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Comment by temporalparts | Hacker News Reader

> Faculty are not required to provide remote access or record lectures

I don't understand this. Harvard Medical School has the same policy (or rather, none of the lectures are recorded).

Why are schools asking students to choose between the health of their peers vs their grades and their potential futures? Even responsible people can get exposed to COVID, and this would be punishing students that decide to not endanger their peers.

This is why unlimited sick days make sense in big tech companies: if you're sick, please don't spread it to everyone else in the office.

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Cornell already had a full school year last year without any breakout cases, proving that this isn't the real trade-off being made. If individual students get sick, of course, there are accommodations, but they are not to the detriment of the community as a whole being shut out of learning.

Schools historically have had vaccine requirements. For some reason (for better or worse), requiring students to have yet another vaccine feels more reasonable than a private company mandating it for its employees.

>> feels more reasonable than a private company mandating it for its employees.

Lol. As universities take money from students this more like the company requiring its customers to be vaccinated. Whatever gets needles in arms imho.

Sure, so the power dynamic is in students' favor to push back on something unreasonable, unlike with employees.

Leaving a job is easier than leaving a University IMO. Most don't accept transfers (especially when you've gotten to the 300/400 level classes.)

>> Cornell already had a full school year last year without any breakout cases, proving that this isn't the real trade-off being made

Could you elaborate on "full school year"? Honestly curious as a Cornell alum.

The Cornell Daily Sun mentions that many classes were fully virtual for those opting on-campus and that many students did school remotely for the year.

https://cornellsun.com/2020/10/14/remote-students-reflect-on...

The Academic Year notice was vague about open/shut: https://finaid.cornell.edu/academic-year-2020-2021-statement...

This year the main variant of COVID in the US is the delta variant which has an R0 of around 7. The main COVID variant last year in the US had an R0 of around 3. That makes staying COVID-free this year is much more difficult.

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Where are you getting your numbers from? That's way higher than what I've seen reported anywhere else and sounds quite off.

Institutions like this are profitable because of the status quo. Recorded lectures and remote learning threaten them to a great degree and they might not be able to afford all those overpaid administrators.

Go ahead and try to find Stanford CS lectures on the internet that aren't the annual Christmas ones.

If business was the main motivator, why would restaurants be operating any differently?

Restaurants don't hold lectures? You're going to have to rephrase what you're saying.

Stanford actually makes money from paid online courses offered through its Center for Professional Development, so that might be a reason why free lecture videos are harder to find.

However, besides the paid offerings, there still seem to be a number of free Stanford courses offered online via edX and listed at online.stanford.edu, and several lecture sequences are still available on youtube (intro CS sequence, AI, algorithms...) Several course web sites offer their written materials online as well (e.g. cs107e.github.io).

Neither paid nor free online courses are a threat to Stanford's (or any major research university's) business model of selling expensive education and credentials to students and their parents, and expensive (though cheap and very underpaid relative to industry) research to the government, or to other lucrative "university" businesses such as professional sports, medical services, property ownership of retail and industrial parks, etc..

Can you get a degree from them online though?

Let's be honest here... there are a lot of better lectures and books than college gives you available online, and with some piracy, even free.

Colleges now give you three things:

- access to college stuff, from professors to machines, labs, etc

- access to peers (networking)

- valid diploma that you can use to find jobs.

The article also points out that only 1/4 of the classrooms are A/V-equipped. It might be a cost thing.

Yeah, webcams are prohibitively expensive for a University.

No. This is because remote learning makes these institutions obsolete and they're going to continue throwing their reputation around to try to prevent that.

Yeah exactly, because the only power of a university is that they keep the material they teach top secret. Just imagine if you could just go into a store and buy textbooks! What a crazy world that would be! Everyone would be a genius and have every degree imaginable!

That's the way its treated though; everyone assumes you don't know what you're doing if you haven't been to university because there's some top-secret stuff there that you couldn't have possibly found somewhere else.

Here’s a clue: _finding_ the material isn’t the problem.

Scroll down to the "temporary accommodation for students" section. It seems to address these concerns.

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