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> 7) Given we have had 2 years of at home lecturing, at what point does the value of this come into question? Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth 3x an open university degree.

Two years of home lecturing that by all accounts has resulted in close to two years of lost progress if my observation of teachers complaining about ill-prepared students is anything to go by.

I think I noticed more divergence in the level of preparation (although, didn't try to quantify it -- grad student here, limited responsibility/scope/ability to make change, so just informal observations). It makes sense -- with at-home instruction there's less of an opportunity to just passively check in with students, remote lectures are easier to ignore, and it is easier to cheat on tests when they are remote (so, unprepared students can get through more easily).

In particular -- it was a real struggle to get my first year college students to do any group work (an opportunity they'd usually jump at, because 50% responsibility, right?).

If this actually is the case, it is a really unfortunate outcome. I'm opposed to getting kids sick/exposing them to "mystery long-term health consequences." But setting them up for academic regression is also no good.

All in all, 0/10 pandemic, would not pandemic again. Not sure there could have been a positive outcome. Not sure what the least-bad option could have been. I wish we'd done more, though. I think we may have failed.

I wish we'd tried some really out there strategies. A pet idea I wanted to suggest was having the students on campus and organizing them by major into units -- so, your dorm/floor (depending on the size of the building) is all your-major students and it forms a unit. Call it the Harry Potter strategy. You can socialize normally with each other, maybe classrooms are assigned to a given unit. Maybe a grad student is assigned to (live with?) the unit (hard, though, grad students have their own lives going on and I guess they wouldn't want to restrict themselves enough to safely interact in person with the students -- I don't think I could). Lectures could be broadcast to the unit, with some local representative for the instructor. No interactions between units, but at least the students would have some peers to interact with. But I don't anyone would have been brave enough take responsibility for this sort of thing safety-wise (I certainly wouldn't), and I don't know that I'd trust the average school to work out all the details. But if it worked out, it could have been really something!

Actually, I guess we're far along enough to see if anywhere tried that out, and if so, if it worked out.

Perhaps things will go more smoothly once the meta verse fully arrives (I’m only half joking..)

Maybe facebooks next pivot will be in education.

Could work, maybe. I'd probably want facial expressions and body language though. The facial expressions of "I'm confused" or "I get it" are crucial. And the gestures of "we're both looking at this while I explain it" "now I stand up a little bit, want to give an example a try?"

Sounds dumb when written out, but the alternative is to keep asking "do you understand?" And then getting back "yes" or "(lying) yes," because nobody ever says they don't understand if the question is asked at them directly.

We have quite a ways to go. It absolutely needs to become more personal. This means facial expressions and body language.

Maybe the fastest way to get to this is a “Star Wars” esque hologram approach. Why else have we been training our youth to see themselves and the world through Snapchat filters.

I agree the benefits of in-person learning are often vastly underrecognized, but there was a lot going on over the last two years other than just in person versus online learning. People in a relatively favorable environment, learning from people who are prepared to do so with established online communication tools, is pretty different from the last two years.

FWIW on your (5) there's nothing unsustainable about the most recent iteration of the pension scheme. The problems are an interesting (if infuriating) combination of the employers wanting to kill the defined benefit scheme to save money, the government's regulatory framework being designed to protect pensionholders in closed defined benefit schemes and not to run functional private DB schemes (which are nearly all gone), the Trustee company being untrustworthy, and the governance arrangements being poor. The only people really committed to the scheme continuing are its members, for whom it's theoretically run but in practice have very little control over it.

If you want an illustration of the magnitude of the problem the might resonate with HNers: the USS Trustee is aiming to achieve CPI+0% investment returns for the next 40 years. With long-run equity returns being what they are, that's borderline criminal. (It's certainly not the investment strategy that universities will be adopting for their own endowments).

The honest truth is that the USS was highly solvent on a going concern basis before the recent changes (which already involved prospective cuts of 30% to accruals only a few years ago). It only generates a deficit if you model closing the scheme tomorrow and shunting the entire fund into gilts in order to eliminate all investment risk. But even if you do that, the scheme can still pay: it's explicitly backed by the combined assets of every scheme member, which includes all the richest universities and (hilariously) the government.

Oh, and the present cuts will take it down to less than half the pension of our colleagues in the newer post-92 universities who are in the Teachers' Pension Scheme. What price a formal government guarantee?

I'm not exactly sure what the GP was talking about, but if the pension benefits are guaranteed and greater than the return on funds invested in the pension, then the only way the pension plan could be sustainable would be in some growth scenarios. In many growth scenarios, though, it wouldn't be.

This a problem with many public sector pension plans. Many cities across this country have pension plans that guarantee pensioners income that cannot be paid from the plan without screwing over future retirees.

Clearly this issue has to be evaluated system by system.

Oh yes, absolutely. This particular scheme is very heavily pre-funded (currently to ~30% of salary, which is why many employers want it dead) and is sustainable as long as your investment strategy isn't 'putting the money under the mattress'. Yes, residual investment risk falls on the universities collectively (by deliberate scheme design) but it's certainly not one of the over-promised schemes of the kind you note. In fact, it's status as a nominally private-sector scheme subjects it to heavy regulation specifically to ensure that the government doesn't get left holding the bag.

If you want far more detail than is sane, there was a 'Joint Expert Panel' set up by the employers organisation and the union to provide a way forward after the industrial action caused by the last attempt to abolish the scheme. Their report analyses USS in detail (rather than pension schemes in general) and is at https://web.archive.org/web/20220506092908/https://ussjep.or...

I am not particularly talking about the most recent iteration of the pension scheme which I can imagine being a lot more cut down and closer to traditional private pension schemes.

Largely talking about my experience seeing my parents'(30 year professors) pension who are in the Teacher's pension scheme along with other pension schemes.

From my perspective, I was blown away by the figures they were being given. With my points in regards to a potential drop in grants, and funding from students. I fail to see how the figures I saw will be sustainable going forward.

Yeah, those days were ended years ago. The present generation of senior management are doing very nicely though: their historically-acquired final salary entitlements with a generous accrual rate coupled with recent insane inflation in senior management salaries mean they're going to make out like bandits.

My own projected pension is £13,180 a year, based on about 30 years' worth of (mostly future) combined employer/employee contributions of 30% of a salary of a little less than £40k/yr. Big bucks it is not.

> Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth

I have a lot of friends and acquaintances that are university professors and it was frankly embarrassing how many of them could not be bothered to learn to adapt to online teaching. There was endless complaining about basic things that anyone who works in an office doing meeting with remote teams has to learn.

There are entire industries based around providing educational content online, and even more based around creating engaging content online. It's more or less a solved problem and someone with a Phd should certainly be capable of learning a few new tricks. You're not tasked with some impossible challenge, you're just being asked to rethink how you teach for the benefit of hundreds of students paying collectively millions of dollar to learn from you.

No matter how much people say it, online learning is a vastly inferior product to in person teaching.

Of course you wouldn't run the system off VHS tapes 30 years ago but it is just absurd to me we have no change in the system when I can literally find all the lectures, the textbook and notes for basically any class in the next 5 minutes.

Not only any class but I can probably find multiple different professors teaching the class and take my pick of who I like the best.

To me, it can only be explained by our cultural obsession with education as credentials and the total disregard that classes have actual valuable information. We have had an absolute revolution in education that we are not taking any advantage of. Instead the classes mostly rot on youtube and the education racket collects rents no differently than in 1980 other than charging way more.

> 1) Student loan plans (especially in the UK) are gonna cripple the economy and are vastly unsustainable.

Why do you say that about the UK? I’m not from there and this is the first I’m hearing about problems with UK student debt.

They're backstopped by the government, in that they're written off after ~30 years if they weren't paid off in that time by the 9% marginal income charge. The scheme was designed as a backdoor graduate tax rather than a conventional finance agreement, and the government has been using them like a credit card to fund the universities off-balance-sheet. Which will be difficult to continue.

So the current plan 2 loans are about 15k per year of study. So for a typical 4 year course, that is about 60k worth of loans.

If you take a 6 year medical course, you are on your own for the 2 extra years at least from a maintenance grant AFAIK. Hence a lot of students, especially those in London struggling for their 5th and 6th year of study. Don't even get my started in regards to the junior doctor salary.

The payback terms of this is 9% of everything you gain beyond a specific threshold i.e. anywhere from 20-25k.

After 30 years, theoretically the loan gets wiped off (unlikely). Already there are talks of extending it for the next gen plans by another 10 years.

The interest rate for this student loan is RPI + 3.5, and adjusts higher the more you earn. Effectively becoming almost impossible to pay back apart from those who are the absolute highest earners.

So far, we have seen the government repeatedly change both the repayment threshold, and the time before it gets wiped.

Given NI rises, I have seen effective marginal tax rates up to 60%.

At the end of the day, the rich are gonna pay it off immediately and avoid the problem, the middle get loaded and pay back far more than necessary during the loan lifetime, and the bottom may get it wiped off but forget the idea of having savings or disposable cash.

https://www.student-loan-calculator.co.uk/

The current system basically reduces massively disposable spending for middle and low earners, doesn't affect the top earners. It also is an effective black hole given most people aren't expected to be able to fully pay back the loan. This will have a massive impact on the economy and government finances. Especially given this is an open blackhole.