ground as fast as possible.
The Paso Robles groundwater crisis is just the end-stage symptom of an unsustainable process that has been going on for decades.
https://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Case...
Irrigated agriculture came to dominate this region only in the last decades of the 20th century. Relatives on my father's side started dryland farming on a property near Paso Robles in the 1910s. That property enrolled in a well-monitoring program in the 1970s. The trend line was clear by the 1980s: water levels dropping over time. But irrigated crops like grapes were more profitable -- at least as long as growers didn't have anyone pricing or otherwise limiting groundwater withdrawal to sustainable levels. Now the same growers who fought water limits are alarmed that Harvard might take the water they counted on claiming. I hope that it's a wake-up call for growers to support truly sustainable water usage plans, lest they lose at their own game to even richer out-of-state entities.
[1] It appears that there are new limits on groundwater extraction for agricultural use in California, but if I read the article correctly they're not really enforced yet.