Ask HN: Why aren't any of my classes taught by my instructors anymore?

My university was like that, but it was WGU, an online university with low prices. My entire bachelor's degree cost $20k, and could have been lower if I had worked faster (took me 2 years).

I got my accredited BSCS, and did learn some news things along the way (even after 15 years programming professionally), even the "bullshit" classes like project management taught me some ideas that keep popping up in the workplace.

Even though every course was just an app, I spoke with a mentor every week who kept me motivated. I also never had trouble getting in touch with instructors the few times I needed.

If you're getting this treatment from an expensive university, you're paying for the name. Is their name worth paying for? Don't pay brick-and-mortar prices for online-only treatment, unless it's a top 10 school whose name will be widely recognized.

Interesting side note: My daughter's elementary school teacher this year got her teaching degree from WGU. I noticed because I went their too. She's been a great teacher and my daughter loves her class.

Sounds kind of typical. I was talking to a friend who is in college and he likes it online like that. He uses ChatGPT to write all his essays and runs them through a plagiarism checker. Takes the online assignments by skipping most of the material since the questions just let him keep trying answers until he gets it right. He said most others are doing the same.

I was a bit shocked. I assumed some of this was going on, but not to that level. Makes me wonder what things are going to look like in 30 years when nobody actually learned the content and they're the primary creators.

I feel like people would be ashamed to admit they bought early copies of the tests and cheated whenever they could through a traditional university program, but people are a lot less ashamed to admit they did the same with online universities.

I don't know what to make of that. Is our moral character worsening, or is this the result of students feeling they get a half-effort from the university and so they give a half-effort back to the university in return?

I knew a few people who would cheat, but not that many people. It also seemed there were fewer opportunities to cheat with in-person tests and stuff. Many of the take-home assignments had multiple versions or required long form answers that should be unique. I guess a lot of people would have used ChatGPT for that if it existed then.

More so the latter. Additionally, more and more students assume that getting the college degree is just a requirement for employment and that they don't need to actually learn anything.

I imagine that in some cases they're not exactly wrong. It's become ridiculous with all the credentialing. Between that and the interview process, they might as well just make people take a formal IQ evaluation instead. It'd save a lot of time and money.

People see a lot of corruption and decay in our organizations too. I don't know if corruption has actually increased or not, but how often do we hear about some executive who's failing by every metric getting a pay raise? It's easy for students to justify cheating with stories like that.

Most of IQ testing is seen as being white supremacist in nature. If I were hiring, I would not touch it.

I think there are two distinct groups in play here. And, I would argue, always have been.

The first group are out to get the degree. That bit of paper that gets you your first job. After that your job experience gets you the second job, and so on.

This is probably the larger group, and likely most of the material recognises this, and in some cases optimizes for it.

The second much smaller group are people wanting to get educated, in the sense of understanding the root fundamentals. They suck the marrow, determined to explore the nooks and cranies. They never ask "will this be in the exam?" (Ironically this group often do poorly in exams because they're too busy learning.)

Threads like this one happen when one group encounters the other, perhaps for the first time. If your goal is to learn then cheating is only fooling you. If your goal is to pass, well, there are multiple ways to do that.

I'll challenge the point that people who actually want to learn do worse on tests. I've been to two schools for a total of 6 years so far, through 3 different undergraduate degrees with differing students. The people who were interested in the material more than their future job invariably do much better. The kids that just want the job don't try too hard to learn any single thing, they don't learn the fundamentals, they don't learn auxiliaries, they get crushed on exams. Kids who really want to learn go learn those things in their spare time and then crush the exams. There is the occasional student who spends their entire college career learning things outside of the material covered by their courses and then do somewhat poorly on their exams, but almost always those people are just learning the skills to get some other job that doesn't align with their degree title too well. they're just a different kind of job first-gimme paper people, they might make an app, or build a company, but most of them don't even try.

All of these people are fine, regular human beings. But i have literally never experienced a colleague do bad on a test because they were "learning too much". My degrees of experience are computer science, mathematics, and physics though so the people who want to keep learning have to be pretty strong students to make it into the master and doctorate programs they want.

I've definitely gone off and studied the wrong thing and learned a bunch of stuff that wasn't on the test and done poorly on it as a result. Didn't stop me from getting a degree, but skipping ahead a few chapters and learning that instead and then failing a test on the chapters you skipped is what "learning too much" looks like.

When I wanted to learn I’d try to understand the fundamentals. How things interact and get a good understanding of relationships between concepts. When I wanted a good grade I’d drill problems for hours on end till I could flawlessly execute the steps required. Completely different study patterns for different outcomes

The answer is you're going to a shit university (or at least a shit program at your university, maybe they are great at Journalism or something).

I think their "main" programs are the nursing program and industrial machine maintenance. It's not exactly an area I'd expect top-notch InfoSec to be, but I expected more than being charged money for something worse than a free MOOC.

Most universities are shit universities at CS though.

Sounds like the school you’re going to is a scam. You can probably learn more and faster on your own, especially if you’re already using linux.

This does not sound right at all. This is something you'd normally get through Coursera or any other MOOC platform. You should check the background of the college you're attending more thoroughly.

FYI in 2021 FTC brought charges against 5 biggest for-profit colleges for misleading claims made to their students and Dept of Education went as far as cancelled students' debt. Those 5 were Corinthian Colleges, ITT Technical Institute, Education Corporation of America, Education Management Corporation, University of Phoenix. I believe other for-profit colleges were targets of similar probes as well. I see Infosec touted a as future-proof career and training programs are being advertised everywhere and I'm afraid you've been misled and paying for a very subpar program. I'd try and see if I could get out and find something better...

A bureaucracy's growth is unbounded, and therefore the % of professors in the university workforce trends to 0%.

Eventually there aren't enough professors to teach, but the system still needs students to eat so you end up with this situation.

Bloated administration caused the costs to skyrocket. The administrators are in charge of cutting costs. The administrators will cut every cost except their own headcount and salaries, because the machine protects itself.

As a comparison, when I went to college, we were taught by full professors with Ph.D's and graduate assistants did the grading, helped with student questions, etc. These full professors had office hours where you could walk in and talk to them. One of my professors was an integral part in building the IRS database. Another was a project manager who helped build the SABRE system. Yet another argued a case before the Supreme Court (one if the highest accolades for a lawyer). Other professors also had impressive accolades in the "real world." This was a public university. This was in the mid 90s, I assume it isn't that way anymore.

The good news, I guess, is in the US, each state is responsible for their own educational system. If the state you are in has horrible education, you at least have the option to enroll in another state.

Well said!

Your observation is so true it hurts.

I just can not bring myself to call it "Mansetmanuseman's Law." Can you please name it? I might get myself fired by putting it in my email signature.

Aha, the upside of starting a Wikipedia page on this is that interested parties would do the historical research to show this percentage change over time ;)

I'm curious what the power law is...

Was this an accredited school? I think you should name it.

It's the Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS), a group of I'm guessing 20+ community colleges around Kentucky. In recent years Kentucky has done a big overhaul of the community college system. Not sure how it compares to other systems, but it's a lot better than it used to be by a long shot. This everything-online stuff didn't start until COVID restrictions came about. But since then they've leaned as hard as they can into it.

Community colleges are great for knocking out general requirements that are pretty standard across most degrees for cheaper than a full blown university (and then transferring to a state university to do the major requirements) if your goal is just to have a lower cost in getting the fancy bachelor's degree diploma, but as far as quality of instruction I am not at all surprised.

https://www.reddit.com/r/careerguidance/comments/1373dim/com...

https://www.usnews.com/education/community-colleges/articles...

there is a subreddit /r/cscareeradvice which might be useful for you. obv. info sec is not the same as CS, but I ran a quick search for InfoSec in the subreddit and saw there are still posts about it.

This is true even at large engineering schools with decent reputations.

Ran into this for Master's level MIS courses. Admittedly they were the pre-req / must take courses, and were mostly overviews of X, where X = Java, Assembly, Mid-level Linux, etc.

But cookie cutter Pearson material. You could search some of the slide bulletpoints and find the same presentation archived at Duke, or UNM, or other schools. Ditto for most of the test questions / homework. They'd change a few of the numbers but it's clear that the course was 100% manufactured.

The instructor was mostly there to answer questions and give a low effort recitation. Some classes were great and had teacher than went above and beyond, but others were clearly a phone-in.

edit: worth noting that plenty of the courses weren't cookie cutter and were very bespoke -- and challenging. Some of the CE and Assembly stuff was clearly designed by specific professors and was quite rigorous.

I prefer pre-recorded classes. It saves me the hassle of taking notes and preserves the instructor's sanity. I don't like class discussions.

The instructor's role is ideally to answer questions. Having to orally re-deliver content to a huge room of people feels archaic and inefficient. This does require the students to be motivated to learn the class. The challenge is maintaining the motivation for the extraneous content required for a degree but perceived as unnecessary by many students. If I am learning information security, I am far less interested in art history.

I believe any course should be waivable by a conversation with the instructor. Someone using LibreOffice on Linux is wasting time in the intro to computers course.

I once took a course on introduction to Internet. I advised the instructor I was an experienced CLI Internet user but wanted to take his course to learn how to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical audience. I also informed him that asking me questions could derail class discussions. We talked about Unix shell applications like archie and gopher in that class.

The instructor was great and I learned a lot about presenting technical content to non-technical audience, which was my goal. He once asked me a question during a lecture on NNTP on the permanence of Usenet posts and I canceled his post with a control message. ;)

There's two problems with that approach, which matters from 2 very different perspectives. From the business point of view, one-on-ones with a highly knowledgeable professor don't scale. The big benefit that the businessman sees from online learning is to dramatically increase the number of graduates who pass through some level of filtering, so scale matters a lot.

The other, "education is important because educating people is important" point of view, runs into a more human problem: most students don't get one-on-one time with their professors, even when the professor ends up sitting in an empty office hour regularly, because doing so takes work. Students need to be reasonably proactive about reaching out, and that weeds out a lot of people regardless of how accessible the professor makes themselves. Online learning makes this even worse: In person, assuming the class is small enough (that's another can of worms), there's a fair amount of opportunity for small interactions: greetings, questions during lecture (for when the professor has completely lost you, which suggests he may have lost others, too), questions after lecture, hell, even body language exchange, where the professor can pick up on students being bored (i.e., they're going too slow, or they've lost the class). All of these make the professors far more approachable, where a brief exchange can become a "hey, let's continue this during office hours". I spent a lot more time in office hours with the professor who memorized all our names and faces before the first lecture than the one who was lecturing at a class of 300.

Not to mention the heightened ease of interacting with your fellow students, which is, IMO, 60-80% of the benefit of higher education.

And at smaller universities, the bureaucracies are a lot more malleable, too. Classes being "waivable by a conversation with the instructor" was very much a thing, albeit with the extra step of having the dean and registrar's office rubber stamp it.

> If it matters, I'm doing InfoSec and programming classes.

What's the consensus on this here? I've worked in tech for 15 years and have never been asked for my qualifications once. What's important is learning what you need to land an entry level job or to take on some freelance work and from there you can work yourself up.

Given tuition fees these days I find it absurd someone would willing pay up for a crappy education that largely won't teach them the practical skills they need for employment anyway. I knew a lot of people who weren't able to land jobs after getting a degree in comp sci so the idea that there will be a job waiting for you when you graduate is wrong.

By far the most important thing to do is land your first job so I'd argue you'd be better spending job searching for 2-3 years than going to college and getting yourself into a ton of debt then finding out if you're even employable after it all.

Plus, assuming you care about learning, you'll almost certainly learn more this way too.

If it matters, I'm not necessarily looking for an InfoSec job. I'm mostly filling a hole in the rest of my knowledge, but now I realize I could have filled that hole on my own a lot better. I probably wouldn't pass a job up, as my carpentry business hasn't had a customer in months, but that's beside the point.

We need skilled manual laborers here in Seattle. Move here live in a van make 100+k a year while you study. The cs courses even at community colleges are decent because we have so much programming talent. The only real issue is housing

Is that a new thing? When I graduated from Cornell back in 2000, the CS majors literally had recruiters throwing money at them. Even when I got my MBA, guys with engineering and CS backgrounds were courted heavily.

That said, I have seen an explosion in "Data Science" degree mills pumping out useless graduates. It will sadden me if CS has fallen that low.

Here's what I found in my community college experience of 5-7 years ago:

The experienced instructors were providing expert-level instruction for the tech classes, such as "CompTIA A+ prep", Cisco CCNA prep, and Linux Red Hat basic-level certification prep. The instructors were highly credentialed and qualified, brought to the table plenty of industry experience, generously invested their time developing custom curriculum and helping students, and could competently answer all our questions during lectures.

By contrast, I took a Calculus course because it was required, and this course was largely delegated to Pearson. We purchased a textbook which included an online component (not cheap at all) and the online component was where we'd find lectures and tests. Our instructor was assigned to assist us with extraordinary questions we couldn't answer through the curriculum itself. In fact, since the course was 100% online, I never met nor saw my instructor. She was assigned to a faraway campus which I never visited. Imagine my surprise when it came time for finals and she informed us that we'd need to show up there in person. I protested, and my disability-assistance office came to the rescue. We arranged a privately proctored final, but it was an extraordinary exception that we shouldn't have needed, considering the online nature of the class.

The Pearson curriculum was OK, but I found myself supplementing knowledge through Khan Academy, and particularly instrumental was the on-campus tutoring center, where I got 1:1 personal attention with each and every problem that stumped me (and there were many.) I also discovered that I could basically brute-force every question on the Pearson quizzes and approach 100% just by guessing. Our assigned instructor was more or less superfluous.

Interestingly, after I met those prerequisites, they reduced/eliminated the Calculus requirements for my major/degree track, and nobody else was required to take such advnced classes.

As a teacher, I apologize.

Did you specifically sign up for online classes?

You should be able to specifically sign up for in-person classes for next semester.

Express your displeasure to the dean.

Some schools move students from in-person classes to online classes and hope you can not prove you signed up for in-person classes.

Meet with (and document your meeting with) an advisor. Ask for in-person classes where the lab is less important than the in-class meeting. Follow up be email. Cc the dean. The dean can overrule anyone on anything.

Then if they move you, go to the dean and complain. Find out when he is there and camp is his waiting room all day. Be clear and provide proof.

We teachers can teach many more students inline than we can in-class. It is possible they are profit driven, or that they have a facility shortage.

I did a fair amount of my master's degree in computer science online. With that being said, it wasn't very easy. The tests were legit. The classes were "pre-recorded" by the instructor, but every year had new recordings. We were able to ask questions in an online forum and/or via messaging with the teacher or the TA.

It felt like my undergraduate studies. It sounds to me like schools have gotten a bit softer and/or your school is really bad.

With that being said, take it for what it is if you don't have any other options. Dive deep into your textbooks, learn as much as you can, look into outside resources, keep on coding. You'll come out better on the other end of it.

Infosec is the latest in college "cash cow" programs, like IT certifications were a few years back. If the courses are training you for a certifying exam, they will use the same tricks as any other exam prep company. Low in-person contact, lots of video presentations and online tests.

This allows them to take in many more students per batch than would be allowed in a traditional college course setting.

In education creating content is hard work. In business marketing and sales is hard work. So others get paid to sort the problem with varying results. We are obsessed these days with pushing problems on to others for an easier life, when often a better job could be done locally.

This is in my opinion, pure fraud.

> To me, what they're doing feels wrong

It's very, very wrong. It's unethical, fraudulent and a scandal.

Higher education is a racket now.

University deans, chancellors, vice chancellors, deanlets, clueless professional managers, bumbling administrators should all be fired and put in jail.

I've written about it extensively [0..5]. After 30 years as a university professor I had to admit to myself - the university system is finished. It's fucked to the very core, devastated by decades of money grubbing gross mismanagement and total lack of vision. Good teachers have been usurped and the institutions taken over by tepid, buggy big-tech software from corporations like Google and Microsoft. Absolutely tragic.

You didn't say whether you're attending a public university or a private college.

I quit working at British universities citing "Unethical treatment of students", and copied my complaints to multiple "authorities". Nobody had the courage to reply.

Everyone should be deeply embarrassed by the state of higher education, which as you say is now on the path of "enshittification".

My advice is to get out while you can. Get a refund and find a private tutor or study group. The degree certificates universities offer are no longer worth the paper they're printed on. Even a weakly motivated student can do better studying alone with a little good guidance.

There's nothing a machine can teach you about infosec.

[0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/your-teaching-an...

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/joy-text-world-t...

[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/fear-zombie-stud...

[3] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...

[4] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/eliminating-harm...

[5] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/how-do-we-get-mo...

As long as _having a high paying job_ requires a piece of paper, higher "education" will be around.

Long may higher education be around. It was around in the times of Plato and Aristotle. In central India the first universities flourished thousands of years ago. Then in Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge in the 11th century. They were all but destroyed by inquisitions but bounced back in time for the renaissance. They've been sacked by Vandals and burned down by Popes.

Higher education will be here in 2124 and in 2224 and so long as human beings seek knowledge and wish to transcend our parochial epoch.

This shitty little period of sad human history, where they've disgraced themselves so far as become nothing but certificate issuers for their industrial masters will fade away like leaving little or no trace in history.

Yes, the best institutions will last, but not all of them. The region of the Roman Empire where the Vandals settled down did not have a university again for over a Millennium.