Item — HN Reader

> The elite research layer of higher education (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT) is still an AI accelerant. But across the country, as Scott Latham told me, “the vast majority of institutions are in a state of AI paralysis.”

Tbf, the vast majority of institutions also suck.

State flagships and some of their second rung, a couple ivies and ivy tier privates, and military academies provide the bulk of talent that you need. And these universities have dedicated pipelines for people who start off at community colleges.

These universities are also much larger - UC Berkeley's and UCLA's 2025 undergrad population is almost double it's 1960 population [0].

And those who had skill or educational deficiencies can remediate them via non-trad or working professionals masters like GT, UT Austin, and CU Boulder's OMSCS for less than $15k.

[0] - https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...

1 comments

Ah, sure, they train enough people to serve all needs. What a load of poppy cock.

They do.

The top 20 CS/EE/CE/ECE/EE degree programs (MIT, CMU, Stanford, Cal, UIUC, GT, UT Austin, Purdue, UW, UCLA, UCSD, Ivies, UChicago, NYU, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, USC, UMinn, UMich) graduate around 15k-20k undergrads a year.

Throw in the next rung of well respected universities (eg. the rest of the state flagships like ASU or IU, the respected regional public programs like CalPoly, NCSU, or SUNY Buffalo, and the handful of regionally respected privates like WPI, Cincy, or both Rochesters) and that number likely doubles.

If you're graduating almost 50k grads a year from target programs, there just isn't enough room for the rest.

Choosing to go to (randomly choosing two universities to pick on) USF or TCU for CS straight out of HS instead of going to your local CC and then transferring to UC Davis or UT Dallas is dumb.

In 1980 you had a little under 2,000 4-year colleges in the US. In 2010 you had almost 3,000 4-year colleges after which the number of institutions started declining. Making more colleges while existing colleges were expanding headcount did nothing to help.

50k/year is not enough for a country the size of the US. Belgium produces about that number of graduates yearly.

Those 40-60 universities graduate around 50k undergraduate CS, EE, CE, ECE, and EE majors a year.

Overall, the US graduates around 125k-150k CS/EE/CE/ECE/EE/EECS majors a year.

Overall we graduated a little under 5 milllion college graduates in 2025 compared to a little under 4 million in 2015.

5M? On a population of 340M? 3.6M children are born yearly. Do they all graduate at a university? The web says 864,457.