Those going to college just for the paper are well advised to keep going. The next couple of years will be easy mode, for sure. You get an A, and you get an A--everyone gets an A!
"...Educational austerity is the simplest path back to an economy in which serious on-the-job learning starts during high school — not after college."
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education...
Or a sign that some people don't understand the value of networking and the value of what earning admission to Princeton signals.
If you are genuinely capable of learning everything alone, just from lectures, there's no need to move to NJ. It's all online anyways.
Also I think a more obvious example of it being popular is the courses and lectures that are made freely available online.
He's basically saying there's no need to buy food because you can eat free samples at the grocery store. He also just happens to be the author of a "contrarian" book arguing that college is worthless. It's purely a coincidence that he's posting misinformation on the same topic - making claims about a university where he doesn't work - in one of the most widely read news outlets.
I'm a prof at a SLAC. Many of the students I have are doing fine. But a good number of them are struggling. Some are working, sometimes many hours because their parents are out of work or anticipate being out of work. Some of them have illness in their family (I don't know of any who are themselves ill).
And for some of them it is that they are not good at this environment-- they didn't sign up for this. Online education is hard. Personally I perceive that especially for people on the left side of the curve, less learning takes place because they are often just not skilled at self-learning.
In the present environment, when working with students I often feel that this is a person who could well have learned, say, Elementary Statistics except that the circumstances hit them where they are weak. Some leeway is called for, it seems to me. I'm not talking about certifying them at something where they are not prepared for the following class (that is, no "Everybody gets an A"). But my school, and many others, is allowing people to choose "No grade" in some cases and that seems reasonable to me.
Rather, just noting that for some students and some courses (especially the non-useful ones), this might be a real opportunity.
My friends who are currently in college tell me that they’re currently dying under a massive workload as teachers fail to realize that “remote learning” does not mean you can assign hundreds of pages of reading “to fill up free time”. Those that are from other countries really dislike waking up at 3 AM to take synchronized online quizzes…it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
Even for my friends that went for CS, they also said they would have loved to have had more time to apply and actually create things vs just learning theoretical/ engineering side of things in school.
Or for instance my brother if he took off from school he would have had the chance to go pro in the MLS, but it was too big of a risk to put off school at the time. Not that sports are happening now, but just gives a more diverse view.
A more HN example would be to create a business or side hustle.
This turned out to be more useful than 80% of what I learned in college.
If my experience of college professors is anything to go by, it'll be more like "You couldn't complete the work because I forgot to include a crucial part of the instructions. Well tough, you fail anyway."
Classes won't all be like, be the ones that are will take up so much of students time that they might as well be.
Usually most people who want gap years are allowed to do so, but usually there aren't many people who want to do gap years (at least in the US).
How are they going to get out of abiding by their own regulations? Universities I'm familiar with all provide for deferred years.
They're desperate, and they're about to be a lot more so. If your money's green, they'll let you.
Essentially, while I get why colleges and politicians would want students to go about business as usual, it seems it benefits them rather than me. I'm going to college for two things: research and connections. Both of these are greatly impeded by virtual-only learning. Research is possible in CS but much harder, especially if one doesn't already know the professor. And it seems impossible to form relationships over videochat only.
Sadly this isn't true for a lot of math/computer science courses, speaking from very recent experience. While having an open book and even online access is an advantage, many profs implement measures ranging from webcam proctoring services to extremely difficult time-limited exams to compensate.