22 ms·

Online classes are not worth cost of full tuition

296 points by varbhat 6y ago

nmstoker 6y ago
Good that the world has learnt from the music industry migrating from CDs to online or they'd be charging more "because it's more convenient"
teslademigod1 6y ago
I'd imagine the tuition should drop by about 30-50%, seeing as college costs are going to be dropping. I'm pretty sure in a skeptical sense they'll be trying to pay associate professors less for the same reason. and charging students more.
- stepstop 6y ago
  > I'm pretty sure in a skeptical sense they'll be trying to pay associate professors less for the same reason. and charging students more. From what I’ve seen, this has already been happening over the past decade already. I agree they’ll continue doing it for “new reasons”
- pmyteh 6y ago
  Bluntly, college costs are not going to be dropping, at least this year. Universities still have the buildings, the infrastructure, and the staff that they bought to deliver in-person classes. That those staff are now having to do more work to put together online curriculums, and the admin are having to arrange extra technology for online classes makes it more expensive, not less. A college set up as a distance-learning establishment is in a different place - and there are some of those. But the costs of running a university don't suddenly vanish just because the students do. And as everyone expects/hopes in-person teaching to be back next year, I don't see many institutions deciding to go online-only as a business model, either. (FWIW the associate professors will be fine: they're mostly tenured. It's the adjuncts which are going to be shafted, together with the people who were hoping to get tenure-track positions in what is now a decimated job market).
- malshe 6y ago
  Did you mean to say adjunct professors?
  - teslademigod1 6y ago
    yeah, sorry, adjunct not associate.
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  Tuition should drop by 50% anyway. The same schools were able to deliver the same services at that price 30 years ago. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition-has-increased-from-1988-to-2018.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition-has...
  - JadeNB 6y ago
    Tuition costs are ridiculously inflated, and I'd love to see them come down, but "the same thing used to be cheaper" is an argument that doesn't work in any other field. I'd rather see a discussion of the inflation-adjusted rate of increase, or perhaps some other appropriately adjusted metric; tuition numbers would still look terrible, so there's no need to weaken one's argument this way.
    - travisoneill1 6y ago
      That is inflation adjusted. Note "with all figures adjusted to reflect 2017 dollars"
      - JadeNB 6y ago
        Yes, you're quite right. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks!
- JadeNB 6y ago
  > I'm pretty sure in a skeptical sense they'll be trying to pay associate professors less for the same reason. 'Associate' is a tenured rank. Now, to be honest, universities should cut the pay of their highest-paid members first—and we've been getting the highly performative "admin taking nominal pay cuts" measures as sops to that—but I'd imagine it's far more likely that non-tenured assistant professors will see those pay cuts first (or perhaps, as maishe points out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23918339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23918339 , you meant adjuncts, who get the weakest protections of any faculty).
non-entity 6y ago
I started looking at going back to school around a year ago and online is basically the only way that will ever happen realistically. While most programs do charge a bit less for tuition, the amount of money they're charging for recorded lectures and a credential is almost comical. On top of that many programs, including some of the better looking ones (i.e. from flagship state schools) still differentiate between in and out of state tuition. There were a few programs that were cheaper, but you could tell there was a reason for that. So yeah, no way in hell I'm paying for what they're asking considering what I'd get.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  >still differentiate between in and out of state tuition. They do this because your taxes have already paid part of your tuition for every in-state University.
- Uberphallus 6y ago
  I was considering MSc EE at Boulder, but the 20k price is way off the mark, especially being used to European prices.
  - non-entity 6y ago
    Oh I saw that and it looked interesting, but an online EE degree sounds fishy regardless. Particularly at the graduate level.
paulie_a 6y ago
In person classes are with the price of full tuition eirher
vzidex 6y ago
I'm going into the final year of my computer engineering undergrad and my tuition is $1,500 cheaper than last year - $15,800 vs. $17,300. However, that might be due to the politicking of our province's government rather than any generosity on the school's part.
troughway 6y ago
The linked article is the real interesting bit: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mandatory-online-courses-ontario-high-school-students-terrible-idea-e-learning-1.5072018 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mandatory-online-cour... Note that it’s talking about high schools.
- JadeNB 6y ago
  It doesn't seem completely apposite to me; it was written in 2019, so thinking of online courses in a situation when physical courses are possible—which is, in many places, not our current situation; a significant portion of my university's classes are going online, but I don't know any faculty who would be doing it if not out of concern for their and their students' safety–and it seems to be based on a lot of opinions, not so much on studies or evidence-based conclusions.
stblack 6y ago
Schools still have a very large proportion of their fixed costs to cover. Schools and their lecturers need to invest in perfecting onlive delivery. Therefore it's not particularly realistic to expect schools to chop their top-line so soon. This is clearly a transitory and uncertain period. With time, possibly less time than schools hope, they will be forced to adjust prices downward.
- siculars 6y ago
  You adjust for that by increasing number of enrolled students. Not by pretending you are delivering the same product.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    Many universities’ core product is exclusivity and hard-to-get-into status signaling. Increasing enrollment disrupts that value.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      It's more than just signaling -- the primary value of limited admission is providing greater networking opportunities and directing social and academic culture. Although, this is mostly lost by going online to begin with.
- josephorjoe 6y ago
  For profit institutions do not get sympathy for their fixed costs.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Most large for-profit schools are primarily online, and have long been. Huge in-person campuses are primarily public universities.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    You might be confusing private nonprofit universities with for-profit schools.
Bx6667 6y ago
Offline classes aren’t worth the cost of full tuition...
- entha_saava 6y ago
  Classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    That's true, but, if you look at how university budgets have changed over the past few decades, it's clear that they aren't supposed to be. They've been aggressively holding educational costs down (see: adjunct professor), while the costs for non-educational services such as career counseling and "student support" (not entirely sure what that entails; my alma mater didn't have it as far as I'm aware) have mushroomed.
  - barnabee 6y ago
    This. The value I got out of university was mostly not tuition, but I think overall, (very pre-pandemic) the whole package was worth it. I've learnt vastly more by reading, engaging with people, and doing both before and after university though, for much less cost. I've also never been on a paid training or course that was worth the cost and didn't involve something above and beyond the tuition (networking, project based, access to facilities/tools/data, etc.). The only times this obviously isn't true are when you're gaining some required or coveted industry certification, and then that's only because of the value attached to it, not the value of the learning itself vs other ways to gain the same skills/knowledge. The lesson for me has been that for any course or school there's got to be an expected benefit way beyond the perceived value of the tuition, and that most of the time this doesn't exist. I think paid training in companies is likely as popular as it is mostly because it feels a bit like a vacation and most companies don't allow, or don't make it socially acceptable, for people to take sufficient time off for their own long term wellbeing.
    - rightbyte 6y ago
      Ye well the major upside with a degree for me was forcing me to learn stuff I would never have bothered with. I mean, at the time when I started in uni I had no clue where to even begin. Nowadays I would prefer reading a book rather than taking classes, but I think that is because I went to uni and learned to learn. I feel it is the same with books on programming. They are worth reading first when you already know how to program.
mumblemumble 6y ago
Online courses lack class discussions that are key to making courses engaging. This sounds absolutely nothing like how things worked in the online degree I received. I don't know what is typical elsewhere. I will say, from watching my son's Zoom-based classroom sessions, that Zoom seems to be almost specifically designed to yield a poor classroom experience. For reasons that I believe would also apply to Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc. I am glad that my school used a meeting platform that was intended for educational use.
- electriclove 6y ago
  What meeting platform did your school use? Which school?
  - CivBase 6y ago
    My university was using Adobe Connect almost a decade ago. It is way better than video call apps like Zoom.
    - amadeuspzs 6y ago
      I couldn't disagree more. Connect is written in Flash and has serious stability issues. For better or for worse Zoom is stable and intuitive for adult learning.
      - mumblemumble 6y ago
        I don't care to weigh in on any questions about how it's built. I also didn't experience any stability problems, but this was admittedly a while ago now, and the product may have subsequently taken a turn for the worse. As far as the user experience goes, though, I would say that Adobe Connect makes it possible to create an online classroom in a way that just isn't possible in Zoom. Which is in no way contradictory to the idea that Zoom is stable and intuitive for adult learning. "Adult learning" is a wide net that covers a lot of learning situations that do not necessarily involve or benefit from a classroom environment. YouTube and printed books are also stable and intuitive for adult learning. But, for educators who are scrambling to adapt their pre-existing curricula to distance learning, I would argue that preserving as many elements as possible from the working environment that they're used to is pretty key to giving them the best chance possible at a successful transition.
deleted 6y ago
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Dwolb 6y ago
What’s missing from all these online courses is a sense of community. The forums are ok but they’re not very vibrant. For an example of a vibrant community, I’d look toward what video games, such as Rocket League, have created. Players have a specific ranking based on competition stats. They level up when they when a sufficient number of games within their ranking. Progression through the game doesn’t have to be a solo endeavor because players can look to the community for how to improve. The community not on my celebrates wins and gives advice on losses, they offer free coaching that can result in paid tutoring [1]. Not only that, but on average the community members are positive and light-hearted. I think other skill-based activities could learn a lot from how and why these communities function and incorporate those aspects into their platforms to help students succeed. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/hv2vus/coaching_tuesday_20200721/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/hv2vus/coachi...
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  No doubt that the community around courses could be improved, but I think it's also a matter of enthusiasm. People are probably a lot more enthusiastic about Rocket League than about some online degree. (Whether that's how it should be is a different issue...) Anyway, that naturally leads to higher participation in communities etc. So I don't know if online course makers even have that much influence over community building in the first place.
  - Dwolb 6y ago
    For sure but then the question I would have is can we take cues from enthusiasm around Rocket League and bring those into the community? The real time ranking system I think is the root of a lot of this. It allows people to know where they stand and they can look to the community on how to improve their game.
    - cylentwolf 6y ago
      I think a real time ranking system for students at a university that is visible by all is just going to be targeted for greedy or ambitious people looking to convert it into jobs or money. If I am in the top 10 percent of the rankings in Rocket League sure I can make a few grand streaming, but if I am in the top 10 percent of rankings at a school I can get a better job than the rest. What are the bottom 90 percent's motivation for helping people improve at that point?
auiya 6y ago
I did an online MS at Georgia Tech. I paid full price tuition for the program. Literally 3 years after I graduated, they announced a slash in price by 80 (EIGHTY!) percent. The program was excellent, and if not for my company offering to pay for it I wouldn't have considered it. I can absolutely recommend it now that it's so much cheaper, but it was also designed to be a remote program from the start.
- M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago
  OMSA/OMSCS worth it? I don’t want a résumé item that may be considered watered down in the future. Plus, with more self-study, can’t you can get into most tech companies because they tend to be more open?
  - eugenekolo 6y ago
    Depending on your field a masters degree in anything is seen equivalent to every other masters degree. And on the other side of the spectrum, they're not considered useful by many employers/jobs.
    - j0hnml 6y ago
      While the mere presence of MS on a resume may not mean much to employers, I almost think it’s more important to weigh its usefulness against your current skill set. For instance, I work in tech but majored in something other than CS, and so I sometimes feel “weak” when I need to write more formal code. I’m going back to get my masters in CS so I can learn some of the foundational aspects that I unfortunately missed out on. I’m not as much concerned with fluffing my resume as I am filling the CS gaps I currently have. Now if I did major in CS, I’m not sure I would still pursue a masters. But I didn’t, so there’s certainly value there for me.
      - 2snakes 6y ago
        This has been brought up before on HN: https://teachyourselfcs.com https://teachyourselfcs.com You don't get initiated by the teachers, you get initiated by doing the practice problems so you can develop schema for what strategy works.
mellosouls 6y ago
The title could be misread as indicating online tuition is not worth the cost generally, which is a different matter. The article is actually making the fair point that students paying for IRL classes are being ill-served by online replacements with no discount. It mis-steps though in generalising to making claims more generally about online tuition; a physical university (say) panicked by lockdown into rush-providing online replacements for normal service is hardly likely to be able to match the quality of service of (decent) institutions that specialise in online learning.
Ijumfs 6y ago
I just have to say, that web site has some of the most offensive features. In-article tables of links to other stories, ads up the wazoo, a huge sort of task bar thing that swoops down. What are they thinking? I didn't even read the article. I don't have TIME for sites like that any more.
game_the0ry 6y ago
A couple of years ago, I was looking into MOOCs for tech education, Udacity's nano degree in particular. I remember stumbling across a video on Youtube where some Udacity folks were discussing the merits of online education with college professors and admins. What stood out to me was how vehemently the college folks were against online education. They were visibly livid - there was no way substituting a live class room environment with online education could be as effective, they shouted. They were obviously threatened - they did not want the world they were so comfortable with to change. Now they are singing a different tune once they don't have a choice - not only are colleges embracing online classes, they are trying to justify full cost for it too. College students heading into the fall semester should take a gap year. I know I would.
- dudul 6y ago
  It reminds me of all this companies that were forcing employees to relocate because good work can only be done when everyone is seating in the open space for 9 hours every day. Suddenly, once this is not possible anymore, no biggy, just work from home! It's fine!
  - ck425 6y ago
    I don't know where you work but no one where I work considers the current situation fine. It's workable but it's definitely no where near 100%.
    - User23 6y ago
      I like it because it disadvantages the politically competent types while advantaging the technically competent types. Guess which category I fall into.
      - nondave 6y ago
        There can be disadvantages for technically competent folks too. I'm really missing going over technical ideas on a whiteboard with colleagues.
ta17711771 6y ago
Many in person classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.
f6v 6y ago
And here I am in Belgium, paying 2000 a year for a Masters degree.
- cpursley 6y ago
  Also, half your paycheck goes to the government and European tech salaries are nearly half that of the US. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    I mean I lived in both ca and ny and the tax rate is pretty close to European ones. When I lived in Switzerland just the federal rate was higher than my Swiss tax rate. The big difference in total compensation after tax between Western Europe and USA is in the compensation part for people that are considered highly skilled. For example for me I get at least 2x here in CA compared to what I would get in Norway and Switzerland. In the UK and Germany the difference is even larger. For people that are not highly skilled it is the other way round, they would earn significantly more in Europe. Another difference there is that life in Europe is much nicer for the average middle class, but personally I think it’s nicer in the US for upper middle class, the top 10%.
    - stainforth 6y ago
      Should that quality be maintained for the top 10%?
      - kmonsen 6y ago
        This was meant more descriptive than add a political view. In my opinion I would change the taxation rates for the .1% first, Will at the same time importing life quality for the bottom let’s say 60%. A lot of this is not in taxes but due to how society is organized. This would indirectly change life for top 10% as you cannot as cheap hire people for services.
motohagiography 6y ago
Depends on what you think of the value of school is. Given the distribution of outcomes and skills, the effect of a degree for the vast majority in the long tail of graduates is just tribal affiliation with the people who achieve in the upper percentiles. For most people, simply paying for the credential without attending classes would deliver most of the value. Traditionally, this was known as "purchasing a commission," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the_British_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...), and today we do the same thing with student debt. Online classes may be a forcing function for the discussion of how to price education, but the question itself has been the elephant in the room for decades.
- harias 6y ago
  Called signalling in economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    I'd argue signalling is the effect, where the tribal initiation is the mechanism and purchasing a commission is the example precedent, but we're certainly in the same realm of ideas.
  - stainforth 6y ago
    Interesting, can this be merged in some way with the concept of signs in postmodernism a la Baudrillard? It would be an interesting marriage
- criddell 6y ago
  What are you talking about when looking at the distribution of outcomes? What are the outcomes? The value of school for me was (in no particular order) learning how to learn, how to tackle large projects with difficult questions, how to work with other people, how to manage my time doing all of that, building a network of both people in my area and outside of my area, smoothly transitioning from childhood to adulthood, having freedom to explore and discover the things that truly interested me, and having a really good time doing all of that. A huge part of the value of school came from staying on-campus in student dorms my first two years. Living with a large group of people expanded and enriched my social life tremendously. I loved being so close to the school and libraries and all the facilities. Its hard to know for sure but the social skills I gained are probably as valuable as the computer science education in creating the life I have now.
mymythisisthis 6y ago
What's missing from this discussion is a history of Universities. In the 19th century, as a student, you paid to be tutored by a professor to pass a standardized exam. Professors were paid by for tutoring. Profs were expected to teach classes, but were not paid for it. It was a means of recruiting students to tutor. Classes were also small, more like seminars.
HarryHirsch 6y ago
Online teaching works particularly well for the tutorial model, where you have a small number (<5) of students plus the instructor engaged in discussion. It fails completely for large classes. That's not dissimilar to the situation before the plague.
- lowmemcpu 6y ago
  > It fails completely for large classes. Large in-person classes you don't even have discussions. Some universities have lecture halls of 400-600 students, and you have to go ask a TA for help later in the week > That's not dissimilar to the situation before the plague. So I think you agree and are saying that it's the same?
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    It's absolutely the same. Before, you'd outsource homework and grading in the large introductory classes to awful proprietary tech, the fact that now you have people who can't put a proper recording of their class together doesn't make it worse.
- fullshark 6y ago
  Wow I'd argue the opposite. Large classes / lectures I didn't even interact with the professor in person, might as well just get that info online. Smaller classes I found in person discussions much more valuable.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    In the large classes you still need to have tutorials, this time led by the TAs. On-line TA herding is difficult, I don't envy anyone who is doing this right now. There's also the hallway track, students organizing themselves into study groups and interest groups. Doing that on-line is quite impossible, how do you have random encounters after class?
s4n1ty 6y ago
This may be the catalyst for a long-overdue reckoning in higher education in the US - it's insane that people are entering the workforce at 23 with a lifetime of unforgivable debt for, in many cases, worthless degrees.
manishsharan 6y ago
The issue is that some of the most valuable experiences and learning comes from in-person interactions with the professor in classroom and with classmates on campus. Purely online classes completely ignore this aspect of learning. Granted we can't do in-person interaction in the current environment, but surely we could give it more thought . The current online classes focus on only delivering the lecture as opposed to encourage learning.
MattGaiser 6y ago
I think it depends on what you think an academic degree gets you. If you are looking for education, it may be worth it. If you are looking for the signal to employers, it may be worth it as long as they don’t water down the reputation by admitting more students and employers don’t devalue it for being online. If you are looking for connections, networking, and resume building opportunities, then it is definitely not worth it. My problem is that the benefits I got from university were nearly all in the two latter areas.
nickik 6y ago
Collage in general has never been about education. Collage is about getting a stamp on your head saying that you have been to collage. Meaning that you spend years learning a bunch of stuff and you didn't do stop shit to kicked out. I guess for engineering where there is significant equipment necessary this doesn't hold. But the majority of collage is pointless, all the knowledge you need is available outside of collage but then nobody can verify that you actually learned it. This book is pretty hard hitting but it provides a lot of solid analysis about what the problem is: The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
- augustt 6y ago
  Well at the very least you'll learn how college is spelled.
  - nickik 6y ago
    I'm not an native English speaker and I have dyslexia, there is a reason I became a programmer.
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  Yep. They have a monopoly on the verification of knowledge and not knowledge itself. That's why brand names are so valued.
- taylodl 6y ago
  Engineering, Science, Medicine, Dentistry, Law, Education, Architecture - those are just a few things that are extremely impractical or even impossible to learn on your own. Let me know how your surgery with your self-taught surgical teams works out for you and how your subsequent lawsuit with your self-taught lawyer goes.
macarthy12 6y ago
Offline classes not worth the cost of tuition.
sakex 6y ago
I'm doing a research on the way students learn programming in online classes. We tried making the student interact with each others by using Zoom's "breakout rooms" feature with mixed results. What's interesting is that while students attended to online classes way less, they understood the class content way more, because they felt less pressure and could work at their on speed.
abvdasker 6y ago
I agree. For some degrees it's less of an issue but for areas of study like chemistry, biology, physics and many others, access to the college's physical resources like laboratories is part of what you're paying for. I don't know how you solve this problem with the current constraints imposed by COVID-19, but you can't expect these students to pay full-price for an inferior education.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  You won't find anyone willing to teach several sections a day in a teaching laboratory with 24 students, the risk of infection is (correctly) perceived as too high. The market has adapted, there are kits to do experiments at home. Research labs are much less densely packed, and in-person interaction is less. In less affected states lab-based research is starting again.
  - thomasfortes 6y ago
    > there are kits to do experiments at home. For high school level, sure. But I can't see a sane way to let students handle acids like I did in chemistry labs during college, and physics labs have equipment that is too complex/expensive/dangerous to send to the students.
    - swiley 6y ago
      You can buy a lot of those chemicals in Walmart and Lows in the US (ex: Walmart usually has fairly pure concentrated sulfuric acid. Lows has most common organic solvents.) The lab equipment is also pretty easy to buy on amazon (I’ve bought some trying to teach myself, although I’d recommend against buying anything from China, It always seems to disappear somewhere around LA.) There’s an entire community of autodidacts that do this sort of thing at home as a hobby. They have lots of advice on PPE, materials handling, storage, where to find papers and books etc. Some of them even record experiments instead of just writing them down so everyone can watch.
      - deleted 6y ago
xigency 6y ago
1) College itself is not worth the cost of full tuition. College tuition costs have increased above the inflation rate for decades to become enormous. 2) Online education can be equal to in-person education and is worth the same cost as in-person education. The overall college experience is subjective, but you can learn everything you need to from reading a textbook and completing assignments and taking tests, all of which are the same in an online setting.
boojack 6y ago
It's mind-boggling how quick and drastic this shift is happening in terms of the value and importance of college education. A gap year sounds like one solution. But chances are many of these people would have figured out something that work for them (greater impact, for less money) that others will adopt and follow. Much of the impact will be here to stay.
x87678r 6y ago
I read the headline and assumed this is about free online MOOC classes. I'm starting to think they are worth less than zero as well. So much time spent listening. Its better to get a book and try stuff yourself.
mikequinlan 6y ago
If this is true then online degrees are worth less than in-person degrees.
- xigency 6y ago
  Exactly. That is the premise I disagree with. The general sentiment here is that people have used college as an extremely expensive social club and believe that is its greatest value. I wouldn’t think of investing $100,000 of my current or future income in order to make friends or learn about myself. I hope I’m not alone in thinking that I learned difficult material that I would not have grasped on my own and had self-improvement from meeting academic challenges under my own responsibility. Maybe this is rare, but I have directly applied my undergrad education to solving problems and used its foundation for learning more. The social aspect of college is not itemized on the tuition statement. The cost of tuition is related to the quality of education directly provided by the school.
thecleaner 6y ago
I would think the same thing. This seems weird that Massive Open Online Courses are so expensive. I would think that having so many subscribers or a global distribution channel would enable one to drop costs significantly like one tenth of original or something thanks to the volume. In a world where workers need to constantly upskill themselves so as to stay relevant I am quite surprised why online education is being priced so high.
deleted 6y ago
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kumarvvr 6y ago
Despite all the discussion about online classes, there is one fundamental aspect of online teaching, that isn't fully 'disrupted' Keeping students attention on the class. Technology may improve, economics may change, industries created and destroyed, but ultimately, if the students attention is not held, everything is lost. In today's world, it has become extremely difficult to even keep focus, with the myriad of distractions abound. I guess in the future, every city will have tens or even hundreds of virtual training centers, which are classes but taught online, by professors in far away universities. Students will gather here for the classroom experience, keep focus and still get quality education. Perhaps a new idea of "Infrastructure as a service" I wish that were true, and I am already seeing signs of that happening in India. Think of how much savings and ease it will bring to a students life, if they can have the convenience of going to college a few streets away combined with the advantage of learning from the greatest minds of humanity.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  I think this stems from a general disinterest of the focus issue pertaining to technology at large. I work from home and have the exact same problem staying focused on work. Phone operating systems still treat features like “zen mode” as second-class citizens while not providing enough granular access to third party apps to implement features that encourage putting down the phone successfully. There are still too many ways to work around these kinds of features and apps like Freedom for iOS do an OK but not great job at allowing you to restrict access to apps and sites on a schedule.
  - kumarvvr 6y ago
    There are a lot of apps that provide the zen mode. However all of them are only as effective as the person's will to use them. In my view, Extreme cases of Phone / Internet addiction can only be solved by physically removing the user from the device. Like you do for drugs and alcohol. I am thoroughly convinced any other method will not be useful. Of course, I base these thoughts solely on my experience and I have been trying to do that since last one year. I have tried many apps, lots of self control and forcing myself to be away from my phone physically, only to be under it's spell in a few days. The most I held out was 2 days. While being physically away from the phone / device is not always practical, I have found that timers for apps are slightly more effective, as they repeatedly warn and close the app. I found zen modes to be not really effective, as they shut off everything and ultimately you end up removing them for one reason or the other.
duxup 6y ago
I sometimes worry that a lot of the online class feedback that while not wrong, is based on a bunch of self selecting folks who are good at / motivated to / prefer taking online classes. If somehow we magically switched to online classes and everyone was good at making them ... I worry we'd loose a lot of people / the education quality could drop and we wouldn't know. Granted that also implies that folks who aren't good at in person classes may have been lost for decades already.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  > Granted that also implies that folks who aren't good at in person classes may have been lost for decades already. For what it's worth, I probably went to about 10% of my classes in college and I got a great education (CS+math) from a combination of the course materials, exams, and working with other students.
mnm1 6y ago
What's the value of an online course? The market says $0. There are plenty of free, online courses. What is the value of an online degree? Well that depends who is awarding it, but that value is unrelated to the value of courses offered. It's the value of a status symbol. Attending online courses will make sense financially only if that status symbol is really amazing, given the current prices of even cheap public universities. If I was a student, I'd do anything to take a year off. Even at high status schools, or perhaps especially at high status schools, missing out on the socialization and experience just to get status a year or two earlier is unlikely to pay off better.
known 6y ago
No vaccine = No school
taylodl 6y ago
I see a lot of people saying take a gap year. I'm the father of a daughter who's starting college this fall. Here are some things needing to be considered: - You've been accepted for this fall. The college is under no obligation to delay your start until next year, especially when there's a fresh batch of incoming students. - You think it's tough to enroll in classes this fall? Wait until you double the number of students all trying to take the same classes! That should be fun! - My daughter has 4 different scholarships. They're all predicated on her starting this fall. Take it or lose it. These scholarships are paying over 50% of all her costs. Since she's going to a State University that means I can afford most if not all the rest leaving her with a minimal amount of debt. - It's her freshman year. I feel more sorry for the juniors and seniors. Most freshman year classes can be done online. The more advanced the class, the more you should be attending in person. - Silver lining - incoming freshman will have to focus more on scholastics and academics and not partying. - Her major, pharmaceutical drug research & development, can't be done online. Yes, there are some classes you can do online, and most of those are in the freshman year, but ultimately you have to have in-person instruction. Especially for the labs. - Her school isn't in one of the "hot spots" and has a governor and mayor more-or-less enforcing mask laws. The dorm housing density has been decreased by 50% - which has left some of the students scrambling to find off-campus housing. All the incoming freshman are guaranteed housing. - She got her dorm assignment yesterday and the steps the university is taking to keep students safe. Daily temperature checks, contact tracing, mix of in-person and virtual classes, on-campus COVID testing with 6 hour test result turn around time, quarantine dorms, dining halls are delivery only. I should mention this university has one of the best research hospitals in the country and a huge medical complex serving the public. Finally, ask yourself this: why do you think anything is going to be any better 1 year from now? Almost every other country in the world is getting back to normal but the United States has done very little in the past 7 months and so far there's no indication that's changing anytime soon. There's no reason to believe things are going to substantially improve by this time next year unless we start taking the steps to make that so. Even a vaccine may not help as the early estimates for the cost of a vaccine is $1,000 per dose. Health insurers aren't going to want to pay that kind of money for everybody. Will the U.S. government? We blew through $7 trillion this year with very little to show for it so who knows?
caenorst 6y ago
MOOC that have been around for years are more prepared for online classes and cheaper than any of those universities that will make you pay for maintenance of facilities that you cannot even use. And don't you tell me that they cannot save on electricity and cancelled activities. The price of tuition is not following any offer-and-demand, they are just using the fact that you are in the middle of your studies and you can't stop now, hope that will make people realise the kind of mafia those university are.
- kogus 6y ago
  I think your second point is incorrect. I work closely with several universities, and the current situation has increased, not reduced, the pressure on their budget. IT infrastructure upgrades, producing training materials, the loss of rent income from university owned housing, and many other factors all combine to far outweigh any savings from not having to run the hallway water fountains. Having said that, a university telling a student they must pay full price for less than full value is expecting the customer to essentially give a charitable donation to a business model "because we need it". To attempt an analogy: if a grocery store had its warehouse burn down, they would not then be able to turn around and charge 10% more than market price on all of their items "because they needed it". That disaster would be a cost they'd have to absorb. Universities are at least partially insulated from having to respond to the market like a business would, because of the high cost and difficulty of switching schools in the middle of an education. My sense is that if things can return to normal within a year, then they'll recover from this. If they can't open for in person classes for longer than that, then students will take the leap and move away from traditional universities permanently.
RobertSmith 6y ago
Most of the teenagers will not like to sit in front of a screen the whole day at home. Also, online classes will not give space for any outdoor sports.
7thaccount 6y ago
It's a shame. I'd like to work on an online masters in engineering to supplement my bachelor's. The cost for 4 years of an online program that actually has relevant classes of interest is like $50k even with my company paying over $5k a year. That's rediculous. They try to sell it to me based off of the potential earnings it could lead to, but I'm already well established in my industry (capped out on the technical track), so the degree is 100% worthless from a career point of view. I really just want to learn new things. I'd gladly pay some money, but it is currently priced 4x higher than I can ever justify paying. So instead, I buy the textbooks and read in my spare time.
- faet 6y ago
  Some schools offer non-degrees and/or the ability to audit a class. I can apply to be a non-degree student at the local college. Then audit a class for free (no credit/grades). The scope of auditing depends on the professor, I've had some that will grade coursework for non-degree students, others just let them into the lectures. Total cost would be like $25 + books.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  You have to consider the opportunity cost as well. Time away from working is income you could have already earned.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Some other countries have free college, so "worth it" is very relative.
jb775 6y ago
Are there any schools that are opening their online material to the public? What a great opportunity to spread knowledge. With all this "defunding" talk, it's probably a good time to reassess how much taxpayer money goes to universities in relation to how much they give back to taxpayers.
phendrenad2 6y ago
I hope that as a side-effect of this extended remote schooling, fully-online degrees become more acceptable to hiring managers. I'd like to finish my BSCS degree I started over a decade ago, but when you live and work in the most expensive place in America (the Bay Area), there aren't a lot of in-person options. Gotta pay rent.
spullara 6y ago
In person classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.
chadash 6y ago
There's something about being on a campus that made a big difference for me in college. Some experiences that I had that are hard to replicate remotely include: * Group discussions in seminars. When you are in person, there's a better dynamic to holding a discussion. You can read others' body language and see when to speak up. Zoom works fine for very small groups (<7) but anything larger than that and it seems to get out of hand in my experience. * Impromptu chats after class with professors to ask questions that I don't want to bug everyone else with. Same goes for chats during office hours. * The opportunity to stumble upon events that you otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. For example, I'm not muslim, but I attended a series of lectures on Islam aimed at Muslim students, put on by the Muslim student association. I learned a lot there and got to speak to fellow students and learn about their views and experiences firsthand. You're not gonna find an event like that online, and even if you did, you'd have to have filtered through all the other garbage on the internet to find it. * Playing intramural broomball after pre-gaming with my friends. Aside from good memories, the social connections you make in college are very important and can help you a lot later in life. Many years later and it's great having a network of people in all sorts of industries. * Living in a freshman dorm and getting exposed to people from many different backgrounds for the first time in my life. If you grew up in one place, then almost by definition, you didn't have much diversity in K-12. You can't really replicate these remotely and in my mind, these sorts of things were half the value of college for me. And this is aside from the fact that I personally find it very hard to pay attention on a zoom lecture, especially if I'm sitting through 4 or 5 of them a day.
- rogerdickey 6y ago
  I can't count the number of social interactions, big and small, that built my character and maturity. Not to mention life-long friendships formed, romantic relationships, and more. It's a unique and critical time when you are finally a free adult but don't yet have "real" obligations like a job or family. There is simply nothing in life that compares to an in-person college experience.
- dwild 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can replicate all that remotely... you may not have the tools to make theses easy to replicate right now (though I'm pretty sure it still possible), but that just show there's a market for theses tools. Facebook did just that when it got out, it made easier to move a IRL friendship to one online.
jb775 6y ago
The only thing that can really explain this is an elaborate form of price fixing between universities. If one university announced they were slashing "online-only" tuition costs, others would probably be forced to follow suit. It would be interesting to see a single reputable university drop tuition prices for "online-only", and offer automatic-transfer admittance to students already accepted into a similarly reputable school (e.g. if you go to Ohio State, you could quickly transfer to Penn State). That might trigger a race to the bottom, and reset tuition rates to what they rightfully should be. The reduced revenue could be made up by cutting the unnecessary ivory-tower jobs, reducing the inflated exec compensation, and reducing the unnecessary $50M+ on-campus construction projects.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  There's no reason for any university to do this unless they were for-profit (desperate for profits, respected) or failing (not respected).
mjparrott 6y ago
Many college classes are lightly attended and only mildly paid attention to already. I had a professor in college who would religiously take attendance every morning then after mid-terms and finals he would show a scatter plot of attendance versus test scores. There was mild correlation, but still plenty of cases outside what you'd expect (perfect attendance + terrible scores, or low/no attendance + high scores)
j_walter 6y ago
Most of the time online classes cost more than in person classes. This is not a factor of cost to give the class, but a factor of paying more for the convenience of taking the class online. I'm currently enrolled in a post-bac CS program that is >$500/credit hour. The on campus classes are $318/credit hour. Not all programs are like this (OMSCS comes to mind), but many are.
aazaa 6y ago
What's really gonna bake your noodle is the idea that remote workers are not worth the cost of full salary.
asdefghyk 6y ago
There should be slight reduction in tuition fees. For example lecture halls need no cleaning. However the physical buildings still need to be paid for during the pandemic.
m23khan 6y ago
As much as I dislike making students paying high tuition fees, as a Canadian, the alternative is worse I feel. What would end up happening should tuition fees be reduced overnight: - Universities / Community Colleges would experience a fiscal deficit (or substantial cut to their income). Here in Canada, that means taxpayers' will be on hook. - Should Educational institutions cut salaries of their staff - they would risk losing their top faculty and support staff. Just like people rush to support local businesses and local economy, they should also support their local education institutions. After all, they employ a large number of people and have a huge hand in inspiring next generation of workers and provide lots of social programs for local community. On another note, I often see people discussing merits of University degree / Community College diploma and often point out that Computer Science degree is not worth it. I beg to differ - the Modern World owes quiet a lot to army of University / Community college graduates who have made quantum leap in civilization's advancement possible. Just over 40 years ago, overwhelming majority of workers didn't have a post-secondary education. But since then, around the World post-secondary education has experienced a boom and we that all corners of the World has experienced substantial gains in their economic output which in turn has led to better health conditions and a better living standard.
xwowsersx 6y ago
Offline classes aren't worth the cost of full tuition either.
jiveturkey 6y ago
in person classes are not worth the cost of full tuition! education isn't paid for on a value-received basis. it's cost-plus. and shifting online due to covid doesn't reduce costs that much. Yes, there is some lower cost due to facilities being empty, but i'd wager that on balance, the expense ratio is actually higher. yes, students are not going to get the same value from their tuition dollars.
throwawayway9 6y ago
Online classes should be deeply discounted in most cases, and free in the others. It's time to end this college tuition scam once and for all.
lanecwagner 6y ago
In-class classes aren't worth it either... Modern tech facilitates advances in education that haven't been taken advantage of. We need to: * Gamify the experience * Focus on mastery * Build a community online that replaces the classroom I'm currently working on a project that aims to do the above, but admittedly we are in the early stages: https://classroom.qvault.io https://classroom.qvault.io
trilinearnz 6y ago
I am taking an online MBA course with my local university and there are many benefits to an online format. First, the lectures are recorded and can be rewound for future reference. This is invaluable in the tougher papers. Second, we utilise the chat function in Zoom which allows the whole class to participate in a "full duplex" fashion without one person monopolising the airwaves with a single conversation (I should mention that this technique is only used occasionally when broad input is required). If the lecturer is facilitating properly (ensuring students are engaged and paying attention, calling upon quieter members), then the class can be as successful as an in-person one. The only negatives I've seen are: easier to be distracted (no one can really tell you're checking Reddit), the online setting with it's mute/unmute approach sets a higher barrier to entry for participating in discussion.

296 points by varbhat 6y ago

Good that the world has learnt from the music industry migrating from CDs to online or they'd be charging more "because it's more convenient"

teslademigod1 6y ago

I'd imagine the tuition should drop by about 30-50%, seeing as college costs are going to be dropping. I'm pretty sure in a skeptical sense they'll be trying to pay associate professors less for the same reason. and charging students more.

stepstop 6y ago
> I'm pretty sure in a skeptical sense they'll be trying to pay associate professors less for the same reason. and charging students more. From what I’ve seen, this has already been happening over the past decade already. I agree they’ll continue doing it for “new reasons”
pmyteh 6y ago
Bluntly, college costs are not going to be dropping, at least this year. Universities still have the buildings, the infrastructure, and the staff that they bought to deliver in-person classes. That those staff are now having to do more work to put together online curriculums, and the admin are having to arrange extra technology for online classes makes it more expensive, not less. A college set up as a distance-learning establishment is in a different place - and there are some of those. But the costs of running a university don't suddenly vanish just because the students do. And as everyone expects/hopes in-person teaching to be back next year, I don't see many institutions deciding to go online-only as a business model, either. (FWIW the associate professors will be fine: they're mostly tenured. It's the adjuncts which are going to be shafted, together with the people who were hoping to get tenure-track positions in what is now a decimated job market).
malshe 6y ago
Did you mean to say adjunct professors?
- teslademigod1 6y ago
  yeah, sorry, adjunct not associate.
travisoneill1 6y ago
Tuition should drop by 50% anyway. The same schools were able to deliver the same services at that price 30 years ago. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition-has-increased-from-1988-to-2018.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition-has...
- JadeNB 6y ago
  Tuition costs are ridiculously inflated, and I'd love to see them come down, but "the same thing used to be cheaper" is an argument that doesn't work in any other field. I'd rather see a discussion of the inflation-adjusted rate of increase, or perhaps some other appropriately adjusted metric; tuition numbers would still look terrible, so there's no need to weaken one's argument this way.
  - travisoneill1 6y ago
    That is inflation adjusted. Note "with all figures adjusted to reflect 2017 dollars"
    - JadeNB 6y ago
      Yes, you're quite right. I don't know how I missed that. Thanks!
JadeNB 6y ago
> I'm pretty sure in a skeptical sense they'll be trying to pay associate professors less for the same reason. 'Associate' is a tenured rank. Now, to be honest, universities should cut the pay of their highest-paid members first—and we've been getting the highly performative "admin taking nominal pay cuts" measures as sops to that—but I'd imagine it's far more likely that non-tenured assistant professors will see those pay cuts first (or perhaps, as maishe points out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23918339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23918339 , you meant adjuncts, who get the weakest protections of any faculty).

non-entity 6y ago

I started looking at going back to school around a year ago and online is basically the only way that will ever happen realistically. While most programs do charge a bit less for tuition, the amount of money they're charging for recorded lectures and a credential is almost comical. On top of that many programs, including some of the better looking ones (i.e. from flagship state schools) still differentiate between in and out of state tuition. There were a few programs that were cheaper, but you could tell there was a reason for that. So yeah, no way in hell I'm paying for what they're asking considering what I'd get.

whatshisface 6y ago
>still differentiate between in and out of state tuition. They do this because your taxes have already paid part of your tuition for every in-state University.
Uberphallus 6y ago
I was considering MSc EE at Boulder, but the 20k price is way off the mark, especially being used to European prices.
- non-entity 6y ago
  Oh I saw that and it looked interesting, but an online EE degree sounds fishy regardless. Particularly at the graduate level.

paulie_a 6y ago

In person classes are with the price of full tuition eirher

vzidex 6y ago

I'm going into the final year of my computer engineering undergrad and my tuition is $1,500 cheaper than last year - $15,800 vs. $17,300. However, that might be due to the politicking of our province's government rather than any generosity on the school's part.

troughway 6y ago

The linked article is the real interesting bit: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mandatory-online-courses-ontario-high-school-students-terrible-idea-e-learning-1.5072018 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mandatory-online-cour... Note that it’s talking about high schools.

JadeNB 6y ago
It doesn't seem completely apposite to me; it was written in 2019, so thinking of online courses in a situation when physical courses are possible—which is, in many places, not our current situation; a significant portion of my university's classes are going online, but I don't know any faculty who would be doing it if not out of concern for their and their students' safety–and it seems to be based on a lot of opinions, not so much on studies or evidence-based conclusions.

stblack 6y ago

Schools still have a very large proportion of their fixed costs to cover. Schools and their lecturers need to invest in perfecting onlive delivery. Therefore it's not particularly realistic to expect schools to chop their top-line so soon. This is clearly a transitory and uncertain period. With time, possibly less time than schools hope, they will be forced to adjust prices downward.

siculars 6y ago
You adjust for that by increasing number of enrolled students. Not by pretending you are delivering the same product.
- Swizec 6y ago
  Many universities’ core product is exclusivity and hard-to-get-into status signaling. Increasing enrollment disrupts that value.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    It's more than just signaling -- the primary value of limited admission is providing greater networking opportunities and directing social and academic culture. Although, this is mostly lost by going online to begin with.
josephorjoe 6y ago
For profit institutions do not get sympathy for their fixed costs.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Most large for-profit schools are primarily online, and have long been. Huge in-person campuses are primarily public universities.
- catalogia 6y ago
  You might be confusing private nonprofit universities with for-profit schools.

Bx6667 6y ago

Offline classes aren’t worth the cost of full tuition...

entha_saava 6y ago
Classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  That's true, but, if you look at how university budgets have changed over the past few decades, it's clear that they aren't supposed to be. They've been aggressively holding educational costs down (see: adjunct professor), while the costs for non-educational services such as career counseling and "student support" (not entirely sure what that entails; my alma mater didn't have it as far as I'm aware) have mushroomed.
- barnabee 6y ago
  This. The value I got out of university was mostly not tuition, but I think overall, (very pre-pandemic) the whole package was worth it. I've learnt vastly more by reading, engaging with people, and doing both before and after university though, for much less cost. I've also never been on a paid training or course that was worth the cost and didn't involve something above and beyond the tuition (networking, project based, access to facilities/tools/data, etc.). The only times this obviously isn't true are when you're gaining some required or coveted industry certification, and then that's only because of the value attached to it, not the value of the learning itself vs other ways to gain the same skills/knowledge. The lesson for me has been that for any course or school there's got to be an expected benefit way beyond the perceived value of the tuition, and that most of the time this doesn't exist. I think paid training in companies is likely as popular as it is mostly because it feels a bit like a vacation and most companies don't allow, or don't make it socially acceptable, for people to take sufficient time off for their own long term wellbeing.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    Ye well the major upside with a degree for me was forcing me to learn stuff I would never have bothered with. I mean, at the time when I started in uni I had no clue where to even begin. Nowadays I would prefer reading a book rather than taking classes, but I think that is because I went to uni and learned to learn. I feel it is the same with books on programming. They are worth reading first when you already know how to program.

mumblemumble 6y ago

Online courses lack class discussions that are key to making courses engaging. This sounds absolutely nothing like how things worked in the online degree I received. I don't know what is typical elsewhere. I will say, from watching my son's Zoom-based classroom sessions, that Zoom seems to be almost specifically designed to yield a poor classroom experience. For reasons that I believe would also apply to Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc. I am glad that my school used a meeting platform that was intended for educational use.

electriclove 6y ago
What meeting platform did your school use? Which school?
- CivBase 6y ago
  My university was using Adobe Connect almost a decade ago. It is way better than video call apps like Zoom.
  - amadeuspzs 6y ago
    I couldn't disagree more. Connect is written in Flash and has serious stability issues. For better or for worse Zoom is stable and intuitive for adult learning.
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      I don't care to weigh in on any questions about how it's built. I also didn't experience any stability problems, but this was admittedly a while ago now, and the product may have subsequently taken a turn for the worse. As far as the user experience goes, though, I would say that Adobe Connect makes it possible to create an online classroom in a way that just isn't possible in Zoom. Which is in no way contradictory to the idea that Zoom is stable and intuitive for adult learning. "Adult learning" is a wide net that covers a lot of learning situations that do not necessarily involve or benefit from a classroom environment. YouTube and printed books are also stable and intuitive for adult learning. But, for educators who are scrambling to adapt their pre-existing curricula to distance learning, I would argue that preserving as many elements as possible from the working environment that they're used to is pretty key to giving them the best chance possible at a successful transition.

deleted 6y ago

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Dwolb 6y ago

What’s missing from all these online courses is a sense of community. The forums are ok but they’re not very vibrant. For an example of a vibrant community, I’d look toward what video games, such as Rocket League, have created. Players have a specific ranking based on competition stats. They level up when they when a sufficient number of games within their ranking. Progression through the game doesn’t have to be a solo endeavor because players can look to the community for how to improve. The community not on my celebrates wins and gives advice on losses, they offer free coaching that can result in paid tutoring [1]. Not only that, but on average the community members are positive and light-hearted. I think other skill-based activities could learn a lot from how and why these communities function and incorporate those aspects into their platforms to help students succeed. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/hv2vus/coaching_tuesday_20200721/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/hv2vus/coachi...

read_if_gay_ 6y ago
No doubt that the community around courses could be improved, but I think it's also a matter of enthusiasm. People are probably a lot more enthusiastic about Rocket League than about some online degree. (Whether that's how it should be is a different issue...) Anyway, that naturally leads to higher participation in communities etc. So I don't know if online course makers even have that much influence over community building in the first place.
- Dwolb 6y ago
  For sure but then the question I would have is can we take cues from enthusiasm around Rocket League and bring those into the community? The real time ranking system I think is the root of a lot of this. It allows people to know where they stand and they can look to the community on how to improve their game.
  - cylentwolf 6y ago
    I think a real time ranking system for students at a university that is visible by all is just going to be targeted for greedy or ambitious people looking to convert it into jobs or money. If I am in the top 10 percent of the rankings in Rocket League sure I can make a few grand streaming, but if I am in the top 10 percent of rankings at a school I can get a better job than the rest. What are the bottom 90 percent's motivation for helping people improve at that point?

auiya 6y ago

I did an online MS at Georgia Tech. I paid full price tuition for the program. Literally 3 years after I graduated, they announced a slash in price by 80 (EIGHTY!) percent. The program was excellent, and if not for my company offering to pay for it I wouldn't have considered it. I can absolutely recommend it now that it's so much cheaper, but it was also designed to be a remote program from the start.

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago
OMSA/OMSCS worth it? I don’t want a résumé item that may be considered watered down in the future. Plus, with more self-study, can’t you can get into most tech companies because they tend to be more open?
- eugenekolo 6y ago
  Depending on your field a masters degree in anything is seen equivalent to every other masters degree. And on the other side of the spectrum, they're not considered useful by many employers/jobs.
  - j0hnml 6y ago
    While the mere presence of MS on a resume may not mean much to employers, I almost think it’s more important to weigh its usefulness against your current skill set. For instance, I work in tech but majored in something other than CS, and so I sometimes feel “weak” when I need to write more formal code. I’m going back to get my masters in CS so I can learn some of the foundational aspects that I unfortunately missed out on. I’m not as much concerned with fluffing my resume as I am filling the CS gaps I currently have. Now if I did major in CS, I’m not sure I would still pursue a masters. But I didn’t, so there’s certainly value there for me.
    - 2snakes 6y ago
      This has been brought up before on HN: https://teachyourselfcs.com https://teachyourselfcs.com You don't get initiated by the teachers, you get initiated by doing the practice problems so you can develop schema for what strategy works.

mellosouls 6y ago

The title could be misread as indicating online tuition is not worth the cost generally, which is a different matter. The article is actually making the fair point that students paying for IRL classes are being ill-served by online replacements with no discount. It mis-steps though in generalising to making claims more generally about online tuition; a physical university (say) panicked by lockdown into rush-providing online replacements for normal service is hardly likely to be able to match the quality of service of (decent) institutions that specialise in online learning.

Ijumfs 6y ago

I just have to say, that web site has some of the most offensive features. In-article tables of links to other stories, ads up the wazoo, a huge sort of task bar thing that swoops down. What are they thinking? I didn't even read the article. I don't have TIME for sites like that any more.

game_the0ry 6y ago

A couple of years ago, I was looking into MOOCs for tech education, Udacity's nano degree in particular. I remember stumbling across a video on Youtube where some Udacity folks were discussing the merits of online education with college professors and admins. What stood out to me was how vehemently the college folks were against online education. They were visibly livid - there was no way substituting a live class room environment with online education could be as effective, they shouted. They were obviously threatened - they did not want the world they were so comfortable with to change. Now they are singing a different tune once they don't have a choice - not only are colleges embracing online classes, they are trying to justify full cost for it too. College students heading into the fall semester should take a gap year. I know I would.

dudul 6y ago
It reminds me of all this companies that were forcing employees to relocate because good work can only be done when everyone is seating in the open space for 9 hours every day. Suddenly, once this is not possible anymore, no biggy, just work from home! It's fine!
- ck425 6y ago
  I don't know where you work but no one where I work considers the current situation fine. It's workable but it's definitely no where near 100%.
  - User23 6y ago
    I like it because it disadvantages the politically competent types while advantaging the technically competent types. Guess which category I fall into.
    - nondave 6y ago
      There can be disadvantages for technically competent folks too. I'm really missing going over technical ideas on a whiteboard with colleagues.

ta17711771 6y ago

Many in person classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.

f6v 6y ago

And here I am in Belgium, paying 2000 a year for a Masters degree.

cpursley 6y ago
Also, half your paycheck goes to the government and European tech salaries are nearly half that of the US. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kmonsen 6y ago
  I mean I lived in both ca and ny and the tax rate is pretty close to European ones. When I lived in Switzerland just the federal rate was higher than my Swiss tax rate. The big difference in total compensation after tax between Western Europe and USA is in the compensation part for people that are considered highly skilled. For example for me I get at least 2x here in CA compared to what I would get in Norway and Switzerland. In the UK and Germany the difference is even larger. For people that are not highly skilled it is the other way round, they would earn significantly more in Europe. Another difference there is that life in Europe is much nicer for the average middle class, but personally I think it’s nicer in the US for upper middle class, the top 10%.
  - stainforth 6y ago
    Should that quality be maintained for the top 10%?
    - kmonsen 6y ago
      This was meant more descriptive than add a political view. In my opinion I would change the taxation rates for the .1% first, Will at the same time importing life quality for the bottom let’s say 60%. A lot of this is not in taxes but due to how society is organized. This would indirectly change life for top 10% as you cannot as cheap hire people for services.

motohagiography 6y ago

Depends on what you think of the value of school is. Given the distribution of outcomes and skills, the effect of a degree for the vast majority in the long tail of graduates is just tribal affiliation with the people who achieve in the upper percentiles. For most people, simply paying for the credential without attending classes would deliver most of the value. Traditionally, this was known as "purchasing a commission," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the_British_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...), and today we do the same thing with student debt. Online classes may be a forcing function for the discussion of how to price education, but the question itself has been the elephant in the room for decades.

harias 6y ago
Called signalling in economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
- motohagiography 6y ago
  I'd argue signalling is the effect, where the tribal initiation is the mechanism and purchasing a commission is the example precedent, but we're certainly in the same realm of ideas.
- stainforth 6y ago
  Interesting, can this be merged in some way with the concept of signs in postmodernism a la Baudrillard? It would be an interesting marriage
criddell 6y ago
What are you talking about when looking at the distribution of outcomes? What are the outcomes? The value of school for me was (in no particular order) learning how to learn, how to tackle large projects with difficult questions, how to work with other people, how to manage my time doing all of that, building a network of both people in my area and outside of my area, smoothly transitioning from childhood to adulthood, having freedom to explore and discover the things that truly interested me, and having a really good time doing all of that. A huge part of the value of school came from staying on-campus in student dorms my first two years. Living with a large group of people expanded and enriched my social life tremendously. I loved being so close to the school and libraries and all the facilities. Its hard to know for sure but the social skills I gained are probably as valuable as the computer science education in creating the life I have now.

mymythisisthis 6y ago

What's missing from this discussion is a history of Universities. In the 19th century, as a student, you paid to be tutored by a professor to pass a standardized exam. Professors were paid by for tutoring. Profs were expected to teach classes, but were not paid for it. It was a means of recruiting students to tutor. Classes were also small, more like seminars.

HarryHirsch 6y ago

Online teaching works particularly well for the tutorial model, where you have a small number (<5) of students plus the instructor engaged in discussion. It fails completely for large classes. That's not dissimilar to the situation before the plague.

lowmemcpu 6y ago
> It fails completely for large classes. Large in-person classes you don't even have discussions. Some universities have lecture halls of 400-600 students, and you have to go ask a TA for help later in the week > That's not dissimilar to the situation before the plague. So I think you agree and are saying that it's the same?
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  It's absolutely the same. Before, you'd outsource homework and grading in the large introductory classes to awful proprietary tech, the fact that now you have people who can't put a proper recording of their class together doesn't make it worse.
fullshark 6y ago
Wow I'd argue the opposite. Large classes / lectures I didn't even interact with the professor in person, might as well just get that info online. Smaller classes I found in person discussions much more valuable.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  In the large classes you still need to have tutorials, this time led by the TAs. On-line TA herding is difficult, I don't envy anyone who is doing this right now. There's also the hallway track, students organizing themselves into study groups and interest groups. Doing that on-line is quite impossible, how do you have random encounters after class?

s4n1ty 6y ago

This may be the catalyst for a long-overdue reckoning in higher education in the US - it's insane that people are entering the workforce at 23 with a lifetime of unforgivable debt for, in many cases, worthless degrees.

manishsharan 6y ago

The issue is that some of the most valuable experiences and learning comes from in-person interactions with the professor in classroom and with classmates on campus. Purely online classes completely ignore this aspect of learning. Granted we can't do in-person interaction in the current environment, but surely we could give it more thought . The current online classes focus on only delivering the lecture as opposed to encourage learning.

MattGaiser 6y ago

I think it depends on what you think an academic degree gets you. If you are looking for education, it may be worth it. If you are looking for the signal to employers, it may be worth it as long as they don’t water down the reputation by admitting more students and employers don’t devalue it for being online. If you are looking for connections, networking, and resume building opportunities, then it is definitely not worth it. My problem is that the benefits I got from university were nearly all in the two latter areas.

nickik 6y ago

Collage in general has never been about education. Collage is about getting a stamp on your head saying that you have been to collage. Meaning that you spend years learning a bunch of stuff and you didn't do stop shit to kicked out. I guess for engineering where there is significant equipment necessary this doesn't hold. But the majority of collage is pointless, all the knowledge you need is available outside of collage but then nobody can verify that you actually learned it. This book is pretty hard hitting but it provides a lot of solid analysis about what the problem is: The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

augustt 6y ago
Well at the very least you'll learn how college is spelled.
- nickik 6y ago
  I'm not an native English speaker and I have dyslexia, there is a reason I became a programmer.
cameronbrown 6y ago
Yep. They have a monopoly on the verification of knowledge and not knowledge itself. That's why brand names are so valued.
taylodl 6y ago
Engineering, Science, Medicine, Dentistry, Law, Education, Architecture - those are just a few things that are extremely impractical or even impossible to learn on your own. Let me know how your surgery with your self-taught surgical teams works out for you and how your subsequent lawsuit with your self-taught lawyer goes.

macarthy12 6y ago

Offline classes not worth the cost of tuition.

sakex 6y ago

I'm doing a research on the way students learn programming in online classes. We tried making the student interact with each others by using Zoom's "breakout rooms" feature with mixed results. What's interesting is that while students attended to online classes way less, they understood the class content way more, because they felt less pressure and could work at their on speed.

abvdasker 6y ago

I agree. For some degrees it's less of an issue but for areas of study like chemistry, biology, physics and many others, access to the college's physical resources like laboratories is part of what you're paying for. I don't know how you solve this problem with the current constraints imposed by COVID-19, but you can't expect these students to pay full-price for an inferior education.

HarryHirsch 6y ago
You won't find anyone willing to teach several sections a day in a teaching laboratory with 24 students, the risk of infection is (correctly) perceived as too high. The market has adapted, there are kits to do experiments at home. Research labs are much less densely packed, and in-person interaction is less. In less affected states lab-based research is starting again.
- thomasfortes 6y ago
  > there are kits to do experiments at home. For high school level, sure. But I can't see a sane way to let students handle acids like I did in chemistry labs during college, and physics labs have equipment that is too complex/expensive/dangerous to send to the students.
  - swiley 6y ago
    You can buy a lot of those chemicals in Walmart and Lows in the US (ex: Walmart usually has fairly pure concentrated sulfuric acid. Lows has most common organic solvents.) The lab equipment is also pretty easy to buy on amazon (I’ve bought some trying to teach myself, although I’d recommend against buying anything from China, It always seems to disappear somewhere around LA.) There’s an entire community of autodidacts that do this sort of thing at home as a hobby. They have lots of advice on PPE, materials handling, storage, where to find papers and books etc. Some of them even record experiments instead of just writing them down so everyone can watch.
    - deleted 6y ago

xigency 6y ago

1) College itself is not worth the cost of full tuition. College tuition costs have increased above the inflation rate for decades to become enormous. 2) Online education can be equal to in-person education and is worth the same cost as in-person education. The overall college experience is subjective, but you can learn everything you need to from reading a textbook and completing assignments and taking tests, all of which are the same in an online setting.

boojack 6y ago

It's mind-boggling how quick and drastic this shift is happening in terms of the value and importance of college education. A gap year sounds like one solution. But chances are many of these people would have figured out something that work for them (greater impact, for less money) that others will adopt and follow. Much of the impact will be here to stay.

x87678r 6y ago

I read the headline and assumed this is about free online MOOC classes. I'm starting to think they are worth less than zero as well. So much time spent listening. Its better to get a book and try stuff yourself.

mikequinlan 6y ago

If this is true then online degrees are worth less than in-person degrees.

xigency 6y ago
Exactly. That is the premise I disagree with. The general sentiment here is that people have used college as an extremely expensive social club and believe that is its greatest value. I wouldn’t think of investing $100,000 of my current or future income in order to make friends or learn about myself. I hope I’m not alone in thinking that I learned difficult material that I would not have grasped on my own and had self-improvement from meeting academic challenges under my own responsibility. Maybe this is rare, but I have directly applied my undergrad education to solving problems and used its foundation for learning more. The social aspect of college is not itemized on the tuition statement. The cost of tuition is related to the quality of education directly provided by the school.

thecleaner 6y ago

I would think the same thing. This seems weird that Massive Open Online Courses are so expensive. I would think that having so many subscribers or a global distribution channel would enable one to drop costs significantly like one tenth of original or something thanks to the volume. In a world where workers need to constantly upskill themselves so as to stay relevant I am quite surprised why online education is being priced so high.

deleted 6y ago

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kumarvvr 6y ago

Despite all the discussion about online classes, there is one fundamental aspect of online teaching, that isn't fully 'disrupted' Keeping students attention on the class. Technology may improve, economics may change, industries created and destroyed, but ultimately, if the students attention is not held, everything is lost. In today's world, it has become extremely difficult to even keep focus, with the myriad of distractions abound. I guess in the future, every city will have tens or even hundreds of virtual training centers, which are classes but taught online, by professors in far away universities. Students will gather here for the classroom experience, keep focus and still get quality education. Perhaps a new idea of "Infrastructure as a service" I wish that were true, and I am already seeing signs of that happening in India. Think of how much savings and ease it will bring to a students life, if they can have the convenience of going to college a few streets away combined with the advantage of learning from the greatest minds of humanity.

save_ferris 6y ago
I think this stems from a general disinterest of the focus issue pertaining to technology at large. I work from home and have the exact same problem staying focused on work. Phone operating systems still treat features like “zen mode” as second-class citizens while not providing enough granular access to third party apps to implement features that encourage putting down the phone successfully. There are still too many ways to work around these kinds of features and apps like Freedom for iOS do an OK but not great job at allowing you to restrict access to apps and sites on a schedule.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  There are a lot of apps that provide the zen mode. However all of them are only as effective as the person's will to use them. In my view, Extreme cases of Phone / Internet addiction can only be solved by physically removing the user from the device. Like you do for drugs and alcohol. I am thoroughly convinced any other method will not be useful. Of course, I base these thoughts solely on my experience and I have been trying to do that since last one year. I have tried many apps, lots of self control and forcing myself to be away from my phone physically, only to be under it's spell in a few days. The most I held out was 2 days. While being physically away from the phone / device is not always practical, I have found that timers for apps are slightly more effective, as they repeatedly warn and close the app. I found zen modes to be not really effective, as they shut off everything and ultimately you end up removing them for one reason or the other.

duxup 6y ago

I sometimes worry that a lot of the online class feedback that while not wrong, is based on a bunch of self selecting folks who are good at / motivated to / prefer taking online classes. If somehow we magically switched to online classes and everyone was good at making them ... I worry we'd loose a lot of people / the education quality could drop and we wouldn't know. Granted that also implies that folks who aren't good at in person classes may have been lost for decades already.

wutbrodo 6y ago
> Granted that also implies that folks who aren't good at in person classes may have been lost for decades already. For what it's worth, I probably went to about 10% of my classes in college and I got a great education (CS+math) from a combination of the course materials, exams, and working with other students.

mnm1 6y ago

What's the value of an online course? The market says $0. There are plenty of free, online courses. What is the value of an online degree? Well that depends who is awarding it, but that value is unrelated to the value of courses offered. It's the value of a status symbol. Attending online courses will make sense financially only if that status symbol is really amazing, given the current prices of even cheap public universities. If I was a student, I'd do anything to take a year off. Even at high status schools, or perhaps especially at high status schools, missing out on the socialization and experience just to get status a year or two earlier is unlikely to pay off better.

known 6y ago

No vaccine = No school

taylodl 6y ago

I see a lot of people saying take a gap year. I'm the father of a daughter who's starting college this fall. Here are some things needing to be considered: - You've been accepted for this fall. The college is under no obligation to delay your start until next year, especially when there's a fresh batch of incoming students. - You think it's tough to enroll in classes this fall? Wait until you double the number of students all trying to take the same classes! That should be fun! - My daughter has 4 different scholarships. They're all predicated on her starting this fall. Take it or lose it. These scholarships are paying over 50% of all her costs. Since she's going to a State University that means I can afford most if not all the rest leaving her with a minimal amount of debt. - It's her freshman year. I feel more sorry for the juniors and seniors. Most freshman year classes can be done online. The more advanced the class, the more you should be attending in person. - Silver lining - incoming freshman will have to focus more on scholastics and academics and not partying. - Her major, pharmaceutical drug research & development, can't be done online. Yes, there are some classes you can do online, and most of those are in the freshman year, but ultimately you have to have in-person instruction. Especially for the labs. - Her school isn't in one of the "hot spots" and has a governor and mayor more-or-less enforcing mask laws. The dorm housing density has been decreased by 50% - which has left some of the students scrambling to find off-campus housing. All the incoming freshman are guaranteed housing. - She got her dorm assignment yesterday and the steps the university is taking to keep students safe. Daily temperature checks, contact tracing, mix of in-person and virtual classes, on-campus COVID testing with 6 hour test result turn around time, quarantine dorms, dining halls are delivery only. I should mention this university has one of the best research hospitals in the country and a huge medical complex serving the public. Finally, ask yourself this: why do you think anything is going to be any better 1 year from now? Almost every other country in the world is getting back to normal but the United States has done very little in the past 7 months and so far there's no indication that's changing anytime soon. There's no reason to believe things are going to substantially improve by this time next year unless we start taking the steps to make that so. Even a vaccine may not help as the early estimates for the cost of a vaccine is $1,000 per dose. Health insurers aren't going to want to pay that kind of money for everybody. Will the U.S. government? We blew through $7 trillion this year with very little to show for it so who knows?

caenorst 6y ago

MOOC that have been around for years are more prepared for online classes and cheaper than any of those universities that will make you pay for maintenance of facilities that you cannot even use. And don't you tell me that they cannot save on electricity and cancelled activities. The price of tuition is not following any offer-and-demand, they are just using the fact that you are in the middle of your studies and you can't stop now, hope that will make people realise the kind of mafia those university are.

kogus 6y ago
I think your second point is incorrect. I work closely with several universities, and the current situation has increased, not reduced, the pressure on their budget. IT infrastructure upgrades, producing training materials, the loss of rent income from university owned housing, and many other factors all combine to far outweigh any savings from not having to run the hallway water fountains. Having said that, a university telling a student they must pay full price for less than full value is expecting the customer to essentially give a charitable donation to a business model "because we need it". To attempt an analogy: if a grocery store had its warehouse burn down, they would not then be able to turn around and charge 10% more than market price on all of their items "because they needed it". That disaster would be a cost they'd have to absorb. Universities are at least partially insulated from having to respond to the market like a business would, because of the high cost and difficulty of switching schools in the middle of an education. My sense is that if things can return to normal within a year, then they'll recover from this. If they can't open for in person classes for longer than that, then students will take the leap and move away from traditional universities permanently.

RobertSmith 6y ago

Most of the teenagers will not like to sit in front of a screen the whole day at home. Also, online classes will not give space for any outdoor sports.

7thaccount 6y ago

It's a shame. I'd like to work on an online masters in engineering to supplement my bachelor's. The cost for 4 years of an online program that actually has relevant classes of interest is like $50k even with my company paying over $5k a year. That's rediculous. They try to sell it to me based off of the potential earnings it could lead to, but I'm already well established in my industry (capped out on the technical track), so the degree is 100% worthless from a career point of view. I really just want to learn new things. I'd gladly pay some money, but it is currently priced 4x higher than I can ever justify paying. So instead, I buy the textbooks and read in my spare time.

faet 6y ago
Some schools offer non-degrees and/or the ability to audit a class. I can apply to be a non-degree student at the local college. Then audit a class for free (no credit/grades). The scope of auditing depends on the professor, I've had some that will grade coursework for non-degree students, others just let them into the lectures. Total cost would be like $25 + books.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
You have to consider the opportunity cost as well. Time away from working is income you could have already earned.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Some other countries have free college, so "worth it" is very relative.

jb775 6y ago

Are there any schools that are opening their online material to the public? What a great opportunity to spread knowledge. With all this "defunding" talk, it's probably a good time to reassess how much taxpayer money goes to universities in relation to how much they give back to taxpayers.

phendrenad2 6y ago

I hope that as a side-effect of this extended remote schooling, fully-online degrees become more acceptable to hiring managers. I'd like to finish my BSCS degree I started over a decade ago, but when you live and work in the most expensive place in America (the Bay Area), there aren't a lot of in-person options. Gotta pay rent.

spullara 6y ago

In person classes are not worth the cost of full tuition.

chadash 6y ago

There's something about being on a campus that made a big difference for me in college. Some experiences that I had that are hard to replicate remotely include: * Group discussions in seminars. When you are in person, there's a better dynamic to holding a discussion. You can read others' body language and see when to speak up. Zoom works fine for very small groups (<7) but anything larger than that and it seems to get out of hand in my experience. * Impromptu chats after class with professors to ask questions that I don't want to bug everyone else with. Same goes for chats during office hours. * The opportunity to stumble upon events that you otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to. For example, I'm not muslim, but I attended a series of lectures on Islam aimed at Muslim students, put on by the Muslim student association. I learned a lot there and got to speak to fellow students and learn about their views and experiences firsthand. You're not gonna find an event like that online, and even if you did, you'd have to have filtered through all the other garbage on the internet to find it. * Playing intramural broomball after pre-gaming with my friends. Aside from good memories, the social connections you make in college are very important and can help you a lot later in life. Many years later and it's great having a network of people in all sorts of industries. * Living in a freshman dorm and getting exposed to people from many different backgrounds for the first time in my life. If you grew up in one place, then almost by definition, you didn't have much diversity in K-12. You can't really replicate these remotely and in my mind, these sorts of things were half the value of college for me. And this is aside from the fact that I personally find it very hard to pay attention on a zoom lecture, especially if I'm sitting through 4 or 5 of them a day.

rogerdickey 6y ago
I can't count the number of social interactions, big and small, that built my character and maturity. Not to mention life-long friendships formed, romantic relationships, and more. It's a unique and critical time when you are finally a free adult but don't yet have "real" obligations like a job or family. There is simply nothing in life that compares to an in-person college experience.
dwild 6y ago
I'm pretty sure you can replicate all that remotely... you may not have the tools to make theses easy to replicate right now (though I'm pretty sure it still possible), but that just show there's a market for theses tools. Facebook did just that when it got out, it made easier to move a IRL friendship to one online.

jb775 6y ago

The only thing that can really explain this is an elaborate form of price fixing between universities. If one university announced they were slashing "online-only" tuition costs, others would probably be forced to follow suit. It would be interesting to see a single reputable university drop tuition prices for "online-only", and offer automatic-transfer admittance to students already accepted into a similarly reputable school (e.g. if you go to Ohio State, you could quickly transfer to Penn State). That might trigger a race to the bottom, and reset tuition rates to what they rightfully should be. The reduced revenue could be made up by cutting the unnecessary ivory-tower jobs, reducing the inflated exec compensation, and reducing the unnecessary $50M+ on-campus construction projects.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
There's no reason for any university to do this unless they were for-profit (desperate for profits, respected) or failing (not respected).

mjparrott 6y ago

Many college classes are lightly attended and only mildly paid attention to already. I had a professor in college who would religiously take attendance every morning then after mid-terms and finals he would show a scatter plot of attendance versus test scores. There was mild correlation, but still plenty of cases outside what you'd expect (perfect attendance + terrible scores, or low/no attendance + high scores)

j_walter 6y ago

Most of the time online classes cost more than in person classes. This is not a factor of cost to give the class, but a factor of paying more for the convenience of taking the class online. I'm currently enrolled in a post-bac CS program that is >$500/credit hour. The on campus classes are $318/credit hour. Not all programs are like this (OMSCS comes to mind), but many are.

aazaa 6y ago

What's really gonna bake your noodle is the idea that remote workers are not worth the cost of full salary.

asdefghyk 6y ago

There should be slight reduction in tuition fees. For example lecture halls need no cleaning. However the physical buildings still need to be paid for during the pandemic.

m23khan 6y ago

As much as I dislike making students paying high tuition fees, as a Canadian, the alternative is worse I feel. What would end up happening should tuition fees be reduced overnight: - Universities / Community Colleges would experience a fiscal deficit (or substantial cut to their income). Here in Canada, that means taxpayers' will be on hook. - Should Educational institutions cut salaries of their staff - they would risk losing their top faculty and support staff. Just like people rush to support local businesses and local economy, they should also support their local education institutions. After all, they employ a large number of people and have a huge hand in inspiring next generation of workers and provide lots of social programs for local community. On another note, I often see people discussing merits of University degree / Community College diploma and often point out that Computer Science degree is not worth it. I beg to differ - the Modern World owes quiet a lot to army of University / Community college graduates who have made quantum leap in civilization's advancement possible. Just over 40 years ago, overwhelming majority of workers didn't have a post-secondary education. But since then, around the World post-secondary education has experienced a boom and we that all corners of the World has experienced substantial gains in their economic output which in turn has led to better health conditions and a better living standard.

xwowsersx 6y ago

Offline classes aren't worth the cost of full tuition either.

jiveturkey 6y ago

in person classes are not worth the cost of full tuition! education isn't paid for on a value-received basis. it's cost-plus. and shifting online due to covid doesn't reduce costs that much. Yes, there is some lower cost due to facilities being empty, but i'd wager that on balance, the expense ratio is actually higher. yes, students are not going to get the same value from their tuition dollars.

throwawayway9 6y ago

Online classes should be deeply discounted in most cases, and free in the others. It's time to end this college tuition scam once and for all.

lanecwagner 6y ago

In-class classes aren't worth it either... Modern tech facilitates advances in education that haven't been taken advantage of. We need to: * Gamify the experience * Focus on mastery * Build a community online that replaces the classroom I'm currently working on a project that aims to do the above, but admittedly we are in the early stages: https://classroom.qvault.io https://classroom.qvault.io

trilinearnz 6y ago

I am taking an online MBA course with my local university and there are many benefits to an online format. First, the lectures are recorded and can be rewound for future reference. This is invaluable in the tougher papers. Second, we utilise the chat function in Zoom which allows the whole class to participate in a "full duplex" fashion without one person monopolising the airwaves with a single conversation (I should mention that this technique is only used occasionally when broad input is required). If the lecturer is facilitating properly (ensuring students are engaged and paying attention, calling upon quieter members), then the class can be as successful as an in-person one. The only negatives I've seen are: easier to be distracted (no one can really tell you're checking Reddit), the online setting with it's mute/unmute approach sets a higher barrier to entry for participating in discussion.