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Comment by stochastic_monk | Hacker News Reader

That's actually a very interesting idea for a country with socialized education wanting a large academic footprint in the world: also open up your classes to online and service the world. I don't know how expensive it might be, but it's got to be a lot cheaper per student for the university.

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The universities in many European countries, are subsidized by the state because education is considered a human right. Having a proper set of teachers, brick and mortar universities, research, etc. costs a lot more than 1k/year per student. While allowing a 5-10% foreign students is good for the remaining 90% because culture, variety, etc., opening up the lectures to people who effectively do not pay taxes, makes no sense.

This is why in Bulgaria, Cz and other countries you see locals paying low rates while other Europeans paying private college fees.

> This is why in Bulgaria, Cz and other countries you see locals paying low rates while other Europeans paying private college fees.

That's incorrect. In EU you can't price-discriminate, based on nationality, regardless of the product or service you're offering. Of course, that applies to EU citizens only. Non-EU citizens do indeed pay higher university fees than locals.

As far as I can tell, the price here (Czechia) is based on language of the study programme not nationality. You can study in Czech for free even as a citizen of another EU (not sure about not-EU) country. I don't think it's particularly practical idea though. The fee for the english version was about 5-6k$ for academic year last time I checked.

In theory or in practice? :-) You're right (in theory), in practice I can assure, it happens.

Quick Google search: https://www.medicalstudyguide.com/bulgarian-university-tuiti...

Come to think of it, they probably discriminate on the basis of the program language: If you take the English course you have to pay high tuition fees, while if you take the local language program, you don't.

> In theory or in practice? :-) You're right (in theory), in practice I can assure, it happens.

If you're foreigner, haggling at a local flea market, of course it can happen. But in "official" places, this is simply not possible. And yes, that program discriminates based on language. If you take the version in Bulgarian, you'll pay same fees as locals, though you're usually forced to undergo a paid language course before enrolling.

As someone currently working my way through OMSCS, I imagine that the incremental cost of adding students is very low. I don't know exactly what ratio GT uses, but the only non-digital scaling they do is TAs. With more polishing of the online content and improvement of the auto-graders, they could probably push the ratio down pretty low. Just have to figure out how to do it without compromising the perceived quality of the education. And TAs aren't expensive in any case, I'm pretty sure they are compensated pretty poorly.

I'm led to believe their student-TA ratio is about 50:1.

The US$15/hr TA pay rate is absolute garbage - when I TAed as a 3rd year undergrad in Australia, I was paid double that.

Taken from an email I got last semester:

Working as a TA pays $15 per hour, distributed twice monthly based on submitted timesheets (alumni are salaried, however).

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