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Comment by vmchale | Hacker News Reader

If anything the pandemic seems to have made people less patient with self-justifying administrators.

I don't think this can continue. Professors/teachers add value for students, you can't cut them indefinitely when they are now so much of the reason that the online college experience has value.

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The switch to online learning IMHO would lead to a 'winner-takes-all' market for professors/teachers.

To simplify, if you're attending class at a top university you get a top math professor, if you're attending a school ranked at #1000, then you have to settle with whomever they can get. However, in an online setting, why wouldn't all the students just use the top online material? And in that situation, the top professors become more valuable (since students of many universities not only want access to their lectures, but also can actually get them), but the majority of median-quality professors become expendable.

To a large extent, anyone can already get access to the top university lectures in the world for a range of subjects already. Since top universities, chiefly MIT, have been recording and publicly sharing full-course classroom lectures for years. I think this shows that students care about more than just the lectures.

In the telecom industry we had an adage, “Always cut staff before line.” Staff were overhead but line produced revenue. The same applies to teaching but it is not in the self-interest of administrators to cut staff.

They will soon find out the truth.

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