Harvard Hit by Loss as Crisis Spreads to Colleges - WSJ.com
Harvard University’s endowment suffered investment losses of at least 22% in the first four months of the school’s fiscal year, the latest evidence of the financial woes facing higher education.
Was it just a few months ago that bleeding heart lefties were demanding that universities pay more of their students’ tuition out of their massive endowments?
Higher education is heading for an interesting crossroads. As endowments get battered, the impulse will be to raise tuition to compensate. But raising prices in this environment is a guarantee of lower sales. And if both enrollments and endowments are dropping, colleges may find themselves having to pare back on departments that don’t actually teach things that are helpful in gaining their students useful employment. Things like ethnic and gender studies, radical liberation theory, religious science, and transgressive literature.
Yeah, sure.
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Actually, these days degrees in all those things are quite useful in getting you a job, especially if you throw in “green” somewhere.
Pity, that.
Global Warming Theory?
Yep.
…and as the actual merit of an Ivy League degree becomes less and less valuable (because they’re crap, content-wise), people will begin to see that the “Rolls-Royce” Ivy League is really just a brand without much merit, and a degree from a second-tier “Lexus” college is just as valuable in terms of its utility.
In the consultant field, we used to joke that “Harvard MBA” behind the name of a startup company’s CEO usually meant “guaranteed to fail, expensively”.
Now that crack is no longer a joke — more of a tautology — but the Harvard MBA is becoming one.
At the College, we used to refer to HBS as the “Babbit Factory.”
In many ways, Ivy prominence is a reputation bubble. It will last so long as there is a critical mass of people who still believe that Ivy degrees are significantly better than others. This bubble currently consists of those already Ivy-educated, and those who wish to join that elite.
Most of the political fantasy ideologies that afflict us are bubble phenomena. 9/11 was not quite enough of a hit to burst the tranzi post-nationalism kumbayah bubble, and its failure to be repeated allowed that bubble to switch back to inflationary mode.
Ya know, ya’d think that the anti-intellectualism of the Bush-Cheney years would taper off now…because YOU see no value in gender studies means that there is no value….truly pathetic - the self-centered navel gazing “if it doesn’t benefit ME it has no worth” mentality of conservatives. Your so-calle dideas are as bankrupt as your economic views. Pathetic….
Meh - looks like the Leftnut Troll Patrol is up early today -
‘Kay, DimPrick, here you go:
1) Sorry to have to disabuse you of an obviously cherished fiction, but the alleged “anti-intellectualism of the Bush-Cheney years” to which you attempt to refer is non-existent - there was more evidence of anti-intellectualism extant during the Clintoon-Algore years, by any useful objective measure.
2) “Gender studies” and the like have, provably, no marketplace value, beyond giving sundry airhead “intellectuals” a tenured “academic” refuge from having to actually teach something of real-world function or value. That’s neither arguable nor is it self-centered - it’s simply the truth; deal with it.
3) Your mischaracterization of conservative principles and views reveals you as both bereft of useful thought and an abject failure (as a direct consequence) at competent rhetoric.
Now, go and tell Mommy you’re done drooling on her keyboard, you useless twat, so she can chain you up in the crawlspace again.