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I think the real value of a university is the community. What you're describing is basically a new textbook. It doesn't replace the people you interact with. Going to a great college doesn't mean great classes with awesome course material. It's other classmates you study with, it's the TAs that hold office hours, the professors too, sometimes.

I can't emphasize this point enough. I learned a ton in the classes I took, but the real value I got from college was the people I was exposed to. I built a ton of lasting friendships and a strong network there, but more important was just the experience of being around smart and motivated people. My peers in college had higher ambitions and expectations for their lives than the people I grew up with. That caused me to shift how I thought about my own life and put me on a very different path. That just would not have happened if I took online classes.

I strongly agree.

When I was an undergraduate, the "lower division", more introductory, required courses were taught by specialists in "Computer Science Education", whatever the heck that is. I hated them. They were ... useful, as a basis for everything later, but they weren't taught well and if that is all there were, I would be very unhappy about the time and money wasted. Then I reached the "upper division", mostly elective courses taught by active researchers in the given field. Sure, their lectures and such were not well polished and rather uneven, but their enthusiasm for the subject generally shone through and you could get more insight from a chat with a professor on a ten-minute walk from class than from any textbook you've ever seen.

TAs that could understand the material and see where you went wrong. Classmates who were challenging and who asked questions you never thought about.

The whole package is what makes it good.

So what I'm hearing is that introductory classes could be replicated in a primarily online environment? I'd be a huge fan of moving the first year or so of college online (or at least having the option to do so) for a reduced rate.

Possibly, yes. My preferred alternative would be to make introductory classes more like later classes.

> What you're describing is basically a new textbook.

Yep. I'm reminded of the MOOCs. The idea was to remove all elements from the class that had a cost (i.e., no office hours, no questions during the lectures). MOOCs turned out to be a better textbook, not a better class.

Absolutely agree, the physical presence is extremely important. So much of what I learned was from having inspiring peers, professors and TAs in undergrad.

With that said though, imagine if the baseline for every class in every university was "great classes with awesome course material". Now the differentiating factor becomes what you talked about - the quality of the TAs, the professors and their research, your classmates. Wouldn't that be an improvement?

I'm thinking of it as us automating away the non-creative part of school - i.e. as you noted, the valuable stuff is the interactions and the peers, so why not maximize the focus on creating opportunities for that?

There's no reason that this couldn't work via an online community. Online courses don't do anything to foster this kind of connection, because they have always been a lazy facsimile of the in-person college course experience. If they tried, online courses could easily foster these kinds of relationships and unlock a ton of potential.

I also think that this is a larger societal problem that should be but has not been addressed by social networking apps. There are no social networks that are designed to foster communication about highly specific ideas. Sure I can go to r/history to find people who are generally interested in history, but where can I go to find people who would be interested in book-clubbing G.J. Meyer's 'A World Undone'? If I want to talk about physics in general, I could go to /r/physics. But how do I find physicists who want to discuss matter-antimatter asymmetry? You can glom on to conversations in current social networks, but there is no way to start/find/subscribe to discussions about very specific subject matter.

Point being, rather than saying that the IRL personal interactions at college are a reason why the current model is ideal, we could do a lot of good by figuring out how to port that experience A) onto online courses, and B) onto the world at large.

My only counter to that is socialization in person is a lot different than socialization online... I notice that from my daughter to a lot of younger people in general that spend more time interacting online or via phone apps vs. in person have far more anxiety regarding interactions in person.

As to TFA, I think that for a lot of people trade schools are a better option, and should often be encouraged. I'd like to see more general education regarding retirement planning etc as well earlier on, as this is a place a lot of people get stuck, esp. in the US.

Another issue is that people should be guided towards educational paths that have demand in the workplace. Does it make sense to go 200k into debt for a job that pays 38k/year, or graduate 10k students for a career path with only 100 openings. Some of this onus is on the students and parents, but the schools themselves could do much better with this. Some reform on funding might help, but it's a touchy subject.

The opposite is true as well. Those who face to face have far more anxiety communicating online with peers.

On social networks... I think we may see a resurgence of community bulletin boards online... more focused on subject of interest than over region/locality.

For all the flack that Facebook gets, you may also be surprised to find some very specific interest groups, I wish they had not removed the live messenger chat for groups specifically though..

> There's no reason that this couldn't work via an online community.

We are rapidly testing this hypothesis during the current pandemic.

Imagine we collected the best material in written, bound volumes. And nearly every city had a large collection you could borrow from for free.

We did. The professors of history, psychology, art, biology, math, - everything - at the world's greatest universities very often write down what they know in books. We achieved this already.

You can read Feynman's course on physics tonight. Your city library probably has it.

Absolutely, and that's something I'm very grateful for! One of the things I love the most about where I live is the excellent library system, and I have taken a ton of advantage of it. That said, it's not always the best for serious self study, since often books lack answer keys or worked solutions.

I'm not proposing distance ed. I'm proposing that we shape education around automating the rote things, in particular delivering lectures. I don't think the main benefit of being on campus is the lectures or coming up with assignments, instead (as another comment noted) it's the peers and the people you interact with and how they help you learn. And so by automating away the rote part of it and focusing on the creative (research, TAing, peer interaction), it seems like we should be able to create better outcomes.

Why do you think universities still give lectures, as the (contemporary) material has been available in written form for a few hundred years? Thousands of professionals, most of them smart and well-intentioned, have had these choices since the advent of cheap printing. Yet lectures today would be recognizable to the ancient Greeks. Why?

That's a good question. I think two things:

1. High quality video recording and transmission is still relatively new technology, and it seems most lectures are audio visual performances.

2. There hasn't been a push for a paradigm shift. Lectures work well enough, and have lots of benefits like creating a gathering of people. But does COVID change that?

There's a lot of value to paying someone who has spent decades reading all the things people wrote down and distilling the most important information, themes, and principles.

I'm reading The Illiad right now (Pope's version). It's quite nice, but I don't understand it. I mean, I get what's going on, but I don't understand why they are telling me this. Why is it composed the way it is? Why start the last few months into a 10 year war? How does one even successfully camp out in front of an enemy city for ten years? Why didn't someone win already? Why are two enemy combatants duking it out while everyone else watches? Why are they willing to stop when the priests put out their poles saying it's nighttime, battle's over? Why are the priests even willing to go near two people fighting? And that's not even getting into all the literary stuff I'm completely missing.

I have the source material. If I spent enough time reading up on ancient Greek culture, and reading analyses of The Illiad, etc. I'll probably get that. Or I could pay a guy who's already done it to explain all the important parts and point me to the things people have written down that are actually helpful (as opposed to not very insightful, based on obsolete information, pushing an ideology, or just flat-out wrong).

Top universities already put all of their courses for free online. e.g. here's all of MIT's CS lectures: https://www.youtube.com/c/mitocw/playlists. There's no downside to them doing so, because they derive most of their profit from their reputations.

And then if you want a more formalized course structure, you have online courses like KhanAcademy.

And then if you want to personalize your learning, you can find individuals who are great at teaching that constantly are producing online content. e.g. Grant Sanderson's channel 3blue1brown, popular even amongst professionals, because it re-teaches concepts in a much more powerful and intuitive manner.

I think the internet is already set up exactly the way that you are imagining. The only difference is that you won't get a reputable slip of paper.

> The only difference is that you won't get a reputable slip of paper.

I would add the costs behind providing that slip of paper are not insignificant.

It requires having people with expert level knowledge of the field assess your work and your knowledge over a broad range of courses.

So universities in the US are ridiculously over priced, but the value they provide is still > 0.

Oh, for sure, slips of paper can be super-valuable. I don't think their main value, however, come from the implied expert-level assessment. Rather, I think their value comes from the implied gating requirement to even get in in the first place. Harvard is more famous for how hard it is to get into, rather than how hard it is to graduate, and then the resulting exclusive club you get to become part of once you're in.

Being part of an exclusive club and having a built-in reputation opens many more doors and makes getting some jobs a lot easier. So then you have to calculate the value of that potential. Department of Education estimated the earning potential for Ivy Leagues to be on average 40k more a year, up to 130k more a year.

[1] http://archive.is/nOfLQ

If we're comparing a college then with no reputation vs taking only online classes, I wonder if there is much if any appreciable difference per year. Maybe at that point the value of the college education is mostly in the knowledge and skills you gain and the paper itself has negligible worth. So then make sure you're only paying a negligible amount to get that paper.

What? Giving an exam is expensive? How many years of college can you test out with AP classes alone?

CS is already like that.

Let's be realistic, there's only so many compilers books, algorithm or OS books around. And most classes are based around these.

I can go coast to coast and everyone I'll meet who is doing an algorithm class will be doing more of less the same thing, only with variation on how hard the problem sets and labs are.

Have you seen The Great Courses (https://www.thegreatcourses.com/)?

> I'd love to be continuously taking classes in new fields, but the world isn't set up that way.

But it kind of is that way?

There is already probably more course content online than you could learn in a lifetime.

Beautiful idea. Courses that improve over time iterated on research would be amazing.

This is a recipe for a very poor education in my opinion. This sort of mass produced educational content, taught by professional educators rather than researchers, produces students who merely know facts and can perform basic algorithms.

Real understanding of a field comes from long hours engaging with the subject and playing with ideas, and from interacting with others in the field. Working through educational material (where it exist) is obviously helpful, but it's not enough.

tl;dr: Nobody becomes in expert in anything by working through a textbook.

You can very easily become better than 99% of humanity at a topic by diligently working through an advanced textbook. That’s not genuine expertise but it’s not nothing. A community of practice is necessary for true expertise in mature fields but you can get a long, long way with a series of textbooks.

Nobody becomes an expert at anything by going to college. Students who get an in Calculus aren't an expert at Calculus or anything close to, they mostly just drilled homework practice problems until they knew enough to an well on an exam.

The goal of undergrad shouldn't be to make anyone an expert, that's what graduate school can be for.