Minimal News_

See https://archive.ph/GkGWE

This framing conveniently ignores the question of whether the president should have the authority to single-handedly withhold funding for universities, broadly considered to be one of the foundational pillars of America's strength in the 20th century. While I think it's interesting and answers the specific question it raises, it's wild that the economist has just accepted that the president has dictatorial powers.

I am not a fan of the orange man.

But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.

All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and community vs vs 4 year college.

Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.

This author presumably understands but buries the lede that for an endowment of $15 billion a university would typically only spend 5%, or $750 million, annually. So "a mere $400m" is over half of the annual funds from the endowment (not including tuition income and donations) that might be available to a university with such an endowment.

It should be relatively obvious that spending into the principal of an endowment is not a sustainable practice over the long-term for universities that are operating at the scale of centuries.

Public schools in the US get a relatively small fraction of their budget from state funding. The distinction between public and private is not as large or substantial as one might imagine.

For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.

"Free speech" is when the President unilaterally withholds research grants from universities, based on statements made by students (not faculty)?

Göttingen and Berlin were arguably the best universities in the world in 1930.

They were not in 1940.

The POTUS should not have this authority obviously, BUT

As "Ivies" grew their endowments at hundreds of percent faster than their student bodies, they became essentially hedge funds that do some education.

They might also be happy for an excuse to implement some of these policies and have the administration as scapegoat.

To be clear: It's not as simple as funding for these schools being taken away.

What's being threatened is funding for research being done at these schools. That's a huge difference.

I keep seeing this presented as if the money were being given away, but isn't it more accurate to describe it as payment for services (e.g. access to research facilities)?

From the HN guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is part of the political reality that we live in. Whichever party is currently in power, will inevitably use that power to promote ideas that are favorable to them and to dissuade ideas that they are opposed to.

The same people who are whining about the Trump administration abusing their power by doing these things; were cheering on the Biden administration for doing similar things from the opposite angle.

This is why we have to be very careful when crafting laws. Before passing it because we want our party to use it to help us, we have to imagine what would happen when the opposing party tries to use this law against us.

As I understand it, billionaires take out loans with their stock/investments as collateral to get cash without selling said assets.

Why can't universities do the same? Or is my understanding of billionaire money shenanigans incorrect?

People need to understand how the pharmacology pipeline works.

The Federal government provides funds for research. That research finds novel compounds and new treatments. The product of that resaerch then gets transferred to private companies who commercialize it and then make massive profits from it.

Generally speaking, drug companies don't research with one exception: patent extension. A given compound will be patented and then the patent owner will have a monopoly over that for a number of years, supposedly because there'd be no investment otherwise, but that patent will ultimately expire. Except... it doesn't really. It's why over a century later we're still dealing with insulin patents. "Patent extension" is the process where you make a small change to a molecule or a delivery system and then get a new patent, refusing to sell the old. And it can be hard for someone else to produce a generic for many reasons.

Now I have a lot of problems with this system:

1. Any form of patent extension should be illegal, basically;

2. The institutions who actually come up with this should share in the profits. After all, it's the government paying for it;

3. We give a monopoly to these companies in the US where it's illegal to import the exact same product from overseas, which leads to something costing $800 in the US and $5 in France.

But given this is the system we're stuck with, cutting off funding makes absolutely no sense. Why?

1. It's going to dramatically impact drug companies negatively in the future as their supply of new products dries up;

2. It's antoerh element of soft power where the US can use the power to produce certain medicines to influence other countries. Think about what happens if China becomes the source for the world's medicines (personally, i'd be a fan but the purveyors of this policy most definitely are not).

Government research has given us things like the Internet and mRNA vaccines. This is so unbelievably shortsighted.

And why are they doing it? Well, the party of Free Speech is punishing institutions because some of their students made factually correct but mean statements about Israel.

I feel things like Universities and Hospitals are some of the most questionable non-profits in existence.

They operate and appear as for profits businesses to most people.

private schools shouldn't be getting public money. shocking people disagree. yes they do research that benefits the public. so does Meta and Google, who don't get public money. public money should go to public schools.

especially considering that the PIs who do the work in the private school scenario effectively boost the private school's clout with public money, but these private schools do not increase accessibility by opening up admission further.

that said, trump is also doing this for the wrong reasons, sadly.