Comment by rs999gti
3 days ago
> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues? This is Philadelphia's problem, the university is just a business operating in the city.
I think that speaks to the low bar we have come to expect from our endowed institutions today more than anything else.
American Universities, historically, are supposed to improve not just their students’ lives but also society as a whole, especially as serving as boosters for the city they’re in and their immediate neighbors. That’s why they’re nonprofits. That’s also likely their strongest lifeline to remain relevant in the future rather than as the hollow alumni clubs and gatekeepers their critics say they are, with AI/the internet/online schooling/topic of the day breaking down socioeconomic barriers to knowledge access
That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.
I doubt they could even if they wanted to. All problems cannot be solved by throwing money at them, and the local governments may not be cooperative or efficient enough to use the money. There are chemically engineered drugs that will gigafry your brain into addiction in one dose getting better every day. Police departments all over the country/west seem to be ineffective at enforcing order, courts are too delayed and too lenient on sentencing, list goes on. Problems on the public side that private enterprise can't really fix without a lot of cooperation. Maybe in a much less regulated world like the Carnegie's, they would be able to try a lot of things without permission, now it would take years of begging to get a permit to build a drug rehab centre somewhere no matter how rich you are and the neighbors would block it.
At the same time there are many places that seem to have figured it out. The way Philadelphia chooses to run their city isn’t the only way.
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> That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.
Historically speaking, wealth accumulation was borderline impossible because the incentive to steal it was so large. You had to become a king, and then constantly murder people trying to take the throne, because everyone had the attitude that the only way to acquire wealth was to steal it from others. And that never really worked out well since the king was always threatened by death (the Sword of Damocles).
This stopped when the upper classes realized it was cheaper and more effective to raise the living standard of everyone else than it is to prevent everyone else from stealing their wealth. When you create wealth, you share some of it with others.
In other words, create a society where everyone has salt and pepper, rather than try to hoard salt/pepper for financial gain.
That's true of schooling as well. In the Middle Ages, only the rich and powerful could read and write. Now that everyone knows how to read, Facebook has a trillion-dollar business selling words.
This mentality is present in FOSS to some extent, but it isn't present for education anymore. Everyone seems to think good universities are a perpetually limited good, so we fight over limited admissions spots rather than figure out a way to deliver high quality education to the masses.
It's stupid, because bumping up the difficulty is how we make education worthwhile.
> You had to become a king, and then constantly murder people trying to take the throne
There’s a bit more to it than that. There’s a reason Xi Jinping doesn’t need to murder members of his cabinet all the time. A stable government has a winning coalition which keeps the leader in power. The leader has to keep them happy which in small enough governments he can do by paying them directly.
In a democracy, the winning coalition is way too large to simply pay supporters. The government has to fund public works which are more cost effective. A larger winning coalition is better for the median person for this reason.
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UPenn is a land-grant institution, they are not "just a business" they were given land and money specifically to serve the public good. They're why we have engineering degrees, the government specifically wanted institutions that taught practical marketable skills and to do research in those fields.
> UPenn is a land-grant institution
The University of Pennsylvania is one of the nine colonial colleges founded before the United States existed. It predates land grant institutions by over a century. I think you are confusing it with Pennsylvania State University, which is a land grant institution.
Wow an actual topic on HN that I know about. I spent 3.5 years studying the history of UPenn - including writing my thesis in its history - and it is definitely not a land grant university.
> They were given land and money specifically to serve the public good.
Their duty is to deliver education. It's not solving political problems meant for elected officials (and the population at large).
If their duty is to deliver education, why are they sitting on a $20B hoard?
Presumably they could spend a little bit of that to deliver some more education, couldn’t they?
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> UPenn is a land-grant institution
It isn't.
Despite the name, it's actually a private university.
Penn State is Pennsylvania's land grant university.
If they are like most other schools with a low income neighborhood nearby, they probably offer an entire k-12 education sequence for these kids ran under their education major’s department. Likewise their hospital probably treats low income people in the community. And of course the school itself is a massive jobs program for low income people in the area as well, who might qualify for reduced or no cost tuition for themselves or their kids.
>Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues?
Who's responsibility is it? Have you seen how the government operates? Why wouldn't UPENN want to help solve it?
You're asking the wrong question: why would they?
How much have you contributed to Philly's woes?
Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.
> How much have you contributed to Philly's woes?
To resolve Philly's woes?
> Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.
If they pay taxes...
It is the government's responsibility. Change your government with votes.
OK, but they do exist to educate people, and have a comically large endowment to do it with that only keeps growing. I guess their plan is to grow the endowment until all human beings everywhere can get full ride UPenn scholarships?
Going up is what an endowment is supposed to do; you spend some part of the return on operational needs, while also growing the base so you have greater (nominal, and hopefully also real) capacity for that downstream.
If, over the long term, an endowment isn’t growing, it’s being mismanaged.