坐擁320億 哈佛菁英得天獨厚
摘錄自：天下雜誌 經濟學人電子報 2014/2/28
2014-02-25 Web
only 作者：經濟學人
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| 圖片來源：flickr.com/photos/paul_lowry/ |
儘管線上課程正夯，但精英大學受到的影響應該不會太大，因為它們提供的產品，與線上課程的標準化遠距教學完全不同；除非，它們也開始提供低廉線上課程，進而破壞自身的商業模式。
史丹佛經濟學家哈克斯比（Carline Hoxby）指出，精英大學有如創投，為高水準學生提供附有補助的勞力密集教育；其目標為培養學生的歸屬感和感恩之情，好在數十年後獲取成功校友的捐款。要是向外人提供低價線上課程，將破壞學生與大學間的連結，讓畢業生不再覺得自己是獲選的少數人。
近期的新聞描繪了此商業模式的兩面。其一，美國國家公共廣播網的《地球財經》報導，1984年，杜克大學每年的學費為1萬美元，現在則高達6萬美元。不過，杜克大學副學務長羅伯茲（Jim Roberts）指出，那其實已經是折價了，因為杜克在每位學生的教育上平均投資9萬美元。事實上，多數精英大學的看法都是如此。
另一則新聞則是，哈佛校友、避險基金管理人葛利芬（Kenneth Griffin）將捐款1.5億美元給哈佛，其中1.25億美元專供大學生財務補助之用。
正是如此，精英大學的學生從來不必支付其教育的全部成本，而且大多數人只支付其中的一小部分。此系統得以持續運轉，是因為少數校友會變得極度富有，並出於義務之感，將部分財富回饋給大學。坐擁約320億基金的哈佛似乎不太需要這筆錢，但對杜克這種「只有」60億基金的大學來說，捐款仍舊極為重要。
精英大學需要大量資金來吸引、留住一流教授和建立一流設施；原因在於，精英大學能吸引一流學生，靠的似乎就是這些東西。要是沒有捐款，最棒的資產就會被搶走，大學也可能降至二流，甚至有可能得與大量的低價高等教育選擇競爭。
以社會福利的觀點來看，那說不定反而是件好事。在此同時，葛利芬的捐款似乎是個非常好的機會，讓人重新檢視一下，富有大學捐款的稅務優惠是否合理。（黃維德譯）
©The Economist
Newspaper Limited 2014
The Economist
Higher
education
Harvard's exit
strategy
By The Economist
From The Economist
Published:
February 25, 2014
Feb 21st 2014,
9:58 by R.A. | LONDON
A RECENT Free
exchange columnlooked at how online education might affect higher education.
Elite institutions should be fine, we wrote, because they product they offer is
completely different from the standardised, distance education that MOOCs
offer. Unless, that is, they begin offering their own course material online at
low prices, in the process breaking their business model. What is that model?
Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby has one answer:
Elite institutions
face very different circumstances, Ms Hoxby reckons. They operate like
venture-capital firms, offering subsidised, labour-intensive education to
highly qualified students. They aim to cultivate a sense of belonging and
gratitude in students in order to recoup their investment decades later in the
form of donations from successful alumni.
Ironically, these
universities may have threatened their own business model by embracing MOOCs.
Online courses break the personal link between students and university and, if
offered cheaply to outsiders, may make regular graduates feel more like chumps
than the chosen few. For top schools, the best bet may simply be to preserve
their exclusivity.
The past 24 hours
have provided an excellent illustration of both sides of that model. First, NPR's Planet Money reports:
In 1984, it cost
$10,000 a year to go to Duke University. Today, it's $60,000 a year. "It's
staggering," says Duke freshman Max Duncan, "especially considering
that for four years."
But according to
Jim Roberts, executive vice provost at Duke, that's actually a discount.
"We're investing on average about $90,000 in the education of each
student," he says. Roberts is not alone in making the claim. In fact, it's
one most elite research institutions point to when asked about rising tuition.
And then there is
this:
A Harvard alumnus
who started trading stock options from his dorm room is donating at least $125
million to support financial aid for Harvard College undergraduates, the university
planned to announce Thursday.
It is Harvard's
largest-ever gift specifically devoted to financial aid. The donation, from
billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin, founder of Citadel, will boost
a financial aid program that is already the envy of other colleges.
With $15 million
more that Griffin is giving, which may go to aid or to other undergraduate
priorities, his is also the biggest donation in Harvard College's history.
In addition, $10
million will be donated to endow a professorship at Harvard Business School,
for a total of $150 million.
This is the
business. No student at an elite university pays the full cost of her education
and most pay a small fraction. This system is sustainable because a few members
of each class will become phenomenally wealthy and, out of some sense of
obligation, will return a share of their fortune to the university.
Now as Matt
Yglesias notes, a gift to Harvard is an odd way to spend one's money. Harvard
just plum doesn't need the money. Its endowment is around $32 billion, 50%
larger than Yale's and five times larger than that of the University of
California system. If it never received another gift it could probably fund
itself indefinitely off the financial returns to its wealth. For lesser elite
schools like Duke, with an endowment of "only" $6 billion, donations
remain a critical part of the business, especially given the zero-sum nature of
a lot of the competition among elite universities. Here's Planey Money again:
[T]he biggest
category of costs is faculty, at $21,000 per year per undergraduate student.
Jennifer West is a
professor of bioengineering and materials science with a long list of
publications, awards, and titles. To hire West away from Rice University, money
wasn't enough. She came with an entourage. "I moved a whole entire
research group with me so I had to move a lot of people and then we had to move
a lot of our equipment and rebuild our lab," she says, "They actually
sent architects to Rice who looked at our lab facilities there, then used that
information to go back and design the facility that would work for us at
Duke."
And West is not
alone. Duke pays what it calls "start-up costs" for a lot of
professors, particularly in the sciences.
Elite universities
need big war-chests to attract and retain the top professors and to build top
facilities, since those are the sorts of things that seem to attract top
students. If the donations aren't materialising then the best assets will get
picked off, the university will sink to the second tier, and it might even find
itself competing with vastly cheaper higher-education options.
That might well
end up being a good thing, from a social welfare perspective. In the meantime
Mr Griffin's gift looks like a good occasion to revisit the sense of giving
tax-advantaged status to charitable donations to phenomenally rich
universities.
©The Economist
Newspaper Limited 2014
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