Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

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Does anyone have numbers indicating the extent to which tuition subsidizes research funding or vice versa? I (and most HNers, I'd assume) wouldn't shed many tears over seeing the extraordinarily exploitative and inefficient institution of college education go through disruption. My experience has been that online lectures, course material, and forum discussions are more than up to the task of replacing their physical counterparts (pause+rewind is a killer feature, and the discussions in online forums are miles above anything I experienced in section/recitation). Hands-on labs are about the only thing that ought to have a marginal cost in this day and age. But I hate to think what disruption could do to academia.

There are a handful of big (sometimes existential!) problems lurking on the horizon which absolutely rely on academia because incremental progress isn't amenable to monetization. I'm most worried about the drug industry. It's imploding (google "inverse moore's law"), leaving the basic science required to get over the slump in the hands of academics, and I don't want to wait 50 years for high-efficiency gene therapy (or let China grab the market) just because the research is tied to an outdated educational system. I know there's very little anyone can do about it, but I need to know the extent to which college tuition subsidizes said research before I can form a solid opinion on disruption.

EDIT: Got off my ass and googled it. The NSF estimated in 1994 that 9.5% of research funding comes from tuition [1]. I would like to formally submit one internet-vote in favor of disruption, along with one internet vote to increase research funding to compensate :)

[1] http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib97313.htm

You mention pause+rewind as a killer feature. Another nice feature is the ability to watch at a faster or slower pace (I usually watch 1.5x). These conveniences have made it such that I strongly prefer watching taped lecture to physically attending class. Add to that the fact that you can almost always get a faster response from posting in an online forum (often Piazza for my Stanford CS classes) than attending overcrowded and understaffed office hours. Most of my education has already moved online.

Even if online class doesn't make professors extinct, I think it will certainly make physical class time a thing of the past.

Yes! 1.5x is fantastic! It solves the impedance mismatch inherent in human speech. 90% of what is being said takes 5% brainpower to process while the remaining 10% takes 300% of available brainpower. If you have to listen at 1x speed you are either bored and sleepy or falling further and further behind, sometimes both. The pause button solves the falling-behind problem and 1.5x speed solves the boredom problem.

"90% of what is being said takes 5% brainpower to process while the remaining 10% takes 300% of available brainpower."

I'd argue that's the result of poor communication, not any deficiency in human speech generally. Granted, it's very very hard to construct something with the right level of addressable information at every moment. But when it's done right it is glorious. I think one of the things people implicitly recognize in good communicators (not necessarily good orators, but good communicators) is their ability to tailor what they're saying in this way.

Variance in the backgrounds of your audience and variance in the physical state of your audience (tired, sick, etc) places a strict upper bound on how well you can communicate. If one student isn't experiencing an impedance mismatch, you can probably find another that is, unless the class is extremely small and homogeneous. Pause+rewind is robust to these problems.

I find that the phrase "pause+rewind" doesn't quite give the right impression; sure, sometimes you missed a sentence and need to rewind, and that's great. Other times, I'd like to fire up an editor and type out the code the lecturer's showing (I'm often surprised at how many things my mind missed just skimming the slide), see if it compiles, how it behaves for 10 minutes or so. Kind of like a self-imposed mini lab, if I'm feeling a bit behind on the topic at hand.

Other times, it's great to play it at 1.5x, or even skip sections entirely. E.g. if I'm comfortable with the topic / environment, I don't want to sit through 20 minutes of setting an IDE up, or a walkthrough of "hello world". I wonder if it would be possible to deviate from the strict linear progression of lectures, and allow the learner to choose. The difficulties in prerequisite knowledge might outweigh the benefits, but it might be an interesting idea. More of a library of closely related lectures and information, rather than a single course.

Another feature that I have found to be quite useful is when I don't quite grok something, I can often quickly jump over to a lecture from a completely different person on the same subject. That alternative perspective can make it instantly clear.

For my part, I don't consider college education to be exploitative or inefficient.

People pay for the time and effort of professors who are very knowledgeable and have extraordinary teaching ability.

I also think MOOCs have great potential, not because college education is bad, but because MOOCs allow the best educators to reach even more people. I don't expect the top-end of education to change much, but I hope that MOOCs can raise the overall quality of education.

Only a small amount of the tuition goes to pay for professors. Most money goes to feed administrative bloat.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-paid-25...

Friendly reminder that in something like 48/50 states the highest paid public employee is the football or basketball coach, and the hockey coach in NH or VT.

I read the article, but I'm not convinced that there really is "bloat". Higher education is bigger and more complex than it once was, and the people best able to make strategic decisions might also be expensive. Coming from private industry, those salaries don't seem particularly high.

They may "bring in" more than their salaries (I suspect they don't, which is a separate issue -- the incompetent bumbling cited in the article seems to be the rule rather than the exception) but even if they do "bring in" more than they cost, it doesn't mean they aren't bloat. Competition for students is a zero-sum game. Luring students to one university takes them away from another. The value of a strategic school administrator to society (the extent to which they better inform students of their options minus the extent to which they convince students to act against their interests) is tiny compared to their value to the particular school which employs them (some number of student tuitions). The difference between the two values can reasonably be called 'bloat'.

This is a known flaw of free markets that we usually write off as a cost of doing business. If you present the invisible hand with a prisoner's dilemma, it falls for it every goddamn time. The 'bloat' is then the difference between the cooperative solution and the nash equilibrium. In this case, the cost is egregious enough (it is very high and it is imposed upon a very vulnerable population) that we might want to pay attention. I doubt we will, leaving disruption as the only hope for the education market.

Many universities are utilizing MOOCs and/or online material in order to implement a reverse classroom. In a reverse classroom, students watch lectures and do reading at home and class time is used to extend and reinforce that material usually by answering questions and working through more examples.

Students take to it pretty well when video lectures are available (my experience is that book only reverse classrooms don't work as well). It also generally leads to better retention, since more time is spent on hands-on experience.

Instructors also take it pretty well. Using an existing set of lecture materials reduces the preparation workload, especially in the first year teaching a course.

Whatever the failings/inefficiencies of college education, I'm not convinced that online courses are the answer. Given the non-credit nature of current MOOCs, they attract mostly bright and self-motivated learners, which leads to high-quality discussions on the forums. Every school and every company in the world has a few such students/employees, and there are enough schools and companies in the world to make current MOOCs shine even if a small fraction of these people subscribe.

SJSU's 'disastrous' experience with 'regular' students may indicate that most students need the discipline/peer presence of a physical college:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/11/23/education-revol...

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