US universities announcing online Fall 2020
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Are people really going to pay that much for 15 hours of Zoom lectures a week? I doubt it. The primary reason parents are willing to pay that much is not for the education (with some exceptions) but for the credentials, the networking, and putting their kids into a cohort of successful, like-minded individuals from which they can choose an acceptable mate. And of course to get that 18 year old bundle of hormones and poor judgement out of the house but still in a relatively safe environment.
Their value in terms of actual employability is basically what HS was 30 years ago.
Short pd some HR bean counters and the universities themselves most in the private sector don’t put too much stock in them.
A degree from the relatively small local college is about the same as big state. Ivy is it’s own thing for sure.
I don’t think a lot of Harvard kids are going to drop out and head to state school, and Harvard knows it.
Writing 1+ page essays and MLA citation formatting is work that seems to only exist in academia. It wouldn't surprise me if community college educated people transferring to university programs needed a refresher on that stuff.
Proper written communication and literature searching skills are demanded everywhere in the workplace. Doesn't everyone dread getting muddled, poorly formatted emails because you have to guess the meaning or write back and forth several times to find out what's going on?
I don't get the pervasive hostility to education and academia in this forum. Granted, much of high school and regional college is piss-poor, but instead of writing off all of university as useless one should demand proper performance.
Proper written communication, absolutely. However, you can argue that people don't need 4 years of writing essays in order to comprise emails or PowerPoints. As for literature searching, what does that mean in a normal office environment context?
Footnoting means to put stuff into proper context. Of course you need literature searching skills to put stuff into proper context, and you need to know where to find documentation for your field of work.
I'm getting deja vu:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23496234
Seems the experience is very different in differing work places.
> Doesn't everyone dread getting muddled, poorly formatted emails because you have to guess the meaning or write back and forth several times to find out what's going on?
This is the norm at my (very successful and large) company.
> I don't get the pervasive hostility to education and academia in this forum.
I'm very pro-education, but I will point out that all the people I know who write very poorly have formal education, and often graduate degrees. Culture will dictate how well you write much, much more than education. If the work culture doesn't value it, people will write poorly.
The life of an academic is tenuous already, and a lot of instruction is done by poorly-paid, untenured sessionals. Tenured positions are in 2020, rare as hen's teeth.
a) There is no way this list is even slightly close to comprehensive.
b) What is the purpose of this?
Also, I agree this is not close to comprehensive, but the best I have seen. If someone here can keep a more comprehensive status I promise you many parents would pay something for access to that status.
For those interested, two more exhaustive sources[0][1], one of which is linked in the footnotes of OP.
[0] https://www.chronicle.com/article/Here-s-a-List-of-Colleges-... [1] https://collegecrisis.shinyapps.io/dashboard/
You can take classes without needing to move/commute to campus. Furthermore, given a work from home environment and a more flexible schedule, many people will be able to make it work without needing to quit their full-time job.
If I ran a struggling university right now I'd lean into this and still be open to applications for the fall semester. This could attract a lot of working professionals like me.
They have 540 out of 812 students planning to live on campus. I somehow don't see this working out.
One of the rare opportunities where hacking could do good for humanity as a whole.
Very few people take advantage of it - because the credential is more important than the knowledge.
For example, when I was learning how to code years back, I literally had no idea what language I should start with. I learned from a top->down approach, but the benefits from a university is they lay it out so you get a bottom->up understanding.
at the end of the day, every single student will put their own interests over taking a stand here
the universities have the leverage
If the amount to be paid is not agreeable for the services expected to be rendered, why would you want to utilize said services?
There does not seem to be any reason for a group to take a stand. It is either worth it or it isn't. If it is, everyone is happy. If it isn't, there is no loss in not seeing the transaction take place.
Hard to say. We would need to look at the level of profit the college is making from this new arrangement.
If it is only worth $20,000 now, which may very well be true, value has been lost. So, what value is lost? I imagine it will be a lot harder to make new friends and find new lovers when you spend your time at home on a computer instead of mingling at school.
Were people previously paying $10,000 per year (to stick with your numbers) to make friends and find lovers?
The thing you said about paying for what a thing is worth ($30,000) instead of what it costs to produce that thing ($20,000) is correct. If I buy a car like that, theoretically I'm able to walk away from the deal if I don't feel like it's worth $30,000, and the seller might eventually lower his price to $20,000 if he never finds a buyer at his desired price.
But I think with colleges, the presence of loans and zeitgeist irrationally motivate people to buy something for $30,000, and then if they do happen to pay off their loans they assume that they got $30,000 of worth out of it... But I think that isn't true, since most employers aren't treating a bachelor's degree very seriously these days.
The outstanding question remains on whether or not the perception of value has declined with these announcements. If so, what perceived value has been lost in that transition? Presumably the education is still being provided.
For your other point, yes, at an apples to apples comparison, the receipt of college credit and education/knowledge should remain the same. But the cost to produce it should be lower. And I'm arguing that the cost savings will not be passed on to the student, because there is no market mechanism that allows them to negotiate the price of their education.
It is not a question of what it is really worth (which is rather meaningless as nothing has some kind of absolute worth that is written into the cosmos), only what people see it as worth and are willing to pay.
> Maybe that's true, but TSLA stock has been worth anything from $200 to $1400 in the past few years.
Of course. The perception of value of a given thing is naturally going to change from person to person and from moment to moment. In this case we're talking about moment to moment. Because it was worth $30,000 to someone last year does not necessarily mean it is worth $30,000 to them today, as their knowledge has changed.
But, if the perception of value has declined, the question is: What has changed?
> But the cost to produce it should be lower
Even if it were free to produce, if it is worth $30,000, then it would be logical to charge $30,000. Input costs are irrelevant. To emphasize that point, it could cost $30,000 to produce, but if people only want to pay $20,000 you can't charge $30,000. You're going to lose money. People lose money producing things all the time. Input costs are irrelevant.
So. There's that.
The most across-the-board policy I've seen is George Washington University, which is giving a 10% tuition discount: https://coronavirus.gwu.edu/. Some other places are offering case-by-case increases in financial-aid packages.