I remember wondering aloud at MIT/Harvard putting their courses online for free for anyone to listen to, and saying, well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college?
I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which is hard virtually.
That being said, the college experience has gone through events like wars, plague, disruption, etc, and has come back before. (Although not at a time when there was such a ready alternative technology at hand.) I'm not yet so worried as some say (wholesale change to the higher education model), unless this goes on for 2-3 years.
> well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college?
You can put on you resume that you were accepted in a selective program, and that you were able to complete it.
Besides, the actual lectures are only the tip of the iceberg. If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams. You also have tutors and professors that supervise, pressure, grade you. You work in collaboration with other students. You have access to internship opportunities or to your professor networks.
I once worked through a distributed systems project from MIT. I worked almost full time on it for a couple of weeks. Most of the material was available, but not everything. You certainly don't have the same resources students have. And you don't have the same pressure students have. Also, this project had zero value on my resume. It would be different if MIT could grade it for me, and certify I did well.
>If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams
Exactly. Even as a self-taught developer, one of my biggest regrets is how little I appreciated the incredible resources I had available at university and didn't really take advantage of or appreciate.
Also, a lot of classes are essentially impossible online. Intense lab courses, term-long project courses, and time-sensitive experimentation courses are all screwed. The way classes are coping is interesting:
1. For classes requiring user testing or behavioral experiments, assignments are being processed through mechanical turk.
2. The experimental physics lab is changing from a 'choose-your-own-adventure' model of choosing a final project to a satellite/telemetry/astronomy project.
3. Some classes are providing synthetic datasets or data from previous semesters for lab classes.
4. Some classes are basically finished. It is actually impossible to continue teaching them, so they're purely instructional or seminars, at this point.
A lot of these lab classes are required to graduate, too. They also require so many resources that they can only be taught once a year. It's seriously demotivating, especially for passionate hands-on learners. And paying sticker price doesn't help the sting for many students.
Medium to large lecture classes can probably work pretty well. As can mostly small seminars I would think. Other things are tough or impossible.
For example, I had an undergraduate thesis in my major, which required being physically in a lab and having access to a machine shop. In any case, there are lab/project classes throughout a lot of STEM majors that students aren't going to be able to reasonably finish this semester. I don't know how this is being typically handled with everyone having to drop things ~ 1 month into the semester.
About halfway through my college experience, I switched gears from extreme attendance-and-attentive-note-taking to extreme self-teaching, out of necessity (I was taking too many classes and working simultaneously, so I didn't have time to attend each lecture each week). Of course, I still did the homework assignments, studied for exams, etc.
Except for the occasional "gotchas" where professors say something random in class that shows up on the exam, it didn't adversely impact my GPA, and it saved a ton of time. I think I learned more efficiently on my own, which led to saving a ton of time shuffling from physical location to physical location. It freed up more time for working, exercising, and sleeping.
Given this experience, in retrospect, I think the most valuable parts of my education were not necessarily the classroom, but rather:
50%: The (well-written) syllabi. They point out which resources (books, blogs, websites, etc) are worth your time, if you have an interest in the subject. The best ones are filled with opinions, and "optional resources if you want to dive deeper into X". Even the lazily-constructed ones are a great foundation if you have no idea about how to begin learning X.
25%: The classmates and TAs. Oral/written feedback, delivered efficiently and with empathy is not essential, but a great catalyst to development. This one's a bit personality-dependent, for other's it might be higher or lower.
25%: The assignments, projects, and deadline pressure. To learn things, you really need time-spaced practice. Reading is not sufficient. The deadline and grade pressures erode as you get better, but they're invaluable early on.
I think that you can get 90% of each of these online, just fine. But that's me! It might require personal conversation for others, but in my experience a good collection of reading and tasks, some form of IRC, and rudimentary deadline pressure are more than sufficient to replace the classroom for self-starting individuals. I think Coursera's relative success proven that case.
> 50%: The (well-written) syllabi. They point out which resources (books, blogs, websites, etc) are worth your time, if you have an interest in the subject. The best ones are filled with opinions, and "optional resources if you want to dive deeper into X". Even the lazily-constructed ones are a great foundation if you have no idea about how to begin learning X.
Do you have any pointers to online examples of syllabi you found useful? My syllabi are always to the point and focussed on the structure of the class; it's never occurred to me that someone might want to use them as a roadmap for independent learning, and I'd be interested in facilitating that.
> You can put on you resume that you were accepted in a selective program, and that you were able to complete it.
BTW via Coursera (perhaps only through white label?) you can enroll at some universities and get an ordinary degree (no qualifying language like “online”, join the alumni association etc). So you can get that benefit from some online programs, though perhaps not the top echelon.
Despite that, I agree with you that the realtime meatspace stuff is at least 50% of the value for the higher end schools (say “top” 100, however you define “top”).
I did not understand this in the first 2 years of uni; I was in a very easy going high school before uni (this had something to do with my grades as well) as in, I did not have to attend classes, so I was used to just going to the exams. Which was great because I could make money writing software while others were sleeping in class. When I went to uni I just continued that pattern; it alienated me from my peers and as a result I did not like. Until (around 2 years in) I got bored and picked a graduate course (kolmogorov complexity) which could not be completed without attending; it was excellent; very small group (6) and the prof. That changed my ideas a bit ; I still wouldn't go to the auditorium stuff (I have/had (ex death metal band gitarist...) tinnitus; I cannot hear anything in full rooms with people whispering and sound echo-ing anyway, so what's the point). Well recommended; going to those gave me businesspartners + colleagues + funding for my first 'real' company as well.
Small classes are the best. I had an intro to the Standard Model class which had 4 students and the teacher... possibly the most enjoyable class I've had. There's no other occasion where a teacher will dedicate so much time to you.
That sounds like one of those experiences where, at least for the first few weeks, you return home and promptly fall asleep, because your brain is too full for anything else.
> Also, this project had zero value on my resume. It would be different if MIT could grade it for me, and certify I did well
This is hugely important not just on the CV. The feedback you get from grading helps you understand what mistakes you made, and the prospect of receiving an official pass or failure grade is a big incentive to work hard.
I know this might not be received well by the HN crowd, but I feel like the classes and networking are secondary, the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé.
I take the opposite stance - being in person makes a huge difference, possibly one not appreciated by the demographics here.
People continually reduce the experience to “sitting in a box and ingesting information.
But a classroom is much more than that - it’s the ability to interact with other students, to deal with real world issues and practice even basic skills like asking questions.
It’s chances to interact in larger groups.
It’s resources which can’t be shared online at all (libraries, information terminals, printers.)
There are also people who depend on interacting with people to process ideas.
All of this modulated by the degree.
If you are doing some courses, you very much depend on interacting with people - doing a negotiations module online is very different from an in person class to pick an example.
And fundamentally- human brains on average are designed to work with people.
Mine isn’t, and being at home and studying isn’t a bad deal- but i would cease being objective if I didn’t recognize that there are many ancillary and direct benefits to studying in college, and for some people in person studying is the only way they can achieve it.
Finally I present to the people here Blooms 2 Sigma problem.
And you aren't even mentioning the case of degree programs that are in some essential sense about learning to use equipment costing in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in some cases whose availability is strictly controlled by the US government.
I got my undergrad in Nuclear Engineering, and I learned to use Gamma Ray Spectrometers costing easily 30,000 dollars and did Plasma Physics experiments in a Vacuum Chamber setup of similar cost, all the while supervised by people who knew how to safely perform experiments with radioactive material and comply with relevant government regulations. And I was mainly about Computational Neutron Transport - I got what was considered a bare-minimum grounding in Experimental Nuclear Science. This is to say nothing of programs with research reactors students can use for experiments (whose ranks my alma mater sadly left just as I arrived).
This was basically true of all the non-CS engineering disciplines. Perhaps one could cobble together an equivalent to a Mechanical Engineering or Civil Engineering degree from my alma mater with CnC Routers at Hackerspaces and the like. But I really can't imagine that working for Nuclear, Aerospace, Biomedical, the Semiconductor side of EE...
Or rather, I can, but it would require an enormous investment into high-fidelity simulation of the relevant equipment. And that is a dangerous road. At the moment, we verify Engineers' ability to use equipment in a very robust way - having them actually use the equipment to perform engineering tasks and measurements. If you rely instead on training simulators you need to be extremely vigilant about their fidelity (and you will almost certainly fall back on minimum duration of instructor-monitored usage of real equipment, like the nuclear and aerospace industries require).
Also, chemistry/biochemistry. How would the labs work? I mean, get real. For anything software, sure, that can be taught almost totally remotely. But most actual engineering disciplines just aren't going to have effective remote coursework with hands-on labs any time soon.
There is almost no demand for 'actual' engineering a ton of this is completely offshored into oblivion, my girlfriend has a degree in chemistry and now works in a bank. There is extremely little demand for everything outside of software.
I don't buy that in the slightest. IT is, hands-down, the most commonly outsourced. The building engineers who inspected my foundation made me wait for 3 months because of demand.
Are the civil engineers running the local water treatment plant -- which can't seem to get enough qualified people -- going to hire people who don't meet the requirements to be called an "engineer" (unlike the US, these reqs are like doctors and lawyers).
Bloom's two-sigma problem is only tangentially related to your argument. What Bloom found was that one-on-one instruction using a very specific type of teaching (Direct Instruction) coupled with mastery-based learning, results in some pretty spectacular gains (at least according to a few, rather underpowered studies).
If anything, the two-sigma problem argues against in-person teaching. Mastery based learning requires that a student prove that they have mastered the current concept before they are allowed to move on to the next concept. That is much easier to do in an online setting, where each student can be presented with customized material, than it is to do in a class of 30-or-so bored undergraduates.
I don’t disagree with anything you said. I think it strongly argues for university being highly inefficient compared to optimal education strategies. University cohorts should probably be smaller, with smaller class sizes and more stringent entry requirements to work toward the ideal 1:1 student:teacher ratios. Sure it’s more expensive, but if you get 2 std deviations out of it, that’s huge.
For certain gen ed classes, maybe have the whole cohort in a single class, not for lectures or exams, but for discussion and collaboration. Make those courses fully project based and assign them uniformly across degree boundaries.
Right now, graduate level courses and prestigious institutions are the only ones even trying to offer a higher education. The majority of universities at this point are paper mills, rushing hundreds or thousands of students through programs without most of the benefits you described. It’s a system optimized for making money or university survival, rather than student achievement or societal benefit.
You are absolutely correct, which is why I keep harping on the Bloom 2 sigma problem. Its an easy way to highlight to readers how significant human 1 on 1 mentoring is to academic outcomes.
That immediately makes it clear to people that we dont have the money or people to afford that outcome, and after a few traversals on that ladder, the issue of education being a huge method to minimize the cost to educate people without overloading on number of teachers and cost of HR becomes apparent.
Mentorship is my new educational holy grail today frankly. Gone is the hope of the MOOC, now we need the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, a mentor that customizes information that matches a student.
Fundamentally though people learn through play, thats how humans are designed.
Kids pick up 5000 combinations from playing league of legends, and do stupid number crunching on the fly.
However play is to hard to create, because we don't associate fun with a lot of work.
If we ever solve education, it will be solved by using play, even Mentors must understand fun.
This can’t happen (in the United States) until there are alternate ways of making a decent living for normal people who can’t self-teach math and programming skills. College is a mandatory job “certification” for a lot of office and other types of jobs so college has to be approachable enough that almost anyone can be accepted.
Bryan Kaplan argues that the majority of the value of a reputable college is signaling.
> Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job.
If the value of education was the information taught in the classes or the network, you should see a somewhat linear increase of value as you progress. For instance, after completing your second year out of four, you should receive ~50% of the college premium.
> Most of the salary payoff for college comes from crossing the graduation finish line. Suppose you drop out after a year. You’ll receive a salary bump compared with someone who’s attended no college, but it won’t be anywhere near 25 percent of the salary premium you’d get for a four-year degree. Similarly, the premium for sophomore year is nowhere near 50 percent of the return on a bachelor’s degree, and the premium for junior year is nowhere near 75 percent of that return. Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation
> Most of the salary payoff for college comes from crossing the graduation finish line. [...] Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation
Well, or employers think people drop out due to poor grades.
Three years of 4.0 GPA then dropping out due to pregnancy and three years of 1.0 GPA then dropping out before your expulsion hearing for cheating both put "3 years of college" on your resume.
This is very true! I believe (don't have a good reference) that companies in the past had more incentive and means to cultivate or train people on the job, and thus, a formal signal of education wasn't as important. (and until 1950s(?), wasn't as available to many)
I seem to observe that now many companies generally want to pick the already-developed crop of people who fit the bill to a T, have had education or previous employment do the job of training / filtering who to consider, and not engage in the training part of it much any more.
Maybe it's due to the increasing cost of hiring people that you must only take a chance on a sure bet, and that there is less and less appetite (financial return-wise) to spend money on training people who are just as likely to pick up and leave for another company.
Especially in "tech," job tenures are generally shorter than they used to be. It wasn't at all unusual at the big computer companies of the 80s and 90s to have a fairly large group of employees who had worked at a company for a decade or two (or more).
For various reasons, on both the employer and employee side, this has changed a lot especially when you're talking startups--but also companies like Amazon from what I understand. In any case, if the expected tenure of an employee is only a couple of years, it's probably unreasonable in most cases to have a 6-12 month training period during which the employee isn't especially productive.
There is no doubt signaling at play, but one important signal conferred by graduating is “can slog all the way to completion of a multi-year, somewhat difficult, often tedious project, following somewhat arbitrary rules along the way.”
That’s close to actual job requirements in a lot of places.
That is indeed the big signaling aspect Kaplan talks about. It's still signaling, that is, what the student learns during that is considered less important.
A large amount of the value results from signaling but don't underestimate the value in taking a smart, ambitious 18 year old and putting them in a dense concentration of similar, like-minded individuals for 4 very formative years.
I really enjoyed Bryan's book. I'd always thought uni was ridiculously overpriced, but hearing it straight from the mouth of a professor really hammered the point home for me.
I believe we are on the verge of the education bubble bursting, just like the housing bubble a decade earlier
Fundamentally attending college has an implied understanding of completing college. That almost completely explains the non linear gains from graduating.
It’s similar to closing a house sale. The money earned by brokers who get the buyer to sign the contract is exponentially more than the money earned by the brokers who only get 90% of the way there.
That doesn’t mean that the value of the initial 90% of the work is 0.
Of course, this is an extreme example for illustration purposes, because real estate is a step function where the returns go from 0 to 100 at a single point.
The exponentially higher earnings of grads can similarly be explained as a step function where earnings go from 50 to 100 after a certain event. And it’s not even that surprising, because the event in question is completing the thing that you actually stepped out to do.
I guess there's a case that someone who got an online degree, even from a reputable university, doesn't allow you to draw the same inferences quite as strongly?
That's what I gather. Colleges in the US have always been a bit of a gatekeeper. If its too easily accessible to students (e.g. lower costs, distance learning, ability to work while attending, etc), then the signal is weaker since more people finish college. It's kind of like an expensive bar charging a lot for drinks. The high price ensures a certain clientele.
I think that ties in to the proliferation of higher degrees, where college is not a strong enough signal so students go on to receive higher degrees that signal more time, money and investment has been spent
I highly disagree with this one. I have one of those brand name diplomas, but the piece of paper is largely irrelevant. Nobody has cared or even asked about it since maybe 3 years out of college.
As a restrospective thought experiment, if you offered me that piece of paper in exchange for a student loan the size of my college education, I would turn it down. But if you offered me the 4-year experience I actually got for that same loan, without the brand name, I would take it in a heartbeat. (You can't actually separate the two since the brand name in part enables the college to implement the product.)
Aside from actual academic knowledge like practice with low level OS and network concepts, here's what I got from those four years that I think made a concrete difference in my life and career:
1. The personal mentorship I got from a professor, who I met during a summer internship, but he was from my comp sci department. It was serendipitous that the two circles collided, but it was crucial, and, to the point, it was enabled by the college network.
2. Meeting people through friends in college who would become co-founders or connections into other jobs.
3. Taking very specific classes on soft skills, such as writing workshops. One in particular, which I took early in college, was like getting two in depth code reviews a week for twelve weeks, except it was for my writing. That course made me fluid and precise at writing. I still suck in comparison to many of my former classmates who write professionally, but it made me a stand-out effective communicator in engineering. In retrospect I would have paid 1/4th of a semester's tuition in a heartbeat for that course (took 4 courses that semester).
4. Being surrounded by people who weren't engineers, who were formidable doers and thinkers, about other fields, such as global health policy and politics. I still remember getting my ass handed to me in a dinnertime debate by someone who was obviously more knowledgeable and more thoughtful about public policy than I was. Getting intellectually smacked down by friends regularly taught me humility and appreciation for the value of expertise in other fields.
5. Spending four years in the company of driven people with high standards. For the people who embrace it, it rubs off on you the same way working on a strong team does. It demystifies high performers and teaches you that you can turn yourself into one.
6. Due to spending time around people who had money/power, you learn to not be (as) intimidated by those people. It's a crash course in walking and talking like an "elite" whether or not you are one.
I've heard that a lot but I did get a degree from a reputable college in my home country (one of the best in France for my subject matter), yet I've only worked outside of France for my entire professional life and pretty much no French colleges are well ranked on international rankings (mostly because the rankings are biased towards much bigger institutions).
And, well, the fact that it is isn't ranked well on any of those international rankings has not been a problem for my carrier at all. I have rarely been asked where I went to university and I don't think that it's affected my carrier at all.
However the fact that I have no student debt because tuition was pretty much free has been a boon for my professional life.
Interestingly, though, it seems that in France, people place a lot of weight on which university you went to long after it becomes irrelevant... especially for the people who went to grandes écoles. I still don't understand how it matters that somebody, for example, want to les Mines 20 years after they've graduated.
But I agree with you; I've worked in a lot of places, and in all of those except France, once you have real work experience, your university degree doesn't mean a whole lot for normal engineering jobs.
It's different if you worked in France though, right? From what I understand, the grandes écoles are very similar. It's not so much that you'll get an education that's ten times better, but you'll have a degree from a school that says you've been selected for leadership.
Yes, probably, I mean I come indeed from a Grande école but since I've never actually worked in France, it's never really been asked for. And the few times when ranking was important (visas for Japan and Hong Kong), the fact that it's not well ranked internationally means that I got no exta points.
In the end, I do think that degrees matter less than what people think and that it's completely possible to have a good career without the school name or university name having much of an influence (obviously it's anecdotical and probably depends on the field). I do strongly believe that being saddled with lifelong student loans is probably more detrimental than the positive aspects of a degree in most cases (maybe with the exception of lawyers but the only those who can cope with the lifestyle)
The fact remains that most educated people are aware of the French approach to higher education and the exacting filter applied for entrance and matriculation.
As an example, in a previous job, I noted that the new French software engineer had come from INRIA and was a graduate of a Grand ecole. The fact that this resource went on to demonstrate well above average work and domain abilities was not a surprise to me.
So note that some of us do pay attention even if it is not mentioned during recruitment.
I absolutely agree that you can have a good career without having a degree (or a degree from the right school), but you will have a very tough time getting beyond a certain threshold. I understand it's very obvious in France for upper management and public/political higher positions that it's not merit-based. The same is true for most countries, with varying degrees of impact and obviousness.
But if you're not going for that threshold, you'll likely not run into issues. And if you're in niche-careers, it's probably true as well.
I have the feeling like OPs reputation theory is self fulfilling in the US and a narrow effect that came up with those paid education thing they have over there. It's like that artificial value you get for your extra money. Like wearing the brand of cloth you bought on the outside of it for everybody to see.
Well, it definitely serves a strong filtering mechanism to find people who have a certain level of probably-going-to-behave-in-ways-you-expect when you're trying to hire. Whether that leads to the most optimal outcome is not always clear, but it seems reliable enough (though boring) that many use it as a filter.
We don't have great alternative mechanisms to find employable people otherwise, and given the current unpopularity of standardized tests / uniform measures of performance or skill, what can an employer do?
Why do you feel like that, what evidence is there for your hypothesis in your personal life, or in statistics that you’re aware of?
There’s a wide variety of viewpoints on HN, so I think it’s unnecessary to speculate on what other people think, but personally the thing that doesn’t sit that well for me is that you’ve stated an opinion with nothing at all to back it up.
FWIW, having gone to both a not super reputable college (state school), and also a very reputable one, I can’t say that reputation is the “main” value, I might have benefitted from it but I wouldn’t even know. The math classes at the reputable school had much higher standards, they were harder and I learned more. I have some lifelong friends from both schools, but the group from the reputable school is generally much higher profile and further reach. I sold a business to someone I met through the reputable school. I also now work for someone I met through the state school.
I think it's almost exactly the opposite. No one cares what college I went to, but the network I built during my time at University is still paying dividends.
> "...the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé."
That might be true for software developers but it's certainly not true for any other engineering field, medicine, most sciences, etc. that require labs or other equipment. The university I attended had its own research reactor on-site for its nuclear engineering program.
It's not even really true for software developers at the top end of the spectrum. Sure, if you're entering a software career trajectory where your education is unnecessary (which is most of them these days), then, yes, going to an elite school is a waste. If you plan to be building OSes, programming languages, doing AI/ML, etc, then learning that stuff from people who know where the cutting edge is invaluable.
Before i had a degree, my father said it's really important etc because of all the things you'll learn. Now after he says it's just about making sure doors are open that would have otherwise been closed.
I guess maybe i needed to do my studies under one set of assumptions to have the motivation. Whilst only finding out on the otherside that those years were really only spent to get me my first job. And now my degree doesn't matter.
I would agree the door-opening effect is true for many walks of life but it doesn't apply to software engineering and similar disciplines.
I'm a drop out; I studied economics and have been doing very technical work (low latency application development) for over 15 years now.
Worked for UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, etc. No one ever asked me about my degree. They were all (rightfully) interested in what I can do for them.
True passion for the job will carry you much further than a piece of paper from a uni.
Did you have a hard time getting your foot in the door?
After 15 years, most people do not care anymore about your education; but when getting that first job, unless you have an impressive portfolio (and even then...), that piece of paper is huge.
With a recognised piece of paper, you can get much more easily get into a recognised company, which has a trickle down effect for the rest of your career.
I was looking for my first job during the dotcom crisis and it took me about 18 months. I took a semi-programming job at slavery-level salary just to get my foot in.
What really helped was the fact that I had spent 3 months as an unpaid intern at a reputable software house 2 years earlier.
I remember my friends mocking me back than for being a looser and an idiot for "working for free".
This sentiment (entitlement?) is even stronger among young people today. They refuse to acknowledge that when you come in with zero experience and nothing to offer and get free training - you are the real beneficiary.
You dont need to have that to get a great high paying job. Most jobs in the tech industry are talent based not merit based.
There are some areas like doctor or experimental physics where physical presence makes a lot of sense. But most education can be found and consumed much better by thinking of the internet as your entire college and then work much more on self-motivation and curiosity which are the real secrets to educating yourself.
> having a reputable college you can put on your résumé.
At what point will firms rank new grad candidates inversely proportional to the prestige of their university?
Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates. Many positions probably don't demand skills beyond the ability to write mostly CRUD apps. The pedigree doesn't really matter in that case.
All companies have these roles. Somebody needs to do the mundane work.
> At what point will firms rank new grad candidates inversely proportional to the prestige of their university?
Never.
> Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates.
But that doesn't mean you rank those people lower. It means you offer them the job at the budgeted salary. If they don't accept the job offer at the salary range you've budgeted for the position, then you move on to the next candidate.
This might make less sense if there's a strong opportunity cost (i.e., missing a candidate because they already accepted a job), but that's not typically the case for new grads.
The main value is extra curriculars being of a higher caliber at top colleges than at lower tier ones. Getting to engage with other very talented people building organizations and so on in a much more serious way matters.
There's a reason why ivy league college newspapers are far more impactful than at lower tier schools.
They’re not unrelated. Part of going to an elite school is the ability to network with older elite school members; this is literally what fraternities are for.
i dont see why the two are mutually exclusive or something. You can both have a reasonable education in a college AND have it play a role as signaling as well, because nobody is going to check what you studied in details.
For me, university was a bit more about direction-finding and serendipity. Few places can expose you to very different things in both a structured and unstructured way as college.
When I started university I was a returning student with a budding tech career. I promised myself I would get a degree, but I wasn't totally sure what benefit it would be. I thought I already had the tech skills needed to do what I wanted to do.
While taking some required political science classes I discovered the world of development cooperation. I did a bit of traveling. I decided to use my time at a 4-year to explore the world of NGOs and other large-scale initiatives. I did a study-abroad project to do some free tech work for a global nonprofit. I fell in love with a new city. I did a short masters to further my knowledge, and also see if it would be possible to combine my tech background and this new world. It was, so I did.
It's hard to know if something similar would have happened without that experience. It's hard to put a dollar amount on it, since I a) paid for my own education and b) probably earn less now that I've changed directions than I would if I hadn't. But I'm so incredibly glad I did. I also don't know how to compare this story to the many stories of people who graduate with 80k in debt and can't find a job in field in which they studied.
> I also don't know how to compare this story to the many stories of people who graduate with 80k in debt and can't find a job in field in which they studied.
I have a friend going through this scenario minus the 80k debt. The field might not exist in their location. She’s looking at relocating and losing custody of her daughter. Or working another job and staying put for her family. I’ve met a lot of brilliant people who’s ambition has been bypassed or delayed due to external factors.
Sometimes getting the brass ring means sacrificing more than you can give.
Something curiously missing from HN threads about uni is the social aspect. I consider my social experience in uni, from living with other students (instead of mom and dad) to studying abroad for a year, just as if not more valuable than the academics, and a major catalyst for finding what I wanted out of life.
There's a lot more to life than credentializing for wage slavery.
One thing I've definitely noticed in CS is that having a TA sit next to you in the computer lab and help you debug your code is a huge value add, and if it's only to track down a misplaced comma in "Introduction to C".
Doing the same over $ONLINE_SERVICE is not quite the same experience, just like a terminal-emulator-in-a-browser isn't quite the real thing when you have slightly higher and jittery lag. And an async/await model (post code on forum, get back answer anything from minutes to hours later) is not the same thing at all.
Currently a student, and I completely agree. The strain is both ways, too. Since timezones are now a very fluid concept, you're seeing courses accommodating completely new challenges in TA-ship. Some TAs have relocated entirely, which means that the course staff can be much smaller than anticipated.
For some students, they can only receive advice asynchronously and it makes it difficult to meet deadlines based on EDT timezones. Even video debugging/office hours for people in EDT is awful, despite advances in screen sharing/Zoom.
Also, I helped transition a professor to virtual instruction. They had never installed the Internet in their house before. They own no smartphone. They communicate entirely through landline and a dated desktop PC in their office. When absolutely necessary (course admin, journal paper updates) they will use Pine for email. This prof taught a 30-person graduate course in neurobiology having never touched any of the technologies they had to use. Bless that class.
I think there is a lot of value in learning in the same place that others are learning. You have a set schedule, you have people to discuss the material with, you can learn from other students, you gain experience working with peers in a group. That being said, all of this can be done without the actual institution of college as it now exists. If you could organize a small group of people that want to learn the same material then all you need is a place to meet. The only things lacking then would be access to the professor and access to a lab but those have solutions as well, you can look for someone who has already graduated from a similar program at a high level or someone working in the field and ask them if they could work with the group or answer questions and for lab work you can search out a hacker space or other community group that has the required materials or maybe split the cost of buying the equipment with your group. I'll admit there's a hard limit to how far this will go, graduates != experienced educators and some equipment will only exist at universities or research institutions but I'm pretty sure that 80% of what is currently done at college could be done in a coffee shop with good wifi.
From my experience the social aspect of college is definitely worth it. Ofc, you may find a group outside college then there is no need for that. Otherwise college is the best place to get socially better.
When MIT put their course material online (thank you Hal Abelson of SCIP fame) they explicit that weren’t thinking it would substitute for an MIT education but just as a resource for others to use for their own courses. I found it handy when I needed to brush up on my thermo (ironically I hated it when I was in school) to review the current materials (as I’d already taken the course years ago The problem sets were enough)
Yeah, the original concept of OCW wasn't really as materials directly for "end users" at all. I imagine this also helped sell the concept; "people like our current students aren't even the audience for OCW." Over time, OCW has added more things like video lectures as video became cheaper and more ubiquitous but it never had a stated objective of being a course in a box for students to consume directly.
A lot of people were underwhelmed by OCW early on because they were expecting something a lot more consumable for a self-learner--which led to MOOCs of course.
College has never gone through an event like this at the scale it currently is at. The idea that every American should attend college is a relatively new one; during the last pandemic in America only a tiny percentage of Americans went to college.
As many have said, the bulk of the value of going to college is in the signaling they're able to provide. You're paying (overpaying in my opinion) for the infrastructure they've put in place to adequately assess your abilities in a way that employers can trust.
Say you pay someone to do an inspection of your home that the gov is requiring before you can sell. Has that inspector taught you anything or made any tangible improvements to your home? No. What they've done is signal to the gov and buyers that your home passes inspections.
I think the college experience will survive precisely because the value add is the social aspect and the cross-pollination that comes from being near tons of people in lots of fields working on interesting things.
Colleges even market this aspect as the key differentiator from online classes.
In that case, I do think some refund is due on principle, because students at home in isolation definitely aren't getting that.
Depending on the place and people (i wasn't very well when I was in college), MOOCs can be better in many metrics.
- less anxiety being in IRC than in class
- more focused (less distracted by people inviting you, peer pressure)
- more communication with other students and teachers
- automatic grading systems being very exciting to keep improving solutions rapidly
As a GA Tech student for two years now (GA Tech's OMSCS program is all MOOCS), MOOCS are generally horrible ways to actually teach.
-I have no idea why anyone would have anxiety about being in class, I don't think that's a common problem.
-There's less focus in online classes because now you have to manage all the different ways you have to communicate with everyone, official and unofficial, in the hopes you can get enough interaction to slog your way through the horribly written assignments and figure out what they actually want you to do.
-There's essentially zero communication with teachers -- they're almost totally absent, communication with other students can be helpful, or not, and you don't always know. There are typically two or three TAs for up to 600 students, so any kind of focused interaction with a TA is almost unheard of, and even if you do get that their level of expertise is often in question.
-autograders work well for some very defined sorts of problems, but they don't work at all for most workflows. The TAs, in my experience, spend most of their limited time fixing autograder screwups.
> I have no idea why anyone would have anxiety about being in class, I don't think that's a common problem.
Like 1 in 5 college students[1], I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. I frequently have anxiety in class, especially before the professor starts talking and is just scanning the room and occasionally making eye contact with me, or if I'm asked to interact with other students.
That said, I still think that MOOCs aren't remotely comparable to real college classes.
You didn't claim they weren't, but I just want to point out how each of those points is very, very subjective. For me:
- I'd much rather be in-person, where I can better gauge what others are communicating and more readily have two-way communication about the material.
- I'm way less focused when on my own computer, on my own time.
- I find I communicate way less purely online than I would in-person.
- Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming, as it can only really test inputs and outputs, and misses a ton of nuance. I want to also know if my code sucks, regardless of it producing the correct output or not.
The main thing MOOCs do well is a solved problem with or without MOOCs--namely lecture videos.
Discussion boards are mostly a tire fire; they're mostly useful for dealing with platform problems. They can probably be better when you restrict access to a qualified class but they don't really scale.
>Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming
I'd probably say automatic grading sucks, "even for programming." At least automatic grading can evaluate outputs of non-trivial programs. Programming is one of the few areas where autograding works for non-trivial, not multiple choice, questions.
I concur with boards being useless in general. It's too slow, not predictable. That's why I liked the moocs IRC channels. It was a live place where we could discuss things and resolves issues quickly.
> There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which is hard virtually.
Maybe even this is not that hard.
People already compete virtually on mobile and console games of all kinds of complexity just to see their names at the top of a "leaderboard"
> what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college?
If you can tell from a resume someone attended in-person, it gives their degree more academic integrity. Not that you can't cheat if you attend in-person, but it's a whole lot harder to pay someone to take the exam for you.
How much of Harvard and MIT's catalogs are actually online in their entirety? (incl. textual resources, coursework, answers, etc.) IIRC it was more like a few handfuls of introductory courses.
Not too surprising that the experience wasn’t good. Having taught in-person and online before, I can guarantee that these students ended up with a sub-optimal experience at best. Teaching online is drastically different than in-person and is not something you can easily pick-up in short notice. Made worse is that they were in the middle of a syllabus designed for in-person instruction. How material is delivered, what type of assignments to give, how to even grade those assignments, etc. - all of that needs to be tailored to an online environment in order to have a good experience. You can’t just “adapt” it like driving on the opposite side of the road. And this is also ignoring tooling needed to make the online experience productive.
I believe the colleges when they say that their professors are doing their best. That they are delivering the same high level material. However, that is willfully ignoring the fact that content is a very small part of the college education experience. The delivery, environment, and people are what gives college its value. Lose that and the cost, especially for these high ranking colleges, is not worth it.
I've not taught online, but I have a close colleague who was doing it for years pre-pandemic, and another colleague who did a bit of it and my impressions are the same.
My sense is that major universities doing online stuff have video production crews (from Communications etc) and everything is heavily edited and redone. It's more like a television show than anything else. Much more preplanning, and interactions with the students are much more structured.
It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you, while you're uprooted like a minor refugee and living who knows where that you didn't plan to.
Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students. This is especially true that universities will be prepared this fall, and were not in late winter/early spring.
My sense is that a lot of the schadenfreude and resentment here on HN and elsewhere is due to a general sense that something is really very wrong with higher education at the moment, at least in the US, and wanting to see it radically reformed. I agree, but I think the problems are not really related to the value of in-person degree education vs what you can get online. The real issues have to do with the cost of the education in general, how degrees are viewed in vocational settings, and costs and spending within higher educational institutions. Until those things change, it will take a lot more than SARS-CoV-2 to change things.
I know Columbia, way back when I attended, had some classes with the lectures online that way. However, your response is showing a lack of understanding of what I mean by teaching online is different. If you go with the heavily edited lecture video style, that is likely not done real time. Instead, it becomes a watch offline experience in which case my gut reaction would be to flip the classroom. If the instructor wasn’t already using that technique, they would likely have to redo their entire syllabus and teaching style.
Its not so much that anything is wrong with college, it is that the cost isn't commiserate with the expected payout (for most). Yet we, as a society, push people who are barely adults into a lifetime of debt slavery like sheep to the slaughter.
I hope that is true. I graduated from undergraduate 10 years ago. My alma mater used to be very good bang for your buck, arguably the best traditional engineering and nursing school in the state, less than 5000 a year, accept almost everyone and fail the ones who won't make it early so they can do other things. But pressure from the state government shifted funding to retention rates so that model of education was dying.
This stat is pretty much always just a direct comparison between grads, right? I wonder how different it would be if you took into account confounders like economic class. I assume much of the widening is college becoming standard, and therefore the only people who don't attend are those who either can't and are disadvantaged in general or those who don't feel particularly ambitious about their career
> My sense is that major universities doing online stuff have video production crews (from Communications etc) and everything is heavily edited and redone. It's more like a television show than anything else. Much more preplanning, and interactions with the students are much more structured.
For some large classes in certain universities, yes. In the rest it's a regular professor giving a live lecture who is now doing it over Zoom.
> Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students.
One of my classes (mandatory writing GenEd) had an online version, so we get the videos from last quarter, and Zoom discussion sections.
So no, we're getting lectures over Zoom at the UCs, at least. If my group of friends had the inclination to talk about serious school stuff, and not literally anything else that keeps our minds off of the state of the world, I could ask people about the situation from anywhere from Rice to Stanford to Princeton. But we don't talk about this, because it's heavy, and if we can shrug that burden off for the time we have together, then that's enough. [0]
Going to back to UCSD in particular, the Chancellor's name is particularly acrimonious in connotation. A couple days ago, I wrote a post here on the state of UCSD's much touted dining [1]. Spoiler: it's not pretty. If you look at the privately shared memes, there's a lot of negative sentiment.
I'm at Stanford, and at least within the CS department, the online classes are nothing like you describe. Some professors are using video recordings from previous quarters, while in many other cases, it _is_ some off-the-cuff Zoom meeting. As a lecturer, it's been difficult to transition.
I have my doubts that students will be back in the fall. The contagiousness of this virus is not going away, and students (particularly undergraduates, almost all of which live in dorms at Stanford) are far too densely connected for social distancing to be effective.
Hey 0d9eooo, with respect you have no idea what's actually happening. My wife attends one of the colleges mentioned in TFA, and at that college everything that you imagine cannot be the case, is actually the case.
> major universities doing online stuff have video production crews
Yes, but those crews don't have the bandwidth to suddenly help every professor transition to online teaching in the space of two weeks.
Also, the online versions of courses which those professionally produced videos are part of, are priced lower than the in-person courses which are currently being taught on Zoom. However at my wife’s college the price has not come down, no partial refunds are being given, no deferments are being allowed, and no transitions to part-time are being allowed.
In other words, students get to choose between leaving the course or paying the same vast amount of money for a reduced level of service.
> It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you
No, that's precisely what it is. One week all classes were in person, then the college cancelled all classes for two weeks to transition, then all classes resumed on Zoom. Neither the professors nor the students had any more warning than that. The college did pay for a Zoom Enterprise subscription so that classes aren’t time-limited by Zoom’s free tier, but that was the extent of the help given to professors. Many professors have never used video conferencing before, or have poor WiFi. Many students have no private quiet spaces to join chats because they’re sharing accommodation in a very expensive city. There was inadequate time and no training or help for professors to adjust lesson plans or teaching resources, and library and printing facilities were closed to students.
The college’s entire response was very ad-hoc. This is perfectly understandable in the circumstances, all of us are making it up as we go along. The problem is that this institution is still charging the same sky-high tuition (six figures for a course) to students who are pouring into it their life savings, or going into lifelong debt. Meanwhile the college is delivering less value and sitting on an enormous multi-billion dollar endowment.
We’re not involved in the lawsuit, but we certainly understand where it’s coming from.
I think maybe you misunderstood what I was saying / I wasn't being clear.
I agree with you actually... what I'm suggesting is that the current situation with online teaching isn't really generalizable to long-term experiences of it, or the situation where something is planned with online teaching in mind.
I know things will vary by institution for sure, but for a lot of schools going forward they're going to try to avoid the problems you're mentioning.
My guess is even when students return, there will be things like substituting large lectures with online material, etc. Colleagues of mine at other institutions are being told that going forward training and skills in online instruction is being expected of everyone. This sounds obvious but what it means in practice is that the university probably won't find what happened this past semester acceptable.
There's a lot of issues for sure, but I don't think that the long-term experiences of online instructions can be generalized from this past semester.
Are universities prepared for something like this though? Do they have some kind of pandemic insurance that will cover the costs of the entire student body if the government shuts the university down? Because I can see that being a very costly insurance.
The colleges/universities that aren't managed by complete idiots use those endowments to hedge exactly this sort of risk.
There were a lot of articles over the past few years about various teeny tiny colleges investing their entire endowment in funds and yelling from the rooftops that they out-performed Harvard's endowment.
The bill is going to come due. Over the next two years, a lot of small colleges that were investing for annual returns instead of for ensuring institutional survival are going to collapse under the quadruple whammy of refunds, lawsuits, decreased enrollment, and decimated endowment.
The best way to treat an endowment is like a retirement fund, except the goal is for the institution to never die and therefore to never exhaust the endowment. If the endowment is invested and makes gains, the institution can grow the endowment (which is necessary for it not to be devalued by inflation over time) and also spend some of the returns.
While I wouldn't argue leaving endowments completely untouched in this situation is necessary, I think saying that "the colleges/universities that aren't managed by complete idiots use these endowments to hedge exactly this rot of risk" and criticizing them for investing their endowments is a dramatic oversimplification of the situation.
Online class is suitable for a range of courses, but not all. Specifically lab classes where equipment is required. You can't have a remote lab class, it's impossible. Students should absolutely be reimbursed for such cases.
Do you think this could be alleviated with something like VR? Even cheap VR with just your phone in a VR headset holder.
To me, it feels like a technical problem. Staring at a small screen in a browser window vs being immersed. Even being able to "see" your classmates or an avatar for them might help.
Sorry, I don't have specific resources to point to although I guess I could eventually take the time to do a write-up. I used to be an in-person instructor at a development bootcamp (also taught prior to this). While there, I was also trained on how to do instruction online for the rare instances where it had to happen. This is where I learned most of it.
I'm also an avid educational content watcher, so I've seen and tried to learn from the best educational content creators over the past decade or so. I've also followed the EdTech space, as a hobby, since before the MOOC acronym even came into existence. Combine all of that with tangentially related hobbies like:
* watching and reading about game design and how to incorporate it into traditional learning styles,
* listening to how podcasts and online content is created/delivered,
and that's where I learned about teaching online effectively. I wish I could continue working in this space, but well... that's a story for another time.
The best online class I ever took had this thing called "muddy buddies." Basically each week we were required to post questions about something we "didn't understand" from the assigned reading, and your assigned muddy buddy is supposed to answer. The genius thing about it is I would be reading the textbook and trying to find something I "didn't understand," but I didn't want to post a question that was too easy. So any potentially confusing part of the reading I would think about more closely until it was no longer confusing. Basically I was motivated to read everything closely because I was trying to find something that was actually hard to understand.
If I go into a restaurant and order pork, but get served beef, I have a right as a customer to complain. It doesn't matter whether beef is in some way better than pork, or whether other customers are perfectly happy with beef, or whether I eat beef myself at other times. I order pork, I expect pork.
If the restaurant can't serve me pork, for example because they've run out, then the right answer is still not to just assume I'll be ok with beef instead.
I don't see how "this other thing is of equal value" (which is debatable in itself) is a defense to a claim that I'm not getting the product or service that I signed up for?
This analogy can still go either way. You ate half the meal. Then there they had to kick you out to finish at home with a doggy bag. You're losing out on some ambience, but the thing you showed up to achieve will be achieved.
Note that there are already refunds for at least some of the in-person stuff such as dorms and gym access. So were already in a position of compromise and partial refund. It's just an argument of what that number should be.
The first half of the meal, the portion they ate, was what they paid for. The meal was suddenly changed halfway through, but there was no option to stop paying. And in this case, the first half of the meal doesn't mean anything without the second half.
Like if you went to a 'make-your-own-pizza' place and were forced to leave the building by a fire marshal after having placed your pizza, with custom toppings, in the oven.
They have presumably already paid for this semester. That's the issue. They paid for one educational experience and environment and it's been switched to one that is presumably lower value in many respects.
More like you ordered a three course meal, they brought out the appetizer, then kicked you out with a doggy bag of the main course, and told you they’d messenger you dessert later.
Better analogy would be if you go to drink overpriced coffee in a fancy place, but midway the drinking they have to unexpectedly close the shop so they take your porcelain cup and pour the leftovers to a takeaway cup and usher you out to drink the leftovers in the alley.
> but the thing you showed up to achieve will be achieved
That's going to be the sticking point, I guess. You could say that giving me beef instead of pork achieves the aim of feeding me just as well. I might disagree (in this analogy, imagine I'm a Hindu).
This argument doesn't really work. It appears that the college students want the credits and they want to finish out the semester, but they want a refund of an arbitrary amount of money. If you order pork and they bring out beef, it's reasonable to not pay for the beef if the restaurant ran out of pork, but it's not reasonable to eat the beef (which costs more) and then demand 40% off the price of pork because it's not what you wanted.
There are two critical points to keep in mind: cost of instruction increased, and this was something the schools couldn't control. A refund for the last few weeks of the semester with no credit makes sense (the students can withdraw and get a prorated refund). An arbitrary refund when the students have access to the material and instructors and get the same credits is not reasonable.
if you really want to force the restaurant analogy, you could say it's sort of like when the restaurant is having a bad night. the service is really slow and some of the dishes don't come out quite right. if it's just a fluke, a good restaurant will comp most of the meal without you even having to ask.
the problem with this analogy is that a restaurant just isn't very similar to a college. it's really important to a restaurant not to lose a good customer over a single bad experience, and it doesn't cost them much to comp a single meal (it costs even less to give credit towards a future meal). a college doesn't have to care that much about any particular student, but giving refunds causes serious cashflow issues.
that said, I don't think what the students are asking is necessarily unreasonable. if you go to a cheap state school and you're still getting the degree, I'd say you don't have much to complain about. if you're paying $60k for world-class facilities and face time with world-class researchers, I'd say the institution should do at least something to make you whole.
A "bad night" because it was hit by a tornado. Your wording implies the universities did something wrong. It's not like they could have done anything differently. They weren't responsible for the pandemic and they were legally obligated to shut down.
> I'd say the institution should do at least something to make you whole
I'd say it is unreasonable. They're not asking for a generic "something to make them whole". They want all the benefits plus a healthy refund. I don't know what the legal basis for their argument would be. Almost certainly they have lawyers who expect bad publicity to force universities to pay. That kind of rubs me the wrong way.
I have no idea whether there's a legal basis for the argument, I'm just stating my opinion on what would be a fair outcome.
> They want all the benefits plus a healthy refund.
I don't think this is an accurate portrayal of the situation, unless you think the entire value of a college education is instruction, grading, and the piece of paper at the end. the school I went to was very much like this: I went to class, got good grades, graduated, and got a good job. no fun, no frills, just business. it was pretty cheap though, so I can't say I didn't get my money's worth.
I don't think people pay $60k a year for the "just business" experience. if they're not walking around the beautiful campus, going to events, or using expensive science equipment, they're not getting their money's worth anymore. online class is a sad substitute for this experience.
There's no doubt that the on campus experience is valuable. "all the benefits" was a bad choice of words. Maybe a better way to say it is that they want to choose which parts they get to pay for (the credits, the material, online interaction with the instructor, grading, homework, exams) but then be refunded for other parts related to the on campus experience. I'd say that's reasonable if and only if the university saved money as a result. Not only did they not save money, it cost them more money to shift formats. I want to reiterate that I'm not opposed to a refund, but I do oppose the refund they're asking for.
> I'd say that's reasonable if and only if the university saved money as a result. Not only did they not save money, it cost them more money to shift formats.
That would be part of the reason universities are getting money from the government through this, as compensation for their efforts, and for taking care of students. For all that has cost the school, they've also got a lot less costs (residential utilities, food, campus entertainment).
And business continuity would behoove them to have had _some_ contingency in place. Alas, my partner, who works in university administration, has seen just how little many universities have had, if any, for having to shift to remote learning, partially or completely.
ultimately this is an argument about who gets to eat a shit sandwich that isn't really the fault of anyone involved. personally, I'm a bit more sympathetic to the students than the large institution, but I can understand your perspective. I certainly don't want schools to go under from refunding tuition.
as I understand it, there's a certain amount of "funny money" going on with private institutions. the actual cost of a year of school doesn't reconcile with tuition receipts; it gets supplemented with donations, state funds, and returns on the endowment. this makes it sort of hard to put a dollar value on what a fair tuition refund would look like.
Colleges who charge $60k a year tend to advertise the student experience and everything that's not "just business" quite a lot to prospective applicants.
> They want all the benefits plus a healthy refund.
Is the benefit the college credit (which you seem to imply), or the education? Because they're not getting the same education. Your argument seems to be "well they'll still get credit, so what's the problem?".
As much as I wish it were better, most online courses offered by universities do not come close to the in-person experience. Their real goal/outcome is to increase access.
Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person and have assignments and curriculums that match. They can't redo that appropriately to be equally effective within a week or two. Few could do it well given over a year doing online only.
Tools are being built and the experience will improve thanks to this global reset.
Education is a space that hasn't really been disrupted ever. Definitely isn't happening within a few weeks.
Why was this downvoted? I failed a class and took the online version once so I got to see both sides.
The online version had:
1) lots of busywork for the sake of busywork (to make up for attendance?)
2) much poorer instruction. Like everything felt like it was written by someone (really a group of people) who didn’t understand the subject very well, which was strange because the in person class was taught by a DR. with a very good understand and a strong passion for it.
3) no organic classroom interaction, people making friends that way have to be an extreme exception. It almost felt like this was actively discouraged to avoid a liability? I’m not sure, but that’s a huge part of the value of going to class that’s totally gone now.
4) and because of that no real discussion (you had discussion boards but those are more like public essays than real conversations.)
The only reason it’s better than just reading a book and doing exercises is that all the administrators recognize you’ve done it, the whole situation is just really dumb.
It was downvoted, because many people here want in person classes to be useless waste of time. They don't want to hear they are better then online. That is mostly due to high price of price of us college.
But imo, content issues are fixable, it just takes way more time. Good online courses with good content and good exercises will become more common.
What will be harder is to simulate the social effects and mutual communication, that will be fixable too in time. That will however require also changes outside of school - people will have to learn how to find friendships and communities without institutional support of school.
Online courses I've taken have been much better than in-person courses.
Online courses have several advantages:
1) The lecturer can prepare a video, refine it, and have others review it before it makes it to the students. Errors can be corrected and annotations can be added.
2) Quizzes, tests, and projects can be effectively randomized to dissuade cheating (see coursera courses).
3) Other resources can be linked directly in the material.
4) Written information for the courses can be intermixed with video lectures.
5) Asking questions is easy and doesn't disrupt the rest of the class.
6) You learn at your own rate.
Most of my more challenging courses at university (math and engineering) did not have any discussion anyway, and the instruction was extremely poor. If Khan Academy or Coursera had existed at the time, I'd have done much better using those courses than learning from my actual professors.
That doesn’t sound like an undergrad online course. Universities could make courses with all of those features but IME and looking at what my friends have seen in theirs they don’t. I’m not sure if it’s an institutional requirement or if it’s because they know they can get away without it and don’t bother.
Most of that is because those are hard requirements to fulfill for most professors. Video production is pretty difficult to do well. The university I teach for basically offered no help in that realm in our transition. They basically just told us we had to transition to online in two days, gave us some bullcrap professional development on how to use Canvas, and then fed us to the wolves.
Make sure to blame the university, not the professors. We're trying our best with almost no help.
The disruption taught us that education is more than what we think of when we imagine the word studying.
Khan Academy exists, and has existed for a while.
The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal.
Online education was/is the holy grail of 2000 era layman ideas of education.
Free, world class, available at your finger tips, at any time, educational content.
Yet We know that with this world class information and self selected motivated students (!!) only a tiny fraction of the class will finish.
In contrast, most people who get in, finish college.
In person education beats online education hollow.
Matter of fact even the work from home enthusiasm will wane and return to office work.
There are too many things people do by being in proximity to each other which may have nothing to do with the “mission”, but make the mission possible.
I went from lurking on HN to joining during the "MOOC rush" exactly because people did not seem to get that for the broad student population, online is nowhere near as useful as in person. While there are some percentage of people who have the motivation and skills to get out of online systems everything they would get out of in-class, the percentage is small.
For example, when I am teaching a class, it is a dynamic process. I am responding to people's questions, they are responding to my response, etc. Most of that goes away online. There are some attempts to recreate it, but most students just do not find it is the same.
You put your finger on it exactly: "most people who get in, finish."
But that doesn't address the article. I am not a lawyer, but the suit seems foolish to me. Colleges were ordered to close. That seems relevant to me.
Studying in person has significantly different results.
The students are askign for partial refunds for tuition, not just room and board. I think this is a fair ask, and should be recompensed in some way or the other.
Yes, colleges were mostly told to close although some were closing at least for undergraduates before the orders came down.
>The students are askign for partial refunds for tuition, not just room and board. I think this is a fair ask, and should be recompensed in some way or the other.
I'm sympathetic. The students aren't getting what they paid for. It's no one in particular's fault, but the service being paid for is being delivered in degraded form. I'm not sure you can even argue that, in general, the students will still get credit for this semester's courses because some classes probably can't be completed and, for a variety of reasons, many students will probably lose part of this semester and end up tacking on time to their degree as a result.
>The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal.
As a counter point to this, roughly 1/2 of med students attend class in person never or rarely. They use online resources because they think it's more efficient. They still pay the 50k a year for med school because they need the credential and it's the gateway for the clinical instruction in years 3/4 that has to be done in person.
The problem with the MOOC model is that it doesn't serve as a credential that people trust
> In contrast, most people who get in, finish college.
> In person education beats online education hollow.
This isn't really true.
"According to the National Center for Education Statistics, just 41% of first-time full-time college students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, and only 59% earn a bachelor’s in six years."
>Among all MOOC participants, 3.13 percent completed their courses in 2017-18, down from about 4 percent the two previous years and nearly 6 percent in 2014-15.
>Certainly 55,000 people got access to education they might not otherwise have had. But "rather than creating new pathways at the margins of global higher education," the authors write, "MOOCs are primarily a complementary asset for learners within existing systems."
They do allude to a construct called "Verfied Students" which I have no idea about, which have higher but significantly varying completion rates.
> And among the "verified" students, 46 percent completed in 2017-18, compared to 56 percent in 2016-17 and about 50 percent the two previous years.
I have never encountered how that cohort was constructed, however if we are to start breaking down sub groups of students from general numbers, your data shows that non-profit and public institutions have near 60% graduation rates at 6 years.
In general a random student will more will likely graduate from a college, than a random person starting a MOOC.
It’s not really a meaningful comparison though - MOOCs have a lower (zero) barrier to entry, and a lower (zero) price of dropping. College is expensive, requires admission, and confers actual credit/degrees.
I view a MOOC as similar to a well funded public library. A fantastic tool for entertainment, current students, and professionals looking for very specific things. But it’s not a replacement for guided education.
>The MOOC rush is over. We know the organic retention rates are abysmal.
I don't think I've ever completed a MOOC. When I get what I want out of it I drop it. Now if I was paying for it or if completion was a requirement for a job or promotion I think I'd be more invested in completing the course.
The lack of structure and pressure is also a thing. In a traditional class you must show up or miss out. MOOCs are available at all times forever, which means you can watch them “someday”, which is usually the same as “never”.
Honestly I'd rather have the MOOCs there so I can access them as though they were a library. You get more context than on Stackoverflow but you don't have to commit to several classes or find out early on that you picked the wrong course.
In retrospect, the idea that MOOCs could come anywhere close to replacing colleges was folly. While not universally available, the tools for self education have been available for a long time in major metropolitan areas, and we know that serious self education there is a relatively rare thing.
VR is still not R. At some point you want to recreate body language, relative positioning, and you want the interface to get away from intruding on the experience.
The whole point of things like technology is to make things easier, keyboards and mice make it possible to manipulate tools to increase the amount of actions we can execute by using programmed automation (for example).
> Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person
Generally, professors are not trained to teach at all. They’re trained to research.
That being said, I was already teaching a hybrid online and in person course, so the transition was (at least from my perspective) pretty seamless. We’ll see how the students feel after we receive evaluations.
Online classes can work, but it makes sense that students are frustrated by courses put together quickly due to unforeseen circumstances.
I've been a student of Georgia Tech's online Master's program for a few semesters now. They've had years to iterate based on previous students' feedback. I am learning an incredible amount for a decent price. But it is a Master's program and involves a lot of self-motivated research. Also, it costs roughly $850 per semester (if you take only one course). I'm not sure I'd have done it if it had cost thousands.
GT's MSCS is a totally different instruction model. It's all MOOCS, not focused online learning with regular sized classes. Most of the classes have 600 students in them.
I guess this is a consequence of building an educational system that is for profit and where student pay a (substantiel) part of their tuition. European universities have also closed, yet I still have to hear about any complaints.
In fact, it seems like the Corona crisis will boost university applications in Europe - If you can't have your gab year and find work you might as well just study. In the US it seems like we will see the opposite effect - Less people will apply and commence studies.
If you have to hear about complaints, you are not in Spain, that I am fairly sure of.
(Am a profesor at a School of engineering here...).
Also because they pay much less than in the States, they feel less agraviated.
While students do pay ridiculous tuition at private universities, very few universities in the US are actually "for profit". The administrators might make insane salaries but there are no investors profiting except in the case of hedge fund managers playing with multi billion dollar endowments.
In the UK you have almost as many complaints regarding the second-half of the school year evaporating with additional news about the universities themselves starting to panic because international students were their primary source of funding and that looks to be drying up.
Citizens pay a lot less than international students, and universities have come to rely upon the money from those international students. The threat of not having international students for a year or two is causing some panic and it is expected that some of the more marginal universities will close.
Well back in 2008 US universities actually saw an increase in applications for programs. It was (and still is) fairly easy for students to get federal and private student loans (which could be deferred for 1-3 years), so the line of thought was if they could not find a job anyways, they might as well use the time to ramp up their credentials.
Maybe I am reading into it, but it seems like your comment implies this is a flaw in the US educational system versus the European system. I would argue this is an example of the opposite. By having the price hidden from them, the students have removed from them the most important signal to decide whether they are getting something of value.
I am not pointing out a flaw, merely a perceived difference.
Personally I don't really buy into the monetization-of-every-aspect-of-life. I did not take my education for its monetary value and I am more than happy to have been removed from that concern. That is a privilege I am more than happy to pay forward to current students.
Even if I had bought into that way of thinking and paid tuition up front, I am not sure how I could have used that information to decide on a major? Under all circumstances I would put myself in position for the highest paid role, regardless of tuition?
Anyways, this is a complex topic and one of the most fundamental differences in the European and American way of thinking. I don't see any right or wrong, just differences.
I am doing a course on epidemiology this semester and I find it is once of the best courses I have ever taken, offline or online. It is offered, usually, in both online and in-person formats. It is very well designed and has rich content and opportunity for online interaction. I get the impression the in-person version is just as good as the online one. So why is this one so good when so many suck? Two possibilities:
1. The course has had an online format for several years and is thus experienced with online delivery.
2. It is a well designed course, regardless of delivery format. Which means only a reasonable amount of deliberation and care is needed to make it good for online delivery.
My conclusion is that I don't think the format is the issue. I think the issue is that most courses are poorly designed in the first place. Insufficient effort and resources are applied and the result is crap.
This comes with the caveats that many topics are best learnt in practical settings (chemistry, some biology, arts etc) so they translate poorly to online only.
My college extended the ability to drop the class for a full refund to nearly the end of the semester. No lawsuit needed. For schools refusing to do this, I absolutely think people should be suing though.
I am all for online education, but it's hit and miss how comparable it is. The course I'm taking at the moment is nearly exactly the same without it's in-class component: I wasn't even attending the in-person classes before the pandemic! But plenty of other classes I took were largely for the hands-on experience which couldn't be replicated over the web.
I don't know what the implications would be on finances / resource allocation for the school, but IMO everyone's education should be "paused" right now, including K-12. If you were going to graduate in six months, and the Coronavirus ends up closing campus for six months, you'll now graduate in 12 months, after you've had your due time on campus. And that additional six months of schooling comes at no additional cost.
If I had a reservation at a restaurant before the Coranvirus, and the restaurant is now closed, I'm not forced to buy a take-out order instead—I just don't pay. That really sucks for all the people who work at the restaurant, but I don't think forcing customers to pay for a service they didn't receive is the right solution.
All students and pupils are forming a chain where each promotion is expected to move up one year, replaced by the next promotion. There ain't a pause capability in the educational system, things MUST move forward every year at a define schedule. If anything, that's a good example of what a "deadline" is.
It can ignore a few months of disturbance, as demonstrated by long strikes or major events. It can't skip one cycle.
We can't skip a cycle, but we can move the students up even though they haven't actually completed their education?
Make no mistake, the situation sucks for everyone. But it seems to me that actually educating people should take priority over meeting an arbitrary deadline.
Apparently schools can let children move on no matter what. When unable to hold end of year exams (end of middle school and high school), they will use the current grades so far and do away without any exam.
For universities, it's gonna be a lot more tricky. They shouldn't get away with charging up to 50k a year for nothing. They can't deliver labs and practical trainings. There is no continuity between an undergraduate and an postgraduate, probably somewhere else.
> Apparently schools can let children move on no matter what.
Colleges could also snap their fingers and mail everyone diplomas in exchange for nothing, if they felt so inclined.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that schools aren't just meaningless certificate factories and that the students who attend them actually learn stuff. Just because the students are being moved up doesn't mean they're adequately prepared for next year.
I agree, there is training that can't be skipped. I think it's mostly a problem for higher education, not for schools.
If a child didn't fully learn to write, or a high schooler didn't complete calculus, they can catch up the next year. (schools will probably have to adjust their curriculum slightly to catch up). Schools don't teach anything major that can't be redone or skipped.
Universities don't have this luxury. If a future dentist didn't train on a procedure this year, too bad because that was the only time it's covered. Gonna have to discover it in the field if it comes up?
I hate this, but they'll have to cope, just like those who lost their jobs and those who lost family and friends.
It sucks, but the real issue is that there's no social safety net for these types of folks in many places, which makes my first sentence sound kinda uncaring, but there's not many other options.
The other major issue is that, for a lot of the students in college, they don't really even need the degree as anything other than a key to the gatekeeping tool used by employers. I'm not saying education is worthless, it's important to have a well rounded knowledge of the world, but you don't need that degree to be a sales person or a realtor or a welder or a carpenter or maybe even a developer. In other words, we shouldn't be forcing them to choose: degree or livelihoods.
This sucks, and I feel for everyone (I'm unemployed as well) but we all will have to deal with some discomfort, I'm really sorry to say that though.
Yes but degrees aren't needed, that's the point. I'm talking about the gatekeeping aspect, specifically, in that part. I know that doesn't hold for every degree or cert, for sure.
really get's tough when the 'entry' point of those grades now has double the students (new incoming students; not those also repeating a grade), as people will want their kids to start schooling at the 'normal' (maybe this changes?) age.
Colleges have the ability to accept fewer incoming freshmen. And if K-12 schools were also delaying graduation, there would be fewer applicants.
One option for K-12 would be to take fewer incoming Kindergardeners, perhaps by moving up the birthday cutoff date. Parents can get over themselves; this isn't a normal situation and some shared sacrifice is necessary.
None of this is a good, but I find it preferable to the current status quo. Making sure students get the education they're due should take priority over meeting arbitrary dates.
Turn education into a business and students will treat education like a business. You can't expect goodwill in a crisis when you squeeze people like a US college.
I think the fascinating thing about these lawsuits is that they'll revolve around two questions:
First, what did the schools promise? And, did they deliver on it?
I doubt it's spelled out in a contract but based on most schools' marketing, the "promise" includes instruction, state of the art classrooms & labs, access to professors, peers, extra curricular activities, dorms, a beautiful campus, and a number of other things. Obviously they've delivered some form of instruction and potentially a way to connect with peers.. but was it the quality or even the product promised/implied?
The easiest court cases to win in practice involve schools promising students that their degree will land them a good job that will pay enough for them to pay back the student fees without problems.
These promises typically happen when people are doubting about signing the contract, and universities are more like "don't worry about the loan, you'll get such a nice job afterwards that you'll be rich and this will feel like pocketchange".
The student that finish university and aren't able to land a good enough job due to their education can sue and do often win.
That's much simpler to handle in court than the questions you are considering, but it requires actually finishing the degree.
I wouldn't take this as an indicator in general that online classes are good or bad (I'm personally not a fan). I think everyone can agree that the quality of classes is going to go down when you have to stop in-person classes mid-semester with no time to prepare for an online transition. Teaching online is a different style that doesn't necessarily work for every instructor or for every subject for that matter.
At the same time, university is extraordinarily expensive. If you are paying 50K/year and not getting what you paid for, you are going to feel like you are owed something. Add on the fact that many students' parents have lost all or parts of their incomes, or fear that they will going forward, and it would be surprising if we didn't see these lawsuits.
Ultimately, it's going to depend what is in the contracts that were signed. If there's a force majure clause favoring the universities, then the students may not have a case. If not, then yeah, they aren't getting what they paid for and should be entitled to refunds.
People focus a lot on whether online can replicate the in-person experience of networking, building relationships, etc. The other part of it is that student tuition pay for the use of facilities as well, not just classrooms, but also the recreation center and other campus amenities. So in other words, not all the money went into the "intangibles", but rather the very real tangibles.
Another comparison would be to prepay for a sit down experience at a high end restaurant, only to be told the restaurant shut down and you're actually going to actually have to get the food delivered. Presumably you'd want a partial refund not just because you didn't get the "magical vibe", but also because you literally did not sit in the physical space for 2+ hours.
What’s the point of paying for college, if you’re stuck behind a webcam?
Yes, you can learn some things, but you can also learn it by just watching YouTube.
The whole point of being physically present in college, is to commingle with your peers. Because surely, you’re not going to make friends over Zoom. That’s just pretty damn lame.
Of course, you hope to sharpen a few skills, and learn a few more things in the 4 years, but just being present is part of the experience. But you’re definitely not going to make a life long friend over Zoom, as opposed to having beers or just chilling at a house party, after your midterms are done.
Colleges should offer online education for $1. It’s useful, but not quite the same.
>What’s the point of paying for college, if you’re stuck behind a webcam?
>Yes, you can learn some things, but you can also learn it by just watching YouTube.
This relies on heavy assumptions.
I recently had a few programming classes with lecturer who has 15 years of experience in industry and a lot of in academia
Not only his lectures are at very good level - best practices, industry standards but also very fresh technology and additionally you have an opportunity to ask questions.
It's not that easy to find this kind of materials on Youtube or even paid services.
Youtube often covers topics briefly, so you have to try to find blogs of an actual experts.
I feel lucky to live in a part of the world where good education is free. In France, you even get some money and an apartment from the state if you need it to study.
> "Some estimate that they could lose up to $1 billion this year as they brace for downturns in student enrollment..."
3.7 million kids graduating this year, 70% of them planning on going to college, and probably 100% of their parents wondering if they should encourage their kid to defer for a year until things get back to normal.
The drop in enrollment could be lessened a bit by lowering tuition for pandemic-related online classes, if required again (more than likely). Especially since many of those who take the year off may never return. If the colleges were smart they'd think about this before digging their heals in.
>3.7 million kids graduating this year, 70% of them planning on going to college, and probably 100% of their parents wondering if they should encourage their kid to defer for a year until things get back to normal.
I can only imagine. It's by no means a given that all universities will even be open for the fall term--and it's hard for me to imagine it makes sense to start college under those circumstances. Of course, it's also not a given what the options for other activities will be if you just go ahead and defer for a year.
> probably 100% of their parents wondering if they should encourage their kid to defer for a year until things get back to normal.
Or on the flip side, everyone who starts this fall will have an advantage in the hiring market 4 years from now when fewer than normal graduates are entering the workforce due to those who encouraged their kids to take a year off now.
I understand the frustration by the students, but I think there are a lot of parts of society and the economy where we are going to have to assume good-faith efforts to "make do" over the next year, and not get lost in the legalese. I mean, are we also demanding refunds for:
- Public schools? I pay a lot of property tax to public schools. They aren't running, but teachers are still getting paid. If we demand refunds from colleges, why can't we demand back-property-taxes?
- Parks and recreation? I paid taxes for state and local parks which are shut down, and I'm not allowed to use.
- The court system? We paid taxes for a functioning police and justice system, which where I am (Seattle) has basically shut down except for flat-out murder.
- Zoos, museums aquariums, and other civic institutions I can't access
I don't think it's fair or practical to try to make a tally of all the services which can't be fully rendered. Institutions are stuck with enormous bills for infrastructure they've built and staff they are (trying) to keep paying. This isn't the time to let lawyers start siphoning money off of institutions attempting in good faith to do what they were paid for.
This is what you get in a litigious society where the "free market" sets tuition prices. Of course students are pissed off at not getting the college experience anymore, given how expensive some of those schools are.
What will be even more fun is watching the house of cards fall apart once the lockdowns extend into the new year and international students stay home. Now there's a cash drain no university can cope with.
I've taught some online classes for a few years and at least in my field, I don't think they are very great. I don't feel like a teacher but a grader. I post mini-lectures and other videos to try to get some connection with students but I don't feel that it is as effective.
In a sense I was lucky when this quarantine in place happened because my college does 8 week classes and we were on a break when things started. Therefore, all the classes I'm teaching right now have been virtual/online from the start and I didn't have to switch gears in the middle of a semester. Even in these classes where we do live zoom meetings I don't really feel like I know my students. It is better and more like a real class than online but the added tech issues make it less than ideal.
Colleges need to change their model and build a "facebook for rich students". Memberships cost $1000 / month, pokes $100, by invitation only.
I 've heard that online classes do not work. Conferences do, however, in fact i think they are preferable. And they get a ton more visibility and attendance too
If there's something about university it's that the culture of curiosity, studying and learning is contagious , and also there's the competitive element which pushes students to perform better. I don't know how you would recreate that in the virtual world. Perhaps with a lot of gamification
I think that’s already recreated in the virtual world by the communities formed by autodidacts (including to some extent HN although that’s not exactly the same.)
IMO: anything artificial is going to so filled with administrators avoiding liability because of the complexity of human interaction that it will be useless.
> Colleges, though, reject the idea that refunds are in order. Students are learning from the same professors who teach on campus, officials have said, and they’re still earning credits toward their degrees. Schools insist that, after being forced to close by their states, they’re still offering students a quality education.
In summary, colleges are only in the business of pimping professor time and selling credits to a piece of paper. Apparently access to those expensive campus buildings and all the friends you made along the way wasn't part of the deal. Therefore, no refunds are necessary.
>> saying colleges are unfairly withholding refunds even while they rest on endowments that often surpass $1 billion.
Not really applicable. Endowment funds ussually have guidelines attached. They are not for general use and are certainly not used for paying refunds. Much of the point of an endownment fund, as opposed to just handing over cash, is that the fund is protected from lawsuits by students demanding their money back, or anyone else making claims against the university. Endowed money is not the university's property.
I read through quite a few replies and it seems like it’s all people whose disciplines didn’t need special equipment.
I did physics. Good luck using a scanning electron microscope, or getting access to an optics lab at home.
A lot of disciplines require specialised and expensive hardware, software or equipment. Industrial design, medicine, electrical engineering, chemical engineering. That’s the value add.
My gf took 3 online courses this semester (planned). Not a single professor had lectures to attend. They all just had a checklist of busy work and readings and an email address to contact them if they had questions about an assignment.
I had an absolutely awful experience with the fast.ai "in person" course. I sat through two lessons before realizing we were going to be seeing the rough cut of the free version (e.g. them doing their intros 3x) and that there were any office hours. In order to get a question answered 5 people had to like it.
Even worse, it was a certification but since it was so low touch the teachers were not grading anything. I do not know what they were certifying, I guess that you paid for the course. I withdrew and they gave me a pro-rated refund that basically charged 300 dollars per class. Absolutely awful education experience.
If these law firms really believe that they are acting like robin hood, taking from the greedy universities and giving back to the students who really need it, they'd be doing these suits pro bono so the students get every dollar they are entitled to.
For some reason, I have a feeling that these firms will take a hefty fee and students will STILL end up with the bill eventually...
> Ken McConnellogue, a spokesman for the University of Colorado, said it’s disappointing that people have been so quick to file lawsuits only weeks into the pandemic.
The country - and courts - might be surprised to learn that we've apparently only been dealing with this since mid April.
The intellectually honest thing would be for colleges to give a prorated refund and make their case that the students (parents) donate it. Plus that would make it tax deductible.
Yeah. That's a long way from tuition is already deductible. Some tuition is deductible (or can be credited) if your income is below a limit. Up to $2,500.
It's disingenuous to use that as a reply to a post about the tax deductibility of a contribution to a charity.
I honestly feel badly for colleges and universities that went to incredible effort to accommodate students only to have it shoved back in their faces with litigation. You know who likes remote education even less than students do? Faculty. Advisors. Administrators. Lab techs. Basically everyone. Students are getting their full value and more, while wearing their pajamas.
I've always been kind of autodidactic, so maybe this might not be the opinion of everyone. But I think apart from the degree signaling my employability, meeting and working with smart people was the main benefit of university.
If it's all online you've lost this important place to connect with others. What you learn is basically available for a fraction of the price. It's only the degree that you're left with basically.
Is it reasonable to say "full value under the circumstances"?
I'm trying to understand the limits of entitlement in a pandemic scenario.
I live near a large (50,000 undergrad students) state university. They have means to survive, but are losing money at an amazing rate right now. If students come at the university with lawsuits and demand refunds en masse, it will be bad for everyone -- including the students.
This situation is different, unique -- and should be treated differently than "I didn't get exactly what I paid for," especially considering what went into a best-possible-alternative workaround.
So is it entitlement for students to be subsidizing the operating costs of a multi billion dollar university (in many cases a private organization) with their student loans?
My University is still charging a "campus activities fee" of $800 that is meant to cover our gym access, intramural sports, tickets to basketball games, etc. All of those activities are obviously cancelled, but they kept the fee. How am I getting "full value" for that $800? Not to mention the $18,000 in tuition which includes access to our libraries, computer lab, maker space, and other campus facilities, which again are all inaccessible. I understand financial planning for colleges is difficult and they likely couldn't refund the entire student body without the university collapsing, but to say I'm getting "full value and more" is clearly wrong and unhelpful to the current discussion.
Local university put as much library material online as possible and is doing check-out-by-mail.
Computer clusters that were previously on-site only were reconfigured with a Citrix-like access.
Gyms, no. Of course not. Maybe a refund of those kinds of fees is reasonable.
I've been downvoted here so I can see that my view is unpopular. I think the university, at least the one I am familiar with, is doing everything short of welcoming students to campus in order to make the best experience for the students.
See, this may be the experience that you have, but for plenty of students its not.
At a UC, we are paying ~1,000 dollars for services that simply don't exist. And don't get me started on out-of-state students. Add a zero on to that figure. These services, which have all been shut down include: shuttles, gyms, libraries, computer labs. We are pissed. Nothing has been changed from their usual online services for libraries, check out by mail isn't a thing. Computer access hasn't changed. And our school has not, and does not plant to refund any money. Keep in mind that they received $38 million from the government as part of the cares act, half of which was supposed to be given directly to students ASAP. Nothing has been said about that money.
I hope you can see why we are mad, and why we think the university isn't doing enough to address our concerns.
My experience at uni usually involved going to the lecture, not quite grasping the rushed material, then heading to the computer lab after to stream a YouTube video on the same topic to actually understand it.
Why was I going to the lectures then? Who knows, on the offhand chance I might ask a question.
Now I'm on the other side of the looking glass, I see three types of uni students - those who group collaborate and therefore are confident enough to ask questions in class (because they no longer fear their peers), those who are silent throughout because they do fear their peers, and those who are silent throughout because they've already read the lecture notes.
The only ones who gain are the students who make use of this collaborative environment to ask free questions.
TLDR - You pay for the environment. The lecture notes, the knowledge - all exist on YouTube
I thought the same as you for most of uni, usually bitter that I was paying $4500 for a course when I couldn't understand the TA anyways and had to watch Youtube videos to do homework. And that's definitely how most of my classes were. Or they were massive lecture halls with zero interaction with the prof.
But then I had a slew of amazing professors in my final year including a philosophy class that was so compelling to me that, after graduating, I sat in their class for a semester without even being enrolled.
I went to a large state school (University of Texas). Sometimes I wonder how different uni would have been for me academically if I went to a tiny school with consistently small classes, as those were always my best experiences in uni.
For example, my calculus classes were so bad at UT (rushed, couldn't interact with the professor, assumed you learned everything outside of class) that I ended up getting my two calculus classes out of the way at a Houston community college over the summer. And man, the class was slow paced, everyone had a chance to ask questions, only 12 kids were in the class. It blew my mind that that class was $60 and my crowded, rushed UT class was $4500.
Something just isn't right in our higher education system.
I'd even go so far as to say it's a superior experience because you can speed up the filler, rewind when something is unclear or when new information give a different context, and pause while looking up something up. And you can still ask questions asynchronously (so there isn't a time pressure for the teacher to answer something quickly) in the comments, with a precise timestamp instead of relying on human memory of what has been said; other students can even answer too.
In-person university lectures are the only time I experienced boredom because it felt like such an inefficient way to learn things.
The instructor has a serious impact on how the material is presented. I had transform mathematics from David Huffman of Huffman coding fame at the same time I had a similar physics math course.
Both got to the same end, but I only passed both because of the approach and the notes I had from Huffman.
Everyone learns differently and that situation where a professor can convey things on a way that clicks isn’t going to happen with a random YouTube video.
You bring up David Huffman, but how many Huffman's and Feynman's are there out there?
Many postdocs who teach are just beginning their academic careers and are juggling running their analyses and creating their profiles that will bring them fame, against their less rewarding teaching duties.
My academic has peaked, so I put more of myself into teaching and training and often find it rewarding when I interact freely with a few keen individuals, but the majority of students out there aren't keen. They're there because they are forced to learn to my schedule and not theirs
There are enough of them, to be honest I passed my degree by the skin of my teeth because I'd spent a year out in industry and found some of it a bit too academic.
I do still however fondly remember my CS101 course with Richard Bornat (who I thought was an excellent lecturer) and wish I'd taken more interest in the lambda calculus elements of the curriculum (we had Peter Landin as head of department) but at the point in time I was heading more down a C / embedded systems / ASIC path.
I trust youtube videos rated well by millions of people over the average professor's ability to convey info. Few people go to the top colleges with the best professors.
Watch a video from a Harvard prof and then one from a directional state school. The Harvard guy usually expects a lot more out of his students, but he's also a million times better at explaining the course content.
Why they aren't just asking some additional classes after the lockout ? Why immediately ask for a refund after a clearly exceptional event for a curriculum that last probably many years ?
The deal has been altered. They paid for in-person instruction and interaction with a professor and classmates, as well as numerous amenities and facilities, all of which contribute to the college experience. All of which comes at a hefty premium. Instead, they got online instruction, which is less valuable (even when it comes to tuition prices), and typically involves little to no instruction or interaction with a live professor. A partial refund does not seem incredibly unreasonable, except that universities may not be able to afford it.
Without the benefits you named, I'd argue that you get almost no value out of university. You end up paying a lot of money to teach yourself things. At that point, I'd rather rely on the excellent (free) resources available on the internet. Khan Academy did more for me than my university ever did.
Why not just refund and let them enroll after the lockout? It seems like creating IOUs for this stuff is just gonna make it more complicated and prone to errors. If I put myself in their shoes, I would certainly prefer a refund now.
Students have lesser avenues to obtain financing than universities; I imagine it’s more important to allow students to keep their finances in order rather than the university (which can access Government grants, PPP loans and apply for other kinds of relief. For those with endowments, they can dip into those funds too)
> Why not just refund and let them enroll after the lockout?
Because if everybody does this for everything at the same time the economy will collapse. Thing that can be solve later with a little negotiation should be solved later to cause as little as possible long term disruption.
Strongly disagree with the notion that students not paying tuition will trigger a systemic economic collapse. It would cause short term issues for Universities, sure.
Hm, at least speaking for my uni (ETH Zurich), lots of grad students from Asia come here for cheap tuition & good PhD salaries, but almost all Chinese grad students I asked want to go back to China afterwards. Ideally we would keep talented people here instead of paying for their education with taxes and have them go back afterwards.
If you were running a country, would you want your brightest and best people leaving and never returning?
A large proportion of chinese people have to go back to China after being educated, or china will discourage them from leaving in the first place, since it wouldn't be in the national interest.
The US does similar stuff - through their worldwide taxation scheme, they discourage citizens from earning lots of money abroad. They're pretty much saying "if you're successful, we want you to bring those profits back to America".
1) This is anecdotal evidence but as far as I know it's difficult for non-EU people to get a work permit in Switzerland. I know quite a few students that completed the CS Master in ETHZ and that are from Egypt or China, etc. that could not get a job in Switzerland because it was hard to get a permit. Similar for Indian students that did their ETH Master in mechanical engineering, etc. All the students that I know wanted to stay and work in Switzerland.
2) Again, I might be wrong, but I feel a number of CS PhD students in ETHZ and EPFL are getting paid by European programs (e.g, ERC). So, it's not necessarily Swiss taxes that pay these people.
3) At the end of the day, the Swiss government or any government is making an investment on those students. As any investment, it might be profitable or not. Some students might stay in the country and pay back the investment by founding companies, getting good salaries and paying higher taxes, etc. versus some students that might just go back to their country. Actually, to me, it seems like a pretty good investment. If some student studies in China and then comes to Switzerland, Switzerland might have to pay for his/her education for a Master and a PhD, but Switzerland never paid for his kindergarten, primary, high-school and college years, etc., because for example China already paid for this.
4) Most of the papers getting published in universities (at least for CS) are published due to the hard work done by graduate and post-graduate students (with the help of their supervisor of course). Even if the students decide to leave Switzerland afterwards, they still increased the research-throughput of the Swiss university in which they worked. I believe we can agree that, that in itself is good.
To point 2): the EU research programs are co-financed by Switzerland. Otherwise, Switzerland wouldn't be allowed to participate in these programs. Hence, the EU research grants are still Swiss tax money in one or another way.
Maybe you could go with something like the Australian model where Uni is relatively expensive but high quality for international students while it is subsidised for domestic students with interest free loans and direct subsidies on course costs.
You are aware of the fact that at most ~8000 non-EEA people can get a work visa in Switzerland every year? This includes what would be called EB-1 visas in the US. A CS PhD graduate with no work experience has zero chance at passing the legal requirements.
There are almost no Asian people at Google Zurich.
> Ideally we would keep talented people here instead of paying for their education with taxes and have them go back afterwards.
Not sure how Swiss uni financing is setup, but I believe in most countries international (undergraduate) students pay full price so it's hard to argue that the host country is "paying for their education with taxes".
Can you expand more on why you feel like these students are being paid for with taxes? My understanding is that foreign students in the U.S. are typically paying massive amounts compared to their domestic peers. If anything they're subsidizing locals (assuming profits are used to expand capacity).
That level of dependence on immigration by schools is foolish, short-sighted, and unsustainable. Forced immigration reductions, whether self-imposed or politically enabled, would ideally provide a much needed opportunity to refocus on developing the domestic talent pipeline and improving the general accessibility of American graduate programs to Americans.
There is nothing stopping this from happening right now and indeed there are various kinds of outreach programs designed to get Americans interested in higher education today. Graduate school requires both aptitude and desire; It is a nativist myth to think you can simply swap out immigrants for Americans. You would have to do some nasty forced education kinda shit and there is little evidence that would work either.
It’s possible that if the population of the US approaches 1 bil or so there may be enough students to fill in (if that ever happens). Otherwise thinking that refocusing on domestic students will help is a pipe dream; there are simply not enough Americans interested in Graduate school.
Why shouldn't students be willing to eat the costs in order to help save the vulnerable population of COVID-19? Why is it the schools fault for this happening?
As someone who finished a Baccalaureate online, I’d say these students simply aren’t prepared for the mind shift to having to learn independently. Most of my professors seemed to loathe having to teach an online class and merely threw together a mountain of almost random assignments and research papers as if to say, “if you can survive this, you can have a degree”. Most of my courses didn’t even offer video lectures and were taught by low-paid adjuncts that never responded to email. You were left alone to figure it out. It’s a whole other ball game when you don’t have the deep support system of being on campus. I hope this brings improvements to online education in general.
As part of my engineering degree, it wasn't all books and lectures. We had to learn the machine-shop, operate the lathe construct a robot, mix chemicals in organic chemistry lab, experiment with lasers in different mediums, wire hard drives... etc...
A lot of that is hands on work. No Zoom session is going to make up for that.
I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which is hard virtually.
That being said, the college experience has gone through events like wars, plague, disruption, etc, and has come back before. (Although not at a time when there was such a ready alternative technology at hand.) I'm not yet so worried as some say (wholesale change to the higher education model), unless this goes on for 2-3 years.