10 ms·

The unbundling of Harvard has begun

eezurr 6y ago
I couldn't finish reading this. While interesting, I sense a lot of hype, and deliberate bending of meaning (e.g. federal government less strict about requiring college degree -> all companies less strict) Traditional college is not just about information scarcity either. People also go to bond, network, participate in extracurricular groups, party, etc. Traditional college isnt going to go anywhere. Also, it's depressing to think of society sitting behind a screen all day. I think most people feel the same way. We need to stop using technology to tear apart the social fabric of society.
- nootropicat 6y ago
  >Also, it's depressing to think of society sitting behind a screen all day. I think most people feel the same way. We need to stop using technology to tear apart the social fabric of society. You are witnessing the mere beginning. Wait for despair before a typical job consists of donning a vr gear with some controllers (possibly brain implants) to control a humanoid robot far away. It's hard to think of a job that couldn't be automated this way except for security, as cutting off the signal would be a big failure point + laws that prevent civilians from using robots for violence. The only other real limitation is latency, so Indians in India probably won't cut grass in SF, just Mexicans (in Mexico). In the longer run, this could kill cities or even states. People could live on ships in international waters, under a flag of some tax haven, but near the place they want to work to ensure low latency. Wages would equalize globally very fast. Last but not least, versatile enough humanoid robots also mean nearly perfect sexbots - whether ai or remote controlled.
  - newen 6y ago
    Butlerian Jihad can't come soon enough.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > We need to stop using technology to tear apart the social fabric of society. Yes, we need to start using it to weave a new fabric. And universities are some of the best places to try this.
typest 6y ago
I celebrate efforts to educate and credential students that don't put them into a lifetime of debt. But, a few points of order/grains of salt: Even though going to college means you may take out more debt that you can pay off in any reasonable amount of time, bailing on college to classes from social media entrepreneurs or to start a company backed by Peter Thiel is a risk-heavy strategy that will not pay off for most. Yes, autodidacts with a safe family situation will likely do well. But what about students from poor backgrounds, students without stable family life, or just students who don't fall into the upper echelons of industriousness? How many of these students are thriving right now in a world of Zoom classes? Talking with friends who are teachers, many students are just skipping their classes altogether. Why would we expect them to do well in this new online world? College, although way too expensive, works decently well for many of these students. I don't think online influencer courses will substitute. Yes, unbundle Harvard. But the harder and more impactful piece is providing quality education to those who aren't in the tails of the distribution.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Conflating Covid-19 pandemic with online school is ridiculous.
SiempreViernes 6y ago
Is this just a big organic advertising operation? Or is this shallow, "buzzfeed-top list" style writing really something that can be called Reporting? I guess it's only appropriate that someone that wrote their thesis on the telephone game/chinese wispers ends up making a newsletter summarising twitter rumours.
- whymauri 6y ago
  A personal newsletter/blog is not reporting and I don't think the intention is to pretend it's reporting.
secondcoming 6y ago
"I'm Brett... and Twitter power user" I can't believe a grown adult considers this some sort of qualification. As for "education-based communities on the backs of (social) media empires"... what a horrible thought. Imagine getting your education from a Twitterati or Fox News-backed organisation. "Psychology is the most underrated major in tech." Maybe for someone with a psychology degree who's looking for a "Silicon Valley" job. I don't think I'd see psychology majors clamouring to get through the doors of IBM or Capita.
- HumblyTossed 6y ago
  Even worse: "Twitter is where all the action happens in the tech industry"
  - swagonomixxx 6y ago
    "Tech Twitter TLDR". As if there is only one "tech Twitter" that you can concisely summarize in a "TLDR". For another, why would I care what users on Twitter say? Is there some proven law that sentiment of Twitter users (mostly bots? I don't know) is now the sentiment of the masses? I'm not denying that there are many students that are angered by Harvard not agreeing to lower tuition costs for online learning, but what does "Tech Twitter" have anything to do with that? Has any one of these prospective Harvard students written something expressing their disdain at Harvard and the extremely overpriced American higher education industry? "Twitter is where all the action happens in the tech industry". Absolutely not. It's where a lot of people mumble garbage about random things. Are there some people on Twitter who don't do this? Of course. However, the large majority of Twitter is a cesspool and it should not be taken as a first-tier source of information. There's just so much wrong with this post. Emoji's everywhere, before practically every sentence and in every section. Tip to the writer - if you want to be taken seriously, do as serious journalists do, and let your prose convey the emotions you want them to convey to the reader. Emojis simply have no place in any journalism of any kind, unless you're a "Twitter power user" I guess.
  - eplanit 6y ago
    Yeah, I stopped reading at that one.
sradman 6y ago
This type of analysis is built on the assumption that the main function of education is student transformation. I think ranking is implicit in the existing system and online education platforms ignore the ranking aspects.
lordnacho 6y ago
I'm looking forward to a time when you can simply pass a highly creditable exam without having to attend class. This will probably require the reputation of an existing high-rep university, but once it's happenend, things are going to be very different. Imagine if you could be anywhere in the world but claim to have passed the math course of some famous university. I think that would change a lot of things about how we view education and qualification.
- logicchains 6y ago
  It's somewhat ironic that this is how many universities worked a hundred years ago.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
roenxi 6y ago
I'm not sure if this gentleman has a thesis but Harvard online education is worth not much. The whole value proposition of Harvard is that you socialise and bond with the sort of people who get in to Harvard. You probably have the phone number of whoever runs Goldman Sachs [0] and you know the President of Whereveristan's daughter because she was in your class. The little things in life. It is possible but unlikely that Harvard has Secret Math and Unknown Physics that their undergrads are exposed to, but their literary and philosophical studies are going to have access to the same books as everyone else. Online-only Harvard has as much value as any top-10% university on the globe. There is absolutely no shortage of incredibly clever people who are willing to explain things to a student. I think we had an article the other week pointing out that hiring a private tutor is a better option if what matters is the quality of education. [0] Although I see the new CEO doesn't come from Harvard. Last bloke did though.
- hatmatrix 6y ago
  > Harvard online education is worth not much You're typically paying for three things: 1. The education 2. The network 3. The brand Even if 1 is not many times greater at Harvard than another institution, 2 and 3 are. Even without 2, a Harvard degree will send a signal that will open doors that might otherwise be closed.
  - throwawaybab323 6y ago
    Well I mean they sell their same courses for like 20 bucks on coursera.
    - paulgb 6y ago
      You can't get a Harvard degree on Coursera though. To get the degree you have to be accepted to a degree program, and being accepted to a Harvard degree program is much of what the degree signals.
      - throwawaybab323 6y ago
xyst 6y ago
~$80K per semester at Harvard. I now understand why almost every graduate of Harvard tends to bring up the fact they graduated from Harvard on nearly every conversation. I went to a public school and my 4 year tuition cost is equivalent to half the cost of single a semester at Harvard. I only graduated a couple of years ago so inflation is negligible. Guess who I work with the most and still earn the same wage (if not more)? It makes you wonder if Ivy League is nothing more than a brand name at this point. It’s like buying anything “Supreme” or Gucci related, except for the “intellectuals”. As for the article, I didn’t really care too much for it. Sort of just skimmed through it and it seemed like an ad for something he was part of. The only thing that caught my eye was the tuition bill at Harvard.
- typest 6y ago
  > I only graduated a couple of years ago so inflation is negligible. If only inflation were the only thing driving the price up! The whole problem with college cost is that cost is increasing faster than inflation. I went to a similar university to Harvard. I enrolled in 2013, and the total cost per year was under 60k. It's now 80k. Cost of attendance is increasing at ~ 4% per year, which is entirely unsustainable. Crazy how a couple years means a difference of 20k per year = 80k over 4 years.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Virtually everyone gets a large discount on that bill in one way or another. Few actually pay the sticker price.
- 1986 6y ago
  80k per year, not per semester, and most students that don't come from wealth pay nowhere near that.
- namdnay 6y ago
  It really depends what job you do. We’re lucky enough in tech that companies don’t necessarily pay based on diploma, but I can guarantee that if you’re in traditional big corporation world, a Harvard grad will be payed a good 20% more than someone who went to an average university
anonunivgrad 6y ago
A big function that universities play is circumventing some arguably bad interpretations of labor law. In the United States, it is essentially illegal to hire based on the results of an intelligence test. This is the result of various cases interpreting and applying the disparate impact doctrine. But no one bats an eye when you send your recruiters to only the "elite" universities or when your company is overwhelmingly staffed with top-20-university graduates and won't even consider the applications of people from "lesser" schools. That's despite the fact that which university you attend is largely a function of your SAT score (and to a lesser degree, your grades), an intelligence test. No one looks at Harvard on your resume and thinks "they must have learned so much at Harvard". The thought is laughably absurd. It's not that someone can't learn something at Harvard, it's that everyone knows Harvard academic rigor is a joke and you can just as easily party your way through 4 years and graduate with a B+ average. They think "they got into Harvard, so they must be smart". The most important department at Harvard is the admissions department. This strange power is then abused for the sake of funding the institution, pursuing its political goals, etc. Donor's children get preference. Politically-favored groups get preference. Applicants who signal that they share certain views get preference. I'm sure the motives are often quite noble, but it is corrupting nonetheless I think. They are just counting on the fact that it's still worth treating a Harvard degree as a proxy of intelligence despite the fudging they do at the edges.
- namdnay 6y ago
  Meh, that also happens in lots of countries where testing candidates isn’t illegal. Example: France. French corporations are extremely attached to the rank of engineering and business schools. The salary of the first 5-10 years of your career will be more or less predefined by where you studied. If anything, it’s the big new US internet companies that are shaking thing up, at least in the IT space
- euix 6y ago
  That's how it works in China and other East Asian countries, if you ever read the history of Korea, government offices were essentially monopolized by Yangban in the late Joseon dynasty. Which was basically an aristocratic class of test takers. Meritocracy over a period of time warps into its own form of elitism.
helen___keller 6y ago
This is a strange choice of title because Harvard is easily among the institutions that will be least affected by the pandemic. While it may be true that for the world's elite that the value prop of Harvard is rubbing elbows with other elites, it's also true that for the rest of us the value prop of Harvard is merely having it on your resume. There's no shortage of talented students who'd love Harvard on their resume even if they have to spend a year remote. Some of the opinions expressed in this article seem rather naive, such as: > Use your time to start an online business. Live at home, spend as little money as possible, and find a side job if you need to. For students in a pandemic, "live at home, spend as little money as possible" is basically implied outside of education expenses. So at this point we return to the standard debate: is a diploma worth the cost of tuition and opportunity cost on time spent? This argument has been played out a million times and is otherwise unchanged by the pandemic.
- namdnay 6y ago
  > Use your time to start an online business What does that even mean? It make me think that for this guy “starting an online business” means setting up a dropshipping website or something equally scammy
- d883kd8 6y ago
  Rubbing elbows with the elites is worth even more if you're not already part of the club
  - helen___keller 6y ago
    Perhaps but an average middle class high schooler who's spent hundreds of hours working on a college app worthy of an ivy isn't worrying about that, I guarantee you. That's not the kind of concern you have time for when you're in a college prep pressure cooker.
tmaly 6y ago
Freshman year is the real deal. Its where you meet new friends and bond. I cannot really see the value of an online only first year. I see this also as an opportunity to improve the online aspect of education. I remember one of my electrical engineering classes had all the lectures recorded and available at the library. This was before YouTube. But it was great that you could re-watch them for points you missed. Better online material could be a boon for primary education. Imagine a public school with a low budget. What happens to the very talented students?
- naiveprogrammer 6y ago
  In other words, you pay what you pay to attend Harvard, to a large extent, because of its network effects. And that is really the reason at the end of the day. This is especially true in areas where network is expected to be a big factor --think Economics, Law, Business. And that's why you pay that much to go to Harvard, to gain access to their network.
  - tmaly 6y ago
    That is even more so for people doing an MBA. It is all networking.
  - cvhashim 6y ago
    It really does suck you have to pay upwards of thousands of dollars just to get some brand name on your education credentials. And thereby having those credentials do opportunities open up. Have you ever seen Suits? The premise of the show was about a young man who gets into a top law firm in New York by lying that he went to Harvard Law School.
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    That's writing off a lot of the educational benefits of a university. YouTube lectures don't recreate the college educational experience. You don't get the group sections with the TA, office hours, personal feedback on your assignments, a group of students studying the same thing who you can work with, undergrad research experience, personal tutoring from graduate students (which undergrads at some elite universities like Harvard and Oxbridge get through their dorms), etc. Most people don't pay much to attend Harvard anyways. Only the rich pay anything near full tuition. It's probably cheaper for the average family than most state colleges.
kanobo 6y ago
PSA: The 80k price tag is the sticker price. The actual average cost of Harvard is < 15k when you account for aid and parents bargaining down the price. So please try to negotiate the price if you are actually considering paying 80k.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  It appears that most families making under 65k USD/year pay nothing to send a child to Harvard. Families making up to 150k USD/year are expected to pay a maximum of 10% of their income. The sticker price is what Harvard charges rich people. Harvard has a massive endowment, and probably doesn't really rely too heavily on tuition anyways.
  - namdnay 6y ago
    I wonder if this encourages some parents to take sabbatical or part time in order to stay under the 150k barrier :)
  - 214610 6y ago
    What % of students with family incomes under 65k/yr are admitted to Harvard vs the % of students with family incomes greater than that? According to: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... “ The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.8% of students at Harvard came from a poor family but became a rich adult.”
    - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
      > What % of students with family incomes under 65k/yr are admitted to Harvard vs the % of students with family incomes greater than that? According to Harvard, about 20% of their undergrads pay nothing. That's probably roughly the percentage of students from families making <65k/yr. > The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. Then the median family should have no problem paying the ~10% of their income that Harvard will charge them, after financial aid. The point is that almost nobody who gets into Harvard decides not to go because they can't afford it. People who really can't afford it get a full ride, and even families that make 150k/yr are paying only a small fraction of the sticker price - they're paying less than what many public universities charge.
cvhashim 6y ago
I couldn’t get through his ramblings. But I got the gist of it, and of course it’s typical Gary Vee-type of hustle porn advice about skipping college and starting a business. Sigh
ykevinator 6y ago
Pretty soon just unqualified celebrities kids will be going there
thehappypm 6y ago
I always hear the argument that college/grad school is silly because you can go read the textbooks yourself. It requires an immense amount of motivation to grind away reading 80 pages of a boring CS textbook every day. The structure and motivation provided by an institution encourages people to go deeper, meet deadlines, and not just skim the boring stuff. It isn't the only way to learn, but when I did a master's degree I felt motivated even when the road was rough.
- diarrhea 6y ago
  My master's degree was essentially thermodynamics, all the various aspects of it, and I have never met anyone self-taught in that area. You just do not sit down and just learn about the physics of energy (storage, conversion, transmission, ...). Part of the reason is that at least in mechanical engineering, the curricula are more or less well-curated and grew over many decades, if not centuries. You learn maths, electrical engineering, mechanics, fluids etc. all at the same time, and they all intertwine. Sometimes one is the basis to learn about the next (mechanics lays the foundation for fluids mechanics; maths is simply the foundation of everything you do and learn). Other times you discover meta-connections that elevate your understanding of everything in combination (voltage, pressure and temperature as potentials, current, mass flow and heat flow as flows resulting from that potential; each with their respective resistances: ohm (or impedance), friction, heat transfer coefficient). It all comes together beautifully and forms a new, elevated whole. I am willing to bet I will go through life without ever meeting someone self-taught, in my field. Computer science might be different, but people confuse computer science and coding. Coding you can self-teach easily, computer science not so much. That is more on the level of self-teaching maths, and I have never met such a person, either.
  - thehappypm 6y ago
    Thank you, diarrhea.
- Item_Boring 6y ago
  Also when it comes to applying what one learned by solving exercises or doing proofs feedback is so crucial and helpful. Firstly, one sees the parts one didn’t fully understand yet and secondly your way might be correct even if it isn’t the same way the provided solution approached the problem.
Ericson2314 6y ago
But widespread remote work will probably make résumé bling even more important.... :/
qwerty456127 6y ago
The first time I've read "Harvard announced that it would continue 100% online learning in the Fall but keep tuition prices the same" I thought this means you can watch all the lectures for free and only have to pay if you care to visit them offline, get the assignments and the diploma. Apparently this is not the case although many Harvard courses actually are available online for free.
rajekas 6y ago
Any article that mentions unbundling, disruption, bubble and tipping point in less then a thousand words deserves mention in the Malcolm Gladwell hall of fame. Here's the opposite argument: universities will eat bootcamps for lunch because in the post-COVID era they will be hungry for the same dollar and I would much prefer getting a Harvard Online degree than from Fullstack Camp TM. There's no doubt that higher education will be transformed by the COVID19 crisis but it's extremely unlikely (in my view) that the shifts will go along the lines predicted by Silicon Valley 'product thinkers.' There's a reason why Universities have lasted longer than civilizations.
- enumjorge 6y ago
  You bring up an interesting point. How do people feel about boot camps? I looked into them a while ago when a friend asked me for a recommendation since he was interested in switching careers. The reviews and experiences I came across were mixed. Some positive and a lot of mediocre ones. Boot camps didn’t seem like they were the disruption to 4 year degrees they were once billed as. If online bootcamps and schools were killing it right now then I could see the argument that they’re the ones to watch. But as it stands I don’t know that there’s an obvious winner. Like you said, universities might be the ones who end up driving the change.
  - sylens 6y ago
    I feel like I have seen mostly negative reviews and impressions come out of them. I'm sure there are some good ones, but I remember specific claims against some of them being that they inflate their own job placement numbers by just employing previous graduates as TAs and instructors to keep the machine going. I think a much more practical option in the long-term will be something like what Shopify is doing with their Dev Degree program - https://devdegree.ca https://devdegree.ca.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
This blog post is self-contradictory. On one hand it says "people aren't going to pay full price for just online college", and then in the other "people will be able to learn from 'influencers' just as well as they do from colleges." The reason people don't want to pay full price for online learning is because they know it has much lower value than in-person instruction.
imranq 6y ago
There's a lot of confirmation bias on this thread. If people want to believe that an elite institution is worthless, they will try to focus on the facts that yield that conclusion. But consider, - Most of the educational material that this article describes as the downfall of universities, has been posted by universities. Don't you think that shows how little it matters? - Anyone who gets into Harvard will have no trouble attending financially. The aid covers the cost. The crazy tuition are for the richest people, who have no trouble paying. - Textbooks and papers have been available at your library for the past few decades. The freedom of information was enough s.t. someone in the 1970s could replicate the experience of studying in college. e.g. “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.” -Good Will Hunting -- I think what we really want to solve isn't to reduce the value of elite institutions, but rather scale what's already there. The issue is that what's there is much more intangible to identify.

I couldn't finish reading this. While interesting, I sense a lot of hype, and deliberate bending of meaning (e.g. federal government less strict about requiring college degree -> all companies less strict) Traditional college is not just about information scarcity either. People also go to bond, network, participate in extracurricular groups, party, etc. Traditional college isnt going to go anywhere. Also, it's depressing to think of society sitting behind a screen all day. I think most people feel the same way. We need to stop using technology to tear apart the social fabric of society.

nootropicat 6y ago
>Also, it's depressing to think of society sitting behind a screen all day. I think most people feel the same way. We need to stop using technology to tear apart the social fabric of society. You are witnessing the mere beginning. Wait for despair before a typical job consists of donning a vr gear with some controllers (possibly brain implants) to control a humanoid robot far away. It's hard to think of a job that couldn't be automated this way except for security, as cutting off the signal would be a big failure point + laws that prevent civilians from using robots for violence. The only other real limitation is latency, so Indians in India probably won't cut grass in SF, just Mexicans (in Mexico). In the longer run, this could kill cities or even states. People could live on ships in international waters, under a flag of some tax haven, but near the place they want to work to ensure low latency. Wages would equalize globally very fast. Last but not least, versatile enough humanoid robots also mean nearly perfect sexbots - whether ai or remote controlled.
- newen 6y ago
  Butlerian Jihad can't come soon enough.
marcosdumay 6y ago
> We need to stop using technology to tear apart the social fabric of society. Yes, we need to start using it to weave a new fabric. And universities are some of the best places to try this.

typest 6y ago

I celebrate efforts to educate and credential students that don't put them into a lifetime of debt. But, a few points of order/grains of salt: Even though going to college means you may take out more debt that you can pay off in any reasonable amount of time, bailing on college to classes from social media entrepreneurs or to start a company backed by Peter Thiel is a risk-heavy strategy that will not pay off for most. Yes, autodidacts with a safe family situation will likely do well. But what about students from poor backgrounds, students without stable family life, or just students who don't fall into the upper echelons of industriousness? How many of these students are thriving right now in a world of Zoom classes? Talking with friends who are teachers, many students are just skipping their classes altogether. Why would we expect them to do well in this new online world? College, although way too expensive, works decently well for many of these students. I don't think online influencer courses will substitute. Yes, unbundle Harvard. But the harder and more impactful piece is providing quality education to those who aren't in the tails of the distribution.

sukilot 6y ago
Conflating Covid-19 pandemic with online school is ridiculous.

SiempreViernes 6y ago

Is this just a big organic advertising operation? Or is this shallow, "buzzfeed-top list" style writing really something that can be called Reporting? I guess it's only appropriate that someone that wrote their thesis on the telephone game/chinese wispers ends up making a newsletter summarising twitter rumours.

whymauri 6y ago
A personal newsletter/blog is not reporting and I don't think the intention is to pretend it's reporting.

secondcoming 6y ago

"I'm Brett... and Twitter power user" I can't believe a grown adult considers this some sort of qualification. As for "education-based communities on the backs of (social) media empires"... what a horrible thought. Imagine getting your education from a Twitterati or Fox News-backed organisation. "Psychology is the most underrated major in tech." Maybe for someone with a psychology degree who's looking for a "Silicon Valley" job. I don't think I'd see psychology majors clamouring to get through the doors of IBM or Capita.

HumblyTossed 6y ago
Even worse: "Twitter is where all the action happens in the tech industry"
- swagonomixxx 6y ago
  "Tech Twitter TLDR". As if there is only one "tech Twitter" that you can concisely summarize in a "TLDR". For another, why would I care what users on Twitter say? Is there some proven law that sentiment of Twitter users (mostly bots? I don't know) is now the sentiment of the masses? I'm not denying that there are many students that are angered by Harvard not agreeing to lower tuition costs for online learning, but what does "Tech Twitter" have anything to do with that? Has any one of these prospective Harvard students written something expressing their disdain at Harvard and the extremely overpriced American higher education industry? "Twitter is where all the action happens in the tech industry". Absolutely not. It's where a lot of people mumble garbage about random things. Are there some people on Twitter who don't do this? Of course. However, the large majority of Twitter is a cesspool and it should not be taken as a first-tier source of information. There's just so much wrong with this post. Emoji's everywhere, before practically every sentence and in every section. Tip to the writer - if you want to be taken seriously, do as serious journalists do, and let your prose convey the emotions you want them to convey to the reader. Emojis simply have no place in any journalism of any kind, unless you're a "Twitter power user" I guess.
- eplanit 6y ago
  Yeah, I stopped reading at that one.

sradman 6y ago

This type of analysis is built on the assumption that the main function of education is student transformation. I think ranking is implicit in the existing system and online education platforms ignore the ranking aspects.

lordnacho 6y ago

I'm looking forward to a time when you can simply pass a highly creditable exam without having to attend class. This will probably require the reputation of an existing high-rep university, but once it's happenend, things are going to be very different. Imagine if you could be anywhere in the world but claim to have passed the math course of some famous university. I think that would change a lot of things about how we view education and qualification.

logicchains 6y ago
It's somewhat ironic that this is how many universities worked a hundred years ago.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

roenxi 6y ago

I'm not sure if this gentleman has a thesis but Harvard online education is worth not much. The whole value proposition of Harvard is that you socialise and bond with the sort of people who get in to Harvard. You probably have the phone number of whoever runs Goldman Sachs [0] and you know the President of Whereveristan's daughter because she was in your class. The little things in life. It is possible but unlikely that Harvard has Secret Math and Unknown Physics that their undergrads are exposed to, but their literary and philosophical studies are going to have access to the same books as everyone else. Online-only Harvard has as much value as any top-10% university on the globe. There is absolutely no shortage of incredibly clever people who are willing to explain things to a student. I think we had an article the other week pointing out that hiring a private tutor is a better option if what matters is the quality of education. [0] Although I see the new CEO doesn't come from Harvard. Last bloke did though.

hatmatrix 6y ago
> Harvard online education is worth not much You're typically paying for three things: 1. The education 2. The network 3. The brand Even if 1 is not many times greater at Harvard than another institution, 2 and 3 are. Even without 2, a Harvard degree will send a signal that will open doors that might otherwise be closed.
- throwawaybab323 6y ago
  Well I mean they sell their same courses for like 20 bucks on coursera.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    You can't get a Harvard degree on Coursera though. To get the degree you have to be accepted to a degree program, and being accepted to a Harvard degree program is much of what the degree signals.
    - throwawaybab323 6y ago

xyst 6y ago

~$80K per semester at Harvard. I now understand why almost every graduate of Harvard tends to bring up the fact they graduated from Harvard on nearly every conversation. I went to a public school and my 4 year tuition cost is equivalent to half the cost of single a semester at Harvard. I only graduated a couple of years ago so inflation is negligible. Guess who I work with the most and still earn the same wage (if not more)? It makes you wonder if Ivy League is nothing more than a brand name at this point. It’s like buying anything “Supreme” or Gucci related, except for the “intellectuals”. As for the article, I didn’t really care too much for it. Sort of just skimmed through it and it seemed like an ad for something he was part of. The only thing that caught my eye was the tuition bill at Harvard.

typest 6y ago
> I only graduated a couple of years ago so inflation is negligible. If only inflation were the only thing driving the price up! The whole problem with college cost is that cost is increasing faster than inflation. I went to a similar university to Harvard. I enrolled in 2013, and the total cost per year was under 60k. It's now 80k. Cost of attendance is increasing at ~ 4% per year, which is entirely unsustainable. Crazy how a couple years means a difference of 20k per year = 80k over 4 years.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Virtually everyone gets a large discount on that bill in one way or another. Few actually pay the sticker price.
1986 6y ago
80k per year, not per semester, and most students that don't come from wealth pay nowhere near that.
namdnay 6y ago
It really depends what job you do. We’re lucky enough in tech that companies don’t necessarily pay based on diploma, but I can guarantee that if you’re in traditional big corporation world, a Harvard grad will be payed a good 20% more than someone who went to an average university

anonunivgrad 6y ago

A big function that universities play is circumventing some arguably bad interpretations of labor law. In the United States, it is essentially illegal to hire based on the results of an intelligence test. This is the result of various cases interpreting and applying the disparate impact doctrine. But no one bats an eye when you send your recruiters to only the "elite" universities or when your company is overwhelmingly staffed with top-20-university graduates and won't even consider the applications of people from "lesser" schools. That's despite the fact that which university you attend is largely a function of your SAT score (and to a lesser degree, your grades), an intelligence test. No one looks at Harvard on your resume and thinks "they must have learned so much at Harvard". The thought is laughably absurd. It's not that someone can't learn something at Harvard, it's that everyone knows Harvard academic rigor is a joke and you can just as easily party your way through 4 years and graduate with a B+ average. They think "they got into Harvard, so they must be smart". The most important department at Harvard is the admissions department. This strange power is then abused for the sake of funding the institution, pursuing its political goals, etc. Donor's children get preference. Politically-favored groups get preference. Applicants who signal that they share certain views get preference. I'm sure the motives are often quite noble, but it is corrupting nonetheless I think. They are just counting on the fact that it's still worth treating a Harvard degree as a proxy of intelligence despite the fudging they do at the edges.

namdnay 6y ago
Meh, that also happens in lots of countries where testing candidates isn’t illegal. Example: France. French corporations are extremely attached to the rank of engineering and business schools. The salary of the first 5-10 years of your career will be more or less predefined by where you studied. If anything, it’s the big new US internet companies that are shaking thing up, at least in the IT space
euix 6y ago
That's how it works in China and other East Asian countries, if you ever read the history of Korea, government offices were essentially monopolized by Yangban in the late Joseon dynasty. Which was basically an aristocratic class of test takers. Meritocracy over a period of time warps into its own form of elitism.

helen___keller 6y ago

This is a strange choice of title because Harvard is easily among the institutions that will be least affected by the pandemic. While it may be true that for the world's elite that the value prop of Harvard is rubbing elbows with other elites, it's also true that for the rest of us the value prop of Harvard is merely having it on your resume. There's no shortage of talented students who'd love Harvard on their resume even if they have to spend a year remote. Some of the opinions expressed in this article seem rather naive, such as: > Use your time to start an online business. Live at home, spend as little money as possible, and find a side job if you need to. For students in a pandemic, "live at home, spend as little money as possible" is basically implied outside of education expenses. So at this point we return to the standard debate: is a diploma worth the cost of tuition and opportunity cost on time spent? This argument has been played out a million times and is otherwise unchanged by the pandemic.

namdnay 6y ago
> Use your time to start an online business What does that even mean? It make me think that for this guy “starting an online business” means setting up a dropshipping website or something equally scammy
d883kd8 6y ago
Rubbing elbows with the elites is worth even more if you're not already part of the club
- helen___keller 6y ago
  Perhaps but an average middle class high schooler who's spent hundreds of hours working on a college app worthy of an ivy isn't worrying about that, I guarantee you. That's not the kind of concern you have time for when you're in a college prep pressure cooker.

tmaly 6y ago

Freshman year is the real deal. Its where you meet new friends and bond. I cannot really see the value of an online only first year. I see this also as an opportunity to improve the online aspect of education. I remember one of my electrical engineering classes had all the lectures recorded and available at the library. This was before YouTube. But it was great that you could re-watch them for points you missed. Better online material could be a boon for primary education. Imagine a public school with a low budget. What happens to the very talented students?

naiveprogrammer 6y ago
In other words, you pay what you pay to attend Harvard, to a large extent, because of its network effects. And that is really the reason at the end of the day. This is especially true in areas where network is expected to be a big factor --think Economics, Law, Business. And that's why you pay that much to go to Harvard, to gain access to their network.
- tmaly 6y ago
  That is even more so for people doing an MBA. It is all networking.
- cvhashim 6y ago
  It really does suck you have to pay upwards of thousands of dollars just to get some brand name on your education credentials. And thereby having those credentials do opportunities open up. Have you ever seen Suits? The premise of the show was about a young man who gets into a top law firm in New York by lying that he went to Harvard Law School.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  That's writing off a lot of the educational benefits of a university. YouTube lectures don't recreate the college educational experience. You don't get the group sections with the TA, office hours, personal feedback on your assignments, a group of students studying the same thing who you can work with, undergrad research experience, personal tutoring from graduate students (which undergrads at some elite universities like Harvard and Oxbridge get through their dorms), etc. Most people don't pay much to attend Harvard anyways. Only the rich pay anything near full tuition. It's probably cheaper for the average family than most state colleges.

kanobo 6y ago

PSA: The 80k price tag is the sticker price. The actual average cost of Harvard is < 15k when you account for aid and parents bargaining down the price. So please try to negotiate the price if you are actually considering paying 80k.

DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
It appears that most families making under 65k USD/year pay nothing to send a child to Harvard. Families making up to 150k USD/year are expected to pay a maximum of 10% of their income. The sticker price is what Harvard charges rich people. Harvard has a massive endowment, and probably doesn't really rely too heavily on tuition anyways.
- namdnay 6y ago
  I wonder if this encourages some parents to take sabbatical or part time in order to stay under the 150k barrier :)
- 214610 6y ago
  What % of students with family incomes under 65k/yr are admitted to Harvard vs the % of students with family incomes greater than that? According to: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... “ The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.8% of students at Harvard came from a poor family but became a rich adult.”
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    > What % of students with family incomes under 65k/yr are admitted to Harvard vs the % of students with family incomes greater than that? According to Harvard, about 20% of their undergrads pay nothing. That's probably roughly the percentage of students from families making <65k/yr. > The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. Then the median family should have no problem paying the ~10% of their income that Harvard will charge them, after financial aid. The point is that almost nobody who gets into Harvard decides not to go because they can't afford it. People who really can't afford it get a full ride, and even families that make 150k/yr are paying only a small fraction of the sticker price - they're paying less than what many public universities charge.

cvhashim 6y ago

I couldn’t get through his ramblings. But I got the gist of it, and of course it’s typical Gary Vee-type of hustle porn advice about skipping college and starting a business. Sigh

ykevinator 6y ago

Pretty soon just unqualified celebrities kids will be going there

thehappypm 6y ago

I always hear the argument that college/grad school is silly because you can go read the textbooks yourself. It requires an immense amount of motivation to grind away reading 80 pages of a boring CS textbook every day. The structure and motivation provided by an institution encourages people to go deeper, meet deadlines, and not just skim the boring stuff. It isn't the only way to learn, but when I did a master's degree I felt motivated even when the road was rough.

diarrhea 6y ago
My master's degree was essentially thermodynamics, all the various aspects of it, and I have never met anyone self-taught in that area. You just do not sit down and just learn about the physics of energy (storage, conversion, transmission, ...). Part of the reason is that at least in mechanical engineering, the curricula are more or less well-curated and grew over many decades, if not centuries. You learn maths, electrical engineering, mechanics, fluids etc. all at the same time, and they all intertwine. Sometimes one is the basis to learn about the next (mechanics lays the foundation for fluids mechanics; maths is simply the foundation of everything you do and learn). Other times you discover meta-connections that elevate your understanding of everything in combination (voltage, pressure and temperature as potentials, current, mass flow and heat flow as flows resulting from that potential; each with their respective resistances: ohm (or impedance), friction, heat transfer coefficient). It all comes together beautifully and forms a new, elevated whole. I am willing to bet I will go through life without ever meeting someone self-taught, in my field. Computer science might be different, but people confuse computer science and coding. Coding you can self-teach easily, computer science not so much. That is more on the level of self-teaching maths, and I have never met such a person, either.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  Thank you, diarrhea.
Item_Boring 6y ago
Also when it comes to applying what one learned by solving exercises or doing proofs feedback is so crucial and helpful. Firstly, one sees the parts one didn’t fully understand yet and secondly your way might be correct even if it isn’t the same way the provided solution approached the problem.

Ericson2314 6y ago

But widespread remote work will probably make résumé bling even more important.... :/

qwerty456127 6y ago

The first time I've read "Harvard announced that it would continue 100% online learning in the Fall but keep tuition prices the same" I thought this means you can watch all the lectures for free and only have to pay if you care to visit them offline, get the assignments and the diploma. Apparently this is not the case although many Harvard courses actually are available online for free.

rajekas 6y ago

Any article that mentions unbundling, disruption, bubble and tipping point in less then a thousand words deserves mention in the Malcolm Gladwell hall of fame. Here's the opposite argument: universities will eat bootcamps for lunch because in the post-COVID era they will be hungry for the same dollar and I would much prefer getting a Harvard Online degree than from Fullstack Camp TM. There's no doubt that higher education will be transformed by the COVID19 crisis but it's extremely unlikely (in my view) that the shifts will go along the lines predicted by Silicon Valley 'product thinkers.' There's a reason why Universities have lasted longer than civilizations.

enumjorge 6y ago
You bring up an interesting point. How do people feel about boot camps? I looked into them a while ago when a friend asked me for a recommendation since he was interested in switching careers. The reviews and experiences I came across were mixed. Some positive and a lot of mediocre ones. Boot camps didn’t seem like they were the disruption to 4 year degrees they were once billed as. If online bootcamps and schools were killing it right now then I could see the argument that they’re the ones to watch. But as it stands I don’t know that there’s an obvious winner. Like you said, universities might be the ones who end up driving the change.
- sylens 6y ago
  I feel like I have seen mostly negative reviews and impressions come out of them. I'm sure there are some good ones, but I remember specific claims against some of them being that they inflate their own job placement numbers by just employing previous graduates as TAs and instructors to keep the machine going. I think a much more practical option in the long-term will be something like what Shopify is doing with their Dev Degree program - https://devdegree.ca https://devdegree.ca.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

This blog post is self-contradictory. On one hand it says "people aren't going to pay full price for just online college", and then in the other "people will be able to learn from 'influencers' just as well as they do from colleges." The reason people don't want to pay full price for online learning is because they know it has much lower value than in-person instruction.

imranq 6y ago

There's a lot of confirmation bias on this thread. If people want to believe that an elite institution is worthless, they will try to focus on the facts that yield that conclusion. But consider, - Most of the educational material that this article describes as the downfall of universities, has been posted by universities. Don't you think that shows how little it matters? - Anyone who gets into Harvard will have no trouble attending financially. The aid covers the cost. The crazy tuition are for the richest people, who have no trouble paying. - Textbooks and papers have been available at your library for the past few decades. The freedom of information was enough s.t. someone in the 1970s could replicate the experience of studying in college. e.g. “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.” -Good Will Hunting -- I think what we really want to solve isn't to reduce the value of elite institutions, but rather scale what's already there. The issue is that what's there is much more intangible to identify.