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Comment by arkh | Hacker News Reader

> You see the exact same thing in STEM: anything but a 50/50 representation of gender is an indicator of discrimination. The 'cure' is to roll out the red carpet with biased programs, so that you actually get lower qualified and less interested people working side by side with others who receive no special provisions and worked hard to get there. It's associated with a moral panic that very noticeably makes the relations between the genders worse.

Just staying with races: the fact Ivy league schools discriminate against people of Asian origins by having quotas against them for decades is fucked-up.

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Absolutely. Even worse though, is the fact that ivy league colleges aren't growing much bigger. If they're so good at educating people, and have so much donation money, why not expand? I think they intentionally limit their size to maintain their elite status, which shows they're more of a zero-sum selection filter than simply good at educating.

> Even worse though, is the fact that ivy league colleges aren't growing much bigger. If they're so good at educating people, and have so much donation money, why not expand?

Maybe what makes them good isn't scale independent.

Functional features of human organizations generally aren't, after all.

How is MIT's Open Courseware and the many programs like it not exactly such an expansion in line with the mission to educate?

The idea that success == expansion is a capitalist (or even more narrowly, Wall Street) ideal and Universities should not be run like businesses.

That's certainly good but you can't get an MIT degree with Open Courseware, so it's not providing the same value that being a proper student does. I don't see how having more of the best is a capitalist thing and not generally good no matter how you look at economics. It's not about MIT gaining market share, but about them giving better education to more people so the overall good to the students is higher.

Perhaps there's a practical reason - maybe they can't find enough professors of the quality they want to teach any more students, but last I heard, professors weren't in short supply, especially not when you have $15 billion like MIT does.

People are becoming more and more educated over the world, not just because of population increase, but also because the world in general is becoming more prosperous. [1] It therefore makes sense for universities (like all other levels of education) to expand to meet the increased demand. More education can be argued for from a capitalist perspective, a communist perspective, a humanist perspective, etc.

[1] e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/tertiary-education

>success == expansion is a capitalist

Well, is it capitalist really, or is it something that capitalists are guilty of propagating as a means of control?

I mean, it could be said that 'success == expansion' is more of a natural law, which can be applied to any 'ism and used, either to contract agency, or .. grow it.

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