Imagine paying the fee for a Harvard MBA and missing out on arguably the most valuable aspect of it - nepotism and networking.
Online videos and assignments at most top universities have been available for free for years now. Universities are entirely about the advantage of learning in person, peer groups and signalling.
If the value of university when remote remains the same for your major/university, then it is a scathing indictment of the in-classroom experience the major/university offered.
If I found myself in such a situation, the first thing I would do is un-enroll and reflect on the stupid financial decisions I've made.
I hope this is a wake up call for middling private universities and non-lucrative majors that can be easily made remote. A $100k+ fee for something that can be accessed online for free without any real loss in value is highway robbery.
If anyone seriously doubts this, consider that pretty much any young person in America can just walk into a university lecture hall, and sit through all the classes they could ever wish for, without paying a cent. [1] Nobody takes attendance, and if you look like a student, nobody's going to notice that you're not actually enrolled in the class.
And yet, nobody actually does this! Instead, millions of people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, so that their attendance will be officially recorded.
Those people aren't stupid. They aren't paying for the education, they are paying for everything besides the education.
[1] Okay, it may cost you a few hundred dollars per year to buy second-hand, old-edition books, if you can't be arsed to study at the university library. This is much less of a financial hurdle than having the luxury to devote 20-40 hours/week on attending classes, and doing classwork.
As long as "learning in person" includes one-on-one time with your professors and access to a university library I agree with you 100%.
> without paying a cent
It's pretty easy to get into hot water with the university if you have any legal ties to them (e.g. by having been a student). It's common to require some fraction of ordinary tuition to sit in on classes.
> Nobody takes attendance, and if you look like a student, nobody's going to notice that you're not actually enrolled in the class.
Enough people do take attendance, or at least take a look at the roster ahead of time (in smaller classes). I had a better success rate speaking with the professor ahead of time and asking if they minded. It's also worth mentioning that not all professors are willing to put in extra one-on-one time with an unofficial student.
> nobody actually does this
Admittedly the slip of paper at the end was important to me, but I saved a little money taking some of the classes I wanted unofficially, and I wasn't the only person in my university peer group to do so. It was also a nice way to sidestep some bureaucratic prerequisite issues for classes outside my major.
Yes, this sort of thing is discouraged - but my point is that anyone who wanted to learn what is being taught in CALC 405, or what-have-you can currently do so, under the table, for essentially free.
My argument was a mild push-back, pointing out that it's more difficult in some respects (e.g., you might not have access to some of your preferred professors), and that it _does_ actually happen occasionally.
Do you have any insight into why more people don't take advantage of that opportunity? Anecdotally, before I attended university I didn't value a college education beyond the slip of paper at the end, and even if I had wanted just the education without the degree I wouldn't have known that I could just sit in on my classes.
Because they correctly value the learning to be worth ~$X,000, but the accreditation to be worth ~$YZ,000.
When you put things that way, the 20-40 hours/week of time that goes into getting an education becomes a lot less of a good investment, if the only payoff is that you get to learn.
The academic value of college comes from small class discussion (you don't get this in large lectures), direct 1:1 access to professors/TAs, and the ability to work together with other students. If you don't get these, then there's no benefit of attending a lecture in person.
>nobody's going to notice that you're not actually
>enrolled in the class.
>And yet, nobody actually does this!
...if they don't take attendance, how do you know nobody does this?
If it were me I'd be looking to defer and reapply later, but then I went to the University of Nottingham and, if they'd chosen not to accept me when I reapplied, I'd probably have been just as happy in Bristol or London. If you're due to attend a high prestige institution like Harvard or Cambridge, where demand far outstrips supply, it becomes a much more difficult decision. Attending those schools is an end in itself and if your heart is set on that end you might feel you're risking a little too much by deferring.
Sorry to nitpick. I just see that word misused a lot online. I doubt that you're implying that a person would be effectively disowned by family members for taking a semester of their Harvard MBA program online instead of on site.
Has Harvard even announced that they are using more "mingly" online conferencing tools?
Doesn't that happen in an informal way on a lot of subreddits and even here?
This doesn't come close to describing every single professor, but I imagine (albeit without any sources to back this up right now) that the ratio of such unicorn professors is higher at Tier 1 univerities vs. non-Tier 1.
Perhaps with a larger supply of determined students willing to tackle this on their own, this is the year where a larger number of focused case-study groups could be formed and sustained online.
In theory these communities can exist online. In reality, the vast majority of online communities are not open to being a classroom setting.
> Yah think yah so smaht? How do you like them apples?