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Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

• supernova87a 6y ago
  I remember wondering aloud at MIT/Harvard putting their courses online for free for anyone to listen to, and saying, well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which is hard virtually. That being said, the college experience has gone through events like wars, plague, disruption, etc, and has come back before. (Although not at a time when there was such a ready alternative technology at hand.) I'm not yet so worried as some say (wholesale change to the higher education model), unless this goes on for 2-3 years.
  • skocznymroczny 6y ago
    I know this might not be received well by the HN crowd, but I feel like the classes and networking are secondary, the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé.
    • enitihas 6y ago
      I think that is an opinion very popular on HN, so don't worry about the reception.
    • swiley 6y ago
      Yeah in the US that’s exactly it. Administrators for the sake of administrators everywhere.
    • nicolas_t 6y ago
      I've heard that a lot but I did get a degree from a reputable college in my home country (one of the best in France for my subject matter), yet I've only worked outside of France for my entire professional life and pretty much no French colleges are well ranked on international rankings (mostly because the rankings are biased towards much bigger institutions). And, well, the fact that it is isn't ranked well on any of those international rankings has not been a problem for my carrier at all. I have rarely been asked where I went to university and I don't think that it's affected my carrier at all. However the fact that I have no student debt because tuition was pretty much free has been a boon for my professional life.
      • Krasnol 6y ago
        I have the feeling like OPs reputation theory is self fulfilling in the US and a narrow effect that came up with those paid education thing they have over there. It's like that artificial value you get for your extra money. Like wearing the brand of cloth you bought on the outside of it for everybody to see.
      • luckylion 6y ago
        It's different if you worked in France though, right? From what I understand, the grandes écoles are very similar. It's not so much that you'll get an education that's ten times better, but you'll have a degree from a school that says you've been selected for leadership.
        • nicolas_t 6y ago
          Yes, probably, I mean I come indeed from a Grande école but since I've never actually worked in France, it's never really been asked for. And the few times when ranking was important (visas for Japan and Hong Kong), the fact that it's not well ranked internationally means that I got no exta points. In the end, I do think that degrees matter less than what people think and that it's completely possible to have a good career without the school name or university name having much of an influence (obviously it's anecdotical and probably depends on the field). I do strongly believe that being saddled with lifelong student loans is probably more detrimental than the positive aspects of a degree in most cases (maybe with the exception of lawyers but the only those who can cope with the lifestyle)
          • luckylion 6y ago
            I absolutely agree that you can have a good career without having a degree (or a degree from the right school), but you will have a very tough time getting beyond a certain threshold. I understand it's very obvious in France for upper management and public/political higher positions that it's not merit-based. The same is true for most countries, with varying degrees of impact and obviousness. But if you're not going for that threshold, you'll likely not run into issues. And if you're in niche-careers, it's probably true as well.
    • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      This is also the main problem, because it suppresses any real competition. All the while these organisations are grading their own students we will continue to get a somewhat mediocre system.
    • echelon 6y ago
      > having a reputable college you can put on your résumé. At what point will firms rank new grad candidates inversely proportional to the prestige of their university? Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates. Many positions probably don't demand skills beyond the ability to write mostly CRUD apps. The pedigree doesn't really matter in that case. All companies have these roles. Somebody needs to do the mundane work.
      • throwawayoverhe 6y ago
        > At what point will firms rank new grad candidates inversely proportional to the prestige of their university? Never. > Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates. But that doesn't mean you rank those people lower. It means you offer them the job at the budgeted salary. If they don't accept the job offer at the salary range you've budgeted for the position, then you move on to the next candidate. This might make less sense if there's a strong opportunity cost (i.e., missing a candidate because they already accepted a job), but that's not typically the case for new grads.
    • bko 6y ago
      Bryan Kaplan argues that the majority of the value of a reputable college is signaling. > Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job. If the value of education was the information taught in the classes or the network, you should see a somewhat linear increase of value as you progress. For instance, after completing your second year out of four, you should receive ~50% of the college premium. > Most of the salary payoff for college comes from crossing the graduation finish line. Suppose you drop out after a year. You’ll receive a salary bump compared with someone who’s attended no college, but it won’t be anywhere near 25 percent of the salary premium you’d get for a four-year degree. Similarly, the premium for sophomore year is nowhere near 50 percent of the return on a bachelor’s degree, and the premium for junior year is nowhere near 75 percent of that return. Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c...
      • supernova87a 6y ago
        This is very true! I believe (don't have a good reference) that companies in the past had more incentive and means to cultivate or train people on the job, and thus, a formal signal of education wasn't as important. (and until 1950s(?), wasn't as available to many) I seem to observe that now many companies generally want to pick the already-developed crop of people who fit the bill to a T, have had education or previous employment do the job of training / filtering who to consider, and not engage in the training part of it much any more. Maybe it's due to the increasing cost of hiring people that you must only take a chance on a sure bet, and that there is less and less appetite (financial return-wise) to spend money on training people who are just as likely to pick up and leave for another company.
        • 6y ago
    • gonzo41 6y ago
      Before i had a degree, my father said it's really important etc because of all the things you'll learn. Now after he says it's just about making sure doors are open that would have otherwise been closed. I guess maybe i needed to do my studies under one set of assumptions to have the motivation. Whilst only finding out on the otherside that those years were really only spent to get me my first job. And now my degree doesn't matter.
      • bitcharmer 6y ago
        I would agree the door-opening effect is true for many walks of life but it doesn't apply to software engineering and similar disciplines. I'm a drop out; I studied economics and have been doing very technical work (low latency application development) for over 15 years now. Worked for UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, etc. No one ever asked me about my degree. They were all (rightfully) interested in what I can do for them. True passion for the job will carry you much further than a piece of paper from a uni.
        • Leherenn 6y ago
          Did you have a hard time getting your foot in the door? After 15 years, most people do not care anymore about your education; but when getting that first job, unless you have an impressive portfolio (and even then...), that piece of paper is huge. With a recognised piece of paper, you can get much more easily get into a recognised company, which has a trickle down effect for the rest of your career.
          • bitcharmer 6y ago
            I was looking for my first job during the dotcom crisis and it took me about 18 months. I took a semi-programming job at slavery-level salary just to get my foot in. What really helped was the fact that I had spent 3 months as an unpaid intern at a reputable software house 2 years earlier. I remember my friends mocking me back than for being a looser and an idiot for "working for free". This sentiment (entitlement?) is even stronger among young people today. They refuse to acknowledge that when you come in with zero experience and nothing to offer and get free training - you are the real beneficiary.
    • yc-kraln 6y ago
      I think it's almost exactly the opposite. No one cares what college I went to, but the network I built during my time at University is still paying dividends.
      • lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Top tier universities offer both. Proof that you can get in, and once you’re in, a network of others who also can get in.
    • supernova87a 6y ago
      Well, it definitely serves a strong filtering mechanism to find people who have a certain level of probably-going-to-behave-in-ways-you-expect when you're trying to hire. Whether that leads to the most optimal outcome is not always clear, but it seems reliable enough (though boring) that many use it as a filter. We don't have great alternative mechanisms to find employable people otherwise, and given the current unpopularity of standardized tests / uniform measures of performance or skill, what can an employer do?
    • govg 6y ago
      This is a pretty common opinion here on HN, and colleges regularly get criticized for being nothing but a brand name.
    • intended 6y ago
      This is the popular view on HN. I take the opposite stance - being in person makes a huge difference, possibly one not appreciated by the demographics here. People continually reduce the experience to “sitting in a box and ingesting information. But a classroom is much more than that - it’s the ability to interact with other students, to deal with real world issues and practice even basic skills like asking questions. It’s chances to interact in larger groups. It’s resources which can’t be shared online at all (libraries, information terminals, printers.) There are also people who depend on interacting with people to process ideas. All of this modulated by the degree. If you are doing some courses, you very much depend on interacting with people - doing a negotiations module online is very different from an in person class to pick an example. And fundamentally- human brains on average are designed to work with people. Mine isn’t, and being at home and studying isn’t a bad deal- but i would cease being objective if I didn’t recognize that there are many ancillary and direct benefits to studying in college, and for some people in person studying is the only way they can achieve it. Finally I present to the people here Blooms 2 Sigma problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem People sorely sorely underestimate what “education” is actually about.
      • Olreich 6y ago
        I don’t disagree with anything you said. I think it strongly argues for university being highly inefficient compared to optimal education strategies. University cohorts should probably be smaller, with smaller class sizes and more stringent entry requirements to work toward the ideal 1:1 student:teacher ratios. Sure it’s more expensive, but if you get 2 std deviations out of it, that’s huge. For certain gen ed classes, maybe have the whole cohort in a single class, not for lectures or exams, but for discussion and collaboration. Make those courses fully project based and assign them uniformly across degree boundaries. Right now, graduate level courses and prestigious institutions are the only ones even trying to offer a higher education. The majority of universities at this point are paper mills, rushing hundreds or thousands of students through programs without most of the benefits you described. It’s a system optimized for making money or university survival, rather than student achievement or societal benefit.
    • ekianjo 6y ago
      i dont see why the two are mutually exclusive or something. You can both have a reasonable education in a college AND have it play a role as signaling as well, because nobody is going to check what you studied in details.
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
      They’re not unrelated. Part of going to an elite school is the ability to network with older elite school members; this is literally what fraternities are for.
    • ThomPete 6y ago
      You dont need to have that to get a great high paying job. Most jobs in the tech industry are talent based not merit based. There are some areas like doctor or experimental physics where physical presence makes a lot of sense. But most education can be found and consumed much better by thinking of the internet as your entire college and then work much more on self-motivation and curiosity which are the real secrets to educating yourself.
    • ThrowawayR2 6y ago
      > "...the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé." That might be true for software developers but it's certainly not true for any other engineering field, medicine, most sciences, etc. that require labs or other equipment. The university I attended had its own research reactor on-site for its nuclear engineering program. It's not even really true for software developers at the top end of the spectrum. Sure, if you're entering a software career trajectory where your education is unnecessary (which is most of them these days), then, yes, going to an elite school is a waste. If you plan to be building OSes, programming languages, doing AI/ML, etc, then learning that stuff from people who know where the cutting edge is invaluable.
    • dahart 6y ago
      Why do you feel like that, what evidence is there for your hypothesis in your personal life, or in statistics that you’re aware of? There’s a wide variety of viewpoints on HN, so I think it’s unnecessary to speculate on what other people think, but personally the thing that doesn’t sit that well for me is that you’ve stated an opinion with nothing at all to back it up. FWIW, having gone to both a not super reputable college (state school), and also a very reputable one, I can’t say that reputation is the “main” value, I might have benefitted from it but I wouldn’t even know. The math classes at the reputable school had much higher standards, they were harder and I learned more. I have some lifelong friends from both schools, but the group from the reputable school is generally much higher profile and further reach. I sold a business to someone I met through the reputable school. I also now work for someone I met through the state school.
    • munchbunny 6y ago
      I highly disagree with this one. I have one of those brand name diplomas, but the piece of paper is largely irrelevant. Nobody has cared or even asked about it since maybe 3 years out of college. As a restrospective thought experiment, if you offered me that piece of paper in exchange for a student loan the size of my college education, I would turn it down. But if you offered me the 4-year experience I actually got for that same loan, without the brand name, I would take it in a heartbeat. (You can't actually separate the two since the brand name in part enables the college to implement the product.) Aside from actual academic knowledge like practice with low level OS and network concepts, here's what I got from those four years that I think made a concrete difference in my life and career: 1. The personal mentorship I got from a professor, who I met during a summer internship, but he was from my comp sci department. It was serendipitous that the two circles collided, but it was crucial, and, to the point, it was enabled by the college network. 2. Meeting people through friends in college who would become co-founders or connections into other jobs. 3. Taking very specific classes on soft skills, such as writing workshops. One in particular, which I took early in college, was like getting two in depth code reviews a week for twelve weeks, except it was for my writing. That course made me fluid and precise at writing. I still suck in comparison to many of my former classmates who write professionally, but it made me a stand-out effective communicator in engineering. In retrospect I would have paid 1/4th of a semester's tuition in a heartbeat for that course (took 4 courses that semester). 4. Being surrounded by people who weren't engineers, who were formidable doers and thinkers, about other fields, such as global health policy and politics. I still remember getting my ass handed to me in a dinnertime debate by someone who was obviously more knowledgeable and more thoughtful about public policy than I was. Getting intellectually smacked down by friends regularly taught me humility and appreciation for the value of expertise in other fields. 5. Spending four years in the company of driven people with high standards. For the people who embrace it, it rubs off on you the same way working on a strong team does. It demystifies high performers and teaches you that you can turn yourself into one. 6. Due to spending time around people who had money/power, you learn to not be (as) intimidated by those people. It's a crash course in walking and talking like an "elite" whether or not you are one.
    • izzydata 6y ago
      I think it depends if you actually intend to learn something or not. College is really only what you make of it.
    • zjaffee 6y ago
      The main value is extra curriculars being of a higher caliber at top colleges than at lower tier ones. Getting to engage with other very talented people building organizations and so on in a much more serious way matters. There's a reason why ivy league college newspapers are far more impactful than at lower tier schools.
  • mav3rick 6y ago
    Assignments are often locked down.
  • yodsanklai 6y ago
    > well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? You can put on you resume that you were accepted in a selective program, and that you were able to complete it. Besides, the actual lectures are only the tip of the iceberg. If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams. You also have tutors and professors that supervise, pressure, grade you. You work in collaboration with other students. You have access to internship opportunities or to your professor networks. I once worked through a distributed systems project from MIT. I worked almost full time on it for a couple of weeks. Most of the material was available, but not everything. You certainly don't have the same resources students have. And you don't have the same pressure students have. Also, this project had zero value on my resume. It would be different if MIT could grade it for me, and certify I did well.
    • zelos 6y ago
      >If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams Exactly. Even as a self-taught developer, one of my biggest regrets is how little I appreciated the incredible resources I had available at university and didn't really take advantage of or appreciate.
      • wolfgke 6y ago
        For me, it rather was "I had so much to do for courses that I had hardly any time to make use of or appreciate the incredible amount of ressources."
      • whymauri 6y ago
        Also, a lot of classes are essentially impossible online. Intense lab courses, term-long project courses, and time-sensitive experimentation courses are all screwed. The way classes are coping is interesting: 1. For classes requiring user testing or behavioral experiments, assignments are being processed through mechanical turk. 2. The experimental physics lab is changing from a 'choose-your-own-adventure' model of choosing a final project to a satellite/telemetry/astronomy project. 3. Some classes are providing synthetic datasets or data from previous semesters for lab classes. 4. Some classes are basically finished. It is actually impossible to continue teaching them, so they're purely instructional or seminars, at this point. A lot of these lab classes are required to graduate, too. They also require so many resources that they can only be taught once a year. It's seriously demotivating, especially for passionate hands-on learners. And paying sticker price doesn't help the sting for many students.
  • mesaframe 6y ago
    From my experience the social aspect of college is definitely worth it. Ofc, you may find a group outside college then there is no need for that. Otherwise college is the best place to get socially better.
  • red_admiral 6y ago
    One thing I've definitely noticed in CS is that having a TA sit next to you in the computer lab and help you debug your code is a huge value add, and if it's only to track down a misplaced comma in "Introduction to C". Doing the same over $ONLINE_SERVICE is not quite the same experience, just like a terminal-emulator-in-a-browser isn't quite the real thing when you have slightly higher and jittery lag. And an async/await model (post code on forum, get back answer anything from minutes to hours later) is not the same thing at all.
    • whymauri 6y ago
      Currently a student, and I completely agree. The strain is both ways, too. Since timezones are now a very fluid concept, you're seeing courses accommodating completely new challenges in TA-ship. Some TAs have relocated entirely, which means that the course staff can be much smaller than anticipated. For some students, they can only receive advice asynchronously and it makes it difficult to meet deadlines based on EDT timezones. Even video debugging/office hours for people in EDT is awful, despite advances in screen sharing/Zoom. Also, I helped transition a professor to virtual instruction. They had never installed the Internet in their house before. They own no smartphone. They communicate entirely through landline and a dated desktop PC in their office. When absolutely necessary (course admin, journal paper updates) they will use Pine for email. This prof taught a 30-person graduate course in neurobiology having never touched any of the technologies they had to use. Bless that class.
  • furyg3 6y ago
    For me, university was a bit more about direction-finding and serendipity. Few places can expose you to very different things in both a structured and unstructured way as college. When I started university I was a returning student with a budding tech career. I promised myself I would get a degree, but I wasn't totally sure what benefit it would be. I thought I already had the tech skills needed to do what I wanted to do. While taking some required political science classes I discovered the world of development cooperation. I did a bit of traveling. I decided to use my time at a 4-year to explore the world of NGOs and other large-scale initiatives. I did a study-abroad project to do some free tech work for a global nonprofit. I fell in love with a new city. I did a short masters to further my knowledge, and also see if it would be possible to combine my tech background and this new world. It was, so I did. It's hard to know if something similar would have happened without that experience. It's hard to put a dollar amount on it, since I a) paid for my own education and b) probably earn less now that I've changed directions than I would if I hadn't. But I'm so incredibly glad I did. I also don't know how to compare this story to the many stories of people who graduate with 80k in debt and can't find a job in field in which they studied.
    • yardie 6y ago
      > I also don't know how to compare this story to the many stories of people who graduate with 80k in debt and can't find a job in field in which they studied. I have a friend going through this scenario minus the 80k debt. The field might not exist in their location. She’s looking at relocating and losing custody of her daughter. Or working another job and staying put for her family. I’ve met a lot of brilliant people who’s ambition has been bypassed or delayed due to external factors. Sometimes getting the brass ring means sacrificing more than you can give.
    • hombre_fatal 6y ago
      Something curiously missing from HN threads about uni is the social aspect. I consider my social experience in uni, from living with other students (instead of mom and dad) to studying abroad for a year, just as if not more valuable than the academics, and a major catalyst for finding what I wanted out of life. There's a lot more to life than credentializing for wage slavery.
  • agumonkey 6y ago
    Depending on the place and people (i wasn't very well when I was in college), MOOCs can be better in many metrics. - less anxiety being in IRC than in class - more focused (less distracted by people inviting you, peer pressure) - more communication with other students and teachers - automatic grading systems being very exciting to keep improving solutions rapidly
    • cblades 6y ago
      You didn't claim they weren't, but I just want to point out how each of those points is very, very subjective. For me: - I'd much rather be in-person, where I can better gauge what others are communicating and more readily have two-way communication about the material. - I'm way less focused when on my own computer, on my own time. - I find I communicate way less purely online than I would in-person. - Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming, as it can only really test inputs and outputs, and misses a ton of nuance. I want to also know if my code sucks, regardless of it producing the correct output or not.
      • ghaff 6y ago
        The main thing MOOCs do well is a solved problem with or without MOOCs--namely lecture videos. Discussion boards are mostly a tire fire; they're mostly useful for dealing with platform problems. They can probably be better when you restrict access to a qualified class but they don't really scale. >Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming I'd probably say automatic grading sucks, "even for programming." At least automatic grading can evaluate outputs of non-trivial programs. Programming is one of the few areas where autograding works for non-trivial, not multiple choice, questions.
        • agumonkey 6y ago
          I concur with boards being useless in general. It's too slow, not predictable. That's why I liked the moocs IRC channels. It was a live place where we could discuss things and resolves issues quickly.
    • 6y ago
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    College has never gone through an event like this at the scale it currently is at. The idea that every American should attend college is a relatively new one; during the last pandemic in America only a tiny percentage of Americans went to college.
  • pharke 6y ago
    I think there is a lot of value in learning in the same place that others are learning. You have a set schedule, you have people to discuss the material with, you can learn from other students, you gain experience working with peers in a group. That being said, all of this can be done without the actual institution of college as it now exists. If you could organize a small group of people that want to learn the same material then all you need is a place to meet. The only things lacking then would be access to the professor and access to a lab but those have solutions as well, you can look for someone who has already graduated from a similar program at a high level or someone working in the field and ask them if they could work with the group or answer questions and for lab work you can search out a hacker space or other community group that has the required materials or maybe split the cost of buying the equipment with your group. I'll admit there's a hard limit to how far this will go, graduates != experienced educators and some equipment will only exist at universities or research institutions but I'm pretty sure that 80% of what is currently done at college could be done in a coffee shop with good wifi.
  • jibolash 6y ago
    > There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which is hard virtually. Maybe even this is not that hard. People already compete virtually on mobile and console games of all kinds of complexity just to see their names at the top of a "leaderboard"
  • 4weekoldroses 6y ago
    How much of Harvard and MIT's catalogs are actually online in their entirety? (incl. textual resources, coursework, answers, etc.) IIRC it was more like a few handfuls of introductory courses.
  • KoftaBob 6y ago
    As many have said, the bulk of the value of going to college is in the signaling they're able to provide. You're paying (overpaying in my opinion) for the infrastructure they've put in place to adequately assess your abilities in a way that employers can trust. Say you pay someone to do an inspection of your home that the gov is requiring before you can sell. Has that inspector taught you anything or made any tangible improvements to your home? No. What they've done is signal to the gov and buyers that your home passes inspections.
  • gumby 6y ago
    When MIT put their course material online (thank you Hal Abelson of SCIP fame) they explicit that weren’t thinking it would substitute for an MIT education but just as a resource for others to use for their own courses. I found it handy when I needed to brush up on my thermo (ironically I hated it when I was in school) to review the current materials (as I’d already taken the course years ago The problem sets were enough)
    • ghaff 6y ago
      Yeah, the original concept of OCW wasn't really as materials directly for "end users" at all. I imagine this also helped sell the concept; "people like our current students aren't even the audience for OCW." Over time, OCW has added more things like video lectures as video became cheaper and more ubiquitous but it never had a stated objective of being a course in a box for students to consume directly. A lot of people were underwhelmed by OCW early on because they were expecting something a lot more consumable for a self-learner--which led to MOOCs of course.
  • shrimp_emoji 6y ago
    >the networking, friends, social aspect The what?
  • munchbunny 6y ago
    I think the college experience will survive precisely because the value add is the social aspect and the cross-pollination that comes from being near tons of people in lots of fields working on interesting things. Colleges even market this aspect as the key differentiator from online classes. In that case, I do think some refund is due on principle, because students at home in isolation definitely aren't getting that.
  • dehrmann 6y ago
    > what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? If you can tell from a resume someone attended in-person, it gives their degree more academic integrity. Not that you can't cheat if you attend in-person, but it's a whole lot harder to pay someone to take the exam for you.
  • davesque 6y ago
    > well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? Ivy league and other high end colleges are much more a brand than they are a product.
• Rexxar 6y ago
  Why they aren't just asking some additional classes after the lockout ? Why immediately ask for a refund after a clearly exceptional event for a curriculum that last probably many years ?
  • RobLach 6y ago
    Negotiation
  • gibolt 6y ago
    Why ask for a refund of a flight you were promised that isn't happening or could give you a disease that you could pass to your family? Even in extreme times, if you pay for something but get something other than what you were promised, adjustments need to be made.
    • Rexxar 6y ago
      The flight has not been cancelled, it's just an air pocket.
  • DangitBobby 6y ago
    The deal has been altered. They paid for in-person instruction and interaction with a professor and classmates, as well as numerous amenities and facilities, all of which contribute to the college experience. All of which comes at a hefty premium. Instead, they got online instruction, which is less valuable (even when it comes to tuition prices), and typically involves little to no instruction or interaction with a live professor. A partial refund does not seem incredibly unreasonable, except that universities may not be able to afford it.
    • nicbou 6y ago
      Without the benefits you named, I'd argue that you get almost no value out of university. You end up paying a lot of money to teach yourself things. At that point, I'd rather rely on the excellent (free) resources available on the internet. Khan Academy did more for me than my university ever did.
• gibolt 6y ago
  As much as I wish it were better, most online courses offered by universities do not come close to the in-person experience. Their real goal/outcome is to increase access. Professors are trained (most at least) to teach in-person and have assignments and curriculums that match. They can't redo that appropriately to be equally effective within a week or two. Few could do it well given over a year doing online only. Tools are being built and the experience will improve thanks to this global reset. Education is a space that hasn't really been disrupted ever. Definitely isn't happening within a few weeks.
  • swiley 6y ago
    Why was this downvoted? I failed a class and took the online version once so I got to see both sides. The online version had: 1) lots of busywork for the sake of busywork (to make up for attendance?) 2) much poorer instruction. Like everything felt like it was written by someone (really a group of people) who didn’t understand the subject very well, which was strange because the in person class was taught by a DR. with a very good understand and a strong passion for it. 3) no organic classroom interaction, people making friends that way have to be an extreme exception. It almost felt like this was actively discouraged to avoid a liability? I’m not sure, but that’s a huge part of the value of going to class that’s totally gone now. 4) and because of that no real discussion (you had discussion boards but those are more like public essays than real conversations.) The only reason it’s better than just reading a book and doing exercises is that all the administrators recognize you’ve done it, the whole situation is just really dumb.
    • watwut 6y ago
      It was downvoted, because many people here want in person classes to be useless waste of time. They don't want to hear they are better then online. That is mostly due to high price of price of us college. But imo, content issues are fixable, it just takes way more time. Good online courses with good content and good exercises will become more common. What will be harder is to simulate the social effects and mutual communication, that will be fixable too in time. That will however require also changes outside of school - people will have to learn how to find friendships and communities without institutional support of school.
• tetris11 6y ago
  And so they should. My experience at uni usually involved going to the lecture, not quite grasping the rushed material, then heading to the computer lab after to stream a YouTube video on the same topic to actually understand it. Why was I going to the lectures then? Who knows, on the offhand chance I might ask a question. Now I'm on the other side of the looking glass, I see three types of uni students - those who group collaborate and therefore are confident enough to ask questions in class (because they no longer fear their peers), those who are silent throughout because they do fear their peers, and those who are silent throughout because they've already read the lecture notes. The only ones who gain are the students who make use of this collaborative environment to ask free questions. TLDR - You pay for the environment. The lecture notes, the knowledge - all exist on YouTube
  • jmspring 6y ago
    Horseshit. The instructor has a serious impact on how the material is presented. I had transform mathematics from David Huffman of Huffman coding fame at the same time I had a similar physics math course. Both got to the same end, but I only passed both because of the approach and the notes I had from Huffman. Everyone learns differently and that situation where a professor can convey things on a way that clicks isn’t going to happen with a random YouTube video.
    • maskboy 6y ago
      Horeshit. having taken lin alg with Gil Strang and simultaneously watched his Youtube videos, I can confidently say that Youtube Gil Strang clicked while realtime Strang confused. ;)
    • tetris11 6y ago
      You bring up David Huffman, but how many Huffman's and Feynman's are there out there? Many postdocs who teach are just beginning their academic careers and are juggling running their analyses and creating their profiles that will bring them fame, against their less rewarding teaching duties. My academic has peaked, so I put more of myself into teaching and training and often find it rewarding when I interact freely with a few keen individuals, but the majority of students out there aren't keen. They're there because they are forced to learn to my schedule and not theirs
• villgax 6y ago
  Now comes the once & for all battle between levelling the allure of MOOCs vs in-person
• pm90 6y ago
  To be honest, I’m more worried by the effect it is already having on immigration and the calls from certain politicians to “reduce Asian students”. Besides the disgusting racism involved in that view, as someone who attended Grad School in US, I can confidently say that Asian Immigrants are some of the brightest and hardest working students I met and I was incredibly happy at this country’s future that the student pool was so diverse and talented. Reducing/Elliminating immigration is going to destroy American graduate programs and will boost those of other Western countries (or even Asian ones) just when we need even more of these folks. This kind of stuff is infuriating and I’m embarrassed at our politicians for even engaging in this rhetoric.
  • pr0duktiv 6y ago
    Hm, at least speaking for my uni (ETH Zurich), lots of grad students from Asia come here for cheap tuition & good PhD salaries, but almost all Chinese grad students I asked want to go back to China afterwards. Ideally we would keep talented people here instead of paying for their education with taxes and have them go back afterwards.
    • em500 6y ago
      > Ideally we would keep talented people here instead of paying for their education with taxes and have them go back afterwards. Not sure how Swiss uni financing is setup, but I believe in most countries international (undergraduate) students pay full price so it's hard to argue that the host country is "paying for their education with taxes".
      • pr0duktiv 6y ago
        Not here, tuition is very low (<2k per year) at ETH (due to being heavily subsidized) and doesn’t depend on nationality
    • londons_explore 6y ago
      If you were running a country, would you want your brightest and best people leaving and never returning? A large proportion of chinese people have to go back to China after being educated, or china will discourage them from leaving in the first place, since it wouldn't be in the national interest. The US does similar stuff - through their worldwide taxation scheme, they discourage citizens from earning lots of money abroad. They're pretty much saying "if you're successful, we want you to bring those profits back to America".
• deleted 6y ago
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• buboard 6y ago
  Colleges need to change their model and build a "facebook for rich students". Memberships cost $1000 / month, pokes $100, by invitation only. I 've heard that online classes do not work. Conferences do, however, in fact i think they are preferable. And they get a ton more visibility and attendance too If there's something about university it's that the culture of curiosity, studying and learning is contagious , and also there's the competitive element which pushes students to perform better. I don't know how you would recreate that in the virtual world. Perhaps with a lot of gamification
  • swiley 6y ago
    I think that’s already recreated in the virtual world by the communities formed by autodidacts (including to some extent HN although that’s not exactly the same.) IMO: anything artificial is going to so filled with administrators avoiding liability because of the complexity of human interaction that it will be useless.
• ImaCake 6y ago
  I am doing a course on epidemiology this semester and I find it is once of the best courses I have ever taken, offline or online. It is offered, usually, in both online and in-person formats. It is very well designed and has rich content and opportunity for online interaction. I get the impression the in-person version is just as good as the online one. So why is this one so good when so many suck? Two possibilities: 1. The course has had an online format for several years and is thus experienced with online delivery. 2. It is a well designed course, regardless of delivery format. Which means only a reasonable amount of deliberation and care is needed to make it good for online delivery. My conclusion is that I don't think the format is the issue. I think the issue is that most courses are poorly designed in the first place. Insufficient effort and resources are applied and the result is crap. This comes with the caveats that many topics are best learnt in practical settings (chemistry, some biology, arts etc) so they translate poorly to online only.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• russellbeattie 6y ago
  > "Some estimate that they could lose up to $1 billion this year as they brace for downturns in student enrollment..." 3.7 million kids graduating this year, 70% of them planning on going to college, and probably 100% of their parents wondering if they should encourage their kid to defer for a year until things get back to normal. The drop in enrollment could be lessened a bit by lowering tuition for pandemic-related online classes, if required again (more than likely). Especially since many of those who take the year off may never return. If the colleges were smart they'd think about this before digging their heals in.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    >3.7 million kids graduating this year, 70% of them planning on going to college, and probably 100% of their parents wondering if they should encourage their kid to defer for a year until things get back to normal. I can only imagine. It's by no means a given that all universities will even be open for the fall term--and it's hard for me to imagine it makes sense to start college under those circumstances. Of course, it's also not a given what the options for other activities will be if you just go ahead and defer for a year.
  • ModernMech 6y ago
    > probably 100% of their parents wondering if they should encourage their kid to defer for a year until things get back to normal. Or on the flip side, everyone who starts this fall will have an advantage in the hiring market 4 years from now when fewer than normal graduates are entering the workforce due to those who encouraged their kids to take a year off now.
• classified 6y ago
  Very apt. I would like to be refunded for having to live in Trumpmerica as an unarmed non-billionaire. That's clearly an insufferable fate.
• madsbuch 6y ago
  I guess this is a consequence of building an educational system that is for profit and where student pay a (substantiel) part of their tuition. European universities have also closed, yet I still have to hear about any complaints. In fact, it seems like the Corona crisis will boost university applications in Europe - If you can't have your gab year and find work you might as well just study. In the US it seems like we will see the opposite effect - Less people will apply and commence studies.
  • pfortuny 6y ago
    If you have to hear about complaints, you are not in Spain, that I am fairly sure of. (Am a profesor at a School of engineering here...). Also because they pay much less than in the States, they feel less agraviated.
  • rufusroflpunch 6y ago
    Maybe I am reading into it, but it seems like your comment implies this is a flaw in the US educational system versus the European system. I would argue this is an example of the opposite. By having the price hidden from them, the students have removed from them the most important signal to decide whether they are getting something of value.
    • madsbuch 6y ago
      I am not pointing out a flaw, merely a perceived difference. Personally I don't really buy into the monetization-of-every-aspect-of-life. I did not take my education for its monetary value and I am more than happy to have been removed from that concern. That is a privilege I am more than happy to pay forward to current students. Even if I had bought into that way of thinking and paid tuition up front, I am not sure how I could have used that information to decide on a major? Under all circumstances I would put myself in position for the highest paid role, regardless of tuition? Anyways, this is a complex topic and one of the most fundamental differences in the European and American way of thinking. I don't see any right or wrong, just differences.
  • evgen 6y ago
• caseysoftware 6y ago
  I think the fascinating thing about these lawsuits is that they'll revolve around two questions: First, what did the schools promise? And, did they deliver on it? I doubt it's spelled out in a contract but based on most schools' marketing, the "promise" includes instruction, state of the art classrooms & labs, access to professors, peers, extra curricular activities, dorms, a beautiful campus, and a number of other things. Obviously they've delivered some form of instruction and potentially a way to connect with peers.. but was it the quality or even the product promised/implied?
  • fluffything 6y ago
    The easiest court cases to win in practice involve schools promising students that their degree will land them a good job that will pay enough for them to pay back the student fees without problems. These promises typically happen when people are doubting about signing the contract, and universities are more like "don't worry about the loan, you'll get such a nice job afterwards that you'll be rich and this will feel like pocketchange". The student that finish university and aren't able to land a good enough job due to their education can sue and do often win. That's much simpler to handle in court than the questions you are considering, but it requires actually finishing the degree.
• shawnps 6y ago
  Online classes can work, but it makes sense that students are frustrated by courses put together quickly due to unforeseen circumstances. I've been a student of Georgia Tech's online Master's program for a few semesters now. They've had years to iterate based on previous students' feedback. I am learning an incredible amount for a decent price. But it is a Master's program and involves a lot of self-motivated research. Also, it costs roughly $850 per semester (if you take only one course). I'm not sure I'd have done it if it had cost thousands.
  • tootahe45 6y ago
    Online classes are $8 a month and usually better quality than most uni lectures. If people wanted online classes they would've avoided uni altogether.
  • smileysteve 6y ago
    Gt's master in CS prices are, I think, the biggest reason for a large refund for this online half semester. Where in state tuition is $13k a year, out of state is $33 and a masters program is $10k total (or $1700 a year based on the same calculations)
    • jki275 6y ago
      GT's MSCS is a totally different instruction model. It's all MOOCS, not focused online learning with regular sized classes. Most of the classes have 600 students in them.
• red_admiral 6y ago
  If I go into a restaurant and order pork, but get served beef, I have a right as a customer to complain. It doesn't matter whether beef is in some way better than pork, or whether other customers are perfectly happy with beef, or whether I eat beef myself at other times. I order pork, I expect pork. If the restaurant can't serve me pork, for example because they've run out, then the right answer is still not to just assume I'll be ok with beef instead. I don't see how "this other thing is of equal value" (which is debatable in itself) is a defense to a claim that I'm not getting the product or service that I signed up for?
  • pfortuny 6y ago
    This is even worse because at least in a restaurant you have not paid yet!
    • sfj 6y ago
      Some restaurants have you pay ahead of time.
  • unishark 6y ago
    This analogy can still go either way. You ate half the meal. Then there they had to kick you out to finish at home with a doggy bag. You're losing out on some ambience, but the thing you showed up to achieve will be achieved. Note that there are already refunds for at least some of the in-person stuff such as dorms and gym access. So were already in a position of compromise and partial refund. It's just an argument of what that number should be.
    • wccrawford 6y ago
      The first half of the meal, the portion they ate, was what they paid for. The meal was suddenly changed halfway through, but there was no option to stop paying. And in this case, the first half of the meal doesn't mean anything without the second half.
      • 6y ago
• blackrock 6y ago
  What’s the point of paying for college, if you’re stuck behind a webcam? Yes, you can learn some things, but you can also learn it by just watching YouTube. The whole point of being physically present in college, is to commingle with your peers. Because surely, you’re not going to make friends over Zoom. That’s just pretty damn lame. Of course, you hope to sharpen a few skills, and learn a few more things in the 4 years, but just being present is part of the experience. But you’re definitely not going to make a life long friend over Zoom, as opposed to having beers or just chilling at a house party, after your midterms are done. Colleges should offer online education for $1. It’s useful, but not quite the same.
  • tester3 6y ago
    >What’s the point of paying for college, if you’re stuck behind a webcam? >Yes, you can learn some things, but you can also learn it by just watching YouTube. This relies on heavy assumptions. I recently had a few programming classes with lecturer who has 15 years of experience in industry and a lot of in academia Not only his lectures are at very good level - best practices, industry standards but also very fresh technology and additionally you have an opportunity to ask questions. It's not that easy to find this kind of materials on Youtube or even paid services. Youtube often covers topics briefly, so you have to try to find blogs of an actual experts.
• kazagistar 6y ago
  If we are still isolating to any extent in the fall, things are going to get real tough. Might not be any incoming freshmen class.
• isoprophlex 6y ago
  This is what you get in a litigious society where the "free market" sets tuition prices. Of course students are pissed off at not getting the college experience anymore, given how expensive some of those schools are. What will be even more fun is watching the house of cards fall apart once the lockdowns extend into the new year and international students stay home. Now there's a cash drain no university can cope with.
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Yup; if people wanted an online course, they could've taken that instead. In their home country as well.
  • sfj 6y ago
    > This is what you get in a litigious society where the "free market" sets tuition prices. The high prices were an unintended(?) effect of guaranteed student loans. So, a warped kind of free.
• speedgoose 6y ago
  I feel lucky to live in a part of the world where good education is free. In France, you even get some money and an apartment from the state if you need it to study.
• deleted 6y ago
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• usrusr 6y ago
  Turn education into a business and students will treat education like a business. You can't expect goodwill in a crisis when you squeeze people like a US college.
• 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
  I read through quite a few replies and it seems like it’s all people whose disciplines didn’t need special equipment. I did physics. Good luck using a scanning electron microscope, or getting access to an optics lab at home. A lot of disciplines require specialised and expensive hardware, software or equipment. Industrial design, medicine, electrical engineering, chemical engineering. That’s the value add.
• hartator 6y ago
  If certain classes can’t be done online (require certain equipment or physical projects to be built), why not delaying everything until they re-open? It feels both university and students want to have the cake and eat it.
• Proven 6y ago
  Looking for an excuse to GTHO without losing a cent, eh?
• raslah 6y ago
  As someone who finished a Baccalaureate online, I’d say these students simply aren’t prepared for the mind shift to having to learn independently. Most of my professors seemed to loathe having to teach an online class and merely threw together a mountain of almost random assignments and research papers as if to say, “if you can survive this, you can have a degree”. Most of my courses didn’t even offer video lectures and were taught by low-paid adjuncts that never responded to email. You were left alone to figure it out. It’s a whole other ball game when you don’t have the deep support system of being on campus. I hope this brings improvements to online education in general.
  • koheripbal 6y ago
    As part of my engineering degree, it wasn't all books and lectures. We had to learn the machine-shop, operate the lathe construct a robot, mix chemicals in organic chemistry lab, experiment with lasers in different mediums, wire hard drives... etc... A lot of that is hands on work. No Zoom session is going to make up for that.
• jccalhoun 6y ago
  I've taught some online classes for a few years and at least in my field, I don't think they are very great. I don't feel like a teacher but a grader. I post mini-lectures and other videos to try to get some connection with students but I don't feel that it is as effective. In a sense I was lucky when this quarantine in place happened because my college does 8 week classes and we were on a break when things started. Therefore, all the classes I'm teaching right now have been virtual/online from the start and I didn't have to switch gears in the middle of a semester. Even in these classes where we do live zoom meetings I don't really feel like I know my students. It is better and more like a real class than online but the added tech issues make it less than ideal.
• brightball 6y ago
  This is the expected outcome after I read this: https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-courses-online/ https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-p...
• deleted 6y ago
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• chadash 6y ago
  I wouldn't take this as an indicator in general that online classes are good or bad (I'm personally not a fan). I think everyone can agree that the quality of classes is going to go down when you have to stop in-person classes mid-semester with no time to prepare for an online transition. Teaching online is a different style that doesn't necessarily work for every instructor or for every subject for that matter. At the same time, university is extraordinarily expensive. If you are paying 50K/year and not getting what you paid for, you are going to feel like you are owed something. Add on the fact that many students' parents have lost all or parts of their incomes, or fear that they will going forward, and it would be surprising if we didn't see these lawsuits. Ultimately, it's going to depend what is in the contracts that were signed. If there's a force majure clause favoring the universities, then the students may not have a case. If not, then yeah, they aren't getting what they paid for and should be entitled to refunds.
• MisterBastahrd 6y ago
  My gf took 3 online courses this semester (planned). Not a single professor had lectures to attend. They all just had a checklist of busy work and readings and an email address to contact them if they had questions about an assignment.
• hysan 6y ago
  Not too surprising that the experience wasn’t good. Having taught in-person and online before, I can guarantee that these students ended up with a sub-optimal experience at best. Teaching online is drastically different than in-person and is not something you can easily pick-up in short notice. Made worse is that they were in the middle of a syllabus designed for in-person instruction. How material is delivered, what type of assignments to give, how to even grade those assignments, etc. - all of that needs to be tailored to an online environment in order to have a good experience. You can’t just “adapt” it like driving on the opposite side of the road. And this is also ignoring tooling needed to make the online experience productive. I believe the colleges when they say that their professors are doing their best. That they are delivering the same high level material. However, that is willfully ignoring the fact that content is a very small part of the college education experience. The delivery, environment, and people are what gives college its value. Lose that and the cost, especially for these high ranking colleges, is not worth it.
  • 0d9eooo 6y ago
    I've not taught online, but I have a close colleague who was doing it for years pre-pandemic, and another colleague who did a bit of it and my impressions are the same. My sense is that major universities doing online stuff have video production crews (from Communications etc) and everything is heavily edited and redone. It's more like a television show than anything else. Much more preplanning, and interactions with the students are much more structured. It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you, while you're uprooted like a minor refugee and living who knows where that you didn't plan to. Students will be back in the fall. The risks of returning do not approach the risks of not returning for most undergrad-age students. This is especially true that universities will be prepared this fall, and were not in late winter/early spring. My sense is that a lot of the schadenfreude and resentment here on HN and elsewhere is due to a general sense that something is really very wrong with higher education at the moment, at least in the US, and wanting to see it radically reformed. I agree, but I think the problems are not really related to the value of in-person degree education vs what you can get online. The real issues have to do with the cost of the education in general, how degrees are viewed in vocational settings, and costs and spending within higher educational institutions. Until those things change, it will take a lot more than SARS-CoV-2 to change things.
• xiaolingxiao 6y ago
  People focus a lot on whether online can replicate the in-person experience of networking, building relationships, etc. The other part of it is that student tuition pay for the use of facilities as well, not just classrooms, but also the recreation center and other campus amenities. So in other words, not all the money went into the "intangibles", but rather the very real tangibles. Another comparison would be to prepay for a sit down experience at a high end restaurant, only to be told the restaurant shut down and you're actually going to actually have to get the food delivered. Presumably you'd want a partial refund not just because you didn't get the "magical vibe", but also because you literally did not sit in the physical space for 2+ hours.
• jameslk 6y ago
  > Colleges, though, reject the idea that refunds are in order. Students are learning from the same professors who teach on campus, officials have said, and they’re still earning credits toward their degrees. Schools insist that, after being forced to close by their states, they’re still offering students a quality education. In summary, colleges are only in the business of pimping professor time and selling credits to a piece of paper. Apparently access to those expensive campus buildings and all the friends you made along the way wasn't part of the deal. Therefore, no refunds are necessary.
• techntoke 6y ago
  Why shouldn't students be willing to eat the costs in order to help save the vulnerable population of COVID-19? Why is it the schools fault for this happening?
• starpilot 6y ago
  Terrible HN comments in this thread...
  • forgotmylogin2 6y ago
    Yours is the worst of the bunch. If you have a gripe with some comment, reply to it and explain why it's wrong.
• Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I don't know what the implications would be on finances / resource allocation for the school, but IMO everyone's education should be "paused" right now, including K-12. If you were going to graduate in six months, and the Coronavirus ends up closing campus for six months, you'll now graduate in 12 months, after you've had your due time on campus. And that additional six months of schooling comes at no additional cost. If I had a reservation at a restaurant before the Coranvirus, and the restaurant is now closed, I'm not forced to buy a take-out order instead—I just don't pay. That really sucks for all the people who work at the restaurant, but I don't think forcing customers to pay for a service they didn't receive is the right solution.
  • fonix 6y ago
    really get's tough when the 'entry' point of those grades now has double the students (new incoming students; not those also repeating a grade), as people will want their kids to start schooling at the 'normal' (maybe this changes?) age.
    • Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Colleges have the ability to accept fewer incoming freshmen. And if K-12 schools were also delaying graduation, there would be fewer applicants. One option for K-12 would be to take fewer incoming Kindergardeners, perhaps by moving up the birthday cutoff date. Parents can get over themselves; this isn't a normal situation and some shared sacrifice is necessary. None of this is a good, but I find it preferable to the current status quo. Making sure students get the education they're due should take priority over meeting arbitrary dates.
  • user5994461 6y ago
    All students and pupils are forming a chain where each promotion is expected to move up one year, replaced by the next promotion. There ain't a pause capability in the educational system, things MUST move forward every year at a define schedule. If anything, that's a good example of what a "deadline" is. It can ignore a few months of disturbance, as demonstrated by long strikes or major events. It can't skip one cycle.
• psim1 6y ago
  I honestly feel badly for colleges and universities that went to incredible effort to accommodate students only to have it shoved back in their faces with litigation. You know who likes remote education even less than students do? Faculty. Advisors. Administrators. Lab techs. Basically everyone. Students are getting their full value and more, while wearing their pajamas.
  • ColanR 6y ago
    I agree that no one likes remote classes, but there is no sense in which those students are "getting their full value."
    • carlmr 6y ago
      I've always been kind of autodidactic, so maybe this might not be the opinion of everyone. But I think apart from the degree signaling my employability, meeting and working with smart people was the main benefit of university. If it's all online you've lost this important place to connect with others. What you learn is basically available for a fraction of the price. It's only the degree that you're left with basically.
    • psim1 6y ago
      Is it reasonable to say "full value under the circumstances"? I'm trying to understand the limits of entitlement in a pandemic scenario. I live near a large (50,000 undergrad students) state university. They have means to survive, but are losing money at an amazing rate right now. If students come at the university with lawsuits and demand refunds en masse, it will be bad for everyone -- including the students. This situation is different, unique -- and should be treated differently than "I didn't get exactly what I paid for," especially considering what went into a best-possible-alternative workaround.
      • FireBeyond 6y ago
        So is it entitlement for students to be subsidizing the operating costs of a multi billion dollar university (in many cases a private organization) with their student loans?
• mhb 6y ago
  The intellectually honest thing would be for colleges to give a prorated refund and make their case that the students (parents) donate it. Plus that would make it tax deductible.
  • panzagl 6y ago
    Tuition is already deductible, if you don't take it as a direct tax credit.
    • mhb 6y ago
      I don't think so. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
      • panzagl 6y ago
        https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/student-loans/education-tax-credits/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/student-loans/educatio...
        • mhb 6y ago
          Yeah. That's a long way from tuition is already deductible. Some tuition is deductible (or can be credited) if your income is below a limit. Up to $2,500. It's disingenuous to use that as a reply to a post about the tax deductibility of a contribution to a charity.
• bpodgursky 6y ago
  I understand the frustration by the students, but I think there are a lot of parts of society and the economy where we are going to have to assume good-faith efforts to "make do" over the next year, and not get lost in the legalese. I mean, are we also demanding refunds for: - Public schools? I pay a lot of property tax to public schools. They aren't running, but teachers are still getting paid. If we demand refunds from colleges, why can't we demand back-property-taxes? - Parks and recreation? I paid taxes for state and local parks which are shut down, and I'm not allowed to use. - The court system? We paid taxes for a functioning police and justice system, which where I am (Seattle) has basically shut down except for flat-out murder. - Zoos, museums aquariums, and other civic institutions I can't access I don't think it's fair or practical to try to make a tally of all the services which can't be fully rendered. Institutions are stuck with enormous bills for infrastructure they've built and staff they are (trying) to keep paying. This isn't the time to let lawyers start siphoning money off of institutions attempting in good faith to do what they were paid for.
• TACIXAT 6y ago
  I had an absolutely awful experience with the fast.ai "in person" course. I sat through two lessons before realizing we were going to be seeing the rough cut of the free version (e.g. them doing their intros 3x) and that there were any office hours. In order to get a question answered 5 people had to like it. Even worse, it was a certification but since it was so low touch the teachers were not grading anything. I do not know what they were certifying, I guess that you paid for the course. I withdrew and they gave me a pro-rated refund that basically charged 300 dollars per class. Absolutely awful education experience.
• pbnjay 6y ago
  If these law firms really believe that they are acting like robin hood, taking from the greedy universities and giving back to the students who really need it, they'd be doing these suits pro bono so the students get every dollar they are entitled to. For some reason, I have a feeling that these firms will take a hefty fee and students will STILL end up with the bill eventually...
• ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  My college extended the ability to drop the class for a full refund to nearly the end of the semester. No lawsuit needed. For schools refusing to do this, I absolutely think people should be suing though. I am all for online education, but it's hit and miss how comparable it is. The course I'm taking at the moment is nearly exactly the same without it's in-class component: I wasn't even attending the in-person classes before the pandemic! But plenty of other classes I took were largely for the hands-on experience which couldn't be replicated over the web.
• sandworm101 6y ago
  >> saying colleges are unfairly withholding refunds even while they rest on endowments that often surpass $1 billion. Not really applicable. Endowment funds ussually have guidelines attached. They are not for general use and are certainly not used for paying refunds. Much of the point of an endownment fund, as opposed to just handing over cash, is that the fund is protected from lawsuits by students demanding their money back, or anyone else making claims against the university. Endowed money is not the university's property.
• master_yoda_1 6y ago
  I hope this overpriced higher education bubble would burst for good.
• FireBeyond 6y ago
  > Ken McConnellogue, a spokesman for the University of Colorado, said it’s disappointing that people have been so quick to file lawsuits only weeks into the pandemic. The country - and courts - might be surprised to learn that we've apparently only been dealing with this since mid April.
• dreamcompiler 6y ago
  IANAL but wouldn't most college tuition agreements have a force majeure clause that would render such lawsuits pointless? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure
• 1-6 6y ago
  I hope they find the textbooks unimpressive as well.