PolyMatter
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2022
21:44 · 2.6M views · Mar 12, 2022
PolyMatter examines how universities, especially in the West, depend on foreign and Chinese student tuition and how rankings and incentives distort institutions around that money.
HN commenters recommend it in college-ranking and higher-ed threads as an explanation of why rankings are a hustle for foreign student revenue.
3 comments from Hacker News
Polymatter recently had a great video on the way the college ranking system is a hustle for foreign student money, and just how heavily it distorts colleges incentives: this video
Polymatter did a great episode on the pressures that create outcomes like this in regards to rankings: this video
The "how good is university" is based on some arbitrary metric, which does not tell anything to the student, but works on foreign students see PolyMatter The Chinese Student Crisis - this video It has even lower value for Europeans, because even if some university in Paris would be THE BEST in the world, it still will have only a national character. For example some guy from Poland is not going to study there, simply because when you are 20 years old, then you can barely speak English on A2, but at that case, to actually understand and learn, you would need to speak French on B2 (of course, we can find rare exceptions). So in the end you are choosing your school from less than dozen national universities (could be less or more, depends on size of your country) and then you will decide by their program - Do you want to study agriculture university with a program on genetical engineering of plants? Do you want to study technical university with a program of computer science? etc. All those universities are national (public), there are also some private universities, but you will go in those if you are mandated to have diploma (i.e. some governmental positions). The problem with private universities is that non-governmental employers are not taking them seriously and they will look at you as on somebody who accidentally bought his diploma with his newspapers.