Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition
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What stood out to me was how vehemently the college folks were against online education. They were visibly livid - there was no way substituting a live class room environment with online education could be as effective, they shouted. They were obviously threatened - they did not want the world they were so comfortable with to change.
Now they are singing a different tune once they don't have a choice - not only are colleges embracing online classes, they are trying to justify full cost for it too.
College students heading into the fall semester should take a gap year. I know I would.
There's a valid argument in the annoyance of audio latency for this making it not as efficient as physical presence but it's still a very workable solution and gets most of the way there.
One of the big issues we've had, which I think we're getting better at, is not realizing how much others on the team are in the dark when you had a discussion but no one else was in on it. This led to a lot of friction and frustration in March / April for us.
If you're used to being able to just tap people on the shoulder and get a group of people looking at something, you can still do that, just get everyone on a call. Working remote, those "collaboration" sessions start to look more like "interruptions", for better or worse. If your team doesn't have more robust communications strategies than being in earshot of each other, it's going to show.
Unfortunately I think that it is also a symptom of poor adaptation to the supposed pandemic, just as much as it is uncertainty for how long this will go on that keeps people and organizations from rebuilding and reorganizing to permanently/temporarily adapt to the current situation. Humans do not do well under perpetual states of uncertainty, no marginally advanced life form really does. Every life form wants and needs predictability, certainty, and habits/patterns. Patterns are the core of life, as they are to the technology sector.
Most people were told we need to "flatten the curve" for two or so weeks and therefore we need to take emergency and short term measures. That was now going on 5 months ago, and without any kind of definitive event horizon for when everyone can "go back to the office".
We hear anything from "we will reassess in two weeks" … every two weeks … to "not until a vaccine is discovered" … which could literally be never, and everything in between. Just alone that ambiguity and uncertainty is causing stress and anxiety because people cannot even plan for their children's education schedule. People are still often operating as if it's a short term emergency, while it is becoming ever more apparent that it may be a permanent shift in reality, especially as companies realize or are pressured to cut costs with remote work that cuts out overhead costs that can be translated into profits or at least revenues to offset the massive costs/losses.
Again, I find that the uncertainty and lack of commitment is a far more damaging situation that may also even lead to severe shake-ups as companies that did commit to remote work and reconsidered and reworked their whole structure to accommodate that, start gaining market share.
What a smart business would do is to commit to some long term schedule as some tech companies already have, e.g, no changes to remote work before the new year, so that people have some certainty, and they would also start investing and rethinking their processes to support remote work to accommodate the things you illustrate as challenges.
I am a tech worker in a highly bureaucratic and "political" type of company (finance). No wonder the "management" has been pushing the return to office so hard - they need the "face time" with their bosses.
It's true that certain types of politicking are harder now, since you can't charm people in the kitchenette or over lunch. But setting meetings and making promises and aligning others' incentives in a way that benefits you is a lot easier in an environment that cuts the non-politicker off from, eg, seeing people walk out of a meeting room and checking their calendars to see what they were meeting about.
why not?
My previous team was distributed across three sites with some people WFH and it worked really well.
Admittedly the people WFH, myself included, had a home office (i.e. a dedicated room for work), the lack of which, I guess, is the main reason for a lot of people not enjoying WFH, that and the children running around :)
Even without those issues WFH requires a lot of self-discipline to create and stick to a routine. That suits some people but a lot of people need and value the external factors of a commute and office to enforce routine.
I haven't gone to classes consistently since the end of my sophomore year. As this year has unfolded, I've discovered that I can learn material much faster out of a textbook. I miss lectures because it was nice having a professor physically near me for questions and advice. That said, I am managing fine. Testing has been completely changed at my University and the anxiety I had around it is gone. I have 24 hours + open book for my exams now. I actually fill in many of the gaps in my course knowledge during the midterms and finals, leading to a more complete understanding of the class. This is obviously not true for everybody, but I am learning more and faster than I was before, leaving free time to explore adjacent interests and read.
The biggest problem I am facing with my learning at the moment is administrative nonsense. Enrolling for classes was already bad (UC). Now, not only is it bad, but it is pointlessly bad. I am not allowed to enroll in a class because there are 35 students in it. Based on what I've seen, maybe 20 will watch the live zoom lectures. Why is an online class that hardly anybody shows up to being capped? I believe it is because there is some contractual limit on how many students a prof/ta can be "responsible for". My roommate got that explanation after he was told he couldn't enroll in the last class he needed to graduate last quarter. In my mind, that reasoning does not hold at all given the current situation. It is either shocking that the administrators don't realize this or it is disgusting that they do realize it and choose not to change it.
That said, I am paying nearly $70,000 this year. Same as I paid last year. I am being ripped off this year. I was ripped off last year. Last year was terrible and this year is extremely terrible. At this point, I want to put the whole thing behind me. College has been great because all I've had to do is learn and I've made amazing friends. This year we'll be in our apartment carrying on.
The biggest concern that I have is the job market I'll graduate into.
I saw a lot of people have this issue after the 2008 collapse.
You could work. The delivery companies are all desperate to hire people. It's not glamorous or high-paying work, but it's better than paying through the nose for online classes.
> That said, I am paying nearly $70,000 this year. Same as I paid last year. I am being ripped off this year. I was ripped off last year. Last year was terrible and this year is extremely terrible. At this point, I want to put the whole thing behind me. College has been great because all I've had to do is learn and I've made amazing friends. This year we'll be in our apartment carrying on.
With due respect, there's no college in existence I would pay $70,000/year for. In four years that's $280,000. That's a nice single family home in a nice suburb, or a brownstone in an up-and-coming city neighborhood. Even if the job market magically rights itself, what job are you expecting to get that will allow you to pay that off?
One thing you could do during a gap year that would be worthwhile would be to apply for every scholarship you can to bring that cost down.
The TAs hold discussion sections (also online), hold office hours and grade exams. I don't think it is unreasonable to limit the number of students per TA.
There are similar restrictions on my time (I can only have so many students before it becomes impossible to answer questions in lecture or office hours). But I think these considerations are less restrictive.
Moreover, even if one doesn't care about how much work the TAs and I might have to do, it is very difficult bureaucratically to increase the number of students per TA. There are department policies limiting this number, university-wide policies, and union contracts.
Oh, and there are looming budget cuts, which will probably reduce the number of TAs available and lower maximum enrollments.
Exactly. It's a good opportunity for self directed study.
I would spend time doing something productive, not traveling.
One of the biggest advantages of college for me was realizing how much there was to learn and how easy it was to do it (after skating through all of my schooling with straight As), and I only really refined my autodidactic abilities in my mid-20s.
Fair point, but that's because students are not encouraged to learn what they are interested in.
I went into computer science as a major because I was interested in computers. College was literally the only way I was able to learn because I didn't know anything about getting started - I didn't know what a programming language was, for example, so I wouldn't know to learn to program.
I grew up poor and my public education was very substandard. College allowed me to get past that, I couldn't imagine trying to do it myself with literally zero guidance.
I know some of you are just so smart you don't need college - but please consider there's a vast about of us plebs that do.
As has been discussed here at length before, for better or worse, good university computer science curricula tend to assume you know your way around a computer and can program--or you have to get up to speed very quickly on the side.
Someone coming from a community where there are literally zero engineers or programmers will be very lucky if they even know what words to look for. We can't search for what we don't even know exists. On the flip side people don't know what they do know, in the sense that assumed common knowledge might not actually be common.
I was lucky that I had a parent who was a teacher, at a time when textbooks started including simple BASIC programs to demonstrate concepts. I was also lucky to have access to a safe and clean public library as a kid, that happened to have a couple of shelves with computer books.
Searching for information online and separating the wheat from the chaff is a skill - one I largely learned in college. I don't take that skill for granted, I see my husband and parents struggling greatly searching for information that's trivial to find (you just gotta know how to find it). Yet I don't tell them they have "learned helplessness" and its just so easy.
You have to understand, I literally didn't know a single person who even knew how to use a computer - it took me months of playing around with the computer to even figure out how to access the world wide web at first. I knew it existed, I knew we had internet and a computer so I should be able to access it, but didn't know anything else. I was so excited when I finally figured it out.
>college doesn't really prepare you for these jobs anyway
Yes it absolutely does, mine did.
Lets crank this up a notch: there are 14 year olds that built a fusion reactor with instructions from the internet (just fusors, no net power), or people that learned how to conduct medical procedures with no outside help. Some even conducted surgery on themselves sucessfully. I doubt the average visitor of HN could do that.
Maybe its because some folks are smarter than others, or maybe you are taking for granted some andavtages you've had over average Joe, or maybe its both. But if you take random Joe off the street and tell them - you will get £10k if you learn to write basic python in a month with no help, just google - most wont be able to do that.
Take yet another step - realise most of the world does not speak english, and for them to learn coding is even harder.
There are probably some core subjects I could usefully have studied. But, in general, I'm probably not going to place out of classes at many schools even if I've deliberately studied for AP tests. So it's not obvious that year of self-study necessarily leads to a shortened or improved degree program.
That's not a reason not to do it of course. But self-study doesn't necessarily lead to greater personal enrichment than volunteering or hiking the Appalachian Trail does.
There are also tons of productive uses of time that can be done during the pandemic. Now is a great time to volunteer.
(OK maybe I'm wrong)
My local food bank certainly requests volunteers, and they're recommending that seniors or those with health conditions cancel their shifts...further reducing their volunteer pool.
We have to be cognizant of the fact that, by all indications, October will be a very stressful time for a lot of people.
Many of my prospects disappeared as COVID hit - and it made me feel some self worth trying to help others. I learned a ton too.
When the volunteer work is truly doing something for the community, I find it more valuable than paid work (even barely scraping by) - just knowing that I did SOMETHING to attempt to help others.
Just my 2 cents.
The "just take a gap year" crew are living on a different planet than me. No, a different universe. How do you afford to eat and have a roof over your head while you're learning python from Wikipedia full time?
Let's be clear here: student loans are not income. If you're going into debt to pay for college, that's even more reason that you should wait to go to college.
If your reason for staying in school this year is that you need funds to survive, you'd be much better off trying to find a job. Jobs pay in actual money, not debt. If you're college age and able-bodied, the delivery companies are all understaffed to the point that if you can fill out an application you're probably hired. It's not glamorous but it's better than many situations right now. When my business was floundering last year, I used my truck to haul recycling for local businesses. Sometimes the best option is not very good.
Obviously you know your situation better than I do, and it may be that there are some other reasons why going to school is a better option. But nothing you have said so far indicates that to me.
However, if you go too long, prerequisites start to change, credits start to expire, etc., so even if you're readmitted that can be problematic.
And there's the caveat that Covid may have all sorts of effects in the coming years.
Can we get into Canada?
EDIT: I mean that I thought Canada won't allow entry to people from the US? Is that just a rumor?
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/201...
Fair point.
Still, students are not getting what they are paying for and colleges will not be able to adequately justify the same cost to students, whatever their fixed operating expenses may be, especially since students do not benefit from those expenses.
Making money off housing will disproportionately affect students of differing income backgrounds, so this is not the same as moving that cost to tuition fees.
Schools shouldn't have to run themselves like a traditional business, yet that is exactly the model most are forced to follow in order to survive.
Edit: "shouldn't" not "should"
Having trouble parsing this. What do you mean?
IMO the problem is that many colleges are not focused on education to begin with. They compete with each other by building the most luxurious facilities, sports programs, and so forth. Then they pay execs crazy salaries while leaving the actual instructors in the dust:
"Auditors said salaries paid to staff in the UC president’s office are much higher than the pay of comparable positions in other state government jobs. Administrative salaries amounted to a combined $2.5 million more than the maximum annual salaries for comparable state employee positions, auditors found.
For instance, the UC system’s chief investment officer has a base salary of $615,000, while the top investment officer with the state’s teachers’ retirement system is paid $568,000, the audit found."
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-uc-audit-2017042...
Now you're stating what? That F500 companies have general lack of funding? So who has? Mom & Pop shop?
I'll also remind that the UC system isn't just "education", so it's difficult to draw direct comparisons from top-line numbers in terms of staff and finances with most other universities.
They run Los Alamos (with Texas A&M + Battelle), Lawrence Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, which cumulatively have a budget in the billions.
They also run 5 major medical centers, which represents ~$13bn of their revenue and a large portion of their staff as well.
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It's a massive enterprise, and if you were drawing the private-sector comparison I've seen elsewhere, it would be in the Fortune 100 in terms of revenue.
I'm not sure what the "right" number is for that job, but it does seem reasonable to think the top couple roles in that enterprise ought to command some sort of high 6-figure salary if you want to get executives of an appropriate caliber to do that job.
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Some of the lines in that article, like:
> University of California’s executive vice president and chief financial officer is paid $412,000, while an executive doing a comparable job with the California State University system makes $341,000.
Seem ridiculous, given that CSU has a budget 1/6th the size to manage. If anything, one would think the difference in salaries ought to be far larger given the vastly different scope and complexity of the two entities.
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I'm sure there's plenty of waste and plenty of reform that could be needed, but I'm not exactly convinced on the basis of these claims.
Why? I can't imagine the UC executive needs to, as an individual, do anywhere near six times the work just because they're managing a budget that's six times larger. I want both executives to do their jobs as well as they can, and that means they should be working about as hard as each other.
- Those at the low end, eligible for financial aid. May be eligible for complete housing/tuition financial aid, but likely to leave school with some amount of debt
- Those in the middle, above meaningful thresholds for financial aid. Perhaps family pays for some tuition/housing, but student is saddled with some amount of debt (full cost of tuition/housing or some fraction depending on family contribution)
- Students in the highest tier have education and housing covered by family or another source. No student loans after graduation.
My issue here is that graduate in the first two categories have less freedom to pursue their career goals compared to a student unburdened by debt. Paying off student loans becomes a driving factor for decisions made after graduation.
Agree that sports and similar are likely unnecessary money sinks, but I don't know whether in some cases these actually bring in more money than they cost (via donations, reputation, or otherwise), but I doubt it.
Even in a no-limits, fully-government-paid education system, Tidmarsh Community College is going to have to convince students to come there instead of Harvard or State U. They'll have different resources.
You'd have to reduce student choice, or socialize college assets, to have a world where colleges just don't care about running like a business. It's not about level of funding, it's allocation.
The current system misallocates by hiding the true cost and benefits from students. You go to the school with fancy-pants dorms because you think it has been successful! Aren't those dorms and gyms built with successful alumni donations and clever investments?
No! Those amenities are being paid with the loan payments you'll make in your 30s and 40s.
I think your argument here is missing the fact that places like Harvard have a competitive admissions process and carry a reputation which will continue to attract distinguished faculty and high-achieving students, regardless of funding scenario.
If a student living near Tidmarsh doesn't get in to Harvard and still wants to attend a school, they may be forced into a second choice school anyway. The top university in many countries is often partially or completely linked to the state (point being gov't funded), and admissions are gated based on academic achievement.
I'm not really sure why you think this system would break down if suddenly if budget worries were suddenly eliminated. Not everyone can go to Harvard in either scenario, and for that matter, not everyone wants to go to Harvard either. If I wanted to be a welder, there are likely dozens of schools better equipped than Harvard to teach me those skills.
I'm a little unclear why socializing university assets would be problematic, but open to clarification on that point if you care to provide it. In my view, a vigorous and stable educational system benefits society as a whole, and seems a reasonable thing to socialize as a "public property" of sorts.
Exactly this. It is not the same experience being in the same class and teaching. All the energy that could have gone into that is now spent twiddling with gadgets. There is no coordinated 'course production system' in many environments. So teachers have to improvise and they are ending up on different ecosystems. Many of them are now learning to twiddle cameras instead of helping out students. I think many universities have to take a 'gap year' to bring in companies to help them reorg across departments.
Nope. What you're saying is "I cant restructure my business becasue I have high costs".
Your competitor disrupting your business could not care less.
+) or significant, why US edu is so bad in terms of price to earnings ratio comparing to what you can get elsewhere. time to say that king is naked.
Accreditation will come from industry which is what really matters. There are plenty of coding bootcamps already who companies pay on par or higher than a university IT degree.
Anyway, how my last sentence went? ;) who couldnt care less?
If anything this is a boon to colleges in the long run - it has proven, without a doubt, how much worse online learning truly is. It has been around for a decade now - and it still sucks.
I know this isn't everyone's experience but I started undergrad at a small state school in Denver, and had great diverse interactions in philosophy and literature courses because of how many different walks of life people came from.
It's hard to have honest and deep conversations on video. I don't think many would contest that.
Maybe it's not just video though. I feel we're lacking the social tools to deal with our situation, something educators could perhaps provide.
I believe some courses could be taken online. For example, here is an amazing course on Algorithms and Data Structures by Robert Sedgewick https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-part1? at Coursera. It works really well for the online format. So, not all online classes suck.
My major was Physics and I was teaching all five years of the Graduate school. I do not have a slightest clue how is it possible to teach Physics remotely at the acceptable quality.
I find it telling that most people who start an online course never finish them - why? The experience isn't worth it.
Just like a video call hasn't replaced person-person interaction, nor can an online course truly replace an in-person class - so many more things happen in the classroom or at a university than at home. There is intelligence in human interaction. This is what silicon valley misses.
But a minority are far better than in-person.
Toss digital scaling in, and it's not a question of if, but when and how. There are real problems people haven't solved, but most of those have to do with how students discover and find good courses, accreditation, etc.
I wouldn't go this far. Enrolling to an online course is essentially an effortless endeavour, unlike on-campus studying. You don't pay anything (or pay less), you don't have to move physically, you (sometimes) can go at your own pace, you can take just this one course instead of the whole curriculum, etc.
I think this is ultimately a subjective thing, I don't really think something like CompSci (a subject most here studied) needs to be on a campus based lecture basis, but I can see why someone who needs more 'hand-holding' and wants the campus life experience would say this.
I was in an actual Science major, Biology, where your physical presence is needed for lab work as so much of it is just repeating your work (and ideally know why it failed) as experiments fail so often--the experiments are actually incredibly archaic and way far behind the Industry standards, where so much of it is actually outsourced for a reason. So watching youtube videos on distillations and titrations is just about as useful as you will never actually do that in a lab, as its a waste of man-power/labour costs. Reagents and precursor molecules are never going to be made in house by anyone, you buy them like you do bio-markers, so why bother wasting an undergrad student's time making them do it instead of teaching them how to use more modern apparatuses that are actually used in the Industry? I thin it's because that's what grad school is ultimately for and for that you have to 'pay to play' as it were.
The lectures and exams for my major, however, should have been entirely Online in my opinion; we had mainly tenured Post-docs doing research teaching our classes which was always a f'ing nightmare as you could tell they were only doing it out of obligation. The one saving race being that they did give hints as to what was on the exam when you attended which could save you hours/days of overstudying if all you did was just look at the book/slides, so I ended up creating a study group with 5 other students where we alternated going to lecture and recording it and then uploading online so we could follow along with the slides and book at home as most of us had to work. This should be the standard! Because the truth is there is simply no way to cover 7 chapters for a midterm for 3-5 lectures plus quizzes on various subjects, plus lab practicals for each one every semester and have any chance of passing those courses, and then on top of that they think you're going to retain even 20% of that information?!
It's the optimized pump-dump model of rote-learning that they're really 'teaching' which is why so many recent-grads are almost entirely useless if/when they get to the Industry for the first year or so. They're being mis-led about the expectations and working conditions of the roles they're going to fill, which is also probably why so few actually end up in the Industry they studied for.
Some of my best professors openly discussed in private how the models is incredibly broken, some even going so far as to say they wish they could get rid of the grading system entirely as its not a very good gauge as they admitted all they are really gauging is how good you are at repeating what was said to you back them without having much room for interpretation or nuance in the discussion, there is simply no time for it given all the constraints. Which incidentally is what the Scientific Model is actually operating on: self-regulating system that questions and even tries to defy conventional wisdom at every step to arrive to a viable conclusion and the cycle repeats itself never really having a 'definitive' of answer, simply a better one than the previous one. And the reality is, no one really replicates any of the peer reviewed journals and its well-documented that they do not, even outside of Academia.
I'll agree that Online learning has some disadvantages but the trade-offs are worth it, and the alternative is remaining with this perversely bloated form of indentured servitude for the benefit of very few that is gamed by those who have the means and resources to do so, be it in Enrollment or even within it.
I learned to code, albeit not very well, almost entirely from Online sources be it Coursera/Udemy for the basics, and then Stackoverflow for my questions on why things didn't work but it was enough to be able to create a fintech startup, the first of it's kind in fact, where as CTO I ultimately ended up outsourcing the work needed to better developers and I focuses on product development, UX and sales. I learned about Bitcoin/Blockchain from my deep interest in the subject of economics and Anarchist philosphy that spanned decades, which was mainly taught from Online sources and epub books. I ended up at IBM that way and saw very quickly how grad students from illustrious universities in 'blockchain like disciplines' could barely grasp something that I understood very well from my first year involved in the Bitcoin Community where we had amazing developers and cryptologists openly having conversations with anyone interested on the subject about how this tech worked and what its goals were in a complicated, but entirely comprehensible level if you were motivated enough to want to do some legwork to understand.
I think you're making a blanket statement which is more a reflection of you as an individual, as it really just depends on what subject you're studying.
For example: I went back to school for Supply Chain and Logistics and Business/Warehouse Data Analytics (most of these are Master level courses) in order to update my CV but I have already worked for several Automotive Multi-nationals in the past in this sector, so I know what actually works and what is just fluff to pad the course out to the 10-15 week requirements (depending on quarter vs semester, as I've done both) and there is 100% no reason why any of it should be done in person, at all.
I really mean no benefit of it what so ever, in fact I'd go so far as to say that if it had like designated Online office hours/chat/video conference you could sign up for and have it posted in the internal forum/discussion board for future review it would be a superior model to that of University at a fraction of the cost. I'd even pay extra for those features just so I don't have to make the effort to be somewhere during the day and choose to finish a course at my own pace in my extra time.
I find in person lectures more engaging and pleasant generally speaking. I definitely don't think the information would have stuck with me as well or as long term with online lectures, and I wouldn't have gotten some connections within academia over the internet.
Not to mention I made friends which I wouldn't have had the course been online.
Thats a perspective of university as a job training program. I would argue that the point of university is more of holistic understanding than inflexible training for skills in need right now. Education in general includes many skills that will not be in industry demand for $$$
It is an infectious production-ism. A thing is only valuable if it makes money. An idea only valuable if it makes money, or produces, here, and now. And then you complain of professors who don't care - but this is the result of what you want. The professors are focusing on productivity and what makes money. This isn't endemic to the system. It comes from without.
The survivor-ship bias is just too hard to ignore. "Just get involved. Read forums, go to stack overflow, this is the true way to learn. I'm taking a business course and it's a joke to me therefore it is worthless. Just build it in your garage." Most people are not you. Most people are not people on HN. They want to have lives - not spend every waking moment learning about bitcoin. Many of them will never have any subject they love so deeply. Some will love economically worthless topics. Many just want to get a job to pay for the other parts of their lives.
> I think you're making a blanket statement which is more a reflection of you as an individual, as it really just depends on what subject you're studying.
It doesn't depend at all on subject. There is a motivated person out there that can learn anything online - they will buy the materials, and do it themselves. Most are not this person. My statement is based on my experience as well as the fact the market has not shifted despite years of online options.
The market has already determined - the online options work best for part time learners and CV chasers (like the supply chain course. Business school in general is built for industry - industry doesn't care what you learn in it, they just want it. That is what you should be complaining about. The universities that offer it are just filling a need.)
Right. As a professor, I'm not embracing this at all. We all hate the situation and don't really know what the best thing to do is.
Not sure where I land on that, but I would guess it's not an uncommon sentiment.
We have 3 college students in our household. We've had these conversations many times in our house over the last few months. The above is the conclusion I've come to for my own kids, that a gap year is basically a waste of time in the current economy. The last thing I'll add is we are saving some money on online classes, room and board makes up roughly $10,000-$15,000 of the cost of sending a kid to college, having the kids at home doing online classes at least saves us that.
But if your point is that gap years are expensive, and not everyone has the luxury to take one--especially in the current economic climate--then I totally agree.
#Edit: I thought you were talking about gap years generally. But, looking back at the context, maybe you mean that 2020-2021 is a particularly bad time to take a gap year, and that current students should tough it out and get their credits in, saving the gap year frivolities for a year when there are more opportunities and less economic uncertainty. If so, I could see this being good advice for a lot of students (though, of course, much depends on one's individual circumstances).
I feel for the kids nowadays. I'd probably just get a year of college out of the way, despite the particularly shitty, expensive form it'll take this year, because there's really no better use of your time right now.
I don't really disagree with your other points (though I might make a different decision). But I'm not sure I buy the argument that you should enter the workforce as young as you can profitably do so (considering net present value relative to educational level) and should never take extended time off between jobs.
This is a value judgment specific to the US (and maybe bunch of other countries in the anglosphere). Places in the Mediterranean like Italy and Greece are notably different in children staying at parents' home till their 30s, or places in the Nordic students both don't pay for college and get small monthly stipends from the government for rent (usually in subsidized student housing) and groceries.
Raising humans is hard work and someone got to be footing the bill. Kids don't magically turn into adults at the age of 18, so their parents who made the decision to make them in the first place has responsibility until their kids reach adulthood, or this responsibility can be collectivized by the whole society because failures of parents will also be suffered by the whole society. Putting the burden of outrageous debt on the kid sounds like the most selfish thing to do by the parents and the society. And a debt only for formal education, which alone is not enough to make kids into adults.
The difference between our quality of life (and especially fear of needing to go back to work) is huge.
Travelling is pretty easy though when you have time and money at this age, I don't feel that I missed out on some travel when I was younger.
I definitely agree with you on the gap year.
They are happy to sing when they get paid the same amount.
Admins on the other hand are just a bunch of insecure pricks who know that the only reason they have a job is the bloated organizations they themselves created, which can only be supported as long as students keep paying that ridiculous tuitions.
I think this may be them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Courses
https://web.archive.org/web/20090714005930/http://www.nytime...
Looks like they have adjusted, but used to provide videotapes and cassettes.
In the office, Michael Scott is asked to give a lecture and brings a boombox with the same music the TTC lectures start off with. Its a hilarious in joke if you get the reference.
From my experience studying online will be harder for a non-small degree of students. (Through for some it's easier as they anyway don't show up for curses and do anything from home "ad-hock".)
I believ that for courses which are mainly frontal putting this part online will be majorly helpful (e.g. a reading in front of a large publicum with close to no questions from the publicum).
But especially during a CS master many curses are smaller and with a lot of student professor interactions. This translates not so well to online, even with video conferences. And that is assuming that students do have a easy to access internet connection which is good enough to do a ~20 people conference.
So while I hope for a lot of improvements by putting parts of the studium online I also hope it will be just part of it.
Lastly in-person studium creates a social environment (similar to in-person work) having online only studies/work would have _major_ health risks for a non small amount of people (such which e.g. are already somewhat depressive, have problems creating social connections, have a weak social net, lost most of their friends due to problems in their school years etc.). I have meat at least one person who would not unlikely already have committed suicide in a "online only" world...
The problem with taking a gap year for current students (in the US) is that many of them have federal student loans whose interest is deferred as long as they are studying full time. A gap year means they will incur interest for the rest of their University time and have that much more to pay off at the end.
unfortunately, for many students that isn't an option. Some students rely on living off of student loans, which they can't get during a gap. Some student's income is tied to the university (for example, working as a TA, or research assistent).
* Group discussions in seminars. When you are in person, there's a better dynamic to holding a discussion. You can read others' body language and see when to speak up. Zoom works fine for very small groups (<7) but anything larger than that and it seems to get out of hand in my experience.
* Impromptu chats after class with professors to ask questions that I don't want to bug everyone else with. Same goes for chats during office hours.
* The opportunity to stumble upon events that you otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. For example, I'm not muslim, but I attended a series of lectures on Islam aimed at Muslim students, put on by the Muslim student association. I learned a lot there and got to speak to fellow students and learn about their views and experiences firsthand. You're not gonna find an event like that online, and even if you did, you'd have to have filtered through all the other garbage on the internet to find it.
* Playing intramural broomball after pre-gaming with my friends. Aside from good memories, the social connections you make in college are very important and can help you a lot later in life. Many years later and it's great having a network of people in all sorts of industries.
* Living in a freshman dorm and getting exposed to people from many different backgrounds for the first time in my life. If you grew up in one place, then almost by definition, you didn't have much diversity in K-12.
You can't really replicate these remotely and in my mind, these sorts of things were half the value of college for me. And this is aside from the fact that I personally find it very hard to pay attention on a zoom lecture, especially if I'm sitting through 4 or 5 of them a day.
Facebook did just that when it got out, it made easier to move a IRL friendship to one online.
It's hard to break out the costs. When I go to a nice restaurant, I wouldn't pay 50% for the ambiance alone without the food or for the food without the ambiance. It's a package and the sum is worth more than the pieces.
I might pay full tuition for remote college if i'm in my last semester, for example. But otherwise, I don't think it's worth it.
Keeping students attention on the class.
Technology may improve, economics may change, industries created and destroyed, but ultimately, if the students attention is not held, everything is lost.
In today's world, it has become extremely difficult to even keep focus, with the myriad of distractions abound.
I guess in the future, every city will have tens or even hundreds of virtual training centers, which are classes but taught online, by professors in far away universities. Students will gather here for the classroom experience, keep focus and still get quality education.
Perhaps a new idea of "Infrastructure as a service"
I wish that were true, and I am already seeing signs of that happening in India. Think of how much savings and ease it will bring to a students life, if they can have the convenience of going to college a few streets away combined with the advantage of learning from the greatest minds of humanity.
Phone operating systems still treat features like “zen mode” as second-class citizens while not providing enough granular access to third party apps to implement features that encourage putting down the phone successfully. There are still too many ways to work around these kinds of features and apps like Freedom for iOS do an OK but not great job at allowing you to restrict access to apps and sites on a schedule.
However all of them are only as effective as the person's will to use them.
In my view, Extreme cases of Phone / Internet addiction can only be solved by physically removing the user from the device. Like you do for drugs and alcohol.
I am thoroughly convinced any other method will not be useful. Of course, I base these thoughts solely on my experience and I have been trying to do that since last one year. I have tried many apps, lots of self control and forcing myself to be away from my phone physically, only to be under it's spell in a few days. The most I held out was 2 days.
While being physically away from the phone / device is not always practical, I have found that timers for apps are slightly more effective, as they repeatedly warn and close the app.
I found zen modes to be not really effective, as they shut off everything and ultimately you end up removing them for one reason or the other.
I agree, which is why I argue that it should be an OS concern, not an application concern. Screen time in iOS provides some of this functionality, but it’s still not powerful enough to restrict access to certain sites, and there are ways to get around the parental control modes.
The problem is that a phone is necessary in many jobs. I tried switching to a “dumb” phone a few years ago and had to revert because I needed app-based 2FA for work.
I would pay good money for a solid iOS screen time app that allows me to set profiles for work time, free time, personal focus time, etc. that only provides access to apps I truly need in a given moment and cannot be worked around. That would be such a game changer
Does having someone else control the password work? I’ve also been wanting to find a solution for this on ios devices. Screen time is weak when you have the password.
The downtime mode in safari also trains you to use it, as you literally can’t whitelist a website from screentime, so you have to bypass.
This sounds absolutely nothing like how things worked in the online degree I received.
I don't know what is typical elsewhere. I will say, from watching my son's Zoom-based classroom sessions, that Zoom seems to be almost specifically designed to yield a poor classroom experience. For reasons that I believe would also apply to Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc. I am glad that my school used a meeting platform that was intended for educational use.
As far as the user experience goes, though, I would say that Adobe Connect makes it possible to create an online classroom in a way that just isn't possible in Zoom.
Which is in no way contradictory to the idea that Zoom is stable and intuitive for adult learning. "Adult learning" is a wide net that covers a lot of learning situations that do not necessarily involve or benefit from a classroom environment. YouTube and printed books are also stable and intuitive for adult learning.
But, for educators who are scrambling to adapt their pre-existing curricula to distance learning, I would argue that preserving as many elements as possible from the working environment that they're used to is pretty key to giving them the best chance possible at a successful transition.
My kids' schools used both Zoom and Google Meets, and schools converged back to Zoom. If there's truly something better would love to hear and share!
Edit: A more wordy response, since I assume the downvote implies that wasn't satisfying --
It has all the key elements - video chat, screen sharing, whiteboarding, etc., but they've all been arranged in such a different way that it's just impossible to single anything out in particular. The best I could do is explain it by analogy: Most software is designed to work best as either an online equivalent to a conference room, or an online equivalent to a lecture hall. But, IRL, a classroom isn't quite like a conference room or a lecture hall. Depending on the type of classroom, the physical differences might be subtle, but they are pervasive.
IMO this is where UX often goes wrong, many people have a feeling for something but they don’t have the terminology to articulate it, nor the skills to reproduce it another context.
From what I've experienced, Zoom is like a basic WebEx "Meeting" where you join a conference and it's an online approximation of a conference room. WebEx has a subsection called WebEx "Events" with a few minor tweaks that make it more useful for classes or seminars.
Mainly it's just about how they set up "roles". In a Meeting, you're all mostly the same (aside from the host). In an Event, you schedule the thing, add a list of people who will be "panelists", and then they get a special password that allows them to log in with their WebEx account and join with elevated privileges.
The "host" role is still the "admin" and can change settings and assign roles. The "panelists" can turn on their own mics and cameras as they choose, and they can be given screen-share rights.
Everyone else gets a different link and joins as "attendees". Attendees can't turn on their own mics or cameras. They can post in the chat box and they can raise their hand to be given mic rights. It effectively prevents the issues of "bombing" online meetings with disruptive behavior and allows the presenters to do the teaching.
Zoom has the same features as the Webex Events in their zoom "Webinar", with separate logins for admins ("hosts") and panelists, q&a chat box etc.
Of course it's not free like Zoom meetings, but costs $300 or more - that's where they make their money... https://zoom.us/buy?plan=pro&from=webinar
I've only used Zoom in the basic/meetings sense. Seems like a rough parity between the two (which makes sense given their origin, I'd imagine).
Although I don't have a reference, I found a study by a German university that compared classes delivered by television with classes delivered with a combination of sound, pictures, graphics and text.
The result was that the latter was as effective as video for all categories of classes, even those teaching kinetic skills such as golf and tennis.
Moving pictures, especially those of the head and shoulders of a professor delivering a lecture, are completely unnecessary.
I think that the key to online learning is the care and expertise with which the content is developed, especially the narrative, pictures, graphics, and reference material, as well as the design and effective use of collaboration tools by the TAs and students.
We attended synchronous online lectures while logged into an IRC server. You could listen to the lecture and chat with classmates about it in real-time as it was happening without interrupting the lecture, and it was delightful and extremely engaging. Frankly, I found it superior to the in-person class meetings I had in undergrad.
Also, class discussions are hardly the only way to engage learners, there are all kinds of active learning techniques that can be employed. In my own teaching, I'm personally fond of using live polling tools to ask formative assessment questions. Many online meeting tools have features for things like breakout sessions where you can ask students to do a think/pair/share.
If a student is not engaged in an online learning environment, I think that points more to instructors not being prepared to teach in that setting rather than an inherent limitation of the setting itself.
For an example of a vibrant community, I’d look toward what video games, such as Rocket League, have created.
Players have a specific ranking based on competition stats. They level up when they when a sufficient number of games within their ranking. Progression through the game doesn’t have to be a solo endeavor because players can look to the community for how to improve.
The community not on my celebrates wins and gives advice on losses, they offer free coaching that can result in paid tutoring [1].
Not only that, but on average the community members are positive and light-hearted.
I think other skill-based activities could learn a lot from how and why these communities function and incorporate those aspects into their platforms to help students succeed.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/hv2vus/coachi...
The real time ranking system I think is the root of a lot of this. It allows people to know where they stand and they can look to the community on how to improve their game.
I think that's a great point but one that the Rocket League community somehow solves.
Trying to make education more like Rocket League, ignoring the wildly divergent motivations of the people involved, is a fool's errand.
What are the objective differences between getting better at Rocket League and getting better at stats?
Agreed if we don't understand or create a basic framework, trying to put lipstick on a pig and making stats look like Rocket League is dumb.
Instead why not organize a catch-all chat for people to talk, like a Discord. Let people talk off-topic and organize to play games and such as a class if they want.
Online classes may be a forcing function for the discussion of how to price education, but the question itself has been the elephant in the room for decades.
The value of school for me was (in no particular order) learning how to learn, how to tackle large projects with difficult questions, how to work with other people, how to manage my time doing all of that, building a network of both people in my area and outside of my area, smoothly transitioning from childhood to adulthood, having freedom to explore and discover the things that truly interested me, and having a really good time doing all of that.
A huge part of the value of school came from staying on-campus in student dorms my first two years. Living with a large group of people expanded and enriched my social life tremendously. I loved being so close to the school and libraries and all the facilities. Its hard to know for sure but the social skills I gained are probably as valuable as the computer science education in creating the life I have now.
Plus, with more self-study, can’t you can get into most tech companies because they tend to be more open?
Now if I did major in CS, I’m not sure I would still pursue a masters. But I didn’t, so there’s certainly value there for me.
The reduced revenue could be made up by cutting the unnecessary ivory-tower jobs, reducing the inflated exec compensation, and reducing the unnecessary $50M+ on-campus construction projects.
and charging students more.
From what I’ve seen, this has already been happening over the past decade already. I agree they’ll continue doing it for “new reasons”
A college set up as a distance-learning establishment is in a different place - and there are some of those. But the costs of running a university don't suddenly vanish just because the students do. And as everyone expects/hopes in-person teaching to be back next year, I don't see many institutions deciding to go online-only as a business model, either.
(FWIW the associate professors will be fine: they're mostly tenured. It's the adjuncts which are going to be shafted, together with the people who were hoping to get tenure-track positions in what is now a decimated job market).
'Associate' is a tenured rank. Now, to be honest, universities should cut the pay of their highest-paid members first—and we've been getting the highly performative "admin taking nominal pay cuts" measures as sops to that—but I'd imagine it's far more likely that non-tenured assistant professors will see those pay cuts first (or perhaps, as maishe points out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23918339 , you meant adjuncts, who get the weakest protections of any faculty).
While most programs do charge a bit less for tuition, the amount of money they're charging for recorded lectures and a credential is almost comical. On top of that many programs, including some of the better looking ones (i.e. from flagship state schools) still differentiate between in and out of state tuition. There were a few programs that were cheaper, but you could tell there was a reason for that.
So yeah, no way in hell I'm paying for what they're asking considering what I'd get.
They do this because your taxes have already paid part of your tuition for every in-state University.
Research labs are much less densely packed, and in-person interaction is less. In less affected states lab-based research is starting again.
For high school level, sure.
But I can't see a sane way to let students handle acids like I did in chemistry labs during college, and physics labs have equipment that is too complex/expensive/dangerous to send to the students.
There’s an entire community of autodidacts that do this sort of thing at home as a hobby. They have lots of advice on PPE, materials handling, storage, where to find papers and books etc. Some of them even record experiments instead of just writing them down so everyone can watch.
This does mean that students from out of city will have to find safe accommodation, but thankfully they are only a small part (<10%) of the student population at my uni .
They've been aggressively holding educational costs down (see: adjunct professor), while the costs for non-educational services such as career counseling and "student support" (not entirely sure what that entails; my alma mater didn't have it as far as I'm aware) have mushroomed.
The value I got out of university was mostly not tuition, but I think overall, (very pre-pandemic) the whole package was worth it. I've learnt vastly more by reading, engaging with people, and doing both before and after university though, for much less cost.
I've also never been on a paid training or course that was worth the cost and didn't involve something above and beyond the tuition (networking, project based, access to facilities/tools/data, etc.). The only times this obviously isn't true are when you're gaining some required or coveted industry certification, and then that's only because of the value attached to it, not the value of the learning itself vs other ways to gain the same skills/knowledge.
The lesson for me has been that for any course or school there's got to be an expected benefit way beyond the perceived value of the tuition, and that most of the time this doesn't exist.
I think paid training in companies is likely as popular as it is mostly because it feels a bit like a vacation and most companies don't allow, or don't make it socially acceptable, for people to take sufficient time off for their own long term wellbeing.
I feel it is the same with books on programming. They are worth reading first when you already know how to program.
* People are getting delusional because of both low quality and high price.
Edit: disclaimer: I am a college student at thus I may be biased about what I see here in India. But I assume it is almost universal from other discussions here and on reddit.
Large in-person classes you don't even have discussions. Some universities have lecture halls of 400-600 students, and you have to go ask a TA for help later in the week
> That's not dissimilar to the situation before the plague.
So I think you agree and are saying that it's the same?
Therefore it's not particularly realistic to expect schools to chop their top-line so soon.
This is clearly a transitory and uncertain period. With time, possibly less time than schools hope, they will be forced to adjust prices downward.
What would end up happening should tuition fees be reduced overnight:
- Universities / Community Colleges would experience a fiscal deficit (or substantial cut to their income). Here in Canada, that means taxpayers' will be on hook.
- Should Educational institutions cut salaries of their staff - they would risk losing their top faculty and support staff.
Just like people rush to support local businesses and local economy, they should also support their local education institutions. After all, they employ a large number of people and have a huge hand in inspiring next generation of workers and provide lots of social programs for local community.
On another note, I often see people discussing merits of University degree / Community College diploma and often point out that Computer Science degree is not worth it. I beg to differ - the Modern World owes quiet a lot to army of University / Community college graduates who have made quantum leap in civilization's advancement possible.
Just over 40 years ago, overwhelming majority of workers didn't have a post-secondary education. But since then, around the World post-secondary education has experienced a boom and we that all corners of the World has experienced substantial gains in their economic output which in turn has led to better health conditions and a better living standard.
If somehow we magically switched to online classes and everyone was good at making them ... I worry we'd loose a lot of people / the education quality could drop and we wouldn't know.
Granted that also implies that folks who aren't good at in person classes may have been lost for decades already.
For what it's worth, I probably went to about 10% of my classes in college and I got a great education (CS+math) from a combination of the course materials, exams, and working with other students.
If you are looking for education, it may be worth it.
If you are looking for the signal to employers, it may be worth it as long as they don’t water down the reputation by admitting more students and employers don’t devalue it for being online.
If you are looking for connections, networking, and resume building opportunities, then it is definitely not worth it.
My problem is that the benefits I got from university were nearly all in the two latter areas.
Note that it’s talking about high schools.
The big difference in total compensation after tax between Western Europe and USA is in the compensation part for people that are considered highly skilled. For example for me I get at least 2x here in CA compared to what I would get in Norway and Switzerland. In the UK and Germany the difference is even larger.
For people that are not highly skilled it is the other way round, they would earn significantly more in Europe. Another difference there is that life in Europe is much nicer for the average middle class, but personally I think it’s nicer in the US for upper middle class, the top 10%.
This would indirectly change life for top 10% as you cannot as cheap hire people for services.
This is a gross underestimate. One can quibble about whether the top 40% or 80% of the US is richer/consumes more than in Europe but the idea it’s only true for the top 10% is delusional. Germany has a lower GDP per capita than every state bar Mississippi. The US has a higher average household income than everywhere but Hong and much larger households. The US is just richer than any remotely comparable country. The countries that look similar on GDP per capita, like Norway, consume a great deal less.
Gdp per capital is misleading without talking about measures of income inequality
It’s really hard to explain and I guess having to be experienced.
I think this has not always been true, and is part of the reason why we are seeing discontent in the US right now. Life for middle class used to be a lot more comfortable.
To be honest my life does not change at all based on sales tax. Perhaps for cars but other than that it is sort of a rounding error. So little of my money goes to direct consumption compared to house and savings.
The article is actually making the fair point that students paying for IRL classes are being ill-served by online replacements with no discount.
It mis-steps though in generalising to making claims more generally about online tuition; a physical university (say) panicked by lockdown into rush-providing online replacements for normal service is hardly likely to be able to match the quality of service of (decent) institutions that specialise in online learning.
2) Online education can be equal to in-person education and is worth the same cost as in-person education. The overall college experience is subjective, but you can learn everything you need to from reading a textbook and completing assignments and taking tests, all of which are the same in an online setting.
What's interesting is that while students attended to online classes way less, they understood the class content way more, because they felt less pressure and could work at their on speed.
If the lecturer is facilitating properly (ensuring students are engaged and paying attention, calling upon quieter members), then the class can be as successful as an in-person one.
The only negatives I've seen are: easier to be distracted (no one can really tell you're checking Reddit), the online setting with it's mute/unmute approach sets a higher barrier to entry for participating in discussion.
A gap year sounds like one solution. But chances are many of these people would have figured out something that work for them (greater impact, for less money) that others will adopt and follow.
Much of the impact will be here to stay.
If I was a student, I'd do anything to take a year off. Even at high status schools, or perhaps especially at high status schools, missing out on the socialization and experience just to get status a year or two earlier is unlikely to pay off better.
The general sentiment here is that people have used college as an extremely expensive social club and believe that is its greatest value. I wouldn’t think of investing $100,000 of my current or future income in order to make friends or learn about myself.
I hope I’m not alone in thinking that I learned difficult material that I would not have grasped on my own and had self-improvement from meeting academic challenges under my own responsibility. Maybe this is rare, but I have directly applied my undergrad education to solving problems and used its foundation for learning more.
The social aspect of college is not itemized on the tuition statement. The cost of tuition is related to the quality of education directly provided by the school.
And don't you tell me that they cannot save on electricity and cancelled activities.
The price of tuition is not following any offer-and-demand, they are just using the fact that you are in the middle of your studies and you can't stop now, hope that will make people realise the kind of mafia those university are.
Having said that, a university telling a student they must pay full price for less than full value is expecting the customer to essentially give a charitable donation to a business model "because we need it".
To attempt an analogy: if a grocery store had its warehouse burn down, they would not then be able to turn around and charge 10% more than market price on all of their items "because they needed it". That disaster would be a cost they'd have to absorb.
Universities are at least partially insulated from having to respond to the market like a business would, because of the high cost and difficulty of switching schools in the middle of an education. My sense is that if things can return to normal within a year, then they'll recover from this. If they can't open for in person classes for longer than that, then students will take the leap and move away from traditional universities permanently.
* Gamify the experience * Focus on mastery * Build a community online that replaces the classroom
I'm currently working on a project that aims to do the above, but admittedly we are in the early stages: https://classroom.qvault.io
education isn't paid for on a value-received basis. it's cost-plus. and shifting online due to covid doesn't reduce costs that much. Yes, there is some lower cost due to facilities being empty, but i'd wager that on balance, the expense ratio is actually higher.
yes, students are not going to get the same value from their tuition dollars.
I'd like to finish my BSCS degree I started over a decade ago, but when you live and work in the most expensive place in America (the Bay Area), there aren't a lot of in-person options. Gotta pay rent.
I guess for engineering where there is significant equipment necessary this doesn't hold.
But the majority of collage is pointless, all the knowledge you need is available outside of collage but then nobody can verify that you actually learned it.
This book is pretty hard hitting but it provides a lot of solid analysis about what the problem is:
The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
Let me know how your surgery with your self-taught surgical teams works out for you and how your subsequent lawsuit with your self-taught lawyer goes.
- You've been accepted for this fall. The college is under no obligation to delay your start until next year, especially when there's a fresh batch of incoming students.
- You think it's tough to enroll in classes this fall? Wait until you double the number of students all trying to take the same classes! That should be fun!
- My daughter has 4 different scholarships. They're all predicated on her starting this fall. Take it or lose it. These scholarships are paying over 50% of all her costs. Since she's going to a State University that means I can afford most if not all the rest leaving her with a minimal amount of debt.
- It's her freshman year. I feel more sorry for the juniors and seniors. Most freshman year classes can be done online. The more advanced the class, the more you should be attending in person.
- Silver lining - incoming freshman will have to focus more on scholastics and academics and not partying.
- Her major, pharmaceutical drug research & development, can't be done online. Yes, there are some classes you can do online, and most of those are in the freshman year, but ultimately you have to have in-person instruction. Especially for the labs.
- Her school isn't in one of the "hot spots" and has a governor and mayor more-or-less enforcing mask laws. The dorm housing density has been decreased by 50% - which has left some of the students scrambling to find off-campus housing. All the incoming freshman are guaranteed housing.
- She got her dorm assignment yesterday and the steps the university is taking to keep students safe. Daily temperature checks, contact tracing, mix of in-person and virtual classes, on-campus COVID testing with 6 hour test result turn around time, quarantine dorms, dining halls are delivery only. I should mention this university has one of the best research hospitals in the country and a huge medical complex serving the public.
Finally, ask yourself this: why do you think anything is going to be any better 1 year from now? Almost every other country in the world is getting back to normal but the United States has done very little in the past 7 months and so far there's no indication that's changing anytime soon. There's no reason to believe things are going to substantially improve by this time next year unless we start taking the steps to make that so. Even a vaccine may not help as the early estimates for the cost of a vaccine is $1,000 per dose. Health insurers aren't going to want to pay that kind of money for everybody. Will the U.S. government? We blew through $7 trillion this year with very little to show for it so who knows?