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To be clear, if you're talking about starting a new college as a real option rather than a theoretical exercise, the problem is the "Starting a new college and raising its prestige" part not the "giving it a pro-Asian ideological bent" part. Going by USNWR rankings *, but the youngest school outside a big state system is Carnegie-Mellon founded in 1900. Which is A) 120 years old, B) Backed by Andrew Carnegie, C) Still a small school and ranked all the way down at 26th. What's the most prestigious non-state school that was founded in the last 40 years? I'm not sure there even is one that's past laughable.
To make it prestigious you're going to attract students. And not just any students, talented students with other options, attracting nothing but low performers who couldn't get in anywhere else won't help. And no, abandoning affirmative action alone will not deliver a significant number of ignored but talented Asian/White students, if you had the resume for affirmative action to matter to you just go somewhere else. There is no pool of kids who don't go to a decent school because of Affirmative action, only kids that got into a modestly worse school. If I were Black I would have been shoe-in anywhere in the top 5, but it's not like as a result of being white I slid into the 100s or something. The kids who get bumped from Harvard get into Cornell, from Cornell to Lehigh, from Lehigh to Penn State, from Penn State Main Campus to Penn State local campuses; the kids below Penn State don't matter.
Students will need to choose to go to your brand new school over highly ranked schools. Some of the issues attracting students to unwoke college groups I discussed in a prior motte conversation here. So let's just be real here, Unwoke university needs to attract women, and it needs to place students in prestigious organizations and jobs. If a university can't get kids jobs, and you can't get laid, it ain't happening; Asian and white guys at the 165 LSAT range will just cruise on to Penn State Honors instead.
Most observers put the male:female ratio at, say, a Jordan Peterson show at around 9:1 male:female; that's a big hill to climb. 68% of Young Women, 72% of women with a college degree identify as Feminists, we can basically write them off from Unwoke university; it's tough to claim numbers on multiple issues, but how many of that remaining quarter-to-third of young women who aren't woke are religious? Those girls are going to pick Messiah or Liberty over Unwoke U. I understand we have some women around themotte, but no one is going to sit here and claim it is better than a third are they? Very few people are going to choose to go to a college that is 90%+ male over one that isn't. I guess you could just go full-send and make it a male only school, I'm not sure that's legal anymore but it might be worth a try at that point.
I'm not going to say it is impossible to bootstrap prestige, but it certainly isn't easy. Takes decades. The Federalist Society is the best example we have, but it was grafted on top of existing schools; notoriously because it had better funding our FedSoc always had better food than the liberal equivalents, and people sometimes went to events just to get a free burrito. Carnegie type money and a commitment from some business leaders would make that easier, but you need serious money to overcome the inbuilt advantages of the existing schools. And given that this is an honest to God shot across the culture war bow, don't think the woke colleges will take this lying down. Grads from woke schools will commit to not applying to businesses that hire from Unwoke, etc. Would, say, Exxon commit to getting nobody from Harvard/Yale/Stanford to get kids from Unwoke? By the time you successfully bootstrap prestige we're probably four full SCOTUS turnovers from now, and who knows what AA law looks like.
But let's assume you could start a new prestigious university, I doubt it would work from a legal perspective, because you'd have to show a compelling interest in only letting in Asian kids or Irish American kids or whatever. Which doesn't really exist, there is plenty of Asian or Irish culture at other schools already. Conservative SCOTUS justices want to overturn AA, they don't want to institute legalized white nationalism and overturn a century of precedent to get us back to Plessy or something.
So, no, in conclusion this wouldn't work at all.
*Just from a quick glance at the rankings, if I missed a more recent one let me know.
I think Monash University, Australian National University, and University of New South Wales in Australia (1958, 1946, and 1949) and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1991) are cases of success in growing a new university even though there were other local universities that were already relatively prestigious.
That said, I’m not sure it’s replicable exactly in all situations. It may be that the market space at the time of these universities’ founding was unsaturated and they could absorb a glut of talented students that the existing institutions would’ve been happy to admit but did not have the capacity for. I think - correct me if I’m wrong - they also tend to be more unbalanced in their subject strengths; Monash is a world leader in pharmacology, ANU is excellent in a bunch of anthropology and humanities-focused subjects as far as I can tell, UNSW in water resources and mineral sciences, HKUST in (surprise!) business and finance.
Maybe a way to grow a new institution’s prestige is to focus really hard on one thing a la UCSF? You could even do it to the point of only offering programs in the field of interest (again, like UCSF). Still wouldn’t be easy, but it’s probably easier than trying to compete in all fields. (I think this was touched on in the OP.)
The big difference is that those are government funded. I don't want to speak to that overseas, I'm not familiar with the contrasts in the systems. In the USA some California state schools were founded much later, but they are part of the broader California state system and have huge resources to draw on. OP's hypothetical was a private university, which in the US sense means it is not under the orders or or primarily funded by the government, outside of grants and scholarships and such.
Fair!
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I'm not sure about real numbers, but my feel from experience is that if you're a serious candidate at a top ten selective school, you're a free ride at a lower ranked school no problem. Hence how I never paid tuition in my life.*
Speaking personally, I had LSAT scores to be above median at HYS, but lacked anything else to make me interesting enough to get in so I was rejected at all three, if I'd been Black I would have gotten into all three statistically. I wound up on a tuition scholarship at a T14, and had full tuition+ rides lined up at schools in the 40s (I didn't apply to any schools between the T14 and the 40s, along with Liberty which I applied to because this really sweet Christian girl from their recruiting department kept calling me and finally got me to fill it out from guilt). So you could definitely do a lot with a billion dollars, but just free tuition alone you'd still be competing with schools a tier down from the one you're targeting. Can you insta-found a school that beats out schools in the 50-75 range right out of the gate?
That said, a big enough endowment is probably step one. Probably enough that the university could run with no income for decades, which would insulate it against political attacks.
*Actually, now that I read it over, that's a lie, I paid my wife's for a couple semesters.
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Exxon runs all of its business out of a state whose top economic regulator is spending most of his energy going after ESG to burnish his resume for primarying Abbott from the right in '26. "Commit to not hiring anyone from the ivies" might be a bit of a stretch, but "recruit from, say, University of Dallas(a religious school, but also a notoriously unwoke one which provides ideological advisors to the Hungarian government) instead of Yale" is within the realm of possibility if the right political pressure is applied. After all, they ostentatiously refused to celebrate pride month.
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