9 ms·

The reason there is such a large premium for on-campus education versus online universities is because on-campus education is an experience as much as it is a s

by jawns 6y ago

The reason there is such a large premium for on-campus education versus online universities is because on-campus education is an experience as much as it is a service. If you're only interested in mastering the content, then online learning may be the place for you. That's why we see so many people pursuing online courses for their master's degrees and when they return to school later in life. They just want the content; they don't need (or have time for) the on-campus experience aspect of college. The on-campus college experience encompasses so much more than just acquiring knowledge based on what's taught in class. It's dorm life, it's extracurriculars, it's meeting people and forming friendships and hanging out with them outside of class time. It's being in a place where there are so many interesting people to meet. It's being in a relatively forgiving environment where practically everyone is figuring out how to live on their own (or with roommates) for the first time. Being physically present in that environment is a key draw. For me, the VAST majority of the value I got out of my on-campus education was the stuff that happened outside of class time. And I'm not even talking about the friendships or the networking or the fun. I'm talking about my actual education. For instance, I learned a lot more about journalism by working for the campus newspaper than from classroom instruction. And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually. I say that, by the way, as a remote worker who has had to spend a lot of time convincing managers and higher-ups that yes, remote workers can be as productive and energized as in-office workers. Remote workers are generally happier when they're not looking to their job to supply all of their social needs. But an on-campus experience is much more all-encompassing in terms of what needs and desires it fulfills for post-adolescents.

chii 6y ago
> It's dorm life, it's extracurriculars, it's meeting people and forming friendships and hanging out with them outside of class time. that's a community. You shouldn't have to need to pay to be part of a community. By gating this behind an expensive college tuition fee, it causes separation in society and is a cause for the inequalities of opportunities in the world. IMHO, tertiary education should be "free" (that is, a loan which is almost zero interest, and only needs to be paid back when earning above some "high" tax rate).
- weehoo 6y ago
  So your degree is free unless other people are willing to pay you to have it? In which case it costs you money? You already did society a favor by studying something other people care about instead of studying something only you care for. Why not just raise income taxes? Serves the same purpose without making people salty about college major choice. You already pay an effective 50% tax rate between income, sales, gas, registration, property taxes, etc. when you’re in that “sweet” spot of earning a great wage but not being wealthy. No one ever gets rich off paychecks.
  - chii 6y ago
    > So your degree is free unless other people are willing to pay you to have it? In which case it costs you money? yes. If your degree is in an area where you are unlikely to recuperate the initial investment of the education, then it effectively becomes free (i.e., paid for by society). I like this because some degrees that aren't productive, but has a genuine societal benefit (like studying history or something), can be funded this way. The person doing said degree has to really like it, and give up a high salary to do so. Degrees which _are_ economically productive will very easily reach the threshold for repayment of the loan, and thus the cost is borne by the employer/employee, who then ultimately benefit the most out of the degree (and therefore, justifies the relief to taxpayers for the cost of the loan). And because i believe most people are not willing to sacrifice their future economic gains just to have a free degree, i believe most will look to doing one which will become economically productive. But there are a few passionate individuals who look beyond their own economic gains, and this method allows those people to exist and contribute their passion to society.
albntomat0 6y ago
I agree with your overall point, but one of the issues with online learning is the credential received isn't the same value as an in-person one. There are an increasing number of exceptions like the Georgia Tech online masters, but I'm not aware of a high-end online bachelors degree.
- alistairSH 6y ago
  Harvard Extension Campus offers quite a few. While not viewed as favorably as an on-campus degree from Harvard, still valued higher than an on-campus degree from many other institutions. https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/bachelor-liberal-arts-degree https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/bachelor-liberal...
  - albntomat0 6y ago
    Nifty, I wasn't aware that existed. Still, there really isn't a viable online bachelors for the average 18 year old college applicant who is looking for a credential to use in the job market.
    - alistairSH 6y ago
      FWIW, HES doesn't require admissions - a prospective student simple registers for the first few required classes in the program. If successful in those, they continue on in the full program. I believe one of the courses is a research & writing survey that is reportedly quite difficult to pass. So, still not an option for an average 18 year old. But, potentially a fantastic option for a smart 18 year old who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend Harvard (or other elite institution).
  - KingMachiavelli 6y ago
    Interesting, it's a BS in liberal arts but offers CS as a field of study? Seems odd.
    - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> on-campus education versus online universities is because on-campus education is an experience as much as it is a service. If this is a true, then why is the online version much pricier?
jerf 6y ago
The problem is, if you're going to fall back on that perspective, Real Life (TM) has all those things too, and it will continue to do so, for essentially free. There will be clusters of that sort of thing somewhere, just as there are "retirement communities" and "bedroom communities" and such. Universities certainly aren't bringing anywhere near enough value for their marginal improvement on those matters vs. what would exist without them to be worth decades of crushing debt. If you surrender on what the Universities have to offer intellectually, then you're putting them in a position where they're going to be competing with generalized social forces that can create similar clusters of demographically-concentrated appeal without having to pay administrators and deans and speech police and all that stuff, and the universities will never be able to win carrying around such baggage. "And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually." It can't be recreated virtually. But it can be recreated without a "University" attached to it. If what the unis were offering was, you know, proportional to the gain, maybe 1/5th to 1/10th the cost they are now, then maybe it would still be worth it. But paying gold-plated prices for "social experiences marginally better than what you could put together yourself if they weren't there" is not a sustainable plan, or an adequate defense for their practices. Viva la disaggregation.
- jawns 6y ago
  The counterpoint to your argument is that if it is so easy to create those types of communities for much less money than what universities are charging, why hasn't it happened? I would guess that it's a combination of 1. not being as easy as it seems and 2. network effects. Because of the latter, you would basically have to persuade a large number of students to make the switch at the same time for them to feel as if they still have the social/professional networking they get from the on-campus experience.
  - jerf 6y ago
    "why hasn't it happened?" Who says it hasn't? To some extent, it has. Interest groups and clubs of all sorts already exist, and non-university-affiliated sports are already pervasive. But the rest of the answer is why I was talking about "what would exist if the universities didn't". Right now, the unis are sucking up a lot of the oxygen in that space. But it's a mistake to think that if they stop doing it, it will all disappear. It may partially disappear, but it will most assuredly not all disappear. There will be places where young people congregate. There will be roommates. There will be interests that emerge and get organized. Existing sports leagues can expand. If the demand exists, supply will appear. It doesn't even have to start from scratch, there's plenty of non-University resources that could simply expand to meet the demand. And the resulting system probably won't put you into decades of crippling debt. For that matter, have a chat with some of your school acquaintances that didn't go to university. You may find their lives aren't as horribly impoverished as you thought. There's also a bit of a false mental image that the choice is either the shining lawn and conspicuously happy people in the university or the darkness where lightning flashes and a grim factory job from which there is no respite, and in reality the choices are not even remotely that stark. In both cases, a lot of it is what you make of it. And, you know, you'd best hope universities aren't some sort of unique fount of such activities and joys, because you will be joining the rest of us in the non-university world after graduation, you know. It isn't actually that horrid or bereft of opportunities.
7thaccount 6y ago
I think the "experience" is vastly overrated with the one exception that it helped me meet my wife.
- gbear605 6y ago
  Sounds like a pretty big exception
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    Well, presumably the parent would have met some other, or maybe the same, wife elsewhere. Unless we’re to believe they on-campus learning is positively correlated with getting married, which seems absurd.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I think a huge number of people meet their future spouse at uni.
peter303 6y ago
Online colleges like the University of Phoenix have been around since the public internet (and by mail before). They went after working people and veterans who didnt care for the 'dorm experience'.
delecti 6y ago
I think a lot of what you're describing ties in with the general lack of "third places" in the US. College is basically one giant third place, and that community experience is hard to find elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
- zomglings 6y ago
  It feels like this was a concept I needed a name for and didn't know it. Thank you for posting about third places.
trixie_ 6y ago
Believe it or not people who don't go to college can have similar experiences as well.
Broken_Hippo 6y ago
Unfortunately, online education isn't popular because folks don't want the experience, especially if you are returning to school later in life. The reality is that many colleges are geared towards a non-working, single, young adult student. This is reflected in classroom times and coursework. (I had a class require volunteer work and short-term participation in college groups). You simply cannot work a 9-5 job and attend most regular colleges.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  I was under the impression remote / online leering was most popular with older learners? Aren’t there schools that specialise in this segment. This post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23353796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23353796 mentions University of Phoenix for one, and I’ve know more than a few people here in Australia who claim to have enjoyed their remote / online courses as older learners.
  - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
    Sure, some folks enjoy them. I'm not arguing this at all: It is just that it is hard to say that folks actually prefer them if they cannot comply with a standard university's requirements - class times, for example. Which really is the reason the colleges would go after older learners. I'm going to guess that there are a few schools that do specialize in this segment - I know Ivy Tech in Indiana use to make an attempt. Not every campus offered non-traditional class times, not all degrees were offered at those times, and I'm not sure you can get more than an associate's from there. There are other weird quirks as well. So many people cannot drive to the school locations (and keep their jobs) and many jobs simply won't work around a college schedule, especially not one that changes from semester to semester. (To be fair, 'traditional' college students have this problem all the time, but it is easier to switch jobs when young than when one has a family and insurance to consider).
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      Ah, right, yes. I see what you were getting at now. Thanks for clearing that up.
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
A lot of anecdotes in this post. Do you think your experience generalises to the whole university population? Was the entire journalism school working for the campus newspaper and did they derive real benefits from it with regard to post-university outcomes? Or does it stand to reason that, on average, half of people who go to university on-campus have a below average experience of it? For every post saying something like yours, there’s another post about how a person didn’t go to university, or dropped out early, and claim to have benefitted from not wasting their time at university. Sweeping generalisations are never going to capture the whole of possible experience, and I believe there’s room for on-campus, off-campus, and way more on the job / apprenticeship style training, and other types of learning I probably don’t even know about.
baryphonic 6y ago
I used to say stuff like this, but now I think it's mostly a lie I would tell myself. For most people, the "experience" of college/university is basically the a four-year party (or five- or six-...). For those who attend elite schools, they get a networking benefit. Most people aren't learning anything in classes, nor are they learning much outside of class beyond their ethanol tolerance. I think you stumbled onto a big truth, though: college kids have by and large zero "real world" experience outside of contrived scenarios posed by their teachers/coaches, so college classes can often devolve into the Chinese Room thought experiment with students memorizing the lookup table without having any concrete idea of what they are talking about, based on lack of experience. (When I realized that this was also true for a significant number of the faculty and almost all of the administration–people whose only cultural experience is within academia,–I started treating my time in college more honestly.) I think a better system would be one in which people actually do gain some experience before attending college. It would be much more efficient (working for free as an intern or apprentice seems preferable to paying several tens to hundreds of kilobux to maximize learning during free time).

by jawns 6y ago

chii 6y ago

> It's dorm life, it's extracurriculars, it's meeting people and forming friendships and hanging out with them outside of class time. that's a community. You shouldn't have to need to pay to be part of a community. By gating this behind an expensive college tuition fee, it causes separation in society and is a cause for the inequalities of opportunities in the world. IMHO, tertiary education should be "free" (that is, a loan which is almost zero interest, and only needs to be paid back when earning above some "high" tax rate).

weehoo 6y ago
So your degree is free unless other people are willing to pay you to have it? In which case it costs you money? You already did society a favor by studying something other people care about instead of studying something only you care for. Why not just raise income taxes? Serves the same purpose without making people salty about college major choice. You already pay an effective 50% tax rate between income, sales, gas, registration, property taxes, etc. when you’re in that “sweet” spot of earning a great wage but not being wealthy. No one ever gets rich off paychecks.
- chii 6y ago
  > So your degree is free unless other people are willing to pay you to have it? In which case it costs you money? yes. If your degree is in an area where you are unlikely to recuperate the initial investment of the education, then it effectively becomes free (i.e., paid for by society). I like this because some degrees that aren't productive, but has a genuine societal benefit (like studying history or something), can be funded this way. The person doing said degree has to really like it, and give up a high salary to do so. Degrees which _are_ economically productive will very easily reach the threshold for repayment of the loan, and thus the cost is borne by the employer/employee, who then ultimately benefit the most out of the degree (and therefore, justifies the relief to taxpayers for the cost of the loan). And because i believe most people are not willing to sacrifice their future economic gains just to have a free degree, i believe most will look to doing one which will become economically productive. But there are a few passionate individuals who look beyond their own economic gains, and this method allows those people to exist and contribute their passion to society.

albntomat0 6y ago

I agree with your overall point, but one of the issues with online learning is the credential received isn't the same value as an in-person one. There are an increasing number of exceptions like the Georgia Tech online masters, but I'm not aware of a high-end online bachelors degree.

alistairSH 6y ago
Harvard Extension Campus offers quite a few. While not viewed as favorably as an on-campus degree from Harvard, still valued higher than an on-campus degree from many other institutions. https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/bachelor-liberal-arts-degree https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/bachelor-liberal...
- albntomat0 6y ago
  Nifty, I wasn't aware that existed. Still, there really isn't a viable online bachelors for the average 18 year old college applicant who is looking for a credential to use in the job market.
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    FWIW, HES doesn't require admissions - a prospective student simple registers for the first few required classes in the program. If successful in those, they continue on in the full program. I believe one of the courses is a research & writing survey that is reportedly quite difficult to pass. So, still not an option for an average 18 year old. But, potentially a fantastic option for a smart 18 year old who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend Harvard (or other elite institution).
- KingMachiavelli 6y ago
  Interesting, it's a BS in liberal arts but offers CS as a field of study? Seems odd.
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

> on-campus education versus online universities is because on-campus education is an experience as much as it is a service. If this is a true, then why is the online version much pricier?

jerf 6y ago

The problem is, if you're going to fall back on that perspective, Real Life (TM) has all those things too, and it will continue to do so, for essentially free. There will be clusters of that sort of thing somewhere, just as there are "retirement communities" and "bedroom communities" and such. Universities certainly aren't bringing anywhere near enough value for their marginal improvement on those matters vs. what would exist without them to be worth decades of crushing debt. If you surrender on what the Universities have to offer intellectually, then you're putting them in a position where they're going to be competing with generalized social forces that can create similar clusters of demographically-concentrated appeal without having to pay administrators and deans and speech police and all that stuff, and the universities will never be able to win carrying around such baggage. "And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually." It can't be recreated virtually. But it can be recreated without a "University" attached to it. If what the unis were offering was, you know, proportional to the gain, maybe 1/5th to 1/10th the cost they are now, then maybe it would still be worth it. But paying gold-plated prices for "social experiences marginally better than what you could put together yourself if they weren't there" is not a sustainable plan, or an adequate defense for their practices. Viva la disaggregation.

jawns 6y ago
The counterpoint to your argument is that if it is so easy to create those types of communities for much less money than what universities are charging, why hasn't it happened? I would guess that it's a combination of 1. not being as easy as it seems and 2. network effects. Because of the latter, you would basically have to persuade a large number of students to make the switch at the same time for them to feel as if they still have the social/professional networking they get from the on-campus experience.
- jerf 6y ago
  "why hasn't it happened?" Who says it hasn't? To some extent, it has. Interest groups and clubs of all sorts already exist, and non-university-affiliated sports are already pervasive. But the rest of the answer is why I was talking about "what would exist if the universities didn't". Right now, the unis are sucking up a lot of the oxygen in that space. But it's a mistake to think that if they stop doing it, it will all disappear. It may partially disappear, but it will most assuredly not all disappear. There will be places where young people congregate. There will be roommates. There will be interests that emerge and get organized. Existing sports leagues can expand. If the demand exists, supply will appear. It doesn't even have to start from scratch, there's plenty of non-University resources that could simply expand to meet the demand. And the resulting system probably won't put you into decades of crippling debt. For that matter, have a chat with some of your school acquaintances that didn't go to university. You may find their lives aren't as horribly impoverished as you thought. There's also a bit of a false mental image that the choice is either the shining lawn and conspicuously happy people in the university or the darkness where lightning flashes and a grim factory job from which there is no respite, and in reality the choices are not even remotely that stark. In both cases, a lot of it is what you make of it. And, you know, you'd best hope universities aren't some sort of unique fount of such activities and joys, because you will be joining the rest of us in the non-university world after graduation, you know. It isn't actually that horrid or bereft of opportunities.

7thaccount 6y ago

I think the "experience" is vastly overrated with the one exception that it helped me meet my wife.

gbear605 6y ago
Sounds like a pretty big exception
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Well, presumably the parent would have met some other, or maybe the same, wife elsewhere. Unless we’re to believe they on-campus learning is positively correlated with getting married, which seems absurd.
chrisseaton 6y ago
I think a huge number of people meet their future spouse at uni.

peter303 6y ago

Online colleges like the University of Phoenix have been around since the public internet (and by mail before). They went after working people and veterans who didnt care for the 'dorm experience'.

delecti 6y ago

I think a lot of what you're describing ties in with the general lack of "third places" in the US. College is basically one giant third place, and that community experience is hard to find elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

zomglings 6y ago
It feels like this was a concept I needed a name for and didn't know it. Thank you for posting about third places.

trixie_ 6y ago

Believe it or not people who don't go to college can have similar experiences as well.

Broken_Hippo 6y ago

Unfortunately, online education isn't popular because folks don't want the experience, especially if you are returning to school later in life. The reality is that many colleges are geared towards a non-working, single, young adult student. This is reflected in classroom times and coursework. (I had a class require volunteer work and short-term participation in college groups). You simply cannot work a 9-5 job and attend most regular colleges.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
I was under the impression remote / online leering was most popular with older learners? Aren’t there schools that specialise in this segment. This post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23353796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23353796 mentions University of Phoenix for one, and I’ve know more than a few people here in Australia who claim to have enjoyed their remote / online courses as older learners.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  Sure, some folks enjoy them. I'm not arguing this at all: It is just that it is hard to say that folks actually prefer them if they cannot comply with a standard university's requirements - class times, for example. Which really is the reason the colleges would go after older learners. I'm going to guess that there are a few schools that do specialize in this segment - I know Ivy Tech in Indiana use to make an attempt. Not every campus offered non-traditional class times, not all degrees were offered at those times, and I'm not sure you can get more than an associate's from there. There are other weird quirks as well. So many people cannot drive to the school locations (and keep their jobs) and many jobs simply won't work around a college schedule, especially not one that changes from semester to semester. (To be fair, 'traditional' college students have this problem all the time, but it is easier to switch jobs when young than when one has a family and insurance to consider).
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    Ah, right, yes. I see what you were getting at now. Thanks for clearing that up.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

A lot of anecdotes in this post. Do you think your experience generalises to the whole university population? Was the entire journalism school working for the campus newspaper and did they derive real benefits from it with regard to post-university outcomes? Or does it stand to reason that, on average, half of people who go to university on-campus have a below average experience of it? For every post saying something like yours, there’s another post about how a person didn’t go to university, or dropped out early, and claim to have benefitted from not wasting their time at university. Sweeping generalisations are never going to capture the whole of possible experience, and I believe there’s room for on-campus, off-campus, and way more on the job / apprenticeship style training, and other types of learning I probably don’t even know about.

baryphonic 6y ago

I used to say stuff like this, but now I think it's mostly a lie I would tell myself. For most people, the "experience" of college/university is basically the a four-year party (or five- or six-...). For those who attend elite schools, they get a networking benefit. Most people aren't learning anything in classes, nor are they learning much outside of class beyond their ethanol tolerance. I think you stumbled onto a big truth, though: college kids have by and large zero "real world" experience outside of contrived scenarios posed by their teachers/coaches, so college classes can often devolve into the Chinese Room thought experiment with students memorizing the lookup table without having any concrete idea of what they are talking about, based on lack of experience. (When I realized that this was also true for a significant number of the faculty and almost all of the administration–people whose only cultural experience is within academia,–I started treating my time in college more honestly.) I think a better system would be one in which people actually do gain some experience before attending college. It would be much more efficient (working for free as an intern or apprentice seems preferable to paying several tens to hundreds of kilobux to maximize learning during free time).