Venture Fund Investment & Endowments
An interesting article in WSJ today: Venture-Capital Bets Swell Stanford’s Endowment.
The author argues that the top schools’ ability to invest in the best funds and their continued access to the top applicants, students, and alumni - will further stratify US higher education.
Well, I do not have a problem with this. Top intellects gathering within the framework of a highly effective system is a very good way to generate advanced thoughts, ideas, innovation.
However, these top schools ought to take some responsibility in sharing their methodology with educational institutions worldwide to raise the general level of education, as well as to standardize the world’s widely taught disciplines along best practices vectors.
MIT’s effort along these lines is the Open Courseware (OCW) project.
I believe, Harvard has a similar effort, but I don’t have a URL for it.
On the other hand, the 1,000-1,500 Engineering Colleges in India ought to align their courses and syllabus to that of MIT’s, to enjoy the benefit of OCW.
Great move from Stanford as it releases lectures, debates, and other academic content on iTunes.