7 ms·

This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia. Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name and selectivity, and

This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia. Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name and selectivity, and for the environment of other equally motivated high potential students. Other schools combine a school with a resort/cruise ship experience. Insofar as the school is no better than a bunch of videos, and the resort is mostly shut down, so long as employers don't care, it will be hard to justify spending 10x on a residential experience. With live teaching going the way of life musicians 100 years ago, we can expect similar effects- fewer better teachers, and better access to them.

dredmorbius 6y ago
I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time, whilst retaining recognizable elements from their origins. Specific universities are remarkably durable, with the oldest (Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Cambridge) dating to the 11th and 12th centuries (Bologna will be 1,000 years old in 2088, within the lifetime of some now reading this). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in_continuous_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in...) Curricula, degrees conferred, methods, organisation, associated attached sport and medical industries, and defence and research programmes ... are largely newer. Starting with the Humboldtian reforms in Germany in the early 19th century, much of what we now think of as the modern universiy started taking shape (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...) In-place instruction of both explicit and tacit knowledge, remains the most effective method attained. Mediated education, whether through old low-tech such as books, or high, such VR headsets, may have their affordances, but simply cannot match the full immersion of simultaneous group presence. More so for tacit knowledge in which simply ingesting words is not sufficient, where hands-on experience is required, and equipment, facilities, and materials needed. There are several fundamental functions of the universiy which seem unlikely to vanish. Education; credentialling; open research; establishing curricula and pedagogy; relations with culture, industry, and government, document archival, basic research; keeping aging academics off the streets; and serving as transition institutions four young adults entering the world, all remain. No doubt individual campuses or systems will collapse, and many revered traditions will be abandoned, at least temporarily. How this is accomplished given a few months, or years, or decades, of endemic disease, is a challenge. The institution's seen worse.
- tkgally 6y ago
  > I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. I agree. I teach at a large public research university in Japan, and we're near the end of our first semester teaching all of our classes online. It has gone better than many (any?) of us expected. The university's decision in late March that all of our classes would be taught in real time using videoconferencing, with prerecorded videos and other asynchronous methods only as a supplement, seems to have been correct. Live online classes, it turns out, are often just as interactive and engaging as in-person classes. Some teachers even report that their students participate more actively and thoughtfully in discussions online than they do in the classroom. There are still many unresolved issues, of course, including how to conduct tests fairly; how to enable more informal mingling among students; and, perhaps most difficult, how to teach subjects that require physical equipment or in-person interaction, such as laboratory chemistry, nursing and medicine, performing arts, etc. But the fact that many subjects can be taught satisfactorily online upends one of the fundamental assumptions of higher education: that teachers and students need to be in the same place at the same time to have high-quality interactions. If they haven't already, forward-thinking universities will soon start taking advantage of this opportunity to create well-planned, rigorous degree programs open to anyone in the world who is qualified and has a decent Internet connection. Even if the coronavirus crisis ends and people can travel freely again, such programs should still be able to succeed.
  - cl3misch 6y ago
    That is interesting to hear! How large are the classes you are teaching live? Our class has 100+ students and we decided in the beginning of the semester to focus on multiple, shorter (10-25 min) videos both for lecture and tutorial. There are specific live sessions for questions, but the initial presentation of the content happens in async videos. Although participation in the live sessions is smaller than we hoped, we thought we would not be able to handle a large amount of students during live and interactive lectures. Which then also would have lasted the conventional 90 minutes, much too long according to studies on remote teaching. (searching for the source...) How do you handle that? Did it just work? Funnily enough, when my colleagues and me looked at recent polls from the students, most prefer one single long lecture video. Which totally goes against research findings.
rayiner 6y ago
> This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia. God I hope you’re right.
- harryh 6y ago
  Many universities are certainly going to have problems but it's hard to see an event that causes problems for a single semester (or maybe two) being an extinction event.
felipemnoa 6y ago
Nowhere in your comment I see you mention that elite institutions are mainly research institutions that do teaching kind of as a side job. In fact, several of the best researchers working at universities are horrible teachers. However, if you want to be at the cutting edge of your field then that is where is at.
- throwaway9870 6y ago
  On what do you base that opinion? I did a MS and PHD at Stanford and was blown away by how good the profs were and how hard they actually tried to teach well. I don't agree at all with your thinking. Perhaps you need to be a bit less general and more specific about what school you are referring to?
  - copperx 6y ago
    I didn't attend an elite school, but OP might be referring to undergrad education at places such as UC Berkeley?
  - secabeen 6y ago
    The impact the coronavirus has on the ~250 R1 and R2 research universities is going to be very different than the effect on the ~4000 other schools. Although the research universities dominate the conversation around academia, they only make up a small fraction of the total number of schools.
- gbronner 6y ago
  I heard a story about a famous stem researcher. In class, a brave student asked a question. After glaring at the student, he slowly responded "I came here to teach. I didn't come here to answer questions". That department has been reformed thankfully.
bachmeier 6y ago
I believe you're referring to lectures rather than a university degree. The arguments you're making are no different than the ones made by people saying traditional colleges would be gone in five years once MOOCs arrived. It's possible that things will change in a major way, but simply being able to watch a lecture from your home is neither new nor a substitute for a traditional four year college. (And note that the in-person lecturing part is actually really cheap - much cheaper than the same lectures online, and only a tiny percentage of the cost of running a university.)
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
Small liberal arts colleges may be extinguished but the major universities will live on. The sciences, medicine, and engineering fields still require facilities and equipment beyond the reach of the individual, particularly for cutting edge research. I could point to universities with their own wind tunnel for aerospace engineering, their own research and teaching hospitals, their own small silicon chip fab and so forth.
- gbronner 6y ago
  Exactly. But most students don't need these resources, and most current teachers don't work at these institutions
- neilparikh 6y ago
  OT: which schools have their own fab?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name Also, their brand names may be tarnished. For example, Yale and Stanford are named after men who abused black and brown people. If the Universities decide to no longer honor these men and remove their names from the university, they will have lost a lot of the brand that they built up over many years.
- gbronner 6y ago
  There's no Adolf Hitler university. There was a time when lots of us people, especially Jews, would but buy a Volkswagen. Today nobody cares. People are not going to UConn over Yale because of the name
- bhntr3 6y ago
  Jeez. Little Leland Stanford Jr. must have been a real terror before he died of typhoid at 15
hardwaregeek 6y ago
You'd think so, but a surprising amount of students are still attending. What else would they do? Most can't get a job. They can't join a program like the Peace Corps. Anything beyond those two options requires a degree of self confidence and financial independence that most students don't have. Colleges are offering a pretty mediocre proposition but there aren't many other options.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Presumably Americorps is still functioning. Be a contact tracer in your gap year.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mennis16 6y ago
It's an interesting parallel to musicians but I think we are far from the tech actually being good enough to scale that well. The problem for most courses is not recording the lectures, it is trying to replicate the one on one (or small group) time available with at least TAs, if not professors. This does work decently well over Zoom for an existing class, where the course staff is selected based on the ~# of students enrolled, but I don't see how it would work for a more broadly taught online class. I got free access to a MOOC this summer that usually costs money just to view (HMX), and even at that scale the course forum is low quality and the "assignments" that have open ended questions just give you an automatic check mark, so you get zero feedback on your thinking. It's a solid class still and I'm enjoying it as a for fun learning experience, but it is not even close to what I would want out of a subject I am more seriously studying. Anyway, I think a large part of that is just the lack of interaction with anyone trained in the material. Maybe I live in a bubble, but the best advice I got as a frosh at orientation was "if you only go to one thing in person, make it office hours", and I think many of my friends would agree.
pdonis 6y ago
You are assuming that academic institutions in general rely on tuition for income. Most of them actually don't to any great extent. They subsist largely on a combination of research grants and endowments. So a drastic cut in how much tuition they take in is not actually a huge threat to them as institutions.
- jackpirate 6y ago
  This is not correct. Major R1 universities have grants and endowments as their primary source of income, but the vast majority of schools do not fall into this category. All liberal arts colleges, religious colleges, for-profit colleges, and most state colleges (i.e. non-R1 universities) desperately need tuition to pay the bills.
satvikpendem 6y ago
As long as employers require a degree, universities will not die.
me_againnnnnn 6y ago
Extinction event is the buzzword of the week. Soooo stupid.

dredmorbius 6y ago

I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time, whilst retaining recognizable elements from their origins. Specific universities are remarkably durable, with the oldest (Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Cambridge) dating to the 11th and 12th centuries (Bologna will be 1,000 years old in 2088, within the lifetime of some now reading this). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in_continuous_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in...) Curricula, degrees conferred, methods, organisation, associated attached sport and medical industries, and defence and research programmes ... are largely newer. Starting with the Humboldtian reforms in Germany in the early 19th century, much of what we now think of as the modern universiy started taking shape (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...) In-place instruction of both explicit and tacit knowledge, remains the most effective method attained. Mediated education, whether through old low-tech such as books, or high, such VR headsets, may have their affordances, but simply cannot match the full immersion of simultaneous group presence. More so for tacit knowledge in which simply ingesting words is not sufficient, where hands-on experience is required, and equipment, facilities, and materials needed. There are several fundamental functions of the universiy which seem unlikely to vanish. Education; credentialling; open research; establishing curricula and pedagogy; relations with culture, industry, and government, document archival, basic research; keeping aging academics off the streets; and serving as transition institutions four young adults entering the world, all remain. No doubt individual campuses or systems will collapse, and many revered traditions will be abandoned, at least temporarily. How this is accomplished given a few months, or years, or decades, of endemic disease, is a challenge. The institution's seen worse.

tkgally 6y ago
> I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. I agree. I teach at a large public research university in Japan, and we're near the end of our first semester teaching all of our classes online. It has gone better than many (any?) of us expected. The university's decision in late March that all of our classes would be taught in real time using videoconferencing, with prerecorded videos and other asynchronous methods only as a supplement, seems to have been correct. Live online classes, it turns out, are often just as interactive and engaging as in-person classes. Some teachers even report that their students participate more actively and thoughtfully in discussions online than they do in the classroom. There are still many unresolved issues, of course, including how to conduct tests fairly; how to enable more informal mingling among students; and, perhaps most difficult, how to teach subjects that require physical equipment or in-person interaction, such as laboratory chemistry, nursing and medicine, performing arts, etc. But the fact that many subjects can be taught satisfactorily online upends one of the fundamental assumptions of higher education: that teachers and students need to be in the same place at the same time to have high-quality interactions. If they haven't already, forward-thinking universities will soon start taking advantage of this opportunity to create well-planned, rigorous degree programs open to anyone in the world who is qualified and has a decent Internet connection. Even if the coronavirus crisis ends and people can travel freely again, such programs should still be able to succeed.
- cl3misch 6y ago
  That is interesting to hear! How large are the classes you are teaching live? Our class has 100+ students and we decided in the beginning of the semester to focus on multiple, shorter (10-25 min) videos both for lecture and tutorial. There are specific live sessions for questions, but the initial presentation of the content happens in async videos. Although participation in the live sessions is smaller than we hoped, we thought we would not be able to handle a large amount of students during live and interactive lectures. Which then also would have lasted the conventional 90 minutes, much too long according to studies on remote teaching. (searching for the source...) How do you handle that? Did it just work? Funnily enough, when my colleagues and me looked at recent polls from the students, most prefer one single long lecture video. Which totally goes against research findings.

rayiner 6y ago

> This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia. God I hope you’re right.

harryh 6y ago
Many universities are certainly going to have problems but it's hard to see an event that causes problems for a single semester (or maybe two) being an extinction event.

felipemnoa 6y ago

Nowhere in your comment I see you mention that elite institutions are mainly research institutions that do teaching kind of as a side job. In fact, several of the best researchers working at universities are horrible teachers. However, if you want to be at the cutting edge of your field then that is where is at.

throwaway9870 6y ago
On what do you base that opinion? I did a MS and PHD at Stanford and was blown away by how good the profs were and how hard they actually tried to teach well. I don't agree at all with your thinking. Perhaps you need to be a bit less general and more specific about what school you are referring to?
- copperx 6y ago
  I didn't attend an elite school, but OP might be referring to undergrad education at places such as UC Berkeley?
- secabeen 6y ago
  The impact the coronavirus has on the ~250 R1 and R2 research universities is going to be very different than the effect on the ~4000 other schools. Although the research universities dominate the conversation around academia, they only make up a small fraction of the total number of schools.
gbronner 6y ago
I heard a story about a famous stem researcher. In class, a brave student asked a question. After glaring at the student, he slowly responded "I came here to teach. I didn't come here to answer questions". That department has been reformed thankfully.

bachmeier 6y ago

I believe you're referring to lectures rather than a university degree. The arguments you're making are no different than the ones made by people saying traditional colleges would be gone in five years once MOOCs arrived. It's possible that things will change in a major way, but simply being able to watch a lecture from your home is neither new nor a substitute for a traditional four year college. (And note that the in-person lecturing part is actually really cheap - much cheaper than the same lectures online, and only a tiny percentage of the cost of running a university.)

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

Small liberal arts colleges may be extinguished but the major universities will live on. The sciences, medicine, and engineering fields still require facilities and equipment beyond the reach of the individual, particularly for cutting edge research. I could point to universities with their own wind tunnel for aerospace engineering, their own research and teaching hospitals, their own small silicon chip fab and so forth.

gbronner 6y ago
Exactly. But most students don't need these resources, and most current teachers don't work at these institutions
neilparikh 6y ago
OT: which schools have their own fab?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name Also, their brand names may be tarnished. For example, Yale and Stanford are named after men who abused black and brown people. If the Universities decide to no longer honor these men and remove their names from the university, they will have lost a lot of the brand that they built up over many years.

gbronner 6y ago
There's no Adolf Hitler university. There was a time when lots of us people, especially Jews, would but buy a Volkswagen. Today nobody cares. People are not going to UConn over Yale because of the name
bhntr3 6y ago
Jeez. Little Leland Stanford Jr. must have been a real terror before he died of typhoid at 15

hardwaregeek 6y ago

You'd think so, but a surprising amount of students are still attending. What else would they do? Most can't get a job. They can't join a program like the Peace Corps. Anything beyond those two options requires a degree of self confidence and financial independence that most students don't have. Colleges are offering a pretty mediocre proposition but there aren't many other options.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Presumably Americorps is still functioning. Be a contact tracer in your gap year.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mennis16 6y ago

It's an interesting parallel to musicians but I think we are far from the tech actually being good enough to scale that well. The problem for most courses is not recording the lectures, it is trying to replicate the one on one (or small group) time available with at least TAs, if not professors. This does work decently well over Zoom for an existing class, where the course staff is selected based on the ~# of students enrolled, but I don't see how it would work for a more broadly taught online class. I got free access to a MOOC this summer that usually costs money just to view (HMX), and even at that scale the course forum is low quality and the "assignments" that have open ended questions just give you an automatic check mark, so you get zero feedback on your thinking. It's a solid class still and I'm enjoying it as a for fun learning experience, but it is not even close to what I would want out of a subject I am more seriously studying. Anyway, I think a large part of that is just the lack of interaction with anyone trained in the material. Maybe I live in a bubble, but the best advice I got as a frosh at orientation was "if you only go to one thing in person, make it office hours", and I think many of my friends would agree.

pdonis 6y ago

You are assuming that academic institutions in general rely on tuition for income. Most of them actually don't to any great extent. They subsist largely on a combination of research grants and endowments. So a drastic cut in how much tuition they take in is not actually a huge threat to them as institutions.

jackpirate 6y ago
This is not correct. Major R1 universities have grants and endowments as their primary source of income, but the vast majority of schools do not fall into this category. All liberal arts colleges, religious colleges, for-profit colleges, and most state colleges (i.e. non-R1 universities) desperately need tuition to pay the bills.

satvikpendem 6y ago

As long as employers require a degree, universities will not die.

me_againnnnnn 6y ago

Extinction event is the buzzword of the week. Soooo stupid.