We were sitting around in a retreat trying to figure out how to get a really small amount of endowment money for our really small, remote, business school.
I was struck by the thought that large, well-endowed schools often spend their income on dubious items.
Wouldn't the world be better if, say, Harvard, spent some of their endowment to make say ... Boston College a better school?
Universities and colleges act as if they were sovereign entities. This means that the Ivy League, flagship state schools, and the major privates are acting like the developed economies. On the other hand, the few thousand legitimate smaller schools are acting like so many Naurus, Jordans and Jamaicas.
This is medieval thinking: hold on to what you've got, and don't help anyone else out. Ever.
If we look at the big, nasty, competitive corporate world, it is often just the opposite. Microsoft and other giants are often seeding smaller operations with the idea that they will grow into useful partners.
A better analogy is probable professional baseball. The relationship isn't perfect, but the major league and AAA teams have a symbiotic relationship, and this continues further down the hierarchy in many cases.
The thing is, these relationships are already there. Most states have articulation agreements between broad groups of schools. Students also routinely do a year or two at a less school followed by a few years and graduation from a name brand school.
It also happens implicitly when schools compete in the same region. When I lived in New Orleans, Tulane University routinely cherry-picked good faculty from (primarily) the University of New Orleans. They did this to me. They'd previously done this to my colleagues Nick Mercuro (now of Michigan State). Doug Brinkley - one of the biggest talking heads on TV also followed this route.
There are religious reasons for doing so, but BYU is already going in this direction, with the independent but related schools BYU-Hawaii, BYU-Idaho, and the Southern Virginia University.
So, why couldn't Harvard do something like use some of its endowment to create a AAA university (say Tufts), a AA school (say Colgate), and an A school (say Hobart)? The more I think about this, the more I'm sure that it is positive sum for all parties.
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