What makes a university?

Students and faculty. Simple answer. It's not the administration, though they can affect students and faculty significantly, for the better and the worse. (So you should hire good staff, deans, presidents and such. Just not too many of the latter.) It's not the physical plant, though you do need good facilities. A beautiful location—like one that is next to a beach, a mountain, a fabulous airport, or great restaurants—doesn't hurt. But you can build relatively good facilities given a reasonable amount of money almost anywhere. It's not just having a large endowment though that doesn't hurt. Meanwhile, I'm not forgetting alumni of former faculty. They were once current faculty and students and thereby remain critical to the definition of their university.

So why do I favor students and faculty? It may seem both self-serving and forgetful of the three most important factors in choosing a home: "location, location and location." But the thing is that universities teach students. Students are attracted by the quality of the faculty AND their fellow students. Meanwhile faculty are attracted by the quality of the students AND their fellow faculty. These two groups therefore come and go hand-in-hand. If you lose one, you'll lose the other. The fact that they are people and not bricks-and-mortar doesn't change the equation. Good faculty and students attract the next round of good faculty and students. That is, the individual faces change from year to year, but the nature of the university remains through the continuously refreshed set. This, of course, relies on universities continuing to invest in maintaining the quality of their students and faculty. AND they need to empower the faculty to make good decisions through enlightened self-interest and thereby trust them to refresh themselves well. So why do universities sometimes forget to fill positions as faculty retire rather than maintain or grow their numbers? They are, or course, driven to that direction because doing so appears to save money, at least in the short run. But they are leveraging their future as the degradation of their student and faculty quality redefines their universities. Sadly, often not for the better. When the economy is tough, I would suggest that's the time to invest even more money (because it's less expensive to do it then.) So far Georgia Tech has done this right as we have grown for the past 15 years or so at a dramatic pace while the economy was topsy-turvy. Hopefully, this trend will continue!

Legacy admission for and against diversity

According to the April 24th issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, this year's admission rate—7.29%—for the class of 2017 was their lowest ever. Rest assured, that is behind Stanford at 5.7%, Harvard at 5.8% and Yale at 6.7%. Those are low odds, and any advantage is clearly welcome. That's one reason why the Fisher v. Texas case before the Supreme Court over the use of affirmative action in college admissions is so compelling. Equally notable, though, is the fact that children of Princeton alumni (so-called legacies) make up 9.7% of admitted students, compared to 9.5% in the previous year. Is a given university merely recording their legacy student demographic or is it using it to create an artificially higher (or perhaps lower) percentage of legacies in their student body?

It's surprising to me that legacy admission is going up (in terms of the percentage of the total) in light of the recent rhetoric arguing against it. Namely, the argument goes that legacy admissions are primarily good for bringing in money (from happy alumni parents), and they keep the demographics of a given campus tuned to that of a generation ago. The former is presumably good for university finances but some argue that it comes at the price of academic quality. The latter has the potential of maintaining the demographics on par with a much less diverse student population of yesteryear, and some argue has the effect of anti-affirmative action policies. For these and other related reasons, there has been significant opposition against legacy admission (including op-eds in the Princeton Alumni Weekly). Yet at Princeton (and likely other places), legacy admission is actually increasing, at least for the moment. Meanwhile, the April 24th issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, also reported that 48.4% of the admitted student class identified themselves as students of color. This suggests that legacy admission may not be entirely coupled to the demographic distribution of the entering class.

So where do you stand on legacy admission? It likely depends on whether or not you are a parent, and whether or not your children stand to benefit from it. Like politics, this can be very local. In my case, my son would obviously stand to lose if legacy admission were to recede. Here also lies a bit of irony; he would be a student-of-color admission. That is, just as the diversity complexion of undergraduate campuses is starting to reflect the broader demographics of this county, is this really the time to remove the alumni privilege of legacy admission?