All Posts Tagged With: "wealth"
Where the rich kids go
Guess which universities get the least student financial aid
From Queen's Players "I go to Queen's!"
You know the stereotype that Queen’s University attracts rich kids? The one played up in this recent viral video in which a student jokes: “I don’t know what financial aid is, but Queen’s has it.”
Well, if the number of students receiving financial assistance is any indication, it’s very likely true.
Queen’s University has the lowest number of students receiving Ontario Student Assistance in the province: only 29.6 per cent of students.
Contrast that to Nipissing University in the relatively poorer north of Ontario, where twice as many—59.6 per cent—get loans. It’s almost as high at Trent University—59.3 per cent.
If you build it, will they come?
Bill Gates should start his own elite university, says one educational policy thinker
In this week’s issue of The Chronicle, Kevin Carey, director of an educational think-tank in Washington, D.C. is publicly running an idea past the world’s richest man. “Two words,” he writes. “Gates University.”
Although the idea is a 19th-century one (Stanford, Duke, Rice), Carey facetiously prods William Gates III, the holder of approximately $40 billion in net worth, to build a university unlike anything the world has ever seen.
Plus, with the billionaire’s recent work trying to improve high school education in the U.S., which is proving to be difficult, Carey says higher education is an elite market with far less competition.
So, what is his vision for Gates University?
- “It wouldn’t be wholly virtual. A university needs a physical center, a beating heart, a place where students and teachers come together and learn.”
- Admission? “No legacy admissions, once you start having legacies. No buying one’s way in, no gentleman’s agreements with wealthy private high schools that admit the “right” kind of students. No bias against striving ethnic groups, no special considerations for senators’ sons.”
- “No preferences for athletes, because Gates University won’t be running a pro football team on the side.”
- “Maybe professors will have Ph.D.’s, maybe they won’t. If a really smart person drops out of college, founds a phenomenally successful business, and decides to turn toward education as a way of giving back, he or she would be welcome to apply for a job. You, for example, would be qualified to teach at Gates U.”
- “There would be no tenure, obviously. I assume you never thought it was a good idea at Microsoft — why have it here? Nor would you sequester faculty members into departments organized around academic disciplines. The world can get by without one more English department or college of business.”
- “How would you grant credits at Gates University? You wouldn’t. At least not the way colleges normally do, based on time in contact with professors. No credit hours at Gates U., no degrees based on the number of years enrolled. Instead you’d describe in great, public detail all of the knowledge, skills, and attributes that students pursuing a given course of studies would need to acquire.”
- “How many students would you serve at Gates University? As many as you can. That, more than anything, would truly distinguish the university from all others.”
For more from this article, click here.
Wente on the challenges facing universities
Are universities a nest of richly subsidized radicals who are overpaid and underworked?
Though the moment is sure to fade away, the recent York University strike brought the challenges of the modern university to the attention of the chattering classes in central Canada — a fleeting benefit of the prolonged and unfortunate experiences of York’s students and workers.
In her column in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente reminisces about her experiences with higher education, including time spent smoking dope at an unnamed university (likely UofT). Amidst her usual tried-and-tested barrage of insults and name-calling, Wente manages to hit on some of the biggest problems facing our universities at present:
The first problem is that there is no money, especially these days. The second problem is that universities are not terribly popular with the public, who tend to see them as a nest of richly subsidized tenured radicals who are overpaid and underworked. (Unfair, but not entirely.) Taxpayers are only willing to subsidize universities to the extent they believe they contribute to the national wealth. The third problem is that a vast proportion of the student body neither wants nor needs a traditional liberal education anyway. They have no desire to sit at the feet of cloistered masters debating truth and beauty. They are essentially there for the credentials.
