10 ms·

Higher Ed: Enough Already

85 points by samspenc 6y ago

verdverm 6y ago
For a professor, the author does a terrible job presenting the complete picture, and like most in academia, select those data points which "support" their claims. You should not trust their opinions. If you look at the stats, Covid is less deadly than the typical flu for those under 30. Time to stop destroying the youth by de-educating them. Stop being so scared. Let locals decided how to handle things. Stop picking isolated stories and applying blanket rules.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Zigurd 6y ago
  "Less deadly than the typical flu" itself amounts to cherry picking. Weeks to months of symptoms, and 4%+ rate of hospitalization for COVID-19 even in the college age group makes it much worse than a typical flu and capable of overwhelming health care systems if you put people in the college age group indoors in lecture halls, labs, meeting rooms, and faculty offices for 45+ minutes several times a day grouped with different people each time. This also involves an invalid comparison: College-age students, if they were broken-out by age among flu deaths, would show a very low death rate from flu, and COVID-19 death rates would be 5X+ higher, as they are proportionately for other age groups. Now let's talk about sacrificing the faculty on the alter of reopening.
  - xbmcuser 6y ago
    Even if younger people are not dying some have reported lasting problems after. We will find out after 1-2 years only the actual effect on the survivors not dying doesn't mean nothing happened
    - mrfusion 6y ago
      What percent of infected young people have lasting problems?
      - ci5er 6y ago
        Ha! We don't know! It's new! Give us 5~20 years, and I'll get back to you.
        mrfusion 6y ago
        Best to lock everything down until then to be safe.
    - ci5er 6y ago
      I understand that lung scarring for the "lightly" symptomatic can be ... not insignificant. I know it is for me (age: 55 y.o. or so), and while it isn't being currently problematic, but I have no idea about how it might present in 20 years.
- chadash 6y ago
  Can you point out some specifics that you disagree with? The author doesn't make the case that students are gonna die. It's more the staff and faculty, plus the possibilities that students are vectors for spreading the virus.
- yardie 6y ago
  That’s a serious assertion you are making. COVID-19 is 10 times deadlier than the flu across the population. Dropping to almost 0 for babies. But we can’t let infants run the country while everyone > 30 stays home.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    We initially thought it might be true for the young, but the deaths of infants and severe complications in children now suggests otherwise. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200511142153.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200511142153.h...
- bobthechef 6y ago
  FWIW, he’s a clinical professor at NYU and a showman.
- geofft 6y ago
  > If you look at the stats, Covid is less deadly than the typical flu for those under 30. By "less deadly" you mean "once infected, more people survive covid than the flu," right? But isn't it more infectious - and doesn't the longer incubation time make it more deceptive? It's fairly easy to control flu outbreaks, even in environments like college campuses, by telling people to stay home. (And you usually don't even need to tell them that, because they'll feel too sick to not stay home.)
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Getting covid at 30 is more dangerous than getting the flu at 30. If you want to argue otherwise please provide an actual peer reviewed study not a non scientists opinion piece or a pre print of a non peer reviewed study. Even if it were merely as dangerous getting the flu at 30 doesn't result in you infecting as many people and not as many of those people subsequently die. Many people pass it on before they get any sort of symptoms and therefore are unable to just stay home and not pass it around. Please stop passing around dangerous misinformation. Your advice could literally kill people.
MattGaiser 6y ago
The admissions year for the class of 2025 is going to be extremely competitive between deferrals and closed schools.
jseliger 6y ago
Very true: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton/ https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz... Too many students or "students" wind up paying for the party for years or decades after they graduate. The incentive structures in academia are (mostly) not good and not properly aligned.
cracker_jacks 6y ago
Professor Galloway also said: --- We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,” [...] That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. --- There's an opportunity here to scale education from institutions all over the world to a level never possible before. Well...it was possible for many years. But the incentives for the institutions commit to it never appeared until now.
- chongli 6y ago
  I think the dissonance you’re seeing here is between the signalling and human capital hypotheses of education. Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses. These are all signs that lend a lot of support to the signalling hypothesis: that the purpose of education is to signal one’s desirable qualities to future employers, rather than to acquire those qualities in the first place. Scaling access to bachelor’s degrees all over the world will only increase the demand for masters and PhDs.
  - DataWorker 6y ago
    Thereby increasing corporate profit at expense of the worker and taxpayers. Moreover, it benefits the Ivy League at the expense of all other universities. There’s a need to differentiate and the Harvard name becomes the criteria rather than the education or diploma itself.
  - take_a_breath 6y ago
    ==Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses.== You make a great point. In my experience some of this is intended thinning of certain majors. For example, P-meds at my university always got a kick at how many people gave up that major after their first Zoology class. Those kids now have to catch-up in order to complete their art history or general business major that they never wanted in the first place. The whole process we have created needs to be re-evaluated.
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
As the parent of a college sophomore, I entirely share the article's fears and sentiment. As a tangential nitpick, I was distracted by this statement: "The average age of a tenured professor is 55, meaning if you meet a 40-year-old tenured prof, there is someone at 70 teaching..." I think it unwittingly supports another point from the article: "A combination of self-aggrandizement and elitism has convinced American universities that our services are worth indebting generations of young people, and now risking becoming agents of spread."
- davrosthedalek 6y ago
  I think tenure at 40 is actually really early.
  - s0rce 6y ago
    Seems about right for North America, 12th grade education (18 years old), 4 year college degree (22 years old), 6 year PhD (28 years old), ~5 (3-7) years postdoc (33 years old), 7 year tenure track (=40 yrs old). If I didn't run away to a biotech startup after my postdoc it probably would be roughly this timeline. Pretty insane really.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  I'm confused. Are you implying that there's something wrong with a 70 year old teacher?
davrosthedalek 6y ago
One of the biggest, if not the biggest, problem of online courses is cheating on tests. And yes, students cheat. I'm talking here about Physics, but I assume it's similar in other disciplines of the hard sciences. This is less so a problem for higher classes -- you can write take-home problems which are hard and uncommon enough that you can't google-solve them. But even then, students will solve them in a team. Or in other words: The best students will solve it, and everybody will have the solution. For lower classes, almost by definition, the problems are all textbook. Yes, you can change numbers around, and formulations, but with some google-fu, most problems are shallow :) The situation gets even harder if you want to be fair to the students who are not on campus. How good is their internet? How do you handle "my internet went down"? Or: I'm in this other timezone, your test is in the middle of the night! What I did in the last semester is allow the students to take the test at any time of the day, and give ample time for the test itself. But of course, that gives them more chance to communicate, and help each other. Even randomized tests (i.e. with changing numbers) do not help here, because often the complication is finding the right formula. Putting in other numbers is then trivial. There are only proctored exams, but they only help if you use a locked down browser. I'd rather not put what amounts to spyware onto my students computers. AND they are pretty easy to fool anyway. The only way around that are taking tests in testing centers. But there is an issue of scale here, especially in COVID times. The second problem is lab classes. It's very hard to teach experimental setup techniques online. How do you use a scope? Can you find a bad connection? Why did this resistor just blow up? You let the students play with sometimes quite expensive equipment, you can not expect them to just have that at home. Third, online teaching is a very bad experience for many students. Not so much of the class itself -- I think this can often be remedied. But things like the exchange with other students, the opportunity to ask the professor face to face, but also so basic things like having to get up and out of your room for class instead of watching it (or a recording) from your bed. Not all, but many students struggled hard to motivate themselves to study sitting at home. I do believe that it's better to have no in-person classes, or maybe a bare minimum. Teachers will try to teach the students as best as possible, but make no mistake, the education of many students will suffer.
- throwaway6734 6y ago
  >There are only proctored exams, but they only help if you use a locked down browser. I'd rather not put what amounts to spyware onto my students computers. AND they are pretty easy to fool anyway. Couldn't they also just use a second computer?
bobthechef 6y ago
The modern university is not a true university. It’s a scam that breeds savages that, at best, leave with some technical savvy and at worst inculcates in them toxic ideology. “The Idea of a University” by John Henry Newman http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/index.html http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/index.html
op03 6y ago
I thought I was going to read some well thought out solutions. Instead just another boomer having a public meltdown.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
andrew_eit 6y ago
Let me see if I understand this correctly (feel free to provide other perspectives): Universities are afraid that by charging students $20,000 per year in tuition for an online degree, people will begin to question its value and possibly turn to other alternatives (perhaps, maybe also enrol in universities abroad that have low or no fees). Thereby pulling the curtains on the whole tuition fee charade, which is that the lion's share is used to find non-academic related expenses (I'm guessing: administration, outreach, marketing, a nice website) [1] Universities that rely heavily on large sums of money from student fees are now faced with 2 choices: 1) Charge close to the same amount of tuition fees for an "online" university experience 2) Re-open and continue with business as usual, hoping the risks of Covid-19 transmission can be mitigated Option 2 apparently seems like the more attractive version to maintain the status quo, which leads to attempts at convincing people that restarting face-to-face teaching is a reasonable way to go forward. If this is what is going on, then this is yet another issue with universities that rely too heavily on income from tuition fees to survive. The primary functions of (public) universities is to educate the population and conduct research. The ability to perform those functions must be prioritised and subsidised via public funds to guard against the influence of financial stability creeping into the decision making process on how to conduct activities for these primary functions. I have studied in both the UK (9,000GBP/Year) and Germany (<€500 per year) and noticed a massive difference in the way both were run and my life as a student in each. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/22/less-than-half-of-tuition-fees-spent-on-teaching-at-english-universities https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/22/less-than-...
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Given the infection curve in the US, scenario 2 defies the laws of nature, so I hope universities don’t try it. I don’t doubt that some will, but under no circumstances should it be considered a reasonable option.
  - andrew_eit 6y ago
    It is the same in Germany currently, although the spread is well under control, most education institutions are still highly skeptical of reopening for the semester after Summer.
rafaelturk 6y ago
I wish I could have Professor Galloway as a board member, however I'm afraid that I would to often hear undeniable truths about my management tough to digest
bo1024 6y ago
This all makes sense to me as far as it goes, but any assessment of university finances, the future of remote versus in-person education, etc, should have a lot to say about the following: Classes are only a fraction of the in-person university experience in the USA today. Schools are priced accordingly and they heavily invest in and compete on non-classroom factors. This includes facilities, support services, activities, athletics. Then there is just the socialization, dorm experience, meeting people, parties, on and on. So it would be a totally reasonable and logical next step in history for schools to say, "Hey, we believe that a lot of the value we offer is the in-person experience. So we will offer remote classes for a lower cost, to many more online-education students." Like Ga Tech's masters program. But, with COVID, the universities have backed themselves into a corner because they should probably make the next year remote, but they made all these expensive on-campus investments and to stay afloat they need the ridiculously high tuition money (including from out-of-state and international students as mentioned). So all of a sudden, they can't afford to admit that remote learning is a much less valuable product. (One thing I am ignoring is the real difficulties and cost from professors to teach large remote classes in an actually effective way. I'm sure administrators will ignore it too.)
- davrosthedalek 6y ago
  > (One thing I am ignoring is the real difficulties and cost from professors to teach large remote classes in an actually effective way. I'm sure administrators will ignore it too.) One of my colleagues teaches intro physics to 1000+ students remotely. It seems to work quite well actually. His TAs screens the questions students have -- it's not like there are 1000 different ones, many a similar/same. He says the large audience is actually an advantage: If he explains something bad/wrong, at least some of them will pick up on it and ask.
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    In other words, it sounds not terribly different than how many webinars are conducted
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
empath75 6y ago
The problem is that have a college degree is the pre-requisite for getting a professional job, rather than having the knowledge that a college degree is supposed to represent.
- kube-system 6y ago
  It is not uncommon for employers to accept equivalent experience in lieu of a formal degree.
  - empath75 6y ago
    True and I have a manager level IC job where people above me have repeatedly asked how I got the job when I don’t have a degree and have to get people to rewrite job requirements every time I do a transfer here.
gfodor 6y ago
Remote learning is a ridiculously solvable problem with modern technology - the fact we seem likely to fail implementing it (due to the inability to imagine trying tools better than zoom) is both baffling and depressing. Send the kids VR headsets, get them in rooms on their PCs, phones, and laptops as avatars using screens and headsets as needed and start experimenting.
throwawaysea 6y ago
Do universities actually make sense anymore? For me, I felt the majority of the benefit of college was not the classes but the social experience. But that is a hell of a price to pay for social experience. Most subjects also do not need expensive facilities or specialized equipment. More typically, the knowledge gained over the course of four years can be learned in a self-guided way. In fact I would say that most subjects are better learned elsewhere, because you can pace yourself, you can choose to go deep or broad selectively, you can seek out multiple sources/perspectives, and so forth. I definitely am concerned that US universities are turning into a monoculture, and an especially dangerous one that is hostile (at times, physically!) to different viewpoints. Self-learning will lead to a diversification of admissible ideas. I also should mention that in big universities, professors are by and large not interested in teaching as much as their own research. The lectures can largely be replaced with a video that is recorded once and viewed by many. The only real value a university confers is certification. Grades are really the result of a couple exams per class. The value of top universities' name on a degree is also largely built on the selectivity of their admissions process. But those students that they admit are not valuable because of the university - they're valuable regardless. So why not pivot to a world where companies administer certification tests for different subjects, at different degrees of difficulty/proficiency, at a low cost?
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "Most subjects also do not need expensive facilities or specialized equipment." The sciences, medicine, and engineering disciplines do. Computer science is a rarity in being a high-paying field that doesn't. (Although, given that the average developer doesn't really require a CS education, as many on HN say, I wouldn't count on CS remaining a high-paying field.)
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    Aren’t these facilities replicable at a much lower cost? My university had meager equipment for physics and mechanical engineering for example. I’m less familiar with the chemical and biology side of things though.
- 6y ago
MintelIE 6y ago
Farming foreigners doesn't work well when global travel is shut down. And Universities get so much more money from foreign students that they've become focused on bringing in these folks over the people from the states who started them for the benefit primarily of the state's residents. This really ramped up in the mid to late 1990s when we were told that Universities should be run more like businesses.
rayiner 6y ago
American universities don't deserve to survive in their current state. The United States already spends a greater %-age of GDP on public funding for higher education than Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. (which together comprise 70% of the EU's population): https://mises.org/wire/government-spending-colleges-us-higher-countries-free-college https://mises.org/wire/government-spending-colleges-us-highe.... They're incredibly inefficient and broken institutions.
- kube-system 6y ago
  I can't find it mentioned in those sources.. do those expenditures include loan principals or subtract income from repayments?
- asciident 6y ago
  I'm confused how you arrived at that. So American Universities get 1.3% funding, which puts them about in the middle of the chart in your source, is at about the same level as Switzerland and the UK (who are both also 1.3%). Yet the US comprises more top universities than the rest of the world combined (according to pretty much university ranking site out there), and they are the ones doing it wrong?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
9214 6y ago
Title convinced me that this has something to do with a modern reincarnation of Unix ed editor.

85 points by samspenc 6y ago

For a professor, the author does a terrible job presenting the complete picture, and like most in academia, select those data points which "support" their claims. You should not trust their opinions. If you look at the stats, Covid is less deadly than the typical flu for those under 30. Time to stop destroying the youth by de-educating them. Stop being so scared. Let locals decided how to handle things. Stop picking isolated stories and applying blanket rules.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Zigurd 6y ago
"Less deadly than the typical flu" itself amounts to cherry picking. Weeks to months of symptoms, and 4%+ rate of hospitalization for COVID-19 even in the college age group makes it much worse than a typical flu and capable of overwhelming health care systems if you put people in the college age group indoors in lecture halls, labs, meeting rooms, and faculty offices for 45+ minutes several times a day grouped with different people each time. This also involves an invalid comparison: College-age students, if they were broken-out by age among flu deaths, would show a very low death rate from flu, and COVID-19 death rates would be 5X+ higher, as they are proportionately for other age groups. Now let's talk about sacrificing the faculty on the alter of reopening.
- xbmcuser 6y ago
  Even if younger people are not dying some have reported lasting problems after. We will find out after 1-2 years only the actual effect on the survivors not dying doesn't mean nothing happened
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    What percent of infected young people have lasting problems?
    - ci5er 6y ago
      Ha! We don't know! It's new! Give us 5~20 years, and I'll get back to you.
      - mrfusion 6y ago
        Best to lock everything down until then to be safe.
  - ci5er 6y ago
    I understand that lung scarring for the "lightly" symptomatic can be ... not insignificant. I know it is for me (age: 55 y.o. or so), and while it isn't being currently problematic, but I have no idea about how it might present in 20 years.
chadash 6y ago
Can you point out some specifics that you disagree with? The author doesn't make the case that students are gonna die. It's more the staff and faculty, plus the possibilities that students are vectors for spreading the virus.
yardie 6y ago
That’s a serious assertion you are making. COVID-19 is 10 times deadlier than the flu across the population. Dropping to almost 0 for babies. But we can’t let infants run the country while everyone > 30 stays home.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  We initially thought it might be true for the young, but the deaths of infants and severe complications in children now suggests otherwise. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200511142153.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200511142153.h...
bobthechef 6y ago
FWIW, he’s a clinical professor at NYU and a showman.
geofft 6y ago
> If you look at the stats, Covid is less deadly than the typical flu for those under 30. By "less deadly" you mean "once infected, more people survive covid than the flu," right? But isn't it more infectious - and doesn't the longer incubation time make it more deceptive? It's fairly easy to control flu outbreaks, even in environments like college campuses, by telling people to stay home. (And you usually don't even need to tell them that, because they'll feel too sick to not stay home.)
michaelmrose 6y ago
Getting covid at 30 is more dangerous than getting the flu at 30. If you want to argue otherwise please provide an actual peer reviewed study not a non scientists opinion piece or a pre print of a non peer reviewed study. Even if it were merely as dangerous getting the flu at 30 doesn't result in you infecting as many people and not as many of those people subsequently die. Many people pass it on before they get any sort of symptoms and therefore are unable to just stay home and not pass it around. Please stop passing around dangerous misinformation. Your advice could literally kill people.

MattGaiser 6y ago

The admissions year for the class of 2025 is going to be extremely competitive between deferrals and closed schools.

jseliger 6y ago

Very true: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton/ https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz... Too many students or "students" wind up paying for the party for years or decades after they graduate. The incentive structures in academia are (mostly) not good and not properly aligned.

cracker_jacks 6y ago

Professor Galloway also said: --- We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,” [...] That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. --- There's an opportunity here to scale education from institutions all over the world to a level never possible before. Well...it was possible for many years. But the incentives for the institutions commit to it never appeared until now.

chongli 6y ago
I think the dissonance you’re seeing here is between the signalling and human capital hypotheses of education. Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses. These are all signs that lend a lot of support to the signalling hypothesis: that the purpose of education is to signal one’s desirable qualities to future employers, rather than to acquire those qualities in the first place. Scaling access to bachelor’s degrees all over the world will only increase the demand for masters and PhDs.
- DataWorker 6y ago
  Thereby increasing corporate profit at expense of the worker and taxpayers. Moreover, it benefits the Ivy League at the expense of all other universities. There’s a need to differentiate and the Harvard name becomes the criteria rather than the education or diploma itself.
- take_a_breath 6y ago
  ==Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses.== You make a great point. In my experience some of this is intended thinning of certain majors. For example, P-meds at my university always got a kick at how many people gave up that major after their first Zoology class. Those kids now have to catch-up in order to complete their art history or general business major that they never wanted in the first place. The whole process we have created needs to be re-evaluated.

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago

As the parent of a college sophomore, I entirely share the article's fears and sentiment. As a tangential nitpick, I was distracted by this statement: "The average age of a tenured professor is 55, meaning if you meet a 40-year-old tenured prof, there is someone at 70 teaching..." I think it unwittingly supports another point from the article: "A combination of self-aggrandizement and elitism has convinced American universities that our services are worth indebting generations of young people, and now risking becoming agents of spread."

davrosthedalek 6y ago
I think tenure at 40 is actually really early.
- s0rce 6y ago
  Seems about right for North America, 12th grade education (18 years old), 4 year college degree (22 years old), 6 year PhD (28 years old), ~5 (3-7) years postdoc (33 years old), 7 year tenure track (=40 yrs old). If I didn't run away to a biotech startup after my postdoc it probably would be roughly this timeline. Pretty insane really.
bdcravens 6y ago
I'm confused. Are you implying that there's something wrong with a 70 year old teacher?

davrosthedalek 6y ago

One of the biggest, if not the biggest, problem of online courses is cheating on tests. And yes, students cheat. I'm talking here about Physics, but I assume it's similar in other disciplines of the hard sciences. This is less so a problem for higher classes -- you can write take-home problems which are hard and uncommon enough that you can't google-solve them. But even then, students will solve them in a team. Or in other words: The best students will solve it, and everybody will have the solution. For lower classes, almost by definition, the problems are all textbook. Yes, you can change numbers around, and formulations, but with some google-fu, most problems are shallow :) The situation gets even harder if you want to be fair to the students who are not on campus. How good is their internet? How do you handle "my internet went down"? Or: I'm in this other timezone, your test is in the middle of the night! What I did in the last semester is allow the students to take the test at any time of the day, and give ample time for the test itself. But of course, that gives them more chance to communicate, and help each other. Even randomized tests (i.e. with changing numbers) do not help here, because often the complication is finding the right formula. Putting in other numbers is then trivial. There are only proctored exams, but they only help if you use a locked down browser. I'd rather not put what amounts to spyware onto my students computers. AND they are pretty easy to fool anyway. The only way around that are taking tests in testing centers. But there is an issue of scale here, especially in COVID times. The second problem is lab classes. It's very hard to teach experimental setup techniques online. How do you use a scope? Can you find a bad connection? Why did this resistor just blow up? You let the students play with sometimes quite expensive equipment, you can not expect them to just have that at home. Third, online teaching is a very bad experience for many students. Not so much of the class itself -- I think this can often be remedied. But things like the exchange with other students, the opportunity to ask the professor face to face, but also so basic things like having to get up and out of your room for class instead of watching it (or a recording) from your bed. Not all, but many students struggled hard to motivate themselves to study sitting at home. I do believe that it's better to have no in-person classes, or maybe a bare minimum. Teachers will try to teach the students as best as possible, but make no mistake, the education of many students will suffer.

throwaway6734 6y ago
>There are only proctored exams, but they only help if you use a locked down browser. I'd rather not put what amounts to spyware onto my students computers. AND they are pretty easy to fool anyway. Couldn't they also just use a second computer?

bobthechef 6y ago

The modern university is not a true university. It’s a scam that breeds savages that, at best, leave with some technical savvy and at worst inculcates in them toxic ideology. “The Idea of a University” by John Henry Newman http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/index.html http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/index.html

op03 6y ago

I thought I was going to read some well thought out solutions. Instead just another boomer having a public meltdown.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

andrew_eit 6y ago

Let me see if I understand this correctly (feel free to provide other perspectives): Universities are afraid that by charging students $20,000 per year in tuition for an online degree, people will begin to question its value and possibly turn to other alternatives (perhaps, maybe also enrol in universities abroad that have low or no fees). Thereby pulling the curtains on the whole tuition fee charade, which is that the lion's share is used to find non-academic related expenses (I'm guessing: administration, outreach, marketing, a nice website) [1] Universities that rely heavily on large sums of money from student fees are now faced with 2 choices: 1) Charge close to the same amount of tuition fees for an "online" university experience 2) Re-open and continue with business as usual, hoping the risks of Covid-19 transmission can be mitigated Option 2 apparently seems like the more attractive version to maintain the status quo, which leads to attempts at convincing people that restarting face-to-face teaching is a reasonable way to go forward. If this is what is going on, then this is yet another issue with universities that rely too heavily on income from tuition fees to survive. The primary functions of (public) universities is to educate the population and conduct research. The ability to perform those functions must be prioritised and subsidised via public funds to guard against the influence of financial stability creeping into the decision making process on how to conduct activities for these primary functions. I have studied in both the UK (9,000GBP/Year) and Germany (<€500 per year) and noticed a massive difference in the way both were run and my life as a student in each. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/22/less-than-half-of-tuition-fees-spent-on-teaching-at-english-universities https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/22/less-than-...

claudeganon 6y ago
Given the infection curve in the US, scenario 2 defies the laws of nature, so I hope universities don’t try it. I don’t doubt that some will, but under no circumstances should it be considered a reasonable option.
- andrew_eit 6y ago
  It is the same in Germany currently, although the spread is well under control, most education institutions are still highly skeptical of reopening for the semester after Summer.

rafaelturk 6y ago

I wish I could have Professor Galloway as a board member, however I'm afraid that I would to often hear undeniable truths about my management tough to digest

bo1024 6y ago

This all makes sense to me as far as it goes, but any assessment of university finances, the future of remote versus in-person education, etc, should have a lot to say about the following: Classes are only a fraction of the in-person university experience in the USA today. Schools are priced accordingly and they heavily invest in and compete on non-classroom factors. This includes facilities, support services, activities, athletics. Then there is just the socialization, dorm experience, meeting people, parties, on and on. So it would be a totally reasonable and logical next step in history for schools to say, "Hey, we believe that a lot of the value we offer is the in-person experience. So we will offer remote classes for a lower cost, to many more online-education students." Like Ga Tech's masters program. But, with COVID, the universities have backed themselves into a corner because they should probably make the next year remote, but they made all these expensive on-campus investments and to stay afloat they need the ridiculously high tuition money (including from out-of-state and international students as mentioned). So all of a sudden, they can't afford to admit that remote learning is a much less valuable product. (One thing I am ignoring is the real difficulties and cost from professors to teach large remote classes in an actually effective way. I'm sure administrators will ignore it too.)

davrosthedalek 6y ago
> (One thing I am ignoring is the real difficulties and cost from professors to teach large remote classes in an actually effective way. I'm sure administrators will ignore it too.) One of my colleagues teaches intro physics to 1000+ students remotely. It seems to work quite well actually. His TAs screens the questions students have -- it's not like there are 1000 different ones, many a similar/same. He says the large audience is actually an advantage: If he explains something bad/wrong, at least some of them will pick up on it and ask.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  In other words, it sounds not terribly different than how many webinars are conducted
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

empath75 6y ago

The problem is that have a college degree is the pre-requisite for getting a professional job, rather than having the knowledge that a college degree is supposed to represent.

kube-system 6y ago
It is not uncommon for employers to accept equivalent experience in lieu of a formal degree.
- empath75 6y ago
  True and I have a manager level IC job where people above me have repeatedly asked how I got the job when I don’t have a degree and have to get people to rewrite job requirements every time I do a transfer here.

gfodor 6y ago

Remote learning is a ridiculously solvable problem with modern technology - the fact we seem likely to fail implementing it (due to the inability to imagine trying tools better than zoom) is both baffling and depressing. Send the kids VR headsets, get them in rooms on their PCs, phones, and laptops as avatars using screens and headsets as needed and start experimenting.

throwawaysea 6y ago

Do universities actually make sense anymore? For me, I felt the majority of the benefit of college was not the classes but the social experience. But that is a hell of a price to pay for social experience. Most subjects also do not need expensive facilities or specialized equipment. More typically, the knowledge gained over the course of four years can be learned in a self-guided way. In fact I would say that most subjects are better learned elsewhere, because you can pace yourself, you can choose to go deep or broad selectively, you can seek out multiple sources/perspectives, and so forth. I definitely am concerned that US universities are turning into a monoculture, and an especially dangerous one that is hostile (at times, physically!) to different viewpoints. Self-learning will lead to a diversification of admissible ideas. I also should mention that in big universities, professors are by and large not interested in teaching as much as their own research. The lectures can largely be replaced with a video that is recorded once and viewed by many. The only real value a university confers is certification. Grades are really the result of a couple exams per class. The value of top universities' name on a degree is also largely built on the selectivity of their admissions process. But those students that they admit are not valuable because of the university - they're valuable regardless. So why not pivot to a world where companies administer certification tests for different subjects, at different degrees of difficulty/proficiency, at a low cost?

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "Most subjects also do not need expensive facilities or specialized equipment." The sciences, medicine, and engineering disciplines do. Computer science is a rarity in being a high-paying field that doesn't. (Although, given that the average developer doesn't really require a CS education, as many on HN say, I wouldn't count on CS remaining a high-paying field.)
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  Aren’t these facilities replicable at a much lower cost? My university had meager equipment for physics and mechanical engineering for example. I’m less familiar with the chemical and biology side of things though.
6y ago

MintelIE 6y ago

Farming foreigners doesn't work well when global travel is shut down. And Universities get so much more money from foreign students that they've become focused on bringing in these folks over the people from the states who started them for the benefit primarily of the state's residents. This really ramped up in the mid to late 1990s when we were told that Universities should be run more like businesses.

rayiner 6y ago

American universities don't deserve to survive in their current state. The United States already spends a greater %-age of GDP on public funding for higher education than Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. (which together comprise 70% of the EU's population): https://mises.org/wire/government-spending-colleges-us-higher-countries-free-college https://mises.org/wire/government-spending-colleges-us-highe.... They're incredibly inefficient and broken institutions.

kube-system 6y ago
I can't find it mentioned in those sources.. do those expenditures include loan principals or subtract income from repayments?
asciident 6y ago
I'm confused how you arrived at that. So American Universities get 1.3% funding, which puts them about in the middle of the chart in your source, is at about the same level as Switzerland and the UK (who are both also 1.3%). Yet the US comprises more top universities than the rest of the world combined (according to pretty much university ranking site out there), and they are the ones doing it wrong?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

9214 6y ago

Title convinced me that this has something to do with a modern reincarnation of Unix ed editor.