Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/coronavirus-college-professors.html

by pseudolus • 6 years ago

124 141 6 years ago

I’m doing a distance data science degree at a fraction of the cost and I would imagine I’m getting much more out of it than this September intake will. There’s been a revolution in remote working, will education follow?

ketanmaheshwari• 6 years ago

Could you post the link to the degree that you're taking.

blackrock2• 6 years ago

I hope the education is free. Because without the human presence, paying $250,000 USD for a university education sounds like a ripoff.

brighton363• 6 years ago

Even with the human presence. There's so much unneeded bundling - these campuses have turned into prestige factories.

chrisseaton2• 6 years ago

Is anyone genuinely paying a quarter of a million dollars for a degree? That seems extreme even for a non-scholarship medical doctorate degree, let alone a simple data-science degree.

atemerev• 6 years ago

I am a researcher and a lecturer in a Swiss university. Switzerland is famous for being expensive, and the reputation is well deserved. However, the price of education for our students is about $1200/year. Which includes famous schools like EPFL (where Scala was born and still developed) and ETH (which contributions to computer science are too many to mention here). The students can e.g. collaborate with CERN researchers as part of their projects. For $1200/year. Available for everyone regardless of their nationality.

The best part is that for many master degrees and some bachelor degrees you can study remotely while living in your own country, only coming to Switzerland once or twice a year.

I don’t know why there are so few American students studying outside the US. (We do have some Canadian and Australian students though).

mdorazio3• 6 years ago

Be careful in your assumptions here. Online degrees still carry a huge negative stigma with them (which is interesting given that all students in the current cohorts at normal universities will have had several semesters of remote learning). Signalling of the college brand is also largely underappreciated by online students. You're getting a degree for a fraction of the cost of an in-person one, but it may or may not also carry a fraction of the job market value.

Note: I do not know which school you are referring to. It might be Berkeley's $70k+ degree or one of the many lower-tier schools, so YMMV.

ckdarby2• 6 years ago

I believe they're specifically talking about data science and fields related?

I'm a prior software development manager and degrees in general in this kind of field don't carry much weight outside of academic hires and very select companies.

While some companies or hiring managers might frown upon this it doesn't matter if there is an active hiring group that doesn't put any weight on them.

I guess one could argue that the ones who frown upon the degree pay more competitive but I've only found the opposite to be true with my experience.

(I'm ignoring FAANG because they're so unique that they're an exception to everything in the "real world")

bllguo• 6 years ago

wow, berkeley has a $70k online DS program??

Does your comment change re: stigma if OP was in fact talking about said berkeley degree?

Google2342• 6 years ago

I personally don’t get the appeal of hiring someone that did a DS degree. Most of the data scientists I know are phds or former post docs in math, physics, statistics, or neuroscience. I feel like as long as these fields keep producing too many graduates then it will be hard to get into the field.

generationP• 6 years ago

What [the students] might not expect: a lack of professors in the classroom.

Maybe they might not expect it, but will they mind it?

1996• 6 years ago

College currently sell an "experience" with clubs, restaurants, football teams, fraternities, housing, a nice campus with trees and lakes, etc. This isn't free. It has pushed up the price of education.

If education turns remote, I would expect prices to fall (and layoffs for the administrative staff), unless a similar experience part can be replicated online (which I strongly doubt)

This is the exact opposite of work vs remote work: if WFH becomes the default, I would expect wages to rise, as the most "experience" provided in the workplace (with nice offices, nice chairs, window view, in a nice campus with amenities like catering etc) will be footed by the employee in a WFH setting

walterbell• 6 years ago

most "experience" provided in the workplace (with nice offices, nice chairs, window view, in a nice campus with amenities like catering etc) will be footed by the employee in a WFH setting

Will these expenses be as tax deductible for WFH employees as they are for business? Is live/work zoning common?

nradov• 6 years ago

If working from home becomes the default then wages will fall because employers will be able to select employees who live anywhere. Working in a physical office constrains the labor supply to workers who live nearby (or are able to relocate).

deathcalibur• 6 years ago

This could work both ways. Workers have more options for employment meaning they can jump to a higher paying job without having to uproot their life.

ativzzz• 6 years ago

It will fall for people living in high cost areas like SF and NYC, but it will rise for people living in low and mid cost areas like Dallas or Cleveland because now companies in SF can easily hire the best developers in Dallas cheaper than average developers in SF by paying them more than the average Dallas rates.

barry-cotter2• 6 years ago

This is the exact opposite of work vs remote work: if WFH becomes the default, I would expect wages to rise, as the most "experience" provided in the workplace (with nice offices, nice chairs, window view, in a nice campus with amenities like catering etc) will be footed by the employee in a WFH setting

Pocket lint compared to the unavoidable costs of employing someone in terms of monetary and in kind compensation and taxes. Knowledge workers are a lot more expensive to employ than the ancillary capital that goes along with getting the benefit of their Labour.

gbronner4• 6 years ago

This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia.

Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name and selectivity, and for the environment of other equally motivated high potential students.

Other schools combine a school with a resort/cruise ship experience. Insofar as the school is no better than a bunch of videos, and the resort is mostly shut down, so long as employers don't care, it will be hard to justify spending 10x on a residential experience.

With live teaching going the way of life musicians 100 years ago, we can expect similar effects- fewer better teachers, and better access to them.

dredmorbius4• 6 years ago

I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time, whilst retaining recognizable elements from their origins. Specific universities are remarkably durable, with the oldest (Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Cambridge) dating to the 11th and 12th centuries (Bologna will be 1,000 years old in 2088, within the lifetime of some now reading this). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in...)

Curricula, degrees conferred, methods, organisation, associated attached sport and medical industries, and defence and research programmes ... are largely newer. Starting with the Humboldtian reforms in Germany in the early 19th century, much of what we now think of as the modern universiy started taking shape (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...)

In-place instruction of both explicit and tacit knowledge, remains the most effective method attained. Mediated education, whether through old low-tech such as books, or high, such VR headsets, may have their affordances, but simply cannot match the full immersion of simultaneous group presence. More so for tacit knowledge in which simply ingesting words is not sufficient, where hands-on experience is required, and equipment, facilities, and materials needed.

There are several fundamental functions of the universiy which seem unlikely to vanish. Education; credentialling; open research; establishing curricula and pedagogy; relations with culture, industry, and government, document archival, basic research; keeping aging academics off the streets; and serving as transition institutions four young adults entering the world, all remain. No doubt individual campuses or systems will collapse, and many revered traditions will be abandoned, at least temporarily.

How this is accomplished given a few months, or years, or decades, of endemic disease, is a challenge. The institution's seen worse.

tkgally2• 6 years ago

I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction.

I agree. I teach at a large public research university in Japan, and we're near the end of our first semester teaching all of our classes online. It has gone better than many (any?) of us expected.

The university's decision in late March that all of our classes would be taught in real time using videoconferencing, with prerecorded videos and other asynchronous methods only as a supplement, seems to have been correct. Live online classes, it turns out, are often just as interactive and engaging as in-person classes. Some teachers even report that their students participate more actively and thoughtfully in discussions online than they do in the classroom.

There are still many unresolved issues, of course, including how to conduct tests fairly; how to enable more informal mingling among students; and, perhaps most difficult, how to teach subjects that require physical equipment or in-person interaction, such as laboratory chemistry, nursing and medicine, performing arts, etc.

But the fact that many subjects can be taught satisfactorily online upends one of the fundamental assumptions of higher education: that teachers and students need to be in the same place at the same time to have high-quality interactions. If they haven't already, forward-thinking universities will soon start taking advantage of this opportunity to create well-planned, rigorous degree programs open to anyone in the world who is qualified and has a decent Internet connection. Even if the coronavirus crisis ends and people can travel freely again, such programs should still be able to succeed.

m0zg• 6 years ago

In-place instruction of both explicit and tacit knowledge, remains the most effective method attained.

Citation needed. I view today's colleges (including the university I attended) as little more than a racketeering scam. "It'd be a shame if you didn't pay us $200K and didn't get a degree, no employer would take you seriously".

Most of the stuff I use on a daily basis I did not learn in the college, and there's no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the 6 years I've spent to get my masters degree would be better spent advancing my career, if I could have that choice. In my field, however, you can't have a career if you don't have a degree, even if you learned little to nothing of relevance getting that degree. It's basically a racketeering scam where you pay "protection money" to get a degree, without which you can't be considered by an employer. As a hiring manager, I've lost count how many times I interviewed fresh grads who know very little and have little to no usable skills. Whoever makes through and manages to acquire actual skills does so in spite of, not thanks to, the best efforts of their professors.

an_opabinia• 6 years ago

Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time

It's as though, if you concentrate a lot of smart and well-meaning people in one place, they make a great institution!

Maybe not any particular university, but the idea of elite, sequestered scholarship itself has long outlived neoliberal capitalism.

It was never about money. Moneyed interests expounding on the future of the academy are always dead wrong.

fastball• 6 years ago

I think you might be underselling the total paradigm shift that is the internet.

Nothing that came before it really compares when it comes to impact on education, except for maybe the printing press, but in many ways that probably strengthened university's grip on education. The internet does the opposite.

rayiner• 6 years ago

This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia.

God I hope you’re right.

harryh• 6 years ago

Many universities are certainly going to have problems but it's hard to see an event that causes problems for a single semester (or maybe two) being an extinction event.

felipemnoa• 6 years ago

Nowhere in your comment I see you mention that elite institutions are mainly research institutions that do teaching kind of as a side job. In fact, several of the best researchers working at universities are horrible teachers.

However, if you want to be at the cutting edge of your field then that is where is at.

throwaway9870• 6 years ago

On what do you base that opinion? I did a MS and PHD at Stanford and was blown away by how good the profs were and how hard they actually tried to teach well. I don't agree at all with your thinking. Perhaps you need to be a bit less general and more specific about what school you are referring to?

gbronner4• 6 years ago

I heard a story about a famous stem researcher. In class, a brave student asked a question. After glaring at the student, he slowly responded "I came here to teach. I didn't come here to answer questions".

That department has been reformed thankfully.

bachmeier• 6 years ago

I believe you're referring to lectures rather than a university degree. The arguments you're making are no different than the ones made by people saying traditional colleges would be gone in five years once MOOCs arrived. It's possible that things will change in a major way, but simply being able to watch a lecture from your home is neither new nor a substitute for a traditional four year college. (And note that the in-person lecturing part is actually really cheap - much cheaper than the same lectures online, and only a tiny percentage of the cost of running a university.)

ThrowawayR2• 6 years ago

Small liberal arts colleges may be extinguished but the major universities will live on. The sciences, medicine, and engineering fields still require facilities and equipment beyond the reach of the individual, particularly for cutting edge research. I could point to universities with their own wind tunnel for aerospace engineering, their own research and teaching hospitals, their own small silicon chip fab and so forth.

gbronner4• 6 years ago

Exactly. But most students don't need these resources, and most current teachers don't work at these institutions

neilparikh• 6 years ago

OT: which schools have their own fab?

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 6 years ago

Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name

Also, their brand names may be tarnished. For example, Yale and Stanford are named after men who abused black and brown people. If the Universities decide to no longer honor these men and remove their names from the university, they will have lost a lot of the brand that they built up over many years.

gbronner4• 6 years ago

There's no Adolf Hitler university. There was a time when lots of us people, especially Jews, would but buy a Volkswagen. Today nobody cares. People are not going to UConn over Yale because of the name

bhntr3• 6 years ago

Jeez. Little Leland Stanford Jr. must have been a real terror before he died of typhoid at 15

hardwaregeek• 6 years ago

You'd think so, but a surprising amount of students are still attending. What else would they do? Most can't get a job. They can't join a program like the Peace Corps. Anything beyond those two options requires a degree of self confidence and financial independence that most students don't have. Colleges are offering a pretty mediocre proposition but there aren't many other options.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

Presumably Americorps is still functioning. Be a contact tracer in your gap year.

mennis16• 6 years ago

It's an interesting parallel to musicians but I think we are far from the tech actually being good enough to scale that well. The problem for most courses is not recording the lectures, it is trying to replicate the one on one (or small group) time available with at least TAs, if not professors. This does work decently well over Zoom for an existing class, where the course staff is selected based on the ~# of students enrolled, but I don't see how it would work for a more broadly taught online class.

I got free access to a MOOC this summer that usually costs money just to view (HMX), and even at that scale the course forum is low quality and the "assignments" that have open ended questions just give you an automatic check mark, so you get zero feedback on your thinking. It's a solid class still and I'm enjoying it as a for fun learning experience, but it is not even close to what I would want out of a subject I am more seriously studying.

Anyway, I think a large part of that is just the lack of interaction with anyone trained in the material. Maybe I live in a bubble, but the best advice I got as a frosh at orientation was "if you only go to one thing in person, make it office hours", and I think many of my friends would agree.

pdonis• 6 years ago

You are assuming that academic institutions in general rely on tuition for income. Most of them actually don't to any great extent. They subsist largely on a combination of research grants and endowments. So a drastic cut in how much tuition they take in is not actually a huge threat to them as institutions.

jackpirate• 6 years ago

This is not correct. Major R1 universities have grants and endowments as their primary source of income, but the vast majority of schools do not fall into this category. All liberal arts colleges, religious colleges, for-profit colleges, and most state colleges (i.e. non-R1 universities) desperately need tuition to pay the bills.

satvikpendem• 6 years ago

As long as employers require a degree, universities will not die.

sumoboy• 6 years ago

So many of these teachers have become unqualified to teach remote classes since they can't adapt to virtual engagement to help students succeed. They don't answer emails, don't chat, leaving students lost. You get more from a youtube video in many cases. Remote teaching has made these teachers lazy IMO.

jasonv2• 6 years ago

I agree, based on this:

My high-school aged son was taking two in-person community college classes this last semester.

When the SIP hit, his Spanish class just "ended". Nothing online, nothing from his teacher, it was just over. His math teacher worked diligently to keep things going, and I could see the adaptations the math teacher attempted to evolve his efforts with the unexpected conditions.

If the CC is only online in the fall, we'll find something else for him. I don't think v1.0 of online CC is worth spending my money on, based on the v0.9 beta.

oarsinsync• 6 years ago

I’m not sure it’s fair to characterise a change in circumstances as severe as what we’ve just been through, and the results of remote work, as a v0.9 beta. MVP feels fairer, and even that feels like a stretch for a lot of places.

coronadisaster• 6 years ago

But with remote classes it becomes easier to find out which teachers are lazy... One of my son had a great remote teacher... not so much for my other one.

geomark• 6 years ago

Yep. And I also was able to see first hand some of the issues my kid frequently told me about when they were doing in-person classes at school, like how much classroom time was wasted due to behaviors by the same kids day after day. It makes a strong impression when you see for yourself the same kids every day unprepared and being disruptive. In addition, I also noticed what a drag the weak students were on the rest of the class. I ended up withdrawing my kid from the school.

pyuser5833• 6 years ago

As former teacher: teaching is hard, and teaching remotely is harder.

Maintaining classroom order is a big part of the job. How are you going to do that remotely?

When I say maintaining order, I’m not even talking about discipline. Think Roberts Rules of Order. Just coordinating discussions in a meeting of 30 people.

Teachers are taught to engage students, and get them to engage with each other.

Just look how fast a HN comment thread can go off the rails.

mtgp1000• 6 years ago

This is good. I think the commoditization of college had profound negative effects on society. Historic trust in the academic system was abused in order to, at best, sell degrees to people who were unqualified for them, and at worst, to indoctrinate two generations of children (anything outside of STEM is heavily politically slanted - it's the long march through the institutions that the infamous Weather Underground spoke of).

If intelligence (and general ability) is truly normally distributed then you cannot award degrees to the majority of the population without lowering historic standards.

analbumcover• 6 years ago

You make a lot of good points here. What is expected of students in University these days is a joke compared to historical standards. Ironic given the more demanding job market expectations.

acwan93• 6 years ago

Scott Galloway of NYU called it, and has been increasingly louder about it.

Like he says, it seems like this is the turning point for many middle-tier universities. Once you start viewing colleges as brands and luxury goods, especially the Stanfords and Harvards, it becomes clear there’s a massive revenue shortfall for them.

This fall, I’m scheduled to teach MKTG-GB.2365 (Brand Strategy) in KMC 2-60 Tuesday nights at 6-9pm. It’s not going to happen. The room would normally be filled with 170 full- and part-time MBAs looking to garner the skills to build economic security for themselves and their families, and improve the world. Mostly the former. However, a room full of 170 NYT subscribers, sitting elbow to elbow, spells one thing — recurrence. So, while Liberty University will likely welcome kids back to campus, I speculate we, and anybody else that does not have their head up their a, will not. https://www.profgalloway.com/post-corona-higher-ed

sys_64738• 6 years ago

Online classes simply don't have the value that in person classes have. Extend that to degrees and that's the stigma you have to deal with when trying to get a job. Telling an employer you got your degree remotely V the in class person, who are you gonna hire?

unishark2• 6 years ago

Online classes simply don't have the value that in person classes have.

I certainly agree with this (people aren't that stupid). But schools like Stanford and USC have been doing online MS programs for decades. As far as I know they are are just as valuable to your resume as an in-person MS from the same school.

The value is in the fact that your average student simply doesn't have the self-motivation to do fully-online classes (we certainly have been seeing this problem in the last few months). This is why they primarily have been for working professions part-time in the past, that's a group and mode of learning where people actually get it done.

pyuser5833• 6 years ago

I’ve benefited immensely from online education, but it’s not a substitute for an in person liberal arts education.

scarface745• 6 years ago

If you tell someone you got the online masters from Georgia Tech, no one would look down on it. I can’t speak for other online masters.

https://omscs.gatech.edu/

noir_lord2• 6 years ago

I’ve been in a position that was involved in hiring.

I’d count an open university degree as equal or better than most universities.

Anyone who can work full time, study for a degree and often manage family life is worth a good look all other things been equal.

OminousWeapons• 6 years ago

Online classes simply don't have the value that in person classes have.

I think one question worth asking is what would happen if we blended both? Would it be possible to have a community college charge community college prices but work off of other peoples' excellent material? Imagine a CS 101 course where the lectures, problem sets, and tests were from MIT's Open Courseware, TAs were on site to hold sessions and help you, and a domain expert or professor was providing supplementary material and answering questions during recorded lectures. Sure it wouldn't be a stand in for MIT for many reasons, but it would probably give you a better education than most schools for a fraction of typical mid tier school pricing.

chongli• 6 years ago

The value of a university education (in many fields, anyway) is in the degree. It’s the signal to employers that you made it. People who drop out in 4th year, even if they’re only one credit away from receiving their degree, are worth far less in the eyes of the employer, despite having passed all but one of the same courses as a grad. This isn’t what you’d expect if every course a person passed contributed a bit of value for the knowledge it imparted. Nope, for the employer it’s all about who crossed the finish line and checked off the box.

dicomdan• 6 years ago

Let the students network and collaborate with each other. Classes and office hours can be done online. Value of universities is primarily in peer interactions.

vgchh2• 6 years ago

For universities to fully crumble and education to become significantly cheaper, in addition to all the advancements that have occurred in last decade, I believe we need a credible way to certify students online. Imagine if someone sitting in Tibet or slums of Bombay could prove to Googles of the world that he/she (and not some hired help) successfully completed a highly ranked test online, it could be transformative. If online testing could vouch for a person in the same way that universities do, it could open the doors to world-class opportunities for the entire world, cheaply.

wongarsu• 6 years ago

Online tests are wide open to cheating if they aren't taken in person. Hybrids exist (take online test in a testing center, e.g. AWS certifications), but aren't all that useful for the slums of Bombay.

And in a way Google is already doing this in person with their interview process: they ask obscure questions aimed at knowlege gained in a computer science degree (or by good test preparation).

vsskanth• 6 years ago

taking tests in a testing center is actually pretty viable and scales well. This is primarily how all those international students from developing countries write GRE, TOEFL and end up coming to study in the US.

jki275• 6 years ago

Proctortrak.

It’s not a perfect solution (and I despise it), but it does resolve a lot of those issues.

creato• 6 years ago

I have heard from people (and read accounts from people on HN) that companies use all kinds of software that does this during remote interviews. Recording the screen, turning on the camera to watch the interviewee, etc.

I doubt the main problem is ensuring integrity, it's that it's hard to test knowledge and capabilities reliably, and that's already a hard problem regardless of where the candidate is.

jonfw• 6 years ago

Exactly. If a single test becomes important enough, it will be very heavily gamed. Conventional education avoids this somewhat, because there are so many models by which you are measured against, over a very long period of time. This makes conventional education much harder to game.

You need a system that encourages people to optimize for maximum problem solving ability, but a formal grading scheme encourages people to optimize for that instead. This is the single biggest problem with online classes and is why online degrees are not considered as highly as in-person ones.

pyuser5833• 6 years ago

But colleges aren’t about testing, but educating. Taking people who can’t pass a test, and turning them into people who can.

The test is merely to help discern how good a job the schools have done.

The etymology of educating is to “lead someone out of” something - namely ignorance.

vgchh2• 6 years ago

There are a lot of people who are capable of self educating and removing ignorance from their lives, but don’t have the means to pay for the fancy universities and prove their capabilities, which is what in the end certificates do. They provide a baseline, a level playing field if you will.

barry-cotter2• 6 years ago

There are many more people who would buy a Princeton diploma without a Princeton education than the reverse. Universities put a lot of effort into stopping people fraudulently claiming to be graduates but ~no effort into stopping people from attending classes without paying for them.

Universities are about a combination of education and certification but the certification is overwhelmingly what people pay for.

JMTQp8lwXL• 6 years ago

It would be transformational if firms would be okay with some of their team working in a different timezone. It's hard to collaborate when you can only meet in the evening for one worker, and early morning the other. I don't know if there's any logistical solution to this.

philangist• 6 years ago

Replace Tibet with Bolivia and the point still stands.

AdrianB14• 6 years ago

It's done on large scale: just split the projects into teams and each team can be on a time zone, so intra-team communication works well and inter-team is done as much as needed.

This is how companies have offices across the world, more and more in low cost locations. It this is what you want ...

AdrianB14• 6 years ago

And then you get what you measure for: people that can pass some very specific test. Not good employees, I guess.

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.is/D6RKy

gruglife• 6 years ago

I’m an adjunct prof at a middle tier college. We have a couple classes planned to be in person for fall. I highly doubt it. Plus a majority of the student body is foreign and can’t even travel to the USA. Essentially I’m sayin RIP to middle of the road universities. Guess I need to start looking for another side hustle.

ghaff• 6 years ago

Not everyone is in a position to do it. And I don't know what the position of universities in deferring will be at this point. And obviously gap year options that are constructive/interesting are way limited at the moment.

But I'd have to seriously consider if it makes sense to enter a university as a freshman in September. Especially given a non-trivial possibility of things blowing up mid-semester with all sorts of attendant costs.

Obviously a really really tough decision. And this will probably result in a lot of students not entering or completing college which, despite some of the common wisdom in tech, will probably lead to some pretty severe downgrades to lifetime career opportunities and income to many.

davesque2• 6 years ago

As a full-time resident of Boulder, CO (college town), this seems like an impossible situation. I can well imagine that the university here is under heavy pressure from local government to hold classes in the fall. This is because going a semester without all the students/faculty will be disastrous for the town's economy. On the other hand, the increase in coronavirus cases will also be disastrous. I don't have an answer. But, as a person who recently bought their first home in the area, I'm pretty bummed at the prospect of the local economy collapsing.

kleinsch• 6 years ago

We’re moving to Boulder next month. With houses starting at $800K and larger houses going for $1.5M+, it seems like the local economy must be driven as much by the tech companies that flocked to Boulder bc of the school as by the school itself.

davesque2• 6 years ago

I've lived here for about 30 years and I really doubt Boulder would last long without the university. And when I said "home", I meant condo, not house. The average tech employee in Boulder is still a long way away from house ownership in town. The real estate prices are not primarily explained by the tech scene.

xenonite• 6 years ago

Usually, the tech companies in college cities are driven by university graduates. It is not hard to guess what happens after a while.

ashtonkem• 6 years ago

Boulder at least is relatively well to do and has close economic ties to Denver, a lot of other college towns would be economically worse off if college stayed close. Lafayette Indiana (Purdue) and Athens Ohio (OU) come to mind, although there are others.

OldHand2018• 6 years ago

I think you are generally correct but need a lot more nuance in your examples.

Purdue is an R1 school with around 50k students in a metro area of over 150k non-students. It is the largest employer in the metro, but the large factories in the area employee far more in total. It's probably a lot more like Boulder than you think. Boulder is an hour from Denver, but Lafayette is an hour from Indianapolis (a larger city than Denver) and an hour and a half from Chicago.

Ohio U is an R2 school with around 30k students in a metro area of around 30k non-students. It's nowhere near any large city and doesn't have more than a small handful of other medium-sized employers.

The economic effect of no students on campus for a year would look vastly different between these two cities.

AdrianB14• 6 years ago

So it is not about education, just about the money. When people started to call college education a massive scam I disagreed, but I start to understand some of their points.

gumby• 6 years ago

I suspect there will evolve a hybrid model:

- a small number of elite institutions will offer largely the same product they do today, possibly in lower volume but even higher price. Some lectures will be online, combined with in person recitation, lab etc.

- these same institutions’ lectures will be available online, perhaps for free or paid. Why get a lecture from state U when you can get the MIT lecture?

- local third parties will offer the recitation, lab etc. Perhaps you’ll go to a completely independent one, perhaps you’ll attend one that has licensed the GAtech name or has some sort of reciprocity deal in order to proctor exams and such.

- the networking value of school attendance will vanish except at the elite places.

- a few professors, the ones actually presenting the lecture, will earn a living wage, or perhaps even a significant wage. Everybody else student-facing in this ecosystem will earn adjunct/ post doc barely-living wage.

- even the recitations could be conducted online, perhaps by third parties in India who can explain the material just as well or better than someone local. You could be getting 1:1 instruction his way.

ckdarby2• 6 years ago

This is the con of universities. The only way to justify the tuition is face-to-face teaching and to have access to all those amenities.

Once you remove those students would be asking for price reduction.

tw1912112• 6 years ago

Recently I read a post about education that was quite resonating. Universities have historically been "hard to enter, but easy to exit", meaning it's really difficult to get in but about the only thing that matter is getting in and no one really cares what your grades are if you are from Stanford/Harvard et.al.

On the flip side, med school or west point are less about getting in but more about exit value. It's not really that important as to whether you got in but whether you graduated from West Point. West Point / Navy Seals can essentially double the class size without losing any credibility. I think higher education is going in similar direction.

qserasera• 6 years ago

Administrative bloat and lax student standards should be geared up for older students and retraining during structural changes happening in the economy (right fucking now)

Sadly administrators have no skills to retrain people.

_Understated_2• 6 years ago

I find it odd that even now, after all that's happened in recent months, and with the reserves of cash that some of the elite establishments (in the US at least) are not taking advantage of online degrees.

To give you an example. I am planning on starting a degree in October. I'm 45. It will be through the Open University. It will cost about £6000 to complete the degree.

I looked at a ton of Universities in the UK and their online offerings are abysmal. there are some in Europe that look ok but the US ones are in the $30k+ price range...

If I thought that Yale, Harvard etc. would do an online degree for a fraction of what an actual degree currently costs in person, I would jump at the chance... who wouldn't want that on their CV?

With the resources they have they could easily extend their degree programme to the rest of the world via online learning. Same lecturers, same material.

Instead, they're sitting on their hands while their entire foundation burns...

I agree with one of the other comments that this could be the beginning of the end for the bricks and mortar universities

Google2342• 6 years ago

A big part of the brand/prestige of Yale and Harvard is the exclusivity.

_Understated_2• 6 years ago

Valid point but there are hundreds of other institutions that don't have that exclusivity that have very little to offer when it comes to online learning.

From what I can see, the OU is miles ahead.

jgalt212• 6 years ago

Full professorships, irrespective of institution eliteness, are a tough job to get. If I were the provost, I'd just sack the folks who refuse to show up to work this fail. Most of them would be very easy replace (certainly if you value teaching skills over research skills).

Furthermore, the health risk to professors is much lower than it is to primary school teachers. 20 year olds can wear* masks for 45-90 minutes at a clip, 2nd graders won't be able to do that for six hours straight.

* or legally forced to, as they are adults.

nr2x• 6 years ago

As recent weeks have shown 20 year olds will be going to bars and parties and seeding new waves of infections. The vast majority of people in their age group have negligible mortality risk, and high incentives to socialize after being stuck at home with parents for months on end. The faculty on the other hand are in the demographic where COVID is a death sentence.

jlokier• 6 years ago

And when they don't die, it can ruin their academic & intellectual lives by making them long-term ill & disabled, including neurologically. Some of the lingering symptoms are nasty.

hiidrew• 6 years ago

I’ve thought about this quite a bit, really interesting what will happen to higher-ed.

I’m currently a graduate student at a public research uni, which I imagine are the type of uni’s that may struggle (cause it’s not like ivy tech or other elite schools, may struggle to tract people if they start competing online only).

Another interesting factor are the increasing amount of bootcamps like Lambda and others offering technical education for the low. I wonder if companies like those will try to expand to other less technical subjects.

Think future higher-ed will be up to the experience and faculty, also makes you kind of worry about these public research institutions if tuition starts drying up.

jake_morrison• 6 years ago

I have two daughters in college.

My older daughter just graduated in mathematics / machine learning from UCLA. Online classes were mostly ok, though there were some comical situations where the professor taught the whole class with his microphone on mute.

Her exams were really rough, though. The math professors were unwilling to make any accommodation for the virus. While in quarantine with demonstrations and national guard soldiers literally across the street, she was taking exams. Everyone had 24 hours to take the exams, so they made them extra hard. They graded on a curve, because taking that away would be sacrilegious. So you have a choice, either spend as much of 24 hours as possible on the test, cheat (like some groups of students did), or get a bad grade. And then she had three exams in the same 24 hour period. The goal of testing should be to ensure that you know the material, not this competition shit.

My younger daughter is studying at USC. She came back to Taiwan last semester, so she hasn't needed to deal with the virus. Online classes have been pretty chaotic, though. Watching async videos has actually been a plus, but the mandatory discussion sections at 3 AM have been rough. It would be nice if they would just open one up in Asia timezone. Especially because students from China are now blocked from going back to the US.

USC was planning to have everyone come back on campus next semester, but just canceled because their opening plan was rejected by LA government. I am happy that she will be safe.

Universities are really worried about their business model, and are willing to have people die to preserve it.

Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

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