MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester
web.mit.edu
web.mit.edu
As a current undergrad at UC Berkeley, they've moved all classes here online [1], and exams are either being postponed or converted to take-home assignments. I'm currently accessing lectures through Zoom.
[1] https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/03/09/as-coronavirus-spreads-...
If these actions are successful in curbing the virus' spread, most people won't appreciate how bad things could have really gotten.
Consider raw r0 of 3.0. Each case infects three other people. But as more and more of the population gets infected and acquires immunity the infection rate drops. Say half the population is immune due to prior infection. The rate is now half r0 = 3.0 * 0.5 Left unchecked 66% of the population will get infected and then the disease dies out.
Social distancing, hand washing, quarantine reduces r0. And reduces the total number that the virus can infect before is dies out. Cut r0 from 3.0 to 1.5 and the number of infected goes from 66% to 33%.
In the US that would be 100 million people. And maybe a million fewer deaths.
Scuttlebutt is China and Taiwan due to high early compliance have r0 down to about 0.3, which means the epidemic is in a state of exponential crash.
If a vaccine wasn't even in the picture flattening the curve would help with these things.
They’re eventually going to lift quarantines after it burns out in different areas.
In the American context, a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction. The administration responsible (federal or state) would be blamed for the economic damage and voted out.
It would take a very strong leader who was willing to act without thought to reelection to really meet the crisis head on. That would be ... rare.
Seems likely. Since solving the problem would make it look like there was no problem in which case what was the point of all the work.
This is also one of those cases where you have to overreact to begin with because once you have an actual problem its too late.
This is what worries me the most. Is there a name for this bias? Seems similar to survivorship bias, I'm sure it's seen across all kinds of contexts.
1, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/emergency....
One example is the Knight Capital trading disaster, where they eventually noticed (I don't remember the exact number) X minutes after the runway trading bot had been put into place, and shut it down, but got blamed for not shutting down the trading soon enough.
Can't find any links about this right now though :(
It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick.
To be fair, I am sure doctors experience that a lot.
I also blame him because, over the years, other patients of him had trouble for his sloppy work.
I absolutely praise the dentist I went after that one, who made his best to fix everything, explained me the pros and cons of every decision he made, and ultimately got me top notch (as best as could be done).
Sorry for he weird "counterpoint", but the example could be open to ambiguity. I still get the point: don't blame the guy fixing things when it's someone elses responsibility.
In my case: I'd be wrong to blame the 2nd dentist for the mistakes of the 1st.
Fast forward to 2020, we still have Feb 29 bugs around (I saw a few posted on twitter, none in person). The response back then was huge and adequate, but totally underappreciated as time went by.
Everyday people in the leadup to y2k assumed it meant that every computer would somehow explode. Almost nobody stopped to actually reason through the real life consequence of a program getting the date and time wrong.
There are students who are graduating this spring and the skills they learn in upper division or capstone lab classes are some of the most important skills they will learn at school. You can’t just cancel the classes (or those students won’t graduate), you can’t do a very good job at all teaching them online... What can you do? We haven’t figured it out here at my institution, and it looks like nobody else has figured it out.
Or, refund this semesters’s tuition, room, and board, and give everyone a do-over until next fall. (I am assuming the virus will burn out in 2-3 months.)
Maybe the best outcome would be radically improve remote learning, this time with full institutional support.
This is a really optimistic assumption. I hope you're right, but I would hope no political unit is making plans based on it.
Not excited to install a rootkit on my computer to take finals, but oh well.
"No non-religious head coverings"
Which makes me think that they record a video of you while you're taking it, which is kind of eerie.
That being said, it won't stop anyone who has a USB webcam you can just unplug, unless the software requires you to have a webcam plugged in and pointed in the right direction.
Unless maybe the requirement is to catch you looking elsewhere?
- Someone will watch you
- The entire session is recorded
- You hold up multiple forms of ID and rotate it / tilt it
- It's effectively a keylogger + mouse tracker + eye tracker + ..., basically malware
- Triggering any security features like looking "to the side or down" will result in human intervention asking you to do a 360 degree view of your room
- You are not permitted to cover or pause the video stream and you may be randomly asked to do things like blink or hold up fingers
- Yes, they can remote control your device
Israel is the best example right now. They have the strongest reaction of any country, essentially closing their borders, but their people don't seem to be outraged, at least not yet.
The big question this begs:
If there is no refund being offered for the content shifting online from in-person, why have in-person at all?
Is room and board going to be refunded?
If courses being taught online is an acceptable substitute, why have caps on admission at all? Edit: Understood that infinite sized classes aren't workable for human intensive grading, interactions, etc.
Most assignments are not scored in an automated manner, and the number of staff is not unlimited.
Remote students and remote adjuncts--what do you need administrators for? Ah, yes, to collect the tuition, attend the luncheons, and issue the credentials.
It would at least put a small dent in the oversupply of Ph.D. holders in some fields.
Elitism works in a limited setting, probably not in an limited/open setting...
That prestige problem is especially dire with medical colleges in the US. The patient community (aka everybody) desires more numerous, cheaper, and better-distributed physicians, but the physician community desires higher-paying positions that are more costly to fill, with a remuneration premium for working in less desirable territories. So only some hospitals are teaching hospitals, and their residency programs have limited slots. (I think the Army/VA system could possibly break that cartel, by ordering qualified recruits that sign up for a longer term of service to become physicians, and routing their medical training outside of the civilian system. It would certainly drop ER visit prices when those stabilization specialists and trauma surgeons get their 20 and start to "retire" out to civilian jobs.)
If universities are going to order students and faculty to leave campus, they are removing a huge piece of their competitive advantage over universities that already have mature distance-learning programs, but with lower tuition. If MIT takes its campus off the table, the thing they have left is their brand name. That's enough to sustain them, specifically, but there aren't many other universities that could get away with it. The one just up Massachusetts Avenue, maybe, and a handful of others. And they still have to pay for grounds and facilities upkeep, even if they aren't using them as much.
Any other distance learning program could probably hire 1 remote adjunct for every 10-15 remote students and outdo "two sections of lecture hall plus office hours" tenured professors that have a 1:300 ratio. They can use some of the savings for cheap test proctors at distributed--and possibly also shared--evaluation sites. If every surplus Ph.D. can get a part-time remote teaching-support gig for 20 hours a week at $25/hour, they can still keep working the jobs they already have, that don't require their advanced degrees, because their graduate universities did not restrict Ph.D. output to just what the industry could bear.
A degree from MIT might open more interview doors, but there is less difference in switching between schools like Rose-Hulman and Georgia Tech. If campus location is no longer a factor, any student could study at any school. Schools that want to survive under such competition would have to bring down costs, fast.
Online doesn't mean that you have unlimited capacity for students. You still need to grade homework and exams, offer virtual "office hours", answer emails.
But all of the above can be done by TAs, and do not need a professor. Professor time is much more limited.
My university had a course where an external professor would deliver a mixed online/offline course. Videos were available on institute website. Professor would hold a class every week to go through that week's contents and clarify student doubts.
This saved a ton of effort on the professor's part.
There is a reserved scheduled class room for the class, but there is no organized zoom meeting yet (or maybe not use zoom after all?).
There is a mail box to drop of home work assignments, but nobody has figured out where students should email things for grading (the prof, the TA or a function account?).
The prof has a set of notes that (s)he writes onto the white board, but not a set of slides to be emailed out. Or might have electronic slides, but they contain annotation that should not be sent out to students.
Everybody has to figure out how to make sure that 200 students can join the zoom session, but have their mic muted. And know how to unmute when they want to ask a question.
Exams for the mid terms might be printed but now need to be (e)mailed. And how do you prevent cheating in an exam that was meant to be taken under supervision with pen(cil) and paper only. Of course you can create an open-book exam where google doesn't help, but that is extra effort. And does not prevent collusion between students.
Somebody need to figure out how to replace lab courses.
And the list goes on. All of that can be fixed. And after a couple of semesters an online class might be no more (or possibly even less, but that is not proven) work than the current offline course. But switching in the middle of a semester with ideally no downtime IS a lot of extra effort.
I'm honestly not sure what you do at this point. Finish up the semester as best you can and just give everyone a Pass? Force people to attend a summer session whether or not they can afford to not be working? There aren't any good options.
The school where I earned my master's degree had two programs, one online and one in-person. There were several differences, but the most salient one was that the in-person program conferred an academic degree while the online one conferred a professional degree, and the online one had significantly higher tuition.
The fact that many state universities have policies limiting how rapidly academic degree programs' tuition can increase, but not the professional ones, is, I assume, just a coincidence.
Perhaps for some, but everyone I knew while I was an Ivy undergrad was doing their level best to take advantage of the benefits of that amazing environment of smart, educated people, both the profs, the visiting speakers, and the other students. Since then, it has been what I've learned, not what signaling I could do that has helped me most (tho I'm not the most social person, so YMV).
One thing I really learned there (among other places), is that it really pays to learn from the best -- you have to go through a learning process, and best to learn it once going directly to the top level, vs. a watered-down version and then re-learning. (of course, you can't instantly jump to the top level, but just getting the clues form those who work at the top levels as you work your way up the curve is a huge benefit).
Yet my above comment, a factual 1st-person account -- nothing more, nothing less -- earns multiple downvotes with no dispute/discussion.
Evidently, anti-intellectualism and 'anti-establishment' virtue-signalling is dominant even here on HN... Sad to see. (yup, let the downvotes begin --- sheesh)
We are getting to the point where lectures should be mandated to be recorded and put into the public domain, and the University's value proposition in admission, tuition, and residence should be the everything else involved which could raise the focus away from re-doing the same lectures over and over.
Does that really make sense? I thought MIT was a private institution. The research is often publicly funded but I don't believe that's the case for the tuition.
If my undergrad CS Theory prof had used recorded lectures, it would've been great for 5 of us, and terrible for the other 30 or so. There were sections that they just did not get and needed repetition or clarifying examples. What's more, the students often don't know what they aren't understanding (sometimes they do, but often not). So they don't know how to ask for clarification because they don't know what needs clarification.
Waiting for test, quizzes, or homeworks is often too late. What worked out well for my classmates was the help of the professor and a couple of us who got the material faster. The three of us could observe the class and identify what material (by non-verbal reaction or by questions) needed to be delved into more. Try doing that with a set of recorded lectures.
In the end, perhaps you have a sufficiently complete set of recorded lectures that cover everything. But you still have the challenge of identifying what students need help with and helping them immediately, instead of failing a large portion of a class and hoping you do better the next time.
I mean, this is literally the waterfall vs agile debate. Classrooms are agile and responsive to student needs, recorded lectures are not.
How about recorded lectures and in-person small group recitations? Or longer office hours? Obviously you have to change the methodology of learning a bit, but I'm sure it can be figured out.
In any case undergrad level science lectures are basically a one-sided info dump where the lecturer is lucky to get so much as an ACK that someone is listening.
Put it on the internet?
Some minor student issues that can be tolerated when lecture is not recorded, will be completely unsuitable in recording.
I'm an MIT grad and know the benefits of being on campus. In fact I spent more time in the lab than I did in classes or my dorm and that just isn't possible online.
My son's school (Courant) has sent everyone home too, with online substitute, but like MIT that only really works for undergrads.
If I was in that situation today, I'd prefer the semester be outright cancelled and replaced with a summer semester.
I hope MIT really does take this stuff on a case by case basis. The student who can relocate and be back on their feet in a day will be at an advantage compared to the student who takes longer to settle from the shuffle.
Stack ranking in employee evaluations is unfair, and is the same thing as curve grading.
Grading on a curve allows everyone to get a perfect score. Stack ranking means that if everyone is perfect only one person can get a perfect score.
They are in fact opposites.
Also, if half the class fails, that is a teaching failure, not a student failure. The teacher failed to teach the material and/or failed to write a good test.
At Berkeley, if 1/2 the class failed, the professor usually wasn’t allowed to teach that class anymore.
Sure they are. The best get a raise/A, the worst get fired/F.
> that is a teaching failure, not a student failure
Let's put it another way. Do you want the pilot flying you across the Atlantic 747 to be graded on a curve where he happened to be better than some of the other students, or graded against "met the standard / did not meet the standard"?
Me, I want "met the standard" every time for someone I trust with my life. The teacher failing to teach is not a reason to pass a pilot who didn't meet the standard.
> Sure they are. The best get a raise/A, the worst get fired/F.
That's actually not at all how stack ranking works. The best might get an A, or a B or a C, and the worst might get a B or a C or a D or an F.
An example: You give a test that is out of 120 points. Here are the scores:
P1 = 100
P2 = 99
P3 = 98
P4 = 97
P5 = 96
Under a curve grading, they all get A's. Under objective grading, they all get B's. With stack ranking:
P1 = A
P2 = B
P3 = C
P4 = D
P5 = F
Should P5 be given an F or get fired? That's what happens in stack ranking.
> Let's put it another way. Do you want the pilot flying you across the Atlantic 747 to be graded on a curve where he happened to be better than some of the other students, or graded against "met the standard / did not meet the standard"?
A pilot is not the same as your undergrad physics class. The pilot was taught by instructor who has to teach in a specific way, often using specific words, developed over many years by a committee of pilots. They then take a test that 100s have taken over many years, written by a committee of pilots.
The pilot instructor has very little leeway on how they teach the class and has no leeway in the test.
Same with medical boards, or any other standardized test.
But your physics professor probably wrote the curriculum themselves, teach it a different way every semester, and use a slightly different test every time.
And as much as you wish it were true, none of your undergrad classes are life or death scenarios.
So yeah, it makes sense to grade on a curve for an undergrad class.
I think you misunderstand what curve grading is.
> none of your undergrad classes are life or death scenarios.
Except that bridges fall down and kill people when designed by incompetents. You bet your life every day on the competence of engineers.
Employers are NOT interested in curve ranking. They're interested in a degree as a mark of meeting a standard. Caltech's policy is that their graduates meet a standard of quality. A curve is not a standard. Someone who gets sympathetic good grades because of a bad teacher is not of interest.
If you don't accept that, there are plenty of other schools to attend.
But I suspect that if you think about it, you expect a standard of quality in everything you buy - goods and services. You're not interested in a flexible curve.
I think you do. Curve grading is where the top score in the class determines the max score, and everyone is graded accordingly. It's a way of making sure that the test isn't so bad that even the top student can't get a perfect score.
> Except that bridges fall down and kill people when designed by incompetents.
That's true. That's why people who design bridges have to take standardized tests with objecting grading standards designed by groups of experts.
But that has nothing to do with the grading policy of undergrad classes.
> Employers are NOT interested in curve ranking. They're interested in a degree as a mark of meeting a standard.
No, they're interested in a degree as a mark of someone who can finish something that takes four years to complete. I don't care if you went to Caltech or MIT or Cal State Northridge, as long as you can write code.
> But I suspect that if you think about it, you expect a standard of quality in everything you buy
Again true, but I'm not buying people. College graduates are not a product to be bought and sold.
I suspect a lot of people believe that
- the people you meet - the brand name on your resume - the psets and structured guide to learning hard things
Notice that the last two still work over Zoom. If I were in the hard sciences this might be different but as a professional Software Engineer, the classes were almost entirely irrelevant to me.
Maybe your specialty is a different case, but there's no way on Earth that I would have gotten access to the equipment I used without the lab. Doesn't have to be MIT's lab, but someone has to have the ridiculous amounts of money necessary to construct and outfit advanced research labs if a student is to replicate that experience.
And that hypothetical, "someone", would have been unlikely to allow me to use it simply because I taught myself a bit about, say, nanomaterials online.
Let's be frank, if you need a lab, you're screwed.
Hundreds of thousands of people have graduated from MIT. I don't think you can categorically say in-person class is a waste for everyone.
As with many things in life, YMMV. Your one anecdotal experience is not going to be the same for everyone.
I did skip most of the big lecture freshman classes (I was in ESG) which would not have worked for me (my HS graduating class was 39) but apart from them the classes tend to be relatively small.
I’ve never really noticed the value of the brand name but perhaps that’s a sign that it works so well :-(
Most MIT undergrads pay no tuition, even though tuition is something like $70,000 a year there. They have a massive endowment and are thus on average one of the lowest cost colleges in the US, though not as low cost as Princeton. What refunds could they give?
> Is room and board going to be refunded?
Undoubtedly.
> If courses being taught online is an acceptable substitute, why have caps on admission at all?
Most of MIT's undergraduate course work is on line and free for anyone to take. Many take advantage of that. They also have a Masters program, the first year of which anyone who wants to can take it for free. Those who do well are admitted to the second year.
MIT's way ahead of other universities on online education and does extremely well with it. The main "problem" is that MIT is in the top two engineering schools in the world, their classes are extremely rigorous and it simply is not for everyone. 99% of the world population, to be blunt, are not intelligent enough to do well there. And MIT has no intention of dumbing it down to be more "fair and equal" in accordance with the democratic ideal of minimal expectations.
But yes, there are effectively no caps on admission if you want to take online classes there. You won't get an MIT diploma, but you will learn the material and what you do with it is up to you.
Mit was probably the first offering serious online courses with recognised certification. You can do their micromaster if you want:
So it's not like they don't offer the option. They also published opencourseware if you don't need the paper itself.
I'm not saying they don't provide value locally, but they do push for online education themselves and literally provide you resources for free.
If MIT switched to an online-only format, that would erode the value of the latter (which, remember, is social proof, not something which is notoriously rational), while open enrollment would obliterate the former.
A semester of remote teaching won't damage the brand.
Not in my case (Caltech). It was clear when I got an industry job that a BS from Caltech was at about the same level as an MS from other institutions. But if the institution is large enough, one can get an elite education by careful selection of the classes and professors, and doing the maximum in those classes rather than just getting by.
For example, take honors calculus, not weeder calculus. Don't avoid the math heavy classes. Don't waste your time with easy-A classes. If you don't find yourself studying 6 hours a day, you're not getting an elite education.
Seems like an unhealthy attitude to me. I really dislike the perspective that education is at its best when the learning is most difficult. The best teachers are the ones that make things as clear and digestible as possible. Bad teachers are the ones that want to see you sweat.
It's not fundamentally different from athletics. If you want to be a good athlete, you're going to have to work your tail off. If you want to be an incredible engineer like Kelly Johnson, that ain't going to happen if you party through school. Nor would you have any chance of working with an engineer like him.
So ask yourself - do you want to design rocket engines? or cup holders?
---
BTW, as for health, I came out of Caltech a far more confident person than when I entered. I knew what I could do, and was happy about it.
Now, I'm not arguing that hard work has no merit. Clearly, working hard can increase your rate of knowledge-consumption and get you further faster. For some people, you included it seems, that works out great. For others, the ever-present "110% or bust!" attitude can have serious mental consequences. Accepting that education can happen without rigor won't harm those that intend to push themselves anyway, but it sure would benefit the constantly stressed-out students.
No pain, no gain. You're simply not going to become an expert in any field, mental or physical, without a lot of hard work.
An MIT grad will always have more gates open than an NCSU grad. You need to do other things in your career to lessen the gap. There is no moving past this point no matter who you ask. And no the amount of hard work you do doesn't matter. Everyone of the "elite" school students work hard.
In the immortal words of Amy Klobuchar “are you calling me dumb?”
> You need to do other things in your career to lessen the gap.
Such as what exactly?
All your posts here disparage higher "brands" than what you have.
That's neither here nor there really. I'd appreciate an answer!
Education doesn't stop with the degree. Good engineers never stop studying to expand their expertise.
I've been working for several decades with other engineers. It's not too hard to see who are the good ones and who aren't. The "aren't" are the ones who solve problems using trial and error, and when they get it to work they don't bother figuring out why it's working.
The "are" engineers will do whatever is required to find out what is actually wrong, work to understand it, and will do a targeted fix.
What kind of engineer you want to be is entirely up to you.
One thing you can do is take the youtube MIT CS courses. It's free. I've taken some of them to fill in gaps in my education.
This is absolute nonsense and a garbage mentality, akin to gate keeping.
Of course, there were a couple unicorns (like Hal Finney) who didn't study and aced the tests, but they are as far beyond you and I as we are from a first grader. Me, I tried studying less, and it simply did not work.
I also have a friend who flunked out of Caltech. About 10 years later he asked if he could try again, and they said sure. He got straight As this time. I asked him if he was any smarter - he laughed, and said no, just that the second time he was ready to work.
I'd guess that if you attended an elite institution and got a degree without studying 6 hours a day, you're either a unicorn or a victim of the institution's marketing department.
I said "value", and that conflated value to oneself with value to and as perceived by others.
Which are definitely not the same thing, and I was referring to the market value of a degree from MIT.
I don't happen to think half a semester of working remote is going to do much to dampen the intrinsic value of an elite education, either. It will mark the cohort as remarkable, having shared the distinctive experience of being Extremely Online together.
There isn't really a good reason other than some people being more disciplined when there's a human instructor that they see face to face every couple days. Plenty of people self-teach from MOOCs, MIT OCW, or just buying the textbooks and working through the exercises and get just as good an education.
When you go to an elite college, you're really paying for the degree. This is also why there are caps on admission: it creates scarcity value for graduates from that university. When there are fewer graduates with a credential, companies that want to employ them have to compete for a limited number of human resources, which drives up wages. Additionally, the university can impose selection bias on matriculating freshmen who will eventually receive the credential, which helps maintain the reputation of the university's graduates.
If you don't maintain the selectivity of the institution, you end up with what's happening in the mid-tier for-profit colleges, where students take out massive loans for a degree but then it doesn't really improve their employment prospects much. If everybody has a college degree, its financial value is basically 0.
In some ways this is the great strength of capitalism, because it provides an incentive to adopt innovations that helps overcome the status-quo bias that most humans have. But it also encourages firms to restrict access to their suppliers and tear their competitors down rather than building everybody up.
Have you read any Guy Standing?
“ …today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.”
What are some of your go to authors, areas of interest? Or in other words, who are you grateful for, for their influence on you?
Are there studies (not from the MOOC providers themselves) that demonstrate that this works?
I got the impression that the MOOC thing wasn't working out as well as expected. The hype around them certainly seems to have cooled off since their peak a few years ago.
My hunch is that it's only a small subset of people that thrive with MOOCs.
Each semester I teach a graduate seminar that typically has about a dozen students, all sitting around one table in a cramped room. The format is ideal for discussions, as we can all see and hear each other and read each other's expressions and gestures in real time. (Needless to say, the format also seems ideal for spreading coronavirus infections.)
If I had to, I could teach the seminar using Google Meet or a similar service, though it would be difficult to replicate the spontaneous interaction of the in-person discussions. However, there might be advantages to online discussions, such as allowing people more time to compose their thoughts before speaking or writing. I won't know until we try.
My bigger concern is with two freshman courses that I am scheduled to teach starting in April. While graduate students are already socialized to university life, first-year undergraduates are being exposed to it for the first time. I worry how well newly admitted students would be able to adjust to the university if they are still sitting at home by themselves in front of their computers. (Most students at our university live at home or in their own apartments, not in dormitories, so the housing issue is not so serious.)
Other commenters here have noted the difficulty of moving lab classes online. To those I would add foreign-language classes that emphasize spoken interaction and practicums in subjects like nursing, medicine, physical education, etc.
> When you go to an elite college, you're really paying for the degree.
In many cases, you go to an elite college to pay for the experience to learn from, engage with, and collaborate with the world's best scientists, thinkers, engineers, and professors. In some cases, like Rice, if your parents make less than 130,000 a year - you don't pay a dime. Undergraduate tuition is pennies to these institutions whose endowments are orders of magnitudes larger than the revenue from tuition. I look at it like this... My degree cost quite a bit a year... in exchange for that I got to study, learn, work in labs with scientists doing things that without me paying the entry fee.. I would have never been able to do. It's not like you can just walk up to a group of NASA researchers and IEEE fellows and say... hey can you send me GBs of data from the Huygens probe and provide me hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing power to play around with that data? Will you let me use your multi million dollar clean room to learn about lithography? Will you let me use that nanotube growing lab to learn about growing carbon nanotubes? If you are just paying for the degree you are doing yourself an offensive disservice.. and I would suspect one day you will look back and realise what a waste you made of the opportunity.
> This is also why there are caps on admission: it creates scarcity value for graduates from that university. When there are fewer graduates with a credential, companies that want to employ them have to compete for a limited number of human resources, which drives up wages. Additionally, the university can impose selection bias on matriculating freshmen who will eventually receive the credential, which helps maintain the reputation of the university's graduates.
There are caps on admissions for a wide variety of reasons - but largely because the faculty of the individual schools within these Universities are working to create a culture and a learning and discovery environment.. these goals are threatened when you have too many students to support while at the same time supporting the research that actually makes the university a worthwhile place to study.
> If you don't maintain the selectivity of the institution, you end up with what's happening in the mid-tier for-profit colleges, where students take out massive loans for a degree but then it doesn't really improve their employment prospects much. If everybody has a college degree, its financial value is basically 0.
I'm going to argue that what is happening at the mid-tier for-profit colleges is that they are actually not providing their students with a quality education or network that improves their employment prospects.
You're paying for the degree. If you want to take interesting courses, learn cool stuff, socialize with intelligent students, and meet Nobel-prize-winning professors, most professors will let you audit their course even if you're not a student at the university, particularly if you seem genuinely interested in the material. (Hell, I'd taken half a dozen college courses as a high-school student before I even got to college.) It just won't count toward the degree, because the colleges know that their business model is selling a limited credential that the rest of the world values very highly.
I dunno about Amherst but Rice students and alumni also have insane access to the worlds coolest toys - https://sea.rice.edu/instruments/all
This is strange. Isn't the travel they are forcing quite possibly a cure worse than the disease? And are they really expecting students (many of them international) to go home within a week, seeing that flights are getting cancelled all over the place?
They do seem to have reasonable exceptions for students who "have concerns that they would not be allowed to return to MIT due to visa issues" or who "will have difficulty returning to their home country if it has been hard-hit by COVID-19" or who "do not have a home to go to, or for whom going home would be unsafe given the circumstances of their home country or homelife". I'm wondering how reasonably these will be implemented, though.
In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? Are they not trusting their students to prepare their own food? Why don't they just close the dining halls instead?
The dorms have shared bathrooms, often shared rooms with doubles, triples, and quads, and shared living spaces (lounges, study rooms, laundry, etc.) in addition to the dining halls. Moreover, in our dorms, we have effectively no way to eat if the dining halls close down. Since mine has a dining hall for us to eat, it has only one kitchen for the entire dorm, which is ~500 people.
Edit: It's also worth pointing out that MIT students are at very low risk right now. Sending us all home before we're at a medium/high risk level is the right move, so students aren't bringing it home with them. Nobody on campus has tested positive yet (as far as we know), and once it reaches the campus it would spread like crazy. Better to preempt it and send us away now.
That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. There's a big demand because universities are packed with students that don't cook for themselves. Why hasn't the same happened to the US then?
These options will continue to be viable unless society completely collapses, which doesn't seem in the cards here.
The point about bringing up the dining hall is they can’t go to the grocery store because they have no way to cook (and maybe even store) the food they bought.
[1] https://studentlife.mit.edu/dining/residential-dining/meal-p...
Dorms do not have private kitchens. They don't even have private sinks. I'm not familiar with MIT specifically, but the most you can usually hope for in the average American dorm room is a mini-fridge and a microwave. It would be incredibly difficult to expect a large number of people to live in those conditions for multiple weeks if quarantined.
In other words, it's not like the dining halls are being closed and then as a consequence the dorms are being closed for lack of food options.
>In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? Are they not trusting their students to prepare their own food? Why don't they just close the dining halls instead?
Dining halls are inherently a highly trafficked gathering of a large group of people. That is exactly the type of things people are being instructed to avoid. It is likely a losing effort to try to prevent the spread of the disease through a college campus while still running dining halls at normal service levels. And once the decision is made to close the dining halls, you have to look at other options to feed the students. There is no clear answer to that question due to the reasons outline in previous posts so the ultimate response is to just send people home.
Anyway, good day!
The area also has/had a small number of food trucks at lunchtime (only) IIRC.
It doesn't even seem like the lunch options are better today, just more expensive. And dinner options, forget about it, way too expensive. We used to go to Tommy Doyles after playing corporate softball, and at least you could get a cheap burger.
One thing I disliked about grabbing lunch in the area was that it mostly seemed really expensive or unhealthful.
I'm about average (I think) in terms of how healthful of a diet I try to have. But around Kendal Square it was hard to avoid crazy amounts of grease and salt in most of the meals. Okay for once in a while, but not every day.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Great+Dome/@42.3615,-71.10...
Which means it's not a viable fallback.
Imagine if every other room had a computer the student could just turn on whenever he felt like it.
In reality, the number of computers is of course more than one per room. No one is worried about the power supply.
Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like blowdrying their hair after their shower?
Its the right decision in my opinion since the largest number of fire alarm evacuations I've had to do were in those dorms because 18 and 19 year olds living away from their parents can't even figure out how to not burn popcorn in the microwave every couple weeks for movie night.
The shared kitchen in my "dorm" (we don't use the word) in London was great -- I made good friends by cooking together with others, and massively improved my cooking ability and confidence.
Day-to-day we mostly cooked fairly simple things (like on the front covers of these "student cookbooks"[1], which I was given about 5 of by relatives and friends), but every 2-4 weeks someone would decide to make an elaborate meal, probably something traditional from their country.
The fire alarm was activated once in two years -- and that was the warden burning something in his kitchen.
These kitchens are all for first year students:
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/campus-life/accommodation/h...
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/campus-life/accommodation/h...
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/campus-life/accommodation/h...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/books/cookbook...
https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1237577750480740353?s=2...
oh and it was 2 years mandatory (most schools it's just 1 .. ours was out of money and shitty). I was so glad to get out of there. Those things are cesspools of ... cess. Get you meningitis shots kids.
It was plain ridiculous that they were fixated on requiring me to eat dining hall food. Cooking is one of the most basic and healthy life skills anyone can have.
The flip side is that there's no shortage of UK students who have no clue how to budget, spend all their money on booze and then have £3 to last them two months until the next student load comes in. Perhaps raising the minimum age to purchase alcohol to 21 isn't such a bad idea ...
Hot plates and other heating elements were banned. Use of a dorm room was mandatory for freshman year.
As a rule (non fast-food) restaurants are very expensive in the US compared to most places in Europe.
Poland is on the extreme end when it comes to high quality food being extremely cheap. In Berlin it isn't terribly hard to get a healthy and large meal for 4-8 euros at a restaurant for me, but even I was surprised visiting Poland when pretty much every restaurant outdid and undercut that.
This depends how you define fast food. Which by the way is already a massive segment in the US versus other places. There's a whole range of restaurants in the middle that serve cheap food that you stand in line to order, often serving working-class people, but aren't technically fast food. Maybe not so many in the expensive gentrified area adjacent to a big university of course.
E.g. there is a tiny Vietnamese place around here that's very fast, but also very tasty, very fresh and reasonably priced (6-10 EUR). They are fast as "fast food", but lack the other "qualities" of junk food, so nobody around here would refer to them as fast food.
Döner (kebab) shops are somewhere in the middle. They offer unhealthy stuff (tons of - depending on the shop, low grade - kebab meat on a Döner for example) as well as a range of veggies and less greasy meals.
I thought it was VAT tax. Everyone said it was VAT tax.
You're only considering the best case scenario of people not getting ill. That's not good enough. Sending people home is as much about planning for the future issues as it is about dealing with the current issues.
Also I had a friend who lived in a shared bunk room in the UK.
This actually varies significantly by university. Prices for accommodation have been going up since the recent government funding cuts (that accompanies the fee increase to £9k), but were traditionally subsidized by the universities such that they were cheaper than market rents.
UK tuition fees are increasing, agreed, but that is a separate argument. Not making an argument against better tuition either, MIT is obviously a leader in some areas.
Please assume my intention is positive. I am not willfully spreading misinformation, if I'm wrong, point me to the facts.
Cost https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten... here says $10k/yr for housing, my mortgage isn't even that high. As a comparison: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/experience/student-life/l... (which I think is still quite high)
There are certainly shared rooms in a university in the UK (at least were ~10 years ago and doubt has changed). However it was a handful of students in shared halls rooms (in big old houses etc) compared to a population that must have been a few thousand. It was cheaper, and some people thought sharing a room would help make friends.
I remain dubious.
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/centenary/memories/JoaoCabral.sht...
The university can send most of its students home. It can't stop the rest of the world from interacting with them in the middle of a regional hub.
Have any been tested? How many have been tested?
I am not sure how one determines "risk" (?) with this asymptomatically contagious disease that lingers on surfaces and can travel in aerosal form a few meters.
The people at "risk" are the older generation [the parents ..], and movement of people contributes to spreading of the disease.
I think MIT is just off loading hot potatoes here.
It would be great if this disease would finally put a stop to the madness of typical dorm living conditions.
An extra benefit would be a huge reduction in conflict. Roommate conflict is stressful and often leads to violence.
Online classes -- GREAT
Cancel social events -- GREAT
Encouraging students to go home -- GREAT
Requiring 4000 students to pack up in a span of a week, getting help from other students to dismantle lofts and home-built furniture and moving heavy boxes, sharing push-carts, sharing vehicles, renting vehicles used by god knows how many strangers, scouting nearby supermarket parking lots for grocery carts because all the dorm push-carts are gone, pushing carts full of boxes around town to storage facilities, cramming hotel rooms, travelling via flights -- BAD
I think Stanford's approach is much more reasonable -- they are letting students stay if they wish but are encouraging students to go home.
Many MIT students will later be discovered to have been exposed, and then exported the disease to places around the US and around the world.
Many (most?) students already travel for spring break, so this shouldn't result in much more travel than usual. I imagine that is what motivated their timing on this.
I'm surprised more universities aren't cancelling before their Spring Breaks so that students don't bring it back.
Anyone with legal knowledge of MA willing to chime in on this?
It is possible they are violating the law, but it's probably worth assuming they aren't and understanding why. It may be related to the MA governor declaring a state of emergency a couple of hours ago.
But anyway, I'm not interested in having a normative discussion as to whether there should be separate laws governing institutions of learning. The fact of the matter is that there are, and have been for a very long time, and that doesn't seem likely to change anytime soon. I'm not the one that made it that way and I don't care enough to argue it with you.
Thing to remember law predates science by about 3000 years.
Does it really?
More specifically, computer science only dates back a few decades (being generous, call it a century), and most of the people applying incorrect frameworks to law on this site are coming in with preconceived notions from that.
They are worse for MIT’s apparent COVID-19 policy of cancelling as much on-premise work and study as possible, since dorms have non-zero labor requirements. Student return-home living arrangements may also have that feature, but it's probably not MIT’s problem, and in any case student return home probably has less marginal effect on the requirements for non-family labor at their home than their impact at MIT.
Hate to think about how anyone with a lab is going to finish - there's not much remote in that.
What I am concerned about is this case in town next to Cambridge where elementary school student tested positive and school remains open with “advice to self-quarantine” for “close contacts”. The town officials thought it was sufficient to close and disinfect the school for one day and then to reopen it again. I find it very disturbing.
This Seattle school figured out measures for handling lunch and remote schooling availability, at least: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/10/us/covid-19-s...
Especially in these early days, dispersal of dense populations can easily mean saving many lives. We need to flatten the curve so spread rate does not exceed hospital bed availability.
Nobody's saying we won't all be extremely inconvenienced by this, but slowing the spread will mean that inconvenience does not include many avoidable deaths. And now is the time to do everything we can. In weeks, once we feel the effects more closely, it is too late to make an impact.
This comic puts it well, the goal is to flatten the curve: https://twitter.com/SiouxsieW/status/1236721200291655680
There is literature on respiratory infections in dormitories:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-019-0196-4
It’s unfortunately paywalled, but the original authors claim they’re working on getting it more openly available
> “ Our study was conducted at one U.S. university, which may limit generalizability.“
There are pros to having the study done on a single university if there is a large enough sample of students and dorms. Since they all were in the same university, it makes it easy to isolate for the dorm variables in a way that wouldn't be as easily accomplished with multiple universities.
[Same university, different dorms] isolates for dorms, keeping the university constant.
[different universities, different dorms] does not inherently isolate for just dorms, since there may be compounding factors present due to known or unknown variables present in different magnitudes in different universities.
Some universities have many dormitories. My alma mater had 18 different dorms and an 30,000-40,000 undergraduate student enrollment. It was like a mini city, complete with its own area code, police department, and post office. If you lived in a dorm, you could go a whole semester without stepping foot off campus if you wanted to. The vast majority of undergraduates lived in dorms during their underclassman years. You can get good data from 18 different dorms and tens of thousands of students. And arguably you can get good data with an even smaller number of dorms and students.
Child gets sick at home, that's on the parents.
Child gets sick in a dorm, that's on MIT.
That might explain a lot of the drastic reactions by institutions everywhere.
You can't let yourself be accused of doing too little.
It's probably less liability for doing too much than the potential liability of doing too little.
(Disclosure: Former MIT grad, not that that should be relevant.)
I'd argue that they're adults, but from the rest of this thread (not allowed to cook, not trusted to keep clean, restrictions on alcohol, without a genuine lease on their home) maybe you're right.
When do American students / young people learn these things?
They would be liable for not taking action against the Virus. Personal homes are much safer especially because all movements and interactions are accounted for. In a dorm, that's basically guesswork at best.
(btw some of the MIT dorms have storage space in the basement)
A campus full of runny noses for a couple weeks? These are overwhelmingly young people of which the vast majority would be perfectly fine.
What's the typical age of the students parents?
What would happen if a good 5% of them have more than a runny nose, end up in intensive care and there is a shortage of beds?
Go read up for a bit on what is happening in Italy, then check where your country is and advance 4 weeks. See if you still think 'runny noses' is a good analogy.
Risk = impact times likelihood.
I hear people say that all the time of all sorts of places, but what does that mean? Does Boston have (beyond some baseline) more respiratory aid machines than other places? More virus or respiratory system specialists? Better or more nurses? If they do, why? It doesn't matter if they have a bunch of world class brain surgeons. I'd imagine the area would have roughly the same level of materials and skills in this specific domain that other big developed areas have. I wonder what makes people so sure about the specific capabilities of all the areas they claim to be (much) better than other areas.
shrug. The position you need to defend, the matter under discussion, in this case is: how does that relate to them being better equipped to deal with this specific virus/outbreak/pandemic/situation?
The correct method of action here is to tell professors to stay home and students to stay put. Not to tell students to leave and travel! That's absolute madness.
Most students are going to be traveling home in May anyways - moving this to now, while the risk of students being infected and asymptomatic seems like the lesser of the 2 evils.
Is it a good idea to send a campus of young potential carriers from an emergency zone [0] to the rest of the nation, if not the world? MIT and Harvard may be setting a precedent in the world's largest college town that the status quo is to send thousands of travelers from a disease epicenter to lesser-affected areas. I'm genuinely concerned - not for my health as a student, but for how I might be impacting the health of the geographies I'm returning to. Am I misguided in this?
[0] https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/03/10/coronavirus-latest-ma...
Right now the chances of many of them being infected are still relatively low. Give it a few weeks and it is pretty much a certainty.
That said, I really do believe there could be several potential carriers on campus. Here are some reasons why:
(1) There were still large events and gatherings, like the Bitcoin Expo.
(2) Especially notable, large lectures were not canceled until very recently.
(3) Testing has been incredibly hard to do via campus medical services. If cases are identified later, I'd imagine it'd be under-reported since students are young and testing is hard.
(4) The carrier who was on campus a few weeks ago was in a very high-traffic building (MIT Sloan) and there was no timely warning of this.
But yes, I do actually see the merits of early dispersion now and understand the point you're getting across.
Also the bit about being no worse than the flu is not true for any age group.
It does appear to be true for the very young (ages 0-9), who are at relatively high risk from flu (especially <2), but at shockingly low risk at dying from COVID-19. Admittedly not the population in consideration here.
As long as there is no vaccine this is going to be a huge exercise in resource allocation.
This is all about getting rid of a huge tsunami of people for which there would be no care. Once the situation normalizes or there is a vaccine it all changes. But right now we are simply utterly unprepared to deal with this at this scale, and fixing that will take time. Even high risk individuals need to eat, and need visitors. Quality of life, especially for people in such high risk groups is already hit hard, the least we can do is to try to make it easier for them to get the care they need should it get to that, at relatively little expense to the rest of us.
And by that time, most of the student body (with who knows how many asymptomatic carriers) will have been widely dispersed.
But you've got to get people out of environments where it is going to spread extremely quickly, like communal living in dorms, just the same.
Financially, they say:
> We understand that being asked to leave campus may pose a serious financial hardship for certain individuals. Students will receive a follow up communication on this matter.
It’s unclear what their solution is, but they seem to have thought about it...
Was evicting a large populace a good idea? Aren't there other options?
The situation is unsettling. Realistically MIT made the right broad decision here, I think we can all agree on that. Classrooms (most of them) are an inherently remotable environment. Lecture halls and giant shared dormitories and shared meal facilities are just not a safe environment in a pandemic.
They made the right call. Demanding that they do it with perfect bureaucratic finesse is a bit much. Over the coming months, all of us are going to be asked to undergo some hardship, there is no getting away from that. And realistically that hardship not going to be distributed fairly. We all need to do the best we can and help where it's possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_T...
That's not to say the Institute isn't corrupt, evil, and horrible in other ways, but this is not one of the ways in which it's evil. The badness mostly starts with higher-ups and schemes in the many millions of dollars.
That kind of badness tends to corrupt entire organizations if left unchecked.
> Please note: Any student who is permitted to stay may be required to relocate to another building on campus.
I can see asking students who left for spring break not to come back. But asking students currently on campus to leave, and even demanding that they travel internationally, seems like it might just increase everyone's risk of exposure, and spread it around. Especially considering that, at least according to the stats they post on their website, about 75% of their international students are from Asia or Europe.
I would cancel classes, but allow everyone that wants to to stay put.
Surely this, along with general hot-potato risk management, is what MIT's administration had in mind.
A college town full of students who see their risk as 0.1% is not what you want right now.
Now, a more sensible thing might be to close the nightclubs, bars, and parties. But the city hasn't done that. Patient zero will probably infect hundred here.
And the people who will die will be the elderly (which includes a lot of faculty too).
By forcing people to go home, rather than shelter in place, everyone has increased contact with others and public infrastructure where the virus could be.
The president of MIT was born in 1950. The Chairman of the Board was class of '73. Virtually everyone in senior leadership are in categories with 10+% mortality rates.
I'm not cynical about everything about the Institute (see my other comments, correcting cynical theories), but this is a place where I know many of the personalities involved personally, and I'm definitely very, very cynical.
What situation are you referring to that would result in increased contact? This particular movement of students to a different location, often home? Or the long-term housing situation of the students throughout the rest of the semester?
If there is no outbreak at MIT, having the on-campus students remain on-campus might be preferable to forcing thousands to make their way through airports, buses, and other public infrastructure.
This site is good for tracking the data: https://studylib.net/coronavirus
Click on a country to see the graphs.
another question is why it even matters. what are they going to do with the fraction of dorms that are empty after the first day of exams that can't wait a few more days?
—a former mit fraternity president
Universities are their own small towns - they provide food, housing, have police forces, a large staff, etc.
Put it the other way around, does it make more sense for a city official to be calling the shots, when campuses have their own special context?
Literally their own police forces? How does that work? Where do they get the authority to be police from? Who are they sworn to?
The university cops are mostly there to protect the students (from off-campus trouble-makers, and also from each other; especially re: alcohol problems).
So, none. Regular police routinely carrying guns is crazy. Leave it to specialists. You don’t need a gun to police a place of learning.
You can say leave it to specialists, but that is the job of the police.
I'm not sure this is really true. I've seen quite a few news stories about them shooting when it didn't really look like there was any need at all. I think police officers also fairly regularly injure themselves accidentally with their weapons.
I fundamentally don't think a gun is an appropriate tool for a civilian community police force. Batons and electric stunners yes in an emergency if really needed. Actual firearms? Not really appropriate in my opinion.
However that issue is unrelated what I was talking about.
And it's solved by not giving ordinary police officers guns to carry around.
Most contracts have a force majeure clause, that either releases the parties from their contractual obligations in such an event, or substantially relaxes the penalties for failing to meet those obligations. The idea is, nobody could have seen these circumstances coming, so it's unfair to hold either party to obligations they suddenly find themselves unable to meet.
(Example. I contract with 5,000 people to give them admission to a concert, and then the night before the show an asteroid falls out of the sky onto the stadium I had contracted to hold that concert in. Force majeure means I'm not obligated to put on another show at my own expense despite losing all the money I'd already invested in the first one. It would be unfair to hold me to that promise, since it was invalidated by circumstances no reasonable person could have foreseen.)
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not privy to the precise language in the contracts between universities and students for residential housing. But I feel pretty confident that they have a force majeure clause in them. And seeing as how Massachusetts declared a state of emergency over the coronavirus today (https://www.boston25news.com/news/mass-gov-declares-state-em...), it seems like universities in that commonwealth would have a reasonably strong legal argument for exercising them.
MIT has contracted with these students to provide them with housing. Part of their normal obligation under those contracts would be to provide them with housing that offers a reasonably healthy environment. MIT will have by now heard from a lot of Highly Credentialed Experts that, in the circumstances of a widely circulating coronavirus, normal dorm conditions don't provide that reasonably healthy environment anymore -- they instead put students at elevated levels of risk.
So if you're MIT, what do you do? You could say "hey, those dorms up to code!" and keep on housing people in them, sure. But if you do, you open yourself up to lawsuits from outraged parents if those students end up getting sick at greater rates than the overall population. And, when it inevitably comes out in the discovery process of those lawsuits that you were directly warned against doing that by the aforementioned Highly Credentialed Experts -- well, at that point you are boned, my friend, contract or no contract.
Or, alternately, you can point to the declaration of a state of emergency, declare that the dorms aren't fit for habitation under the current circumstances (which, you will take pains to remind everyone, were beyond your ability to predict), and kick the kids out. Yes, it'll suck for the kids, but not as much as drowning in their own fluids would. And if anyone comes after you with a lawsuit when the dust clears, you'll be on a much sturdier position from which to defend your actions.
I keep reading that the casualty rate for young people is miniscule. It's the nursing homes that are being decimated, no?
This probably also applies to firms in general now, but the article is specifically about its use in China.
[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/22/chinese-firms-...
It's very hard to be sympathetic to people doing business with or outsourcing to China when that is KNOWN to be basically cashing out now and foisting the consequences/risk off onto your successors.
Western firms are running with no inventory and no contingency. The Taiwan quake several years ago showed that Western business managers suffered no consequences for that so why should they care?
I know terribly little about law. But from what I've seen, tenants have a great deal of rights as to their status quo living conditions. The property is not hazardous to inhabit, clearly their non-student neighbors couldn't be evicted for the same reason. Seems like a court would favor the tenant here unless the university provided evidence from the government that favored their eviction.
I was researching about domicile before Since the full time RV/digital nomad life interests me and looks like people decide on South Dakota, Texas and Florida or use a friends or family address even if they don't really live with them, and probably the only family member who's stable and I'd trust handling my mail isn't that computer savvy to scan them for me and security concerns - so going to a friendly state and paying a provider makes sense if you are going to get rid of all your stuff and be a nomad.
Kinda seems like discrimination in a way though. Some couple who retired sold their house and bought a RV and ran into issues with their state's DMV, so they had to hurry up change to a friendly one, but I guess their former state loses out more then they did anyways since they saved a lot of money since the new state has no income tax, and cheaper registration and insurance. Then homeless people or abused people escaping from their partner or family can struggle to get all their documents. I guess some DMVs were telling elderly people their birth certificates were no longer good and they had to buy new ones and wait.
Then also seems a form of voter suppression, some county in Florida said people who are homeless, living in a van, rv or boat wasn't allowed to vote. I'm a fan of one person, one vote though but seems like they need a better system for IDs. Also wouldn't surprise me if some workers would give you trouble for printed bank or credit card statements since so many people are paperless... Oh the DMV is such a annoying place, I think maybe could be right below going to the dentist. I know both Texas and Florida have online renewals every other renewal too, so sounds like when moving maybe factor in the DMV along with other things. Then Texas even offers online driving school too where you can take your permit test online even, so they seem maybe one of the more advanced states.
Still have that dream of full time travel though but building up passive income online would be needed, right now I think I rather focus on a startup and find a city I'd love like maybe Austin or Miami, warmer, focus on being happier - then travel a few weeks a year which would be way more vacation I have now.
[1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-11/coronavirus-infection...
Harvard have announced the same thing: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/3/11/harvard-coronav...
In your scenarios:
1. "keep it contained at the university" would probably look like: thousands of students, staff, businesses get the coronavirus rapidly over the course of the next two months (possibly overwhelming local hospitals), proceed to spread across the other densely populated area universities, Boston, NY, Spring Break, summer internships, travel everywhere happens post-mass-infection phase. Many deaths attributable to the campus being open likely.
2. Single person brings it to where they're from - same effects of a single sick person traveling we're seeing in the US every day (including what brought it to Boston). Unless they're going to another densely populated university or conference, which if more measures like this take place they should not be, the impact will be far less.
At this point they aren't aware of any students who have it, so a likely scenario if nothing is done is that the student population GETS it from the Biogen outbreak in Cambridge, AND spreads it at a much higher rate across the local area, country, world.
* Has MIT ever suspended a semester before?
* Have they ever run a shortened or extra class year? I seem to remember something unusual happened during WW2?
Not sure that all my peers going home is the best idea. Also, we on campus have watch those from the Florence Abroad Program come back to campus and attend events. Not too likely to have been infected, but I'm worried about all our parents and grandparents.
I wonder, what will my Korean or Chinese friends do? If they are expected possibly to have to be back on campus in a month, they can't go home and come back, they can't stay here, so they have to pay for an apartment for a month?
[0] https://www.waer.org/post/syracuse-university-cancels-campus...
Email sent out 20 minutes ago says "SPRING QUARTER CLASSES: Stanford will begin the spring quarter on time, but we will use virtual learning, rather than in-person classes, until further notice."
MIT's research enterprise does not seem to be affected, however...
Of course who knows what would have happened without the response.
Lots of people don’t have a place other than school they can live & be successful.
It's getting kinda wild.
The source is that I am currently here and it is unfolding before my eyes and in my community.
The list of complications just goes on... and let it be known that there are still some classes that haven't canceled exams or other large milestones through this Friday.
> Students who do not have a home to go to, or for whom going home would be unsafe given the circumstances of their home country or homelife.
Some folks will go home to places with their own bedrooms, or even a family study, or a good local library.
Some will go home to nothing like anything of the above.
> Students who do not have a home to go to, or for whom going home would be unsafe given the circumstances of their home country or homelife.
- International students who have concerns that they would not be allowed to return to MIT due to visa issues.
- International students who will have difficulty returning to their home country if it has been hard-hit by COVID-19.
- Students who do not have a home to go to, or for whom going home would be unsafe given the circumstances of their home country or homelife.
The bottom 20% of US incomes is between $0 to $25k a year for a household - call me a skeptic but I think its unlikely ~58 (938 x 6.2%) people came from backgrounds like that in America,
These questions are framed in the wrong way. The filter isn't cost, it's getting in, and people from middle class and poor families are at a disadvantage in terms of accomplishments.
Yes and no. In that there is correlation but probably not direct causality. For example, Asian middle and poor families seem to do fairly well in getting their kids to have the right achievements.
Online courses are surprisingly difficult to get right.
Here is what I predict this ad-hoc online teaching will be like: professors will take their slides and put them on a webpage. There you have an online course.
Lab classes are a different matter entirely.
1. Students with financial difficulties or out of state students
2. International students
shrug, probably the best thing to do.
4. Estranged students
- International students who have concerns that they would not be allowed to return to MIT due to visa issues.
- International students who will have difficulty returning to their home country if it has been hard-hit by COVID-19.
- Students who do not have a home to go to, or for whom going home would be unsafe given the circumstances of their home country or homelife.
(I know that MIT has already made many courses available on yootoob. Those are wonderful, I've watched many myself.)
Upon re-reading my lecture notes from long ago, they are sadly incomprehensible without the lecture that went with it. It would be great to be able to review those lectures and refresh my memory. I remember attending one given by Feynman for which no record exists.
I'm currently not in Boston, but I received an email this morning essentially instructing me to not return to campus for the foreseeable future. A family member of mine is also a graduate student at UCLA and they were also informed that all coursework would be conducted online for the next month.
* Students at the college level can be counted on to self-study /to an
extent/ if you make accommodations and provide the resources they need
* Internet access can be taken for granted when dealing with college
students
* Colleges are largely beholden only unto themselves, a college typically
doesn't *actually* need to have students complete the curriculum
before x date because they can shuffle things around and make
provisions internally, whereas high school students taking
standardized exams, applying to colleges, etc. don't /necessarily/
have that luxury.
* Kids are slovenly and have poor hygiene,
* Schools need to factor in National School Breakfast/Lunch programs
and other welfare programs that absolutely rely on having all the kids
corralled in a single place for x hours a day
* Imagine the mess if suddenly every family without a stay-at-home parent
suddenly had to arrange for someone to watch their elementary school
student
* Pretty much all colleges/universities have *some* online component to
their education, even if it's just a portal where assignments can be
posted. A lot of schools have no such system in place whatsoever, and
now have to not only find such a solution but also train their faculty
on its use and migrate/import/create the virtual classrooms, etc.
It's a very tough call all around.
I tried to find some things on Google but shockingly I can’t find anything. I want to know what it’s like to have it (from the perspective of someone who is young and healthy)
They already do that. It's not quite "LIVE", but it's close. When you sign up for a certificate, you take the course along with a cohort of other students during a preset period of several weeks. There are staff and other students available to talk and answer questions in a shared forum, your work is graded, and the lectures/homework/exams/etc are spaced into weekly modules.
Sadly, the quality varies wildly between institutions and it doesn't seem to work as well as an in-person education for most people. But the affordability and availability make them excellent for helping to expand equality of access and get people started down the road of becoming proficient in specialized topics.
Some commenters mentioned that that is a preparation for possible outbreak there. Well, i'd think that preparation for outbreak would be making sure that various resources are stocked up (e.g. masks, handheld non-contact infrared thermometers, etc.), necessary personnel brought up and trained, "civilians" educated and all the travel and mass gatherings canceled/discouraged, quarantine procedures and checkpoints are established and ready to be activated, etc... That of course cost money and other resources. An alternative is to kick the can out to somewhere else.
I understand that the world can be an ugly place right now, but filling in your lack of firsthand knowledge with negativity from your imagination doesn't benefit anyone.
That also seems like an exhausting way to operate.
You're being disingenuous now, so there's no point in paying any further attention to you.
Who are these commenters. Why do they assume this.
What is going on.
MIT (and many other higher education providers) seem to be trying to preempt the spread of a disease.
If someone has specific, concrete, information about someone who is harmed by this and whose difficulties are ignored by administration, of course, comment!
But all this hypothetical speculation feels mean spirited.
That said, I also sympathize with administrators, who had to pick a course of action in a chaotic environment and make it work.
[1] https://twitter.com/hakeemangulu/status/1237367253374398465
The naming of this thing is such a disaster, even MIT can't get it right.
- the virus is called SARS-CoV-2 (like HIV)
- the disease it causes is named COVID-19 (like AIDS)
- pretty much everyone calls both the virus and the disease coronavirus
The common and original name is "Wuhan virus". That is easy to remember, easy to type, and specific enough. Use it, for better communication.
Interestingly, UMass Boston still hasn't done this despite having a student confirmed with it a few weeks ago. I wonder if the administrations believe Columbia/Stanford/MIT/Harvard students deserve more protection or something - that sort of attitude wouldn't surprise me.
Which reinforces my original thesis
(Submitted title was "MIT moves all classes online, requires undergraduates to leave campus".)
Many universities also offer a small number of courses during the summer break. Some universities allow certain courses to be only a half-semester in duration.
Is it, objectively, so much worse than usual seasonal flu epidemics? An honest question, any scientific/quantitative pointers appreciated!
Those dorms are going to be sitting empty after the students move out. Seriously, what is the logic behind this mess?
https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
Universities are taking this extremely disruptive step because they have a very large influence on how quickly this disease spreads, and they know it.
Those 100,000+ students weren't going to voluntarily stop attending classes. The universities have now forced the issue for them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9DXSCpcz9E&feature=youtu.be
I don't necessarily disagree with your overall sentiment here, but I always feel the need to point out that this is a really bad example of a frivolous lawsuit. That lady's car didn't have cupholders, which was pretty common on '90s cars, and the coffee was hot enough to fuse her labia together. You can look up pictures; it wasn't pretty. She also only sued for medical damages and nothing more, if I remember correctly.
"Sixteen countries have shut schools nationwide, impacting almost 363.1 million children and youth. A further sixteen countries have implemented localized school closures to prevent or contain the spread of COVID-19."
https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-emergencies/coronavir...