Paulson’s School — An education system’s destination

Today John A. Paulson donated $400 million to Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and changed its name to Paulson. The news shocked the community. Harvard sold itself twice in one year. The first wave started with the Chinese real estate tycoon T.H. Chan who got his family name imprinted on to Harvard School of Public Health in addition to his hundreds of millions of dollars of properties at Harvard square.

Harvard SEAS history is interesting. Started by Abbott Lawrence in 1847 after donating $50K as an independent institute, Lawrence scientific school aimed to bring interdisciplinary fields to train architects, engineers, and scholars. Gordon McKey as influential figure set a trust of $4 million in 1893 to create McKey Laboratory. Merging Lawrence scientific school with Boston Tech (later AKA MIT) was in discussions since 1870s brought up by MA governor. The failure of the merger diminished the importance of the engineer school at Harvard until the creation of SEAS in 2007 after Harvard realized fell behind the most of nation’s educational institutes.

Graduated from NYU and HBS, Paulson certainly is an successful Wall Street hedge fund manager with billion dollars earning annually. Similar to Lawrence and McKey, he was not affiliated with SEAS previously. He made some donations of $20 million to NYU Stern. With a larger donation this time, he definitely made his name everywhere in the news today. This triggered many discussions related to American education system

1. Why not donated to the lesser funded education system to benefit a greater population?
2. Working at Wall Street might become a better option again. Let all the graduates from college to PhD pursue the jobs at Wall Street.

But the jokes are there

1. People, there are only 10 schools left. Act quickly!
2. Wall Street certainly fought back and informed the Silicon Valley who was really in control!