9 ms·

Many college towns and rental properties relying on student income will be devastated.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
Permanently, too, if this causes a paradigm shift and virtual learning becomes the norm. Beyond the crisis, colleges were already planning on declining enrollment due to demographic shifts. Real estate in exclusively college towns, dependent on collegiate rentals, will be seeing long term changes regardless.
- derrick_jensen 6y ago
  I don't believe virtual learning will be widely used long-term. I might be biased, coming from a mostly engineering school, but there is a lot of vital lab equipment needed for the curriculum, not to mention that social networking and connections are essential to most careers going forward, and I don't see that transferring over in the same way
  - malandrew 6y ago
    I’d be happy if this was the beginning of the end for humanities departments that have become overtly political. More resources should be shifted to more utilitarian degrees like engineering and hard sciences.
    - nradov 6y ago
      Engineers are worthless if they can't communicate effectively and don't understand the context of their work.
      - baggy_trough 6y ago
        Humanities departments emit some of the most cryptic texts around. They should be worrying about that before trying to help engineers.
        klodolph 6y ago
        Tu quouque doesn’t make an argument. Gutting humanities in favor of “practical” degrees is short-sighted in the extreme. The problem with humanities is not that it doesn’t provide value to the community, the problem is that it is difficult to monetize skills in the humanities. There is a pathology that larger organizations often develop where they start investing only in ideas that where they can measure the impact on the time scale of a performance review cycle. For example, any project where the results can’t be measured in one or two quarters might be dead on arrival, depending on what company you work for. The same kind of short-term, narrow-minded thinking is what makes people dismiss humanities.
        imtringued 6y ago
        Or there is an oversupply of humanities graduates and that is what is causing monetization problems. Just think about how many poorly paid artists there are.
        mattkrause 6y ago
        You're gonna be gutted when you look up how much non-CS scientists make.
        saagarjha 6y ago
        Perhaps if you took the time to learn the humanities, they’d become more accessible to you? It’s not like engineering texts are the paragon of clarity.
        noema 6y ago
        The opacity of contemporary humanities texts is overstated. Yes, the general academic style tends to be verbose and baroque. But it bespeaks a certain hubris when a layman to a given field claims an absence of meaning to its work. The topics being discussed are often technical and by virtue of their intended audience (peer scholars) presuppose vast amounts of preliminary knowledge.
      - twomoretime 6y ago
        You don't need a politicized liberal arts department to teach engineers to write. We would be just as well served if we went back to learning classics, for example. I was disappointed to go through college having touched nothing older than Shakespeare officially. But I got plenty of feminist and minority-focused literature that was irrelevant to my particular (non-white) echnicity. Why should these modern authors take such a heavy precedence? Isn't it hubris to presume that your ideas are superior simply because they are new? Students are a captive audience when the entire institution is leaning in the same direction.
    - cassiet 6y ago
      What a useless world that would create.
      - prawn 6y ago
        There was a great tweet/meme about people savaging the idea of bailing out the arts industry during a pandemic, all while spending more and more time reading news sites, playing games and watching TV/movies online...
      - twomoretime 6y ago
        You can pick up most of the soft skills you learn in humanities by doing things like reading and practicing writing. The minimum functional skill level is low enough for a majority of people to achieve through practice with minimal guidance. People don't have to spend thousands of dollars and four years of their life to paint or sculpt or whatever - it may not be proficient and lifelike but it'll still be art. Your world wouldn't be all that much more drab if we stopped forcing engineers to learn "culture".
        eusebius 6y ago
        > People don't have to spend thousands of dollars and four years of their life to paint or sculpt or whatever - it may not be proficient and lifelike but it'll still be art. I don't think it's important to the overall argument of your comment, but this is incredibly reductive. If one has little appreciation for a particular form of art maybe this is true, but if, for example, all orchestras or other classical music ensembles were comprised of less proficient musicians I'd sooner stop listening to classical music altogether. > Your world wouldn't be all that much more drab if we stopped forcing engineers to learn "culture". I'm not sure if it was your intention, but quoting the word culture comes off as disparaging, but given the tone of your comment it certainly seems so. I think I would've agreed with you if you'd simply said "engineers shouldn't be forced to take humanities in higher education; doing so is largely ineffective, at least in terms of imparting cultural appreciation and other related soft skills." Instead, I can't help but read it and think that it's single-minded and tone-deaf.
        cassiet 6y ago
    - bransonf 6y ago
      I once thought like this too. And then I studied engineering to learn that I hated it. I ended up switching into the humanities. Once there, I began to apply a combination of statistics and computer science to address very real problems (crime, vacancy, civic participation, neighborhood economics etc.) We don’t actually live in a world governed only by the hard sciences. There are people here too, and I’d argue that understanding people is just as difficult as understanding the laws of physics. Some of the biggest challenges in society today are not questions of hard science, but rather about people and groups and institutions. I think our current situation exemplifies this.
      - malandrew 6y ago
        I didn't criticize humanities in general. I criticized humanities departments that have become overtly political. The overtly political ones produce useless graduates.
    - noema 6y ago
      More resources ARE being shifted to those "practical" (read: revenue-generating) programs, to the detriment of students. The purpose of higher education is edification, not securing directly applicable job skills - that's what trade schools are for. Being able to read, write, interpret and communicate well are just as important to a software developer than the textbook CS curriculum. It's only because of the harsh economic reality of America's university system that such a prospect is even thinkable.
  - JCharante 6y ago
    Adding on to this, college is a great place to meet students from all around the world. The downside of virtual learning is that many students fled the countries where the government's response was underwhelming, so it's hard to collaborate across so many timezones. If virtual learning continues to be the norm, then students would likely go to schools to operate in a timezone that works best for them (which would most likely be during the day for them). This would eliminate the opportunity to work on projects with people from the other side of the world for most.
  - anjc 6y ago
    In my experience, the primary limit for engineering/CS labs are simply room capacities and the number of PCs per lab. Each lab therefore must be tightly scheduled by the school. Virtual learning has been amazing in this sense: labs can be rescheduled, have unlimited capacities, can run concurrently, etc. They're also far easier to manage, less noisy, you aren't on your feet for hours.
klodolph 6y ago
Forgive me, but I find it a bit hard to be sympathetic in a broad sense to the organizations that make their money from rental income.
- jacoblambda 6y ago
  As someone who has made an effort to build a connection with my landlords, being a landlord is not in any way an easy job. Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. This is doubly so in a rural university town where the seasonally renting(2/3rds of the year) population is anywhere from 10 to 30 times the size of the permanent residents in the surrounding area. Also more generally, the lack of university students in these rural university towns could potentially cripple the local economy for a long time. Many of the local businesses are only able to sustain themselves with the income they receive during the Fall and Spring semesters.
  - clumsysmurf 6y ago
    > Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. Good landlords are hard to find. There is so much information asymmetry when choosing a rental property. They can get large troves of data on you, but the reverse is not so easy if possible at all.
    - q084yn39cptyth 6y ago
      Business opportunity in that current asymmetry?
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Being a good landlord is not an easy job, but individual landlords (good or bad) are in the minority. The majority of properties are owned by PMCs, and the difference is larger when you look at MDUs or college towns. By their nature, PMCs are after profit, and improvements are an expense to minimize. The nature of college towns mean that there is a constant supply of “fresh meat” in the market, often moving to or from other cities, further disincentivizing improvement or good behavior on the part of the PMC. Why bother to replace moldy carpet, if the tenants don’t stick around to take you to court for it? Having rented from PMCs in the past, having worked in college housing, the idea that you would feel sympathy towards a PMC in a college town is pathological.
aiddun 6y ago
Current college student here at a school with a large off-campus housing population - one thing I've been hearing from some of my friends (although anecdotal) is a decent amount of people still want to go to their apartments next semester even if it's online. I don't know how much of a dent this behavior will do overall, especially because I think an overwhelming majority of people would prefer not to have to pay rent every month for an unnecessary apartment.

Permanently, too, if this causes a paradigm shift and virtual learning becomes the norm. Beyond the crisis, colleges were already planning on declining enrollment due to demographic shifts. Real estate in exclusively college towns, dependent on collegiate rentals, will be seeing long term changes regardless.

derrick_jensen 6y ago
I don't believe virtual learning will be widely used long-term. I might be biased, coming from a mostly engineering school, but there is a lot of vital lab equipment needed for the curriculum, not to mention that social networking and connections are essential to most careers going forward, and I don't see that transferring over in the same way
- malandrew 6y ago
  I’d be happy if this was the beginning of the end for humanities departments that have become overtly political. More resources should be shifted to more utilitarian degrees like engineering and hard sciences.
  - nradov 6y ago
    Engineers are worthless if they can't communicate effectively and don't understand the context of their work.
    - baggy_trough 6y ago
      Humanities departments emit some of the most cryptic texts around. They should be worrying about that before trying to help engineers.
      - klodolph 6y ago
        Tu quouque doesn’t make an argument. Gutting humanities in favor of “practical” degrees is short-sighted in the extreme. The problem with humanities is not that it doesn’t provide value to the community, the problem is that it is difficult to monetize skills in the humanities. There is a pathology that larger organizations often develop where they start investing only in ideas that where they can measure the impact on the time scale of a performance review cycle. For example, any project where the results can’t be measured in one or two quarters might be dead on arrival, depending on what company you work for. The same kind of short-term, narrow-minded thinking is what makes people dismiss humanities.
        imtringued 6y ago
        Or there is an oversupply of humanities graduates and that is what is causing monetization problems. Just think about how many poorly paid artists there are.
        mattkrause 6y ago
        You're gonna be gutted when you look up how much non-CS scientists make.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        Perhaps if you took the time to learn the humanities, they’d become more accessible to you? It’s not like engineering texts are the paragon of clarity.
      - noema 6y ago
        The opacity of contemporary humanities texts is overstated. Yes, the general academic style tends to be verbose and baroque. But it bespeaks a certain hubris when a layman to a given field claims an absence of meaning to its work. The topics being discussed are often technical and by virtue of their intended audience (peer scholars) presuppose vast amounts of preliminary knowledge.
    - twomoretime 6y ago
      You don't need a politicized liberal arts department to teach engineers to write. We would be just as well served if we went back to learning classics, for example. I was disappointed to go through college having touched nothing older than Shakespeare officially. But I got plenty of feminist and minority-focused literature that was irrelevant to my particular (non-white) echnicity. Why should these modern authors take such a heavy precedence? Isn't it hubris to presume that your ideas are superior simply because they are new? Students are a captive audience when the entire institution is leaning in the same direction.
  - cassiet 6y ago
    What a useless world that would create.
    - prawn 6y ago
      There was a great tweet/meme about people savaging the idea of bailing out the arts industry during a pandemic, all while spending more and more time reading news sites, playing games and watching TV/movies online...
    - twomoretime 6y ago
      You can pick up most of the soft skills you learn in humanities by doing things like reading and practicing writing. The minimum functional skill level is low enough for a majority of people to achieve through practice with minimal guidance. People don't have to spend thousands of dollars and four years of their life to paint or sculpt or whatever - it may not be proficient and lifelike but it'll still be art. Your world wouldn't be all that much more drab if we stopped forcing engineers to learn "culture".
      - eusebius 6y ago
        > People don't have to spend thousands of dollars and four years of their life to paint or sculpt or whatever - it may not be proficient and lifelike but it'll still be art. I don't think it's important to the overall argument of your comment, but this is incredibly reductive. If one has little appreciation for a particular form of art maybe this is true, but if, for example, all orchestras or other classical music ensembles were comprised of less proficient musicians I'd sooner stop listening to classical music altogether. > Your world wouldn't be all that much more drab if we stopped forcing engineers to learn "culture". I'm not sure if it was your intention, but quoting the word culture comes off as disparaging, but given the tone of your comment it certainly seems so. I think I would've agreed with you if you'd simply said "engineers shouldn't be forced to take humanities in higher education; doing so is largely ineffective, at least in terms of imparting cultural appreciation and other related soft skills." Instead, I can't help but read it and think that it's single-minded and tone-deaf.
      - cassiet 6y ago
  - bransonf 6y ago
    I once thought like this too. And then I studied engineering to learn that I hated it. I ended up switching into the humanities. Once there, I began to apply a combination of statistics and computer science to address very real problems (crime, vacancy, civic participation, neighborhood economics etc.) We don’t actually live in a world governed only by the hard sciences. There are people here too, and I’d argue that understanding people is just as difficult as understanding the laws of physics. Some of the biggest challenges in society today are not questions of hard science, but rather about people and groups and institutions. I think our current situation exemplifies this.
    - malandrew 6y ago
      I didn't criticize humanities in general. I criticized humanities departments that have become overtly political. The overtly political ones produce useless graduates.
  - noema 6y ago
    More resources ARE being shifted to those "practical" (read: revenue-generating) programs, to the detriment of students. The purpose of higher education is edification, not securing directly applicable job skills - that's what trade schools are for. Being able to read, write, interpret and communicate well are just as important to a software developer than the textbook CS curriculum. It's only because of the harsh economic reality of America's university system that such a prospect is even thinkable.
- JCharante 6y ago
  Adding on to this, college is a great place to meet students from all around the world. The downside of virtual learning is that many students fled the countries where the government's response was underwhelming, so it's hard to collaborate across so many timezones. If virtual learning continues to be the norm, then students would likely go to schools to operate in a timezone that works best for them (which would most likely be during the day for them). This would eliminate the opportunity to work on projects with people from the other side of the world for most.
- anjc 6y ago
  In my experience, the primary limit for engineering/CS labs are simply room capacities and the number of PCs per lab. Each lab therefore must be tightly scheduled by the school. Virtual learning has been amazing in this sense: labs can be rescheduled, have unlimited capacities, can run concurrently, etc. They're also far easier to manage, less noisy, you aren't on your feet for hours.

klodolph 6y ago

Forgive me, but I find it a bit hard to be sympathetic in a broad sense to the organizations that make their money from rental income.

jacoblambda 6y ago
As someone who has made an effort to build a connection with my landlords, being a landlord is not in any way an easy job. Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. This is doubly so in a rural university town where the seasonally renting(2/3rds of the year) population is anywhere from 10 to 30 times the size of the permanent residents in the surrounding area. Also more generally, the lack of university students in these rural university towns could potentially cripple the local economy for a long time. Many of the local businesses are only able to sustain themselves with the income they receive during the Fall and Spring semesters.
- clumsysmurf 6y ago
  > Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. Good landlords are hard to find. There is so much information asymmetry when choosing a rental property. They can get large troves of data on you, but the reverse is not so easy if possible at all.
  - q084yn39cptyth 6y ago
    Business opportunity in that current asymmetry?
- klodolph 6y ago
  Being a good landlord is not an easy job, but individual landlords (good or bad) are in the minority. The majority of properties are owned by PMCs, and the difference is larger when you look at MDUs or college towns. By their nature, PMCs are after profit, and improvements are an expense to minimize. The nature of college towns mean that there is a constant supply of “fresh meat” in the market, often moving to or from other cities, further disincentivizing improvement or good behavior on the part of the PMC. Why bother to replace moldy carpet, if the tenants don’t stick around to take you to court for it? Having rented from PMCs in the past, having worked in college housing, the idea that you would feel sympathy towards a PMC in a college town is pathological.

aiddun 6y ago

Current college student here at a school with a large off-campus housing population - one thing I've been hearing from some of my friends (although anecdotal) is a decent amount of people still want to go to their apartments next semester even if it's online. I don't know how much of a dent this behavior will do overall, especially because I think an overwhelming majority of people would prefer not to have to pay rent every month for an unnecessary apartment.