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Cornell joins with Technion in bid for a New York Campus

RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA at the NY Times informs us that Cornell is teaming up with the Israeli university, Technion, on the computer nerd part of the potential university in NY.

What is fascinating is how this looks on paper. Cornell’s press release promises that graduates from the new institution would get a “dual degree” from Technion and Cornell. That sounds kind of fancy, doesn’t it?  I’ve bumped into several folks in the academic world with two degrees and some like to sort of lord it over us like they’re twice as smart. The folks who get MDs and PhDs like to imply the same thing.

Naturally, this distinction only occurs on paper. The students at this future university will spend the same four years learning as they would at the regular campus. They’ll take the same number of classes and some of the professors will be “from Technion” and some will be “from Cornell”. I’m guessing some will have “joint appointments” the way that some professors I know think it’s really important to have “joint appointments” in multiple departments at the same campus. In reality, they gain little from this because they usually don’t get votes in both places. It’s just a few extra lines on a piece of paper.

It’s fascinating to game how this will turn out. I’m sure that Cornell is filled with Ivy League snob professors who would love to live in NYC if they could find a way to do it while keeping their Ivy League appointment. I’m sure some folks at Technion would like to visit and maybe live in NY. But in general both places are going to find it hard to fund the campuses in NYC. They’ll be expensive to run and staff.

I am curious to hear what happens to the intellectual property rights. Stanford has been bragging that not many startups have come out of Cornell, effectively pretending that its dropouts are really complements. Technion has been spinning off a number of startups in Israel and Cornell probably sees this as a way to bolster their application. Fine. But Technion is also a “public university”. Who gets the revenue from the patents that come from the DARPA and NSF grants given to Technion/Cornell?

So many questions and notice that very few have to do with the undergraduate experience? Surprised? Not me.

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This entry was written by admin and posted on October 19, 2011 at 4:03 pm and filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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5 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

  1. “The folks who get MDs and PhDs like to imply the same thing.”

    The ones I have meet are smarter than you me and 99.9999% of the population.

    One proof: They get med school tuition paid and a stipend. The graduate debt free.

    1. Walter Sobchak on October 19th, 2011 at 5:53 pm

  2. I thought that those piling on degrees were just unable to land a steady job. It’s just a gilded cage, as far as I am concerned. This includes engineers getting an MBA.

    The other thing here is how this is a prime example of credential inflation — going for the gold ring in the lottery of higher ed by piling on the prestigious degrees. I have a disseration on my reading shelf about why it takes TWO degrees, and not just a law degree anymore, to get hired by a company willing to help pay off that six-figure debt. Yeah — credential inflation. Nothing more, nothing less.

    2. Higby on October 20th, 2011 at 1:48 am

  3. Come again, Walter?

    Medical school debt is written off? I must have missed something when I was working at SLM those two seasons.

    3. Higby on October 20th, 2011 at 1:50 am

  4. In my past, I worked at a medical school for several years so I know more than my fair share of combo MD/Phds.

    I honestly don’t know any that felt like they were twice as smart by doing the double doctorate, all of them joked that they were just gluttons for punishment.

    In the medical school, there was also a big deal about the MDs not wanting the PHd to also be called doctors, and many times PhD were snubbed from being in charge of medical based research projects because they were not MDs.

    All of the MD/PhD combos were somewhat claiming to do the combo so they could do clinical research involving human subjects and it is easier to do that with both degrees. (Otherwise two separate people, a MD and a PhD have to agree to partner and share a clinical project.)

    I think a lot of it has to do with that most of them started out in medical school, but they really wanted to do research, and they were already far enough along in medical school to not want to switch, plus the prestige comes from medical school, so they then decide to go for both.

    By combining degrees, classes that count for both the MD and PhD can be paid for with a PhD free tuition and stipend deal in theory, so it can reduce the cost of a medical degree if set-up properly.

    So I think what many MD/PhD combos are really doing is paying for the prestige of the MD, and all their family and friends can say that so and so is a medical doctor, when what they really want to do in life is research, and the PhD is so they can do research. They want to do the research of a Phd, but want the prestige of a MD. Most of them that I still know personally wind up making lower salaries than MDs alone because they follow along more closely the route of PhD.

    A few come from the other direction because a few slots in the medical school that I worked for were reserved exclusively for PhD students. So if a person just barely missed getting into medical school, they could apply for the PhD program, and then reapply for medical school the following year or even the year after that. A few do finally make it into medical school by essentially going in through the “backdoor” of the PhD route. They do have to prove themselves, not an easy route at all, very few of the applicants that try this get one of the medical school slots, but these are students that did not make it into medical school the regular way, so definately not twice as smart by getting a combo MD/PhD.

    4. Soapbox0916 on October 20th, 2011 at 3:47 pm

  5. That should be PhDs, not PHd in the third paragrah above. Too many ancrynoms. LOL

    5. Soapbox0916 on October 20th, 2011 at 3:51 pm