It is a pretty interesting story, David Geffen apparently lied on his resume that he graduated from UCLA (he never even went there) to get a job in the mail room at WMA, from which point he moved up in the world. He also gave couple hundred million to UCLA once he became rich.
I was recently watching a commencement address [0] by Neil Gaiman (author) and he talks about lying about writing for certain publications to get writing jobs. In a similar tangent, he mentioned that he made it a point to write for those publications after the fact.
Off the top of my head I recall Tom Ford (fashion) also kind of lied to get his first job in fashion.
I have friends who lied in their resume about the technologies they have experience with. They learn on the job. 9 times out of 10, this seems to work out.
I never did. Those who lied are doing better than me.
Now I feel like an idiot. I guess these kinds of lies are not that bad in the long run? This is more of a problem with the system than the candidates. This is a chicken and egg problem...
This has a long history, Leonardo Da Vinci did the same thing with his letter to Ludovico Sforza (the Duke of Milan). Almost nothing he said he knew how to do were things he had done before (or would ever do).
One of many morality-related shocks for me, joining adult life, was that cheaters often prosper. Gaming systems against the spirit of rules, lies of omission, outright deception—all are kind of a great idea if you want to succeed, and, as one might expect under those circumstances, are basically normal. It's only suckers like me who have a hard time with them. Go figure.
That said, there are different levels of cheating. If I knew Laravel but I lie in my resume that I know Zend, that is not a big deal. If I lie to a patient that I have done brain surgery when I haven't, then that is on a whole another level.
I know someone who used to be a QA person. She had a baby and didn't work for a few years. When she went back to work, she said she was a business analyst before, got the job, did very well. Now she is doing BA work for multiple teams at the same time. Was it wrong for her to lie? Maybe, but she didn't hurt anyone and everything worked out in the end. So maybe not?
Also note that a lot of people are forced to lie, because employers are not flexible. Say I want to code Ruby but I only know Python. It is not a big deal for me to pick up Ruby, but most employers won't even give me an interview if I don't lie in my resume about Ruby. Blame the system and not the players?
It's because you take it seriously. Most of our money making culture is fake, it's a role play game of some sort where people make important faces, speak important speeches, buy wooden boxes and moving carts only to see it all turning into dust at the end. From military generals to burger flippers, it's one big costume party. Things that are real exist, but aren't valued in our society - I mean those boring rules given by saints thousands years ago.
Oh, there have been a lot of other shocks that aren't strictly morality-related, and how much economic (and other) activity is wasteful, or even harmful, play-pretend has been another. Like, damn, it's a lot. No wonder people sometimes look at a market economy and go, "surely we can do better..."—even if they end up being wrong about that, the motivation for the idea is evident.
Most people not actually being as amazing at their jobs as you might imagine given their titles, background, or organizations they're associated with (though a few are! But this seems only weakly correlated to expectations based on context), and most (but not quite all) famous people (especially in academics and business, and to some extent in art) becoming famous not because of what they personally did, but because they're great at taking credit for things, is another. Oh, and nepotism. Lots and lots of that. This is all related to the above, about much of adult life being a show, where people's roles are largely based on stage-dressing and expectations. "There but for the grace of god..." is the rule, not the exception. So much circumstance, chance, and external validation of same reinforcing early luck or fortunate circumstances into patterns of apparent excellence that's not actually more than bare competence plus positive expectations and support.
Hell, anyone who's switched employers with a significant title-bump in the process, and abruptly had shockingly more respect and deference in meetings has seen this stage-like reality-behind-the-reality in action. Same person as last week, totally different treatment, and all it took was a scenery & costume change. All eyes on you, people deferentially raising points plainly seeking validation, and your words carry actual weight. Days earlier, you were on the other side. No change on your part, you're just playing a new character.
Overall, the world of adults is just way less different from the world of kids than I'd thought it was, when I was a kid. The main differences are that you're a bit freer to choose the company you keep, and that if life gets very very bad for you it will be entirely "your fault" (if you're a kid that can still happen, but it's at-most only partially your fault, as folks judge it).
Many places use some stupid software that will reject resumes if they don't contain certain keywords. So people stuff their resume with keywords. Interviewers may not have time to ask questions on all the tech (even though they were listed in the job ad), so this might not matter, as far as the interview is concerned.
Once they have the job, they can learn on the job. Obviously this wouldn't work for "big" lies, but for smaller ones, this seems to work out.
If it costs $150 million to cover the tuition for 200 students, surely the interest from Yale's massive endowment could cover tuition for a much greater number of students?
>, surely the interest from Yale's massive endowment could cover tuition for a much greater number of students?
A lot of endowments (most?) are earmarked for a specific purpose because that was the condition for receiving the charity money from the donator. And funding general tuition often doesn't meet the conditions. (Several articles explain this: https://www.google.com/search?q=ivy+league+endowments+earmar...)
And the alternative of donating "unrestricted" sometimes doesn't have the desired outcome the public wants to see. (E.g. spending on football scoreboard instead of financial aid for students. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26377357 )
Yale's endowment (presumably) already covers the tuition of every student, just not the full tuition. At most private universities, student tuition only covers something like a third the cost of attending.
Yale has 12000 students, 7000 are grad students, many of which have tuition waiver. Even if every one of these 12000 paid $40,000 tuition receipts would only be half a billion which is a third of what their endowment makes a year. I'd be very surprised if the actual tuition receipts are even a third of that with all the scholarships and phd waivers they give out.
Still, why throw away 100+ million a year if you don't have to?
The real takeaway is how underfunded higher Ed is.
I’m no Marxist but my intuition is that the the total payoff of a system where every high school graduate who maintains halfway decent grades can attend State U Springfield, tuition and room and board covered, would exceed the costs?
Theatre designer here. Just being accepted into that program is a winning lottery ticket. Make it through, and the worst life that awaits you is a tenured professorship, if not a Broadway and TV career.
Yeah, exactly, Yale Drama is just one of those places that will make your career. There are certainly great actors out there that go on different paths, but Yale is going to give you an enormous advantage.
I disagree. They have a couple hundred students there at any time and the percent of people who will make an actual career from it is still relatively low. Way better than moving to Hollywood with no connections but it is still extremely winner take all.
Hollywood may be the pinnacle for some actors financially, but the stage is where many want to hone/demonstrate their abilities.
I disagree that drama classes should be free solely on the basis that actors, on average, are not highly-paid. That opens the door to income-based repayment for every other major/career combination.
As someone who benefited from a similar act of generosity, I know this will be a life changing gift for those who have the talent but lack resources or connections to go far on their own. Many of our favorite entertainers come from this school. I look forward to many more.
Slightly off topic, but I attended a higher-ed conference a couple years ago and the administrators are all scared about 2025. The birthrate took a hit in 2008 and has never recovered. Peak enrollment will be 2024 and then diminish for the foreseeable future.
The expectation is that top tier schools will be fine, just less selective, but the B- and C-tier schools are going to suffer. I suppose they can make it up in international enrollment--that wasn't discussed.
This feels just weird to me. I can understand having some money in the bank as a cushion etc, but tens of billions of dollars? Aren't these institutions supposed to further education and spend whatever resources they have for that purpose instead of hoarding and running a hedge fund style investment program?
Universities stopped being about education when 1) they became a replacement for on the job training and 2) activists began the “long march through the institutions.”
I think if you asked these universities they would say that they are taking the very long term view. (For instance the one I went to has been around for 800 years already.) If you are thinking on a timescale of centuries then you want to treat your funds as capital, so you spend your investment income on research, scholarships, building maintenance and other educational goals, but you don't eat into the capital or in 200 years you'll be in a bad place financially. And if your funds are sizeable then investing them and managing them is a big job that you probably don't want to outsource.
IMHO large endowments are less of a distraction to the purpose of the university than NCAA sports are. The Ivy League simply shut down sports completely during COVID time, which was certainly a better idea than the dozens of colleges who got as many students on campus as they could and then had to send them home within months or (!) weeks. If voters want third-class universities without endowments to continue to exist, they need to elect politicians willing to support those universities with public funds.
I could be misremembering this, but wasn't there some drama about five years ago about schools literally investing a lot of their endowment and the like in hedge funds?
Hedge funds have targets for volatility and rates of return that they try to meet. Endowment managers take such metrics into account when allocating money across different asset classes. They are most certainly not giving away their entire endowment to buy GME.
The only controversy I can see is whether the returns provided by hedge funds outweigh the management/performance fees they charge.
When I was a student at some big state school in 08-09 I overheard some profs talking amongst themselves about how the endowment had fallen by a third. I really wasn’t keyed in at the time to stonks- I was just trying to party and pass my classes, but my ears stood up for that one.
I guess almost any large store of money is going to be invested in the market tho
I had a friend who attended Yale Photo MFA, one of the most prestigious art programs in the world. They still had to pay all the costs of printing and their windowless studios were in a dank basement of an old gymnasium.
I went to a Yale arts open house one time, and all the studios I visited had daylight and were about the size of a 2-person dorm room. Different departments with different budgets?
I'm 99.9999% positive that what you suggest would be illegal, and would land the administrators in prison.
As a lawyer once explained it to me, if person X gives organization Y some amount of money Z for purpose W, then spending even a penny of Z on purpose Q is felony fraud.
I could be wrong, but that's how it was explained to me.
Restricted gifts exist, but it's wrong to state categorically that the existence of restricted gifts precludes spending any endowment income on tuition. GP is also simplistic - not all the endowment income is available to cover operating expenses - but is directionally right. Lots of scholarships and the like offered by schools are transfers from the endowment to the operating budget mediated through a 'lower' tuition bill for the student. A relevant number to look at is the average income per student (money + loan proceeds) to the school - usually that's much, much less than the stated cost of attending.
Where do you think the tech industry would be without the endowment funds of universities? They almost single handedly gave rise to VCs in the 80s/90s -=-> fast forward to today.
Giving free tuition to a bunch of kids who probably already are extremely loaded seems like a waste. There are hundreds of colleges around the country that have low endowments and kids coming from disadvantaged backgrounds who will be in debt the rest of their lives. Further, tuition is way cheaper at these schools (like a fifth or a tenth) so you’d really be making an outsized impact. Donating to the Yales of the world is a massive ego booster/vanity project and a terrible use of funds.
getting into a top art school is one of the few, nearly guaranteed ways, to "make it" in the art world. the connections you get there enable even mediocre artists to make a real living out of making art.
The US spends enormous amounts of tax dollars on higher education. The problem is that it spends twice as much per student (adjusted for purchasing power) than the OECD average, so that only covers about half of total spending.
>States provide roughly 53 percent of the costs of teaching and instruction at these schools. Schools have made up the difference with tuition increases, cuts to educational or other services, or both.
>These sharp tuition increases have accelerated longer-term trends of college becoming less affordable and costs shifting from states to students.
We spend so much because we refuse to fund things directly. By shifting costs onto students, prices go up for everyone. Then aid to students has to be increased, creating this cycle. If we fund higher educational institutions directly, we can reduce costs for everyone.
>Over the past several years, public colleges and universities have cut faculty positions, eliminated course offerings, closed campuses, and reduced student services, among other cuts.
The idea of relentlessly "trimming the fat" has eliminated all slack capacity in our society and economy, to our detriment. Ask anyone who incompletely copied the lean Toyota model and didn't allow for a stockpile or excess capacity where it was prudent to do so. We're delaying infrastructure projects that will only get more expensive to fix. We can't keep pushing these problems into the future and hoping we'll stumble upon a magic solution later. We're at the point where we need to make drastic changes because we've been collectively refusing to make incremental changes.
We are an incredibly wealthy society. We can afford education and healthcare (very similar causes, very similar solutions) for everyone in the USA and we merely need to make the choices to do so.
Same is true for healthcare, K-12 education, and infrastructure. The US spends more dollars per person—excluding military expenditures-than Canada, but Canada somehow manages fit universal healthcare into that same budget.
It’s best to think of the US public sector as comparable to that of a semi-functioning developed country, such as Italy, rather than one of the competent ones, like Germany or Sweden.
Who sabotaged it this way? What are those choices? The people in states with large government spending, like NY, NJ or CA, would sure like to know how to avoid waste.
This assumes that the government actually reflects the will of the people. A majority of people seems to want at least some type of reform on this matter [0], but our elected officials aren't following though with it. Some have made promises that they haven't kept, but most politicians seem to not care about the will of the people.
“Do you support X” questions don’t mean anything without the “what will you pay?” question.
European countries tax middle class people to subsidize the 25-30% of relatively privileged people who get a university degree. That’s actually quite regressive. The Anglo (US, UK, and AUS) system of government loans with income-based repayment is superior.
I wouldn't call government-backed loans "superior". They fuel tuition inflation and thereby contribute to the rising costs of education even for those who want to pay out of pocket.
Leaving education loans solely to the private sector (with regulations against predatory marketing and usury) would ensure the money is spent efficiently. It wouldn't be possible to get a large loan for a degree with dim economic prospects. Colleges would need to look at their cost structures and charge students according to the actual market value of the degree.
The European model at least has costs under control. The people who get university degrees presumably also contribute more to the tax base, once they start working, than people without degrees. So it's less regressive than it seems.
You could. But you can only tax them so much. And the truly rich are able to avoid taxes by moving capital around.
There are a lot of progressive spending proposals and they all can't be paid by just taxing the wealthy.
Using that money to pay for benefits that mostly go to privileged people is not the best use of dollars. College graduates make more money on average, by a lot, 30 thousand dollars.
Our current system address those who have loans but don't actually get high income. They barely have to pay their loans--and often don't pay anything. A person making 35k, with an average of 3.5% a year income growth won't pay a single cent under the PAYE program if they have a family of four.
As was explained to me after the most recent insider leaks of income and tax information, a mere $70M wealth is enough to avoid taxes altogether. One "invests" one's wealth, and then lives off of revolving loans against those investments. Such a structure allows one to declare a $0 income every year for the rest of one's life.
So, any particular change to our current system of taxation might be flawed. However, in general, we must change our current system of taxation.
The question is whether it’s practicable, and if it is, we should ask why other developed countries rely on heavy middle class taxes instead.
The fact of the matter is that if you define “wealthy” as the top 1% (as Biden implicitly does by refusing to raise taxes on folks making up to $400,000), then there just isn’t enough money there to pay for a robust welfare state without raising middle class and upper middle class taxes. Doubling the tax rate on the top 1% (which isn’t in the cards) would raise $650 billion annually. That won’t even come close to closing the current budget deficit, and won’t pay for even a third of Medicare for all. It would pay for the Biden infrastructure plan, plus maybe free college, but none of the other things in the progressive wish list.
Even if we take as drastic a step as doubling the tax rate on the top 1%, it would still be highly inequitable to distribute that money for free college before hitting priorities like universal healthcare, improved unemployment insurance, etc.
Sorry I don't want my friend's taxes, who has a small business doing blue collar work and didn't go to college, to fund (useless) degrees in majors with little to no job prospects.
Do you also agree that your blue-collar friend shouldn't receive anything from society when their job is outsourced or made useless by technology? I disagree, but at least that would be consistent. If you believe everyone should fend for themselves, why do we even have a society instead of being lone hunter-gatherers?
"Alternative headline: Man worth $10.2 billion who pays lower tax rate than you gets $150 million tax break to aid institution that has a $31 billion endowment" -- Dan Price
