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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

If I had attended Caltech remotely, I wouldn't have lasted a semester. I had a lot of generous help from others, mostly fellow students, and sometimes a professor.

Besides, being around a pack of intelligent, highly motivated people (what their admissions select for) 24/7 was incredibly fun. I mean, you're around people who build CPUs out of 7400 ttl chips, people who build stereo equipment from scratch just because it's fun, people who build a working railroad running through the dorms, and on and on. If you want to see what it was like, see the movie "Real Genius", which was based on events at Caltech. The movie exaggerates, but not as much as you might think :-)

Edit: I also have to admit that the embarrassment of failing was a motivator that wouldn't exist if I attended remotely, along with the shared camaraderie of working on and succeeding at something hard.

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I'm curious what would happen , if we gather a few classes of intelligent highly motivated students , arrange them a cheap nice place to live , give them them great educational content(not the stuff you get out of today's mooc's , the good stuff that the UK's open university - an expert in remote learning - designed over decades) , give them some support and some tools(labs , parts, etc) , and connect them through the web to their respective communities.

Surely that could be much cheaper. But would be just as good ? maybe.

And as for prestige ? if you build the admission process on extremely high standards , and offer something unique that the big universities won't offer , maybe you'll manage to get extremely talented students. And that's the key for building prestige.

Makes sense ?

EDIT: one more question - once you're an esteemed graduate of this institution ,sort of a "navy seal", in this day and age where talent is the limited resource in making money(and surviving in business), how hard would it be to arrange the networking ?

Ans isn't all this kinda like what ycombinator did?

I think that still underestimates the effect the professor has on the students. There's nothing like a professor who is excited about the topic of his lectures. Take a look at some of Feynman's youtube lectures, and imagine hearing that stuff in person!

It's like the difference between listening to a CD and going to a concert.

Great teachers(not feynman's level, but still great) for standard subjects(math, physics, etc) shouldn't be that expensive. There are still a lot of savings to be had.

Especially if you select your teachers for actual teaching ability, as opposed to citation count on their papers. Teaching ability is undervalued by the market.

I agree, I just finished my masters online at Johns Hopkins University in bioinformatics. Holy shit was it a slog, I about had a break down halfway through. The best way I study, with a small group of people focused on a similar topic, was largely unavailable to me.

However, online classes or MOOCs are intended to be a solution to a problem. I don't think they will ever be better than an in-person education, if you can spend 4-10 years after high school not worrying about time or money and just focusing on your education. For a great number of people that is not a possibility. When looking at a partially social issue like education, we need to pay more attention to how it plays out for the lowest 10% not the highest 10%.

Oh, I agree that MOOCs are a boon to people who could not otherwise attend college. But for those who can attend college, there is a lot of value that is hard to get from a MOOC, and I'm not talking about prestige or networking or credentialism.

Heck, I watch online course material while I do my exercising.

This follow-up isn't meant as a disagreement, just thinking 'out-loud':

So what do we solve this problem then? While our economy does demand increased knowledge for a good wage we also ALL know about the near pointless demand for increased credentials. We ALL know a certain chunk of top-echelon jobs are all but removed based on our university pedigree. This isn't even efficient for the economy, but that's a completely different post.

We need to get more people more education, we need to quit demanding absurd amounts of credentials for everything from a barber to a glorified desk jockey, and we need to not cut off people from a prosperous life path because of their pedigree or poor decisions made in the first 22 years of their life.

Online degrees were/are an attempt to solve this. So how do we fix them or what else do we do?

Online degrees might still be good enough. Even though they might not be as good as an offline degree, they can be radically cheaper. (See innovator's dilemma and how they originally defined `disruption'.)

This!!! "Prestigious" colleges aren't mostly about the course material, which after all must be learned and re-learned throughout life (at least in my case). The more important part of the experience is communicating with and learning from your fellow students. How do they approach problems? In what kinds of thinking do they generally succeed where you fail? How do /you/ deal with failures and stumbles when they occur? Truly, I think that the idea of online courses replacing the value of attending and living at an institution like CalTech, Yale, or Harvard is beyond laughable.

Why is it so trendy these days to forecast that human relationships and interaction don't matter outside of the internet anymore? Who wants to live this isolated hermit life anyways?

Being in the same space as people you'd like to learn from is key, but I don' think we need the traditional educational institutions for it. For instance, there are more bright highly-motivated (especially motivated) people at my local makerspace than there ever was at my engineering college (this in Norway).

This is something MOOCs should work on. Create a social network of students and add some competition to it. Make it possible to show off your work, and be humbled by other's work. It's not something that "can't be replicated".

Oh, and add some VR campus in the mix.

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