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I firmly believe that university is way, way overpriced in a world of free, high quality MOOCs. It just makes zero economic sense and I believe the market will

I firmly believe that university is way, way overpriced in a world of free, high quality MOOCs. It just makes zero economic sense and I believe the market will correct this sooner or later. Think about how utterly inefficient it all is: you have hundreds of professors around the world, each mechanically teaching the same subject semester after semester to new students (I know, they do a bit more than that). Some will say it is about signaling but in a free market, smart companies will eventually start to pick up on better signals. People who attempt to justify the cost of university really just seem unimaginative.

almano 9y ago
Christ, I've been struggling with this all month. I finished college in 2014, worked in industry for three years, then came back to school for a PhD. I am now completely shocked that these undergrads are paying $60k/year to come here to listen to the same cookie-cutter lectures that are being given at thousands of other institutions across the country. I almost feel embarrassed for the professors as well, having to act like they're doing something useful or valuable by giving this lecture, when in reality its just a mechanical performance. I feel like you need 20-30 different MOOCs for each class. You need a tier 1 (MIT etc) level difficulty Physics I class, then a tier 2 class, and so on. This would even be advantageous for students at 'top' schools (if they still exist), as it would be easier for a physics major to acquire cs skills if they don't have to go through their schools theoretically biased curriculum. Its completely insane...
- olalonde 9y ago
  Yep, agreed. It's not really that universities are bad, just that they're outrageously overpriced and inefficient. And from my personal experience, most professors don't seem that passionate about educating (many of them rightfully think their time would be better spent elsewhere). I think the two missing pieces for university alternatives to pick up steam are industry acceptance and a more curriculum based format (vs single courses).
intended 9y ago
Quite the opposite! > According to a visualization of MOOC completion rates assembled by Katy Jordan (2013), the 50 investigated MOOCs have generated 50.000 enrollments on average, with the typical completion rate hovering below 10%. Put it somewhere around 7.5%, or 3.700 completions per 50.000 enrollments. Meyer (2012) reported that the dropout rates of MOOCs offered by Stanford, MIT and UC Berkley were 80-95%. For example, only 7% of the 50.000 students completed who took the Coursera-UC-Berkeley course in Software Engineering. There is a similar reported dropout rate in Coursera’s Social Network Analysis class where only 2% of participants earned a basic certificate and 0.17% earned the higher level programming with distinction certificate. MOOCs are not the solution. Matter of fact, MOOCs turned out to be the counterfactual that clearly illustrate the depth of problems we have with education - and more importantly re-training. MOOCs are in so many ways ideal. When Khan academy lectures were first made available online, I had huge hopes for the future of education and therefore humanity. Education/re-training is a critical lynch pin of the modern model of economic development. Innovation -> job loss -> retraining -> people return to well paying jobs. But it turns out, that this was not happening, and that education and training is a lot harder than anticipated. MOOCs had it all - convenience (always on the net), not time constrained (you can read/watch classes whenever), accessible (taught by the good teachers), high quality (same teacher, able to use visual and other aids) and self-selected by people who wanted to finish the course. They should have been a massive success. The self-selected, interested student part should alone, have resulted in large numbers of newly trained students. It hasn't. Which meant the importance of those factors in educational results was overstated. This also means, that our current education system, may well be the better state of the art option we have. OR worse, a large chunk of humanity may not be able to transition to new subjects, and therefore new roles. This is a huge bloody problem, because that means if coal miners lose jobs, the economy will stall. This in turn puts huge political pressure to avoid following economics, and instead fight for protectionism, which also doesn't work. ---- Side note/silver lining: Perhaps the intransingence of education is a good thing. If it becomes easier to teach a person how to learn X details, perhaps it can become a lot easier to also indoctrinate a person in Y religion, or belief. In the end, a technique which has a high success rate in teaching students X subject, could easily be used to teach any subject. The difficulty in teaching people could well be a natural impediment to mass scale conversion, or invasion of ideas/propaganda.

almano 9y ago

Christ, I've been struggling with this all month. I finished college in 2014, worked in industry for three years, then came back to school for a PhD. I am now completely shocked that these undergrads are paying $60k/year to come here to listen to the same cookie-cutter lectures that are being given at thousands of other institutions across the country. I almost feel embarrassed for the professors as well, having to act like they're doing something useful or valuable by giving this lecture, when in reality its just a mechanical performance. I feel like you need 20-30 different MOOCs for each class. You need a tier 1 (MIT etc) level difficulty Physics I class, then a tier 2 class, and so on. This would even be advantageous for students at 'top' schools (if they still exist), as it would be easier for a physics major to acquire cs skills if they don't have to go through their schools theoretically biased curriculum. Its completely insane...

olalonde 9y ago
Yep, agreed. It's not really that universities are bad, just that they're outrageously overpriced and inefficient. And from my personal experience, most professors don't seem that passionate about educating (many of them rightfully think their time would be better spent elsewhere). I think the two missing pieces for university alternatives to pick up steam are industry acceptance and a more curriculum based format (vs single courses).

intended 9y ago

Quite the opposite! > According to a visualization of MOOC completion rates assembled by Katy Jordan (2013), the 50 investigated MOOCs have generated 50.000 enrollments on average, with the typical completion rate hovering below 10%. Put it somewhere around 7.5%, or 3.700 completions per 50.000 enrollments. Meyer (2012) reported that the dropout rates of MOOCs offered by Stanford, MIT and UC Berkley were 80-95%. For example, only 7% of the 50.000 students completed who took the Coursera-UC-Berkeley course in Software Engineering. There is a similar reported dropout rate in Coursera’s Social Network Analysis class where only 2% of participants earned a basic certificate and 0.17% earned the higher level programming with distinction certificate. MOOCs are not the solution. Matter of fact, MOOCs turned out to be the counterfactual that clearly illustrate the depth of problems we have with education - and more importantly re-training. MOOCs are in so many ways ideal. When Khan academy lectures were first made available online, I had huge hopes for the future of education and therefore humanity. Education/re-training is a critical lynch pin of the modern model of economic development. Innovation -> job loss -> retraining -> people return to well paying jobs. But it turns out, that this was not happening, and that education and training is a lot harder than anticipated. MOOCs had it all - convenience (always on the net), not time constrained (you can read/watch classes whenever), accessible (taught by the good teachers), high quality (same teacher, able to use visual and other aids) and self-selected by people who wanted to finish the course. They should have been a massive success. The self-selected, interested student part should alone, have resulted in large numbers of newly trained students. It hasn't. Which meant the importance of those factors in educational results was overstated. This also means, that our current education system, may well be the better state of the art option we have. OR worse, a large chunk of humanity may not be able to transition to new subjects, and therefore new roles. This is a huge bloody problem, because that means if coal miners lose jobs, the economy will stall. This in turn puts huge political pressure to avoid following economics, and instead fight for protectionism, which also doesn't work. ---- Side note/silver lining: Perhaps the intransingence of education is a good thing. If it becomes easier to teach a person how to learn X details, perhaps it can become a lot easier to also indoctrinate a person in Y religion, or belief. In the end, a technique which has a high success rate in teaching students X subject, could easily be used to teach any subject. The difficulty in teaching people could well be a natural impediment to mass scale conversion, or invasion of ideas/propaganda.