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Amar Bose To Donate Company To M.I.T.
MBC1977 writes with this eyebrow-raising news from CNN: "'The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced Friday that [Amar] Bose, the 81-year-old founder of the sound system company that bears his name, has donated the majority of Bose Corp.'s stock to the school.'
Very cool indeed!"
MIT has done wonderful things for the world. As have many academic institutions. But this is as good a time as any to note that making large donations to an elite academic institution is a pretty ineffective way to use your money.
MIT is already well funded, and while this money may go to fund additional research, it may also just lead to a lot of pretty buildings going up. If you have the opportunity to donate, why not donate to a school that will use the money to dramatically increase the number of students it educates, or to a charity that sees the money directed into existing research initiatives that need it.
I'm sure the new Bose facilities will be very nice and the Bose family will have no problem getting into MIT for the next few generations. Nonetheless, it seems like a bit of a waste.
True story: An elderly gentleman walked into an electronics store in Toronto looking to buy speakers. The salesman showed him a couple of different models. The customer pointed at another set on the shelves and asked about them. The salesman said "Oh, those are Bose, they're crap." The customer was Amar Bose.
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You probably didn't mean anything deep by it, but I find the choice to lump universities under the broad heading of 'charity' an interesting one. Although I think there's little better use for one's money than promoting education, my time spent at a (fairly well-regarded) American university seemed (to my godless commie foreign eyes) a surprisingly commercialised experience. It's clear just from looking at the campus that an awful lot of money is given back by alumni, and this action by Bose further confirms it, but I don't think I could ever get over the voice in the back of my head saying "What about all those times you tried to screw me out of every penny I didn't have?".
I applaud the efforts of people like Bose in giving something back, and I know this is something of a digression. It just seems odd, from my external perspective, that people are happy giving such vast gifts to organisations that treat their students in such a mercenary manner; or, I suppose, that organisations receiving such vast gifts still feel the need to squeeze their students so much...
No one at Caltech has to use Bose, they can build their own that are better.
Curiously enough, there used to be a Caltech project class based on pretty much exactly that, although it's unfortunately no longer offered:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~musiclab/
As a bit of trivia, Caltech alum Bill Gross actually ended up founding GNP Audio based on an engineering project he did as a student. He later went on to co-found, like, a gajillion other companies.
I'm a white male starting my PhD in the fall and I'm getting more money from the state of Arkansas than a foreigner would because I'm an Arkansas resident. I also had my undergrad degree fully funded by a state scholarship (to the tune of around $80,000). My university is practically begging locals to pursue a PhD. My foreign colleagues generally have to pay full retail and don't get the federally backed student loans my wife is relying on for her AuD. By the time I finish my PhD, it's looking like my state will have paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000 to educate me. I'm thankful for that and plan on living in Little Rock for the rest of my life so my taxes can help future students.
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It depends upon the model. Speaking of speaker systems only, some used resonance to produce boomy base to impress the rubes, leaving inadequate response at deep base and low-mids.
Other speakers, particularly the long-time top-of-the-line 901s, used active compensation to extend the somewhat flat range as far to the high and low as practical. Bose used 9 cheap 5" drivers in each 901, with the result that decent response up to 20 kHz was impossible, as was low distortion and good response at 20 Hz. Due to the complication of having all those drivers and the active compensation box, A.G.Bose claimed (in the class he taught) that the profit margin on the 901s was actually quite small, and the claim seems almost reasonable to me.
Professional speaker designers at more reputable firms joke that Bose's slogan "better sound through research" should read "better sales through advertising".
The fact is that speakers that sound good in isolation appeal to large numbers of uncritical listeners, and that's where Bose does well. A competent critical listener, or someone in a position to A-B against similarly priced reputable brands, will find Bose lacking.
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To get the "message" that they are losing money on every students, Universities pull accounting tricks worthy of Hollywood. They take all of their expenses, including research and administrative related ones on the one hand, they take what students pay on the other, totally ignoring donations, and they say, "eh, student tuition is only one third of our income, therefore student are actually not paying much at all".
In reality, some studies have shown that top-level college education really costs no more than about $40k per year per student for engineering, about $80k for medicine, and sometimes as lows as $10k for maths or philosophy. Law is also cheap. If students pay $200k over 4 years, they are totally covering that. In most of Europe, students typically pay less than $10k per year, sometimes much less. Oxford and Cambridge charge about $15k per year. They seem to be doing quite well nonetheless. As it was reported here not so long ago, even top-level US-universities pay their professors a relative pittance compared with other professionals with similar qualifications.
If universities stopped admitting, they would immediately lose 1/3 of their funding, and so would have to let go of a corresponding share of their staff. They would lose their status and soon all of their donations, losing another 1/3, later they would lose all of their network and influence obtained through alumni, professors would not be needed for teaching and soon the place would be an empty, nearly pointless shell. That doesn't sound like being better off financially.
The morals is that Universities are there for teaching, and students are at the very center of their mission. Research and whatnot is indeed nice, but it is there to attract funding and top-level researcher, ensuring the quality of the teaching because beginner teachers want to join their teams and so work hard to get tenure. A few top-level researchers are also dedicated and excellent teachers, which is very nice from the university point of view, because they get to write the classical textbooks on their field, ensuring more revenues. Students and alumni are not the only teaching-related income universities get. There are many other things to say, but I'll stop.
However, saying that universities would be better off without students is utter bollocks, to be polite.
MIT is a wonderful place. I almost went there in the early 2000s before opting for a local school that was 7th in engineering (my preferred fields). They were far more willing to work with me on the tuition rates than the school I did choose and MIT was 4 times more expensive at the time. Right off the top MIT gave a half-tuition credit to those they sought out (as to those that simply applied) and then there was further reward if you succeeded. MIT is not a private school and operates largely for the good of humanity. Comparing your local college experience to MIT is really unfair. The only places I can think of that compete are places like Cal Poly Tech and a few other Tech schools in the US. Giving the stock to MIT means they'll have a healthy steady source of income that hopefully will enable them to continue to research when politics pressure their research funds. PS: On the subject of tuition the US has relatively high tuition because schools don't get the kind of funding they need from the state and private schools though non-profit in most cases need to have an excess to invest and protect against the future. Non-profit doesn't mean sum-zero, it means there is no dividend to pay out to trustees and they are limited in their total profits. State colleges by comparison are much cheaper and would be free if the state gave the proper kind of funding they deserved.