Andrew Yang Policy on EXPAND SELECTIVE SCHOOLS

[Sherman A1]

Harvard has an endowment of $37b, an undergraduate class size of ~1700, and an acceptance rate of around 5%. Yale’s endowment is $27b, while it has an undergraduate class size of ~1500 and an acceptance rate of under 7%. Stuyvesant, a top NYC public school, has a class size only slightly over 3200, while there are over 1.1m students in the public school system. Phillips Exeter Academy, a high school, has an endowment of over $1 million per student.

These schools are not for everyone and we have bigger problems to address that are more relevant for most Americans. However, these schools reflect a false scarcity in our elite education system – instead of expanding access and opportunities, many schools remain small and selective because the prestige of turning many people down helps them maintain cachet and rankings. This has in turn warped parent and student behavior as many see getting their kids into various schools as a cutthroat competition, driving extreme, unhealthy, unethical, and even illegal behaviors. It is deranging our culture.

Many highly selective schools have the resources to expand their class sizes, but they currently don’t have an incentive to do so. Their rankings pressures actually reward them for rejecting many applicants. In order to ensure that more students are able to take advantage of these educational resources, it’s necessary to provide incentives for these schools to expand, both in size and, in the case of colleges, geographically.

The geographic benefits would extend past just the increase in capacity. By establishing campuses in different parts of the region or country, these schools would:

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/expand-selective-schools/

[rpannier]

1. Thanks for Keeping Us Informed

I do read posts for all the candidates to get a better understanding of each one and their policies
I appreciate all the work you are doing

[Sherman A1]

4. Thanks for the kind words

I hope that the posts are informative. He has a lot of different policies and I have just scratched the surface so far. My hope is to put the information out and let folks read and discuss something beyond the latest poll numbers or whatever some pundit has to say.

Policies can be boring most certainly, but we need to get beyond what the is latest drama that CNN or MSNBC wants us to waste our time upon.

[delisen]

5. Would like to see building up of schools that

already are more diversified.

Maybe identifying schools that are likely candidates, around the country

[pnwmom]

2. These statistics are artificially low. Students apply to twenty schools instead of the handful

they applied to when I was in college.

College push up their application numbers by sending their materials to kids based on SAT scores. The more kids they fool into applying (even if they have almost no chance), the more selective they appear to be.

It's a racket. We could double or triple the size of these schools and it would still be a racket.

[NewJeffCT]

6. I know, back in the Dark Ages when I was in high school

I applied to like 4 or 5 colleges because each one had their own application that you had to either type or hand write out.

Nowadays, you have the Common App for almost all "highly selective" colleges, except the UC schools (University of California, which has their own app for all 8 or 8 UC schools) and Georgetown, who still does it the old fashioned way.

[Girard442]

3. Ultra-selective schools are a pox on education.

Does anyone truly believe that their selectivity is tuned toward talent and ability? More like used to perpetuate the aristocracy. Seriously, do the graduates of the Ivies seem like intellectual ubermenschen to you? Or maybe more like entitled trust-fund babies.

[dalton99a]

7. +1. It's mostly who you know and how much money you have

And the admissions scandal is the latest proof of that

(Exceptions are technical schools like MIT and Caltech)

[NewJeffCT]

8. How do you expand a school in a city?

NYU is in the heart of lower Manhattan - unless they start buying up ultra-expensive real-estate nearby, they can't really expand unless they knock down buildings and rebuild bigger, which is going to also take a lot of time and money. The same with Columbia - unless they knock down some classic architecture and rebuild bigger, they'd need to buy up nearby real estate as well.

The same with schools like UCLA and USC in Los Angeles, University of Chicago, Boston University, etc.

Sure, maybe some schools could be expanded, but not all of them.

[Blue_Tires]

9. Wouldn't it be better in the long run to lift up the schools on the bottom?