35 ms·

Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

401 points by danso 6y ago

akhilcacharya 6y ago
Meanwhile, my alma mater is still resuming in person. I wonder what the difference is... [0]: https://abc11.com/coronavirus-classes-nc-state-college/6364012/ https://abc11.com/coronavirus-classes-nc-state-college/63640...
- eitally 6y ago
  I lived in Cary for a long time and also attended NCSU for grad school. I've been following the conversation on related sub-reddits and it seems like the biggest concern is what students are doing when they're not on campus: parties, crowded gatherings down Hillsborough St, etc. Community spread will still happen ... just that campus activities will not be the main driver.
  - AlphaWeaver 6y ago
    I'm a current student at NC State, and have been relatively satisfied with the University's planning and policies on paper... That said, this is obviously a cash grab, and they're ignoring that students aren't going to follow their rules when they're off campus (Hillsborough St, parties, as you said above.) I've already seen it happening... this isn't going to go well.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The difference is the state government. Stanford doesn't exactly oppose the state's guidance, but I think their announcement makes it clear that they would have opened the campus if the state guidance had been a bit less strict.
Overtonwindow 6y ago
Have any universities stated how they will handle all of the fees that are tacked on to tuition, such as the parking fees?
- nathanaldensr 6y ago
  I think by this point we can guess what their intent, generally, is: to keep the money. Schools have had plenty of time to say that tuition will be reduced if the campuses are closed, but I have yet to find a single major school announcing this.
  - 32notp 6y ago
    Princeton's tuition was reduced by 10%. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/07/06/princeton-announces-plan-fall-2020-guidelines-undergraduates-returning-campus https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/07/06/princeton-announce...
barbecue_sauce 6y ago
I was always under the impression that the word "frosh" was weird slang for freshmen, not a word considered just as proper for written communication.
- BlueScreenDeath 6y ago
  Although frosh refers to a first-year student and has a resemblance to fresh, freshman is not believed to be the source of the word. More likely, frosh is from the dialectic German word for a frog, Frosch. ... Students already had a slang term for freshman, the diminutive freshie.
  - neltnerb 6y ago
    The question "what it is slang for" is different from the question "what is the word derived from". The prior may well change if everyone has a group delusion and believes it is slang for something different. The latter obviously not.
- danso 6y ago
  My immediate thought to your comment was that "frosh" is actually very common and accepted slang for "freshmen". That said, I did not expect to see it in the article's lede – or in the president's official statement [0]: > We will continue planning with the hope and expectation of bringing undergraduates back to Stanford at the earliest possible time. If public health conditions allow, we plan to invite frosh, sophomores and new transfer students to be in residence on campus for the winter quarter, and juniors and seniors for the spring quarter. [0] https://healthalerts.stanford.edu/covid-19/2020/08/13/autumn-update/ https://healthalerts.stanford.edu/covid-19/2020/08/13/autumn...
  - TechBro8615 6y ago
    I imagine that's because "freshmen" is problematic in $CURRENT_YEAR, but it sounds too weird to say "freshpeople" so they went with the existing slang of "frosh."
BlueScreenDeath 6y ago
I hope universities die. Along with the insurance market, for-profit medicine, the US Petro-Dollar cartel and software patents. The system is broken. The very existence of Stanford is a symptom of the problem.
tyingq 6y ago
My son's state university is forcing students to return in person. I fully expect a notable outbreak in some college to start a wave of media noise, followed by all the universities sending everyone back home again. Sucks because students are signing leases, moving crap, buying meal plans, etc, right now. Aside from the obvious safety issues.
- epmaybe 6y ago
  It's absurd here in my state as well. We have peak number of cases in one of the biggest college towns, and students are moving in as we speak. I give it two or three weeks before we cancel everything again. As an aside, equally scummy are universities that pulled the rug from under students very close to move in. My sister got kicked out of her housing by the university a few days before move in, and basically had to accept that she would be staying home for the fall, as rent prices near school nearly doubled overnight.
  - neltnerb 6y ago
    I hate to be all like "to be fair" but wouldn't it have been even worse if they'd waited until after she moved there and then sent her home and made her move twice instead of canceling a move once? Do you mean they're still having in-person classes required but are just not offering housing? That's definitely scummy, that's the kind of thing that would have changed people's admission acceptance decisions.
    - epmaybe 6y ago
      Some in person classes, yes. My sister luckily only has online ones. Regarding when, I think the obvious answer should have been to cancel in person classes back in may or June.. We knew covid was here to last even then.
  - pc86 6y ago
    Are you in Pennsylvania because that sounds exactly like my experience. I'm extremely thankful that I graduated long ago and don't have children or relatives having to deal with this.
eric4smith 6y ago
I firmly think there is a sea change going on from standard “college” degrees to more practical training that will be a mix of apprenticeship and solid training like air/vac, electricians and online skills, since the vast majority of jobs don’t really need a college degree. This has actually begun already at the high school level. Once again I believe net/net the beer virus will be positive for America in the long run - even if only on the educational level. Some will insist that a portion of the population will be disenfranchised and that is true. But our education assumptions and priorities have been wrong for so long now that it has actually become the weakness of an entire generation for the last 10-20 years. Just think of it! In a few months we are completely re-examining the utility of taking out a student loan that many cannot pay back in their working lifetimes. We’re looking and complaining if colleges will go online or reopen in person classes - but there is so much more going underneath that conversation. This is maybe (hopefully) the last generation of the “underwater basket weaving” so-called useless degrees.
- nsnick 6y ago
  No one is deciding to work a trade instead of going to Stanford.
  - fortran77 6y ago
    How many Stanford students are even capable of working a trade?
    - 32notp 6y ago
      What do you mean by that?
      - war1025 6y ago
        Would you be equally confused if it was phrased the other way? "How many trade workers are even capable of going to Stanford?" People like to talk about "grit" in white collar circles. If you want to see real "grit" go talk to the blue collar people who do shitty jobs at the expense of their personal health so their kids can have a better life. The working class has an understanding of self sacrifice that is largely absent from more well-off groups.
anonunivgrad 6y ago
Let the college kids get sick. They are extremely unlikely to have any serious effects from covid. At least on a college campus they won’t infect older family members. Herd immunity on campus would be reached very quickly. The few with serious preexisting conditions can stay home until that happens. The level of fear is frankly ridiculous. People get sick and people die. One day, we will all die. That is the human condition. Life must go on. This is not the Black Death. A 1% fatality rate, mostly of people already on the cusp of death, is not a reason to bring society to a halt, to lock children inside for months.
- everydaydriver 6y ago
  Even Cuomo mentioned in April that closing down colleges and having students return to live with, in some case, elderly relatives, may not have been the best public health policy.
  - matz1 6y ago
    Is the policy is to have 0 death and to ignore the damage from lockdown? Then yeah its not the best policy.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  This (over) reaction makes me worried about a real pandemic, should one ever come.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- SamuelAdams 6y ago
  Do you have sources saying the fatality rate is capped at 1%?
  - chasd00 6y ago
    nothing is capped during an ongoing pandemic but yeah given we're seeing around 40% asymptomatic, 1% seems about right if not a little on the high side. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html#box https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
feralimal 6y ago
I think we're not demanding technological, remote learning enough yet! We will have to go through this charade a couple of times more. IMO, all teaching as we know/knew it is gone. And those controlling the governance will be happy about that as it removes unnecessary costs.
trekrich 6y ago
good might stop the student union from taking over the place!
xwdv 6y ago
It used to be the case that even if you took out massive student loans to attend elite schools, at least the in-person experience and networking opportunities would be worth it. Now you don’t even get that. You get some bullshit online instruction that is little more than a glorified MOOC, and when you finally graduate, you have to compete for remote jobs with people from all across the country, and get outbid by people with the same skills as you but willing to work for peanuts because the cost of living in their area is practically negligible. Meanwhile, you have to keep paying for that massive student loan for most of your life with cash flow that comes in well below your expectations, wrecking your ability to save money and making retirement a distant fantasy that is about as probable as the dreams people have of becoming multi-millionaires. This should be an outrage, but no one will care. This will be the generation that takes it on the chin.
- hinkley 6y ago
  > and get outbid by people with the same skills as you but willing to work for peanuts More like: underbid by people whose skills are indistinguishable from yours. This is the same problem we've always had with remote work. As was explained to me, your salary is paid by someone who can't decide what your value is. If you don't know what something is worth, or in fact for, you might as well get the cheap one.
- naveen99 6y ago
  Networking doesn’t have to be in person. Facebook, twitter, linkedin, even hn work also. Facebook even started by facilitating intra college networking.
v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago
Is there still a possibility to defer? I would‘ve definitely done that back in April.
- ilyas121 6y ago
  Maybe if you don’t have loans or scholarships. This late in the game it’s almost certain that the loans and scholarships are cashed for the the bill by now
- epoch_100 6y ago
  Stanford student here. The answer is _yes_ -- afaik, they've extended the deferral deadline to August 19th to give people enough time to make a decision.
celnardur 6y ago
I feel like I can offer a unique perspective on this because I go to Notre Dame and we are just finishing the first week of classes with everyone back on campus. It's gone alright so far. All the cases so far have been traced back to off campus bars or parties. However, I expect it to get worse soon as cases start spreading on campus. If you want to see how Notre Dame is doing with cases and testing we have a dashboard here: https://here.nd.edu/our-approach/dashboard/ https://here.nd.edu/our-approach/dashboard/ I really hope we can make this work because, as an electrical engineer, most of my classes can't be moved online.
- JoshTko 6y ago
  So the only way this would work long term is if students on campus don't go to bars to parties?
  - celnardur 6y ago
    Yea pretty much. However, I would extend that to off campus students as well because as soon as someone has a really severe case (or dies) then we will probably all be sent home. Also it's not just bars or parties. You also have to worry about other gatherings. If people don't where masks and social distance those can become a problem as well. However, so far people have been mostly responsible with other on campus gatherings.
  - stingraycharles 6y ago
    Technically it could work if they keep distance and wear masks, but as it looks like this has proven to be pretty difficult for people aged 20-30 so far, mostly because the impact of COVID for them is fairly low.
  - breck 6y ago
    Or it may work because there’s close to zero chance of dying for college students, and we have far more immune people now than we did back in the spring. Sweden’s numbers are looking very interesting right now.
    - 6y ago
jimmar 6y ago
I'm a professor at a regional university. Not a big name school, but we have about 5,000 students. We would be bankrupt if we told students we'd only be offering classes online this fall because students, by an overwhelming majority, want the in-person experience. We know we would lose enrollment if we went fully online this fall, and the drop would be significant enough for the university to declare bankruptcy. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and other big names have enough reputation and big enough endowments to weather a storm of a temporary drop in enrollment due to shifting instruction online. Many universities cannot.
- jstepka 6y ago
  businesses go through these challenges all the time. the fat that gets trimmed is what makes them better.
  - jimmar 6y ago
    I agree that universities should do more to control costs. I'll push back just a bit that trimming all "fat" would make universities better. Where I am, the "fat" proposed for trimming is support for study abroad, music education, research conferences, and other things that enrich the lives of students and (hopefully) benefit society as a whole.
    - csa 6y ago
      That’s sad, since that seems more flesh that fat to me. The real “fat” is the admin bloat at most universities. Most schools will continue to be in a precarious financial situation until that fat is cut, imho.
      - mindslight 6y ago
        The fundamental problem is that music teachers tend to care about music, while administrators tend to care about protecting their own jobs. So any budget cuts tend to cut services, rather than reducing the overhead. This dynamic plays out everywhere with overgrown middle management.
nradov 6y ago
College students have to be somewhere. They don't magically disappear when schools are closed. So this just means they will be getting infected and transmitting the virus in other places. How is that better?
- dharmab 6y ago
  Undergrads are usually required to live in dense, on campus housing. Even in normal times, campus dorms are a hotspot of disease transmission.
  - randcraw 6y ago
    Navigating dorms often requires close contact (elevators, dining halls, shared bathrooms, shared rooms). Social gatherings in near-campus bars, fraternities, and on campus parties will invite infection, as party events at various summer hotspots have demonstrated already. Classrooms are probably the easiest venues of campus infection to mitigate.
- jmull 6y ago
  The virus doesn't spread at a constant rate just because people exist. An infected person comes into contact with other people to a sufficient degree to transmit the virus. Those people, in turn come into contact still other people to a sufficient degree to transmit the virus to them, etc. At a school, groups of students form, both officially (e.g., in classes) and unofficially (socially), often in ways that are friendly for transmitting the virus. Then groups reform (students go to their next class, or meet with another group of friends or attend another activity), then reform again... and again... and again, etc. Of course, this doesn't entirely go away when students are off campus. But the transmission vectors are so much smaller -- classes and groups for. other organizations don't occur; social groups tend to be smaller, more stable and with less overlap into other groups.
williesleg 6y ago
Weird, with all that brainpower they can't figure it out. Oh well, c'est la vie
kingkawn 6y ago
The self-righteous smugness on display in this thread about what is valuable to learn and what isn’t is mind boggling. Apparently humility and curiosity about things you don’t know aren’t on the stem curriculum y’all took
- chrisjarvis 6y ago
  Also its much easier to say every should go to school online when the person saying it most likely already got to go to college for real.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I am currently trying to convince a friend with teenagers that the 'going away' part of 'going away to college' is part of the entire point. Keeping your kid in town is just infantilizing them. And god knows we have enough enfants terribles in the world, and especially in tech. She's going to end up with a 28 year old son still living at home playing video games all day, while his degree rots away, wondering what went wrong. Maybe I should start logging dates and conversations. "Here it is, July 15th, 2019..."
    - ausbah 6y ago
      sorry, but this is wildly out of touch. going to a local university while living at home is not infantilizing anyone. it is a very financially smart and sensible plan that meets the needs for many people's goals in life. balancing classes, extracurriculars, a job, and other college activities that don't depend on your living situation is more than enough of sampling what "adulting" is like not everyone needs to, or can, move across the country for school living in their own place right out of high school
      - hinkley 6y ago
        There's a huge financial difference between going to school at a better school in-state than going out of state. I went to school an hour from home. And if we're going to talk about out of touch, I'm not sure where you're from where you think everyone who goes to school has a university in the same town as them, let alone with the degree program they want to attend. Changing your degree to one that's 'good enough' so you can stay in town? That's setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment. As far as I've heard, parking on campus at my alma mater is even worse than when I attended, so being 10 minutes off campus is more conceptual than factual. It's probably true that Uber is far cheaper than a dorm, even if you averaged 3 rides a day, especially these days, but there are loads of semi-spontaneous interactions that become stilted when you have to worry about getting back and forth across town. It's not doing your own laundry, it's the people you meet while doing your laundry.
known 6y ago
No vaccine = No school
- notassigned 6y ago
  If my school requires taking the vaccine, I will not be returning
halfFact 6y ago
Is there a rational reason behind this? The hyper scary emotional reaction is to close everything down, but given the at risk population is well understood- is this a money grab?(less brick and mortar costs) The 70 year old professors and obese 50 year old professors clearly are able to online teach, why make everyone lose? Heck if students went to college we'd get closer to herd immunity.
wuxb 6y ago
More or less, the "top" universities have maintained an ecosystem that attracts so many people over the course of their live and makes people believe that's the "road" to a better life. The problem is not about the pandemic, it's about what's in the mind of average people. People start to have doubts. It doesn't really matter what's the decision afterwards. People start to think about the next level things.
m0zg 6y ago
Reduce prices. Expand the number of students. Most STEM work does not require that you be present on campus. Heck, even "gender studies" degrees do not require it, if you'd like more of that. This is once in a decade opportunity to increase the throughput, _and_ increase the quality of their creme de la creme (because with more throughput more high performing outliers will randomly be caught). And they'll 100% squander it.
- non-entity 6y ago
  > Most STEM work does not require that you be present on campus I was under the impression that the reason more STEM degrees weren't online because you can't effectively replicate science or engineering labs at home very well. Most engineers (not software engineers) I've talked too said they wouldn't take an online degree very seriously.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    > I was under the impression that the reason more STEM degrees weren't online because you can't effectively replicate science or engineering labs at home very well. True, you can't. But I have a BS degree in physics, and I took a grand total of one physics lab in four years. (I also took one in chemistry.) True, that's not engineering. But then, most math people don't take many labs at all. So maybe this is true of the "TE" parts of STEM, and not so true of the "SM" parts.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    And that's why I said "most" STEM and not just "STEM". I'm sure labs could be set up to do experimental work. You just don't need the rest of the campus (and the blood sucking administrators that go with that). > they wouldn't take an online degree very seriously They would, if that was the only degree available. And I'm sure Stanford, of all places, can do it as well as anybody.
grensley 6y ago
A high school teacher once told us "Only half of what you learn here is in the classroom" and for college, I think that drops down to about 20%.
eitally 6y ago
My experience in engineering grad school (industrial) was that the most valuable things I learned were engineering econometrics and statistical simulation, both of which apply to nearly everything.

401 points by danso 6y ago

Meanwhile, my alma mater is still resuming in person. I wonder what the difference is... [0]: https://abc11.com/coronavirus-classes-nc-state-college/6364012/ https://abc11.com/coronavirus-classes-nc-state-college/63640...

eitally 6y ago
I lived in Cary for a long time and also attended NCSU for grad school. I've been following the conversation on related sub-reddits and it seems like the biggest concern is what students are doing when they're not on campus: parties, crowded gatherings down Hillsborough St, etc. Community spread will still happen ... just that campus activities will not be the main driver.
- AlphaWeaver 6y ago
  I'm a current student at NC State, and have been relatively satisfied with the University's planning and policies on paper... That said, this is obviously a cash grab, and they're ignoring that students aren't going to follow their rules when they're off campus (Hillsborough St, parties, as you said above.) I've already seen it happening... this isn't going to go well.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The difference is the state government. Stanford doesn't exactly oppose the state's guidance, but I think their announcement makes it clear that they would have opened the campus if the state guidance had been a bit less strict.

Overtonwindow 6y ago

Have any universities stated how they will handle all of the fees that are tacked on to tuition, such as the parking fees?

nathanaldensr 6y ago
I think by this point we can guess what their intent, generally, is: to keep the money. Schools have had plenty of time to say that tuition will be reduced if the campuses are closed, but I have yet to find a single major school announcing this.
- 32notp 6y ago
  Princeton's tuition was reduced by 10%. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/07/06/princeton-announces-plan-fall-2020-guidelines-undergraduates-returning-campus https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/07/06/princeton-announce...

barbecue_sauce 6y ago

I was always under the impression that the word "frosh" was weird slang for freshmen, not a word considered just as proper for written communication.

BlueScreenDeath 6y ago
Although frosh refers to a first-year student and has a resemblance to fresh, freshman is not believed to be the source of the word. More likely, frosh is from the dialectic German word for a frog, Frosch. ... Students already had a slang term for freshman, the diminutive freshie.
- neltnerb 6y ago
  The question "what it is slang for" is different from the question "what is the word derived from". The prior may well change if everyone has a group delusion and believes it is slang for something different. The latter obviously not.
danso 6y ago
My immediate thought to your comment was that "frosh" is actually very common and accepted slang for "freshmen". That said, I did not expect to see it in the article's lede – or in the president's official statement [0]: > We will continue planning with the hope and expectation of bringing undergraduates back to Stanford at the earliest possible time. If public health conditions allow, we plan to invite frosh, sophomores and new transfer students to be in residence on campus for the winter quarter, and juniors and seniors for the spring quarter. [0] https://healthalerts.stanford.edu/covid-19/2020/08/13/autumn-update/ https://healthalerts.stanford.edu/covid-19/2020/08/13/autumn...
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  I imagine that's because "freshmen" is problematic in $CURRENT_YEAR, but it sounds too weird to say "freshpeople" so they went with the existing slang of "frosh."

BlueScreenDeath 6y ago

I hope universities die. Along with the insurance market, for-profit medicine, the US Petro-Dollar cartel and software patents. The system is broken. The very existence of Stanford is a symptom of the problem.

tyingq 6y ago

My son's state university is forcing students to return in person. I fully expect a notable outbreak in some college to start a wave of media noise, followed by all the universities sending everyone back home again. Sucks because students are signing leases, moving crap, buying meal plans, etc, right now. Aside from the obvious safety issues.

epmaybe 6y ago
It's absurd here in my state as well. We have peak number of cases in one of the biggest college towns, and students are moving in as we speak. I give it two or three weeks before we cancel everything again. As an aside, equally scummy are universities that pulled the rug from under students very close to move in. My sister got kicked out of her housing by the university a few days before move in, and basically had to accept that she would be staying home for the fall, as rent prices near school nearly doubled overnight.
- neltnerb 6y ago
  I hate to be all like "to be fair" but wouldn't it have been even worse if they'd waited until after she moved there and then sent her home and made her move twice instead of canceling a move once? Do you mean they're still having in-person classes required but are just not offering housing? That's definitely scummy, that's the kind of thing that would have changed people's admission acceptance decisions.
  - epmaybe 6y ago
    Some in person classes, yes. My sister luckily only has online ones. Regarding when, I think the obvious answer should have been to cancel in person classes back in may or June.. We knew covid was here to last even then.
- pc86 6y ago
  Are you in Pennsylvania because that sounds exactly like my experience. I'm extremely thankful that I graduated long ago and don't have children or relatives having to deal with this.

eric4smith 6y ago

I firmly think there is a sea change going on from standard “college” degrees to more practical training that will be a mix of apprenticeship and solid training like air/vac, electricians and online skills, since the vast majority of jobs don’t really need a college degree. This has actually begun already at the high school level. Once again I believe net/net the beer virus will be positive for America in the long run - even if only on the educational level. Some will insist that a portion of the population will be disenfranchised and that is true. But our education assumptions and priorities have been wrong for so long now that it has actually become the weakness of an entire generation for the last 10-20 years. Just think of it! In a few months we are completely re-examining the utility of taking out a student loan that many cannot pay back in their working lifetimes. We’re looking and complaining if colleges will go online or reopen in person classes - but there is so much more going underneath that conversation. This is maybe (hopefully) the last generation of the “underwater basket weaving” so-called useless degrees.

nsnick 6y ago
No one is deciding to work a trade instead of going to Stanford.
- fortran77 6y ago
  How many Stanford students are even capable of working a trade?
  - 32notp 6y ago
    What do you mean by that?
    - war1025 6y ago
      Would you be equally confused if it was phrased the other way? "How many trade workers are even capable of going to Stanford?" People like to talk about "grit" in white collar circles. If you want to see real "grit" go talk to the blue collar people who do shitty jobs at the expense of their personal health so their kids can have a better life. The working class has an understanding of self sacrifice that is largely absent from more well-off groups.

anonunivgrad 6y ago

Let the college kids get sick. They are extremely unlikely to have any serious effects from covid. At least on a college campus they won’t infect older family members. Herd immunity on campus would be reached very quickly. The few with serious preexisting conditions can stay home until that happens. The level of fear is frankly ridiculous. People get sick and people die. One day, we will all die. That is the human condition. Life must go on. This is not the Black Death. A 1% fatality rate, mostly of people already on the cusp of death, is not a reason to bring society to a halt, to lock children inside for months.

everydaydriver 6y ago
Even Cuomo mentioned in April that closing down colleges and having students return to live with, in some case, elderly relatives, may not have been the best public health policy.
- matz1 6y ago
  Is the policy is to have 0 death and to ignore the damage from lockdown? Then yeah its not the best policy.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
This (over) reaction makes me worried about a real pandemic, should one ever come.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
SamuelAdams 6y ago
Do you have sources saying the fatality rate is capped at 1%?
- chasd00 6y ago
  nothing is capped during an ongoing pandemic but yeah given we're seeing around 40% asymptomatic, 1% seems about right if not a little on the high side. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html#box https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

feralimal 6y ago

I think we're not demanding technological, remote learning enough yet! We will have to go through this charade a couple of times more. IMO, all teaching as we know/knew it is gone. And those controlling the governance will be happy about that as it removes unnecessary costs.

trekrich 6y ago

good might stop the student union from taking over the place!

xwdv 6y ago

It used to be the case that even if you took out massive student loans to attend elite schools, at least the in-person experience and networking opportunities would be worth it. Now you don’t even get that. You get some bullshit online instruction that is little more than a glorified MOOC, and when you finally graduate, you have to compete for remote jobs with people from all across the country, and get outbid by people with the same skills as you but willing to work for peanuts because the cost of living in their area is practically negligible. Meanwhile, you have to keep paying for that massive student loan for most of your life with cash flow that comes in well below your expectations, wrecking your ability to save money and making retirement a distant fantasy that is about as probable as the dreams people have of becoming multi-millionaires. This should be an outrage, but no one will care. This will be the generation that takes it on the chin.

hinkley 6y ago
> and get outbid by people with the same skills as you but willing to work for peanuts More like: underbid by people whose skills are indistinguishable from yours. This is the same problem we've always had with remote work. As was explained to me, your salary is paid by someone who can't decide what your value is. If you don't know what something is worth, or in fact for, you might as well get the cheap one.
naveen99 6y ago
Networking doesn’t have to be in person. Facebook, twitter, linkedin, even hn work also. Facebook even started by facilitating intra college networking.

v7p1Qbt1im 6y ago

Is there still a possibility to defer? I would‘ve definitely done that back in April.

ilyas121 6y ago
Maybe if you don’t have loans or scholarships. This late in the game it’s almost certain that the loans and scholarships are cashed for the the bill by now
epoch_100 6y ago
Stanford student here. The answer is _yes_ -- afaik, they've extended the deferral deadline to August 19th to give people enough time to make a decision.

celnardur 6y ago

I feel like I can offer a unique perspective on this because I go to Notre Dame and we are just finishing the first week of classes with everyone back on campus. It's gone alright so far. All the cases so far have been traced back to off campus bars or parties. However, I expect it to get worse soon as cases start spreading on campus. If you want to see how Notre Dame is doing with cases and testing we have a dashboard here: https://here.nd.edu/our-approach/dashboard/ https://here.nd.edu/our-approach/dashboard/ I really hope we can make this work because, as an electrical engineer, most of my classes can't be moved online.

JoshTko 6y ago
So the only way this would work long term is if students on campus don't go to bars to parties?
- celnardur 6y ago
  Yea pretty much. However, I would extend that to off campus students as well because as soon as someone has a really severe case (or dies) then we will probably all be sent home. Also it's not just bars or parties. You also have to worry about other gatherings. If people don't where masks and social distance those can become a problem as well. However, so far people have been mostly responsible with other on campus gatherings.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  Technically it could work if they keep distance and wear masks, but as it looks like this has proven to be pretty difficult for people aged 20-30 so far, mostly because the impact of COVID for them is fairly low.
- breck 6y ago
  Or it may work because there’s close to zero chance of dying for college students, and we have far more immune people now than we did back in the spring. Sweden’s numbers are looking very interesting right now.
  - 6y ago

jimmar 6y ago

I'm a professor at a regional university. Not a big name school, but we have about 5,000 students. We would be bankrupt if we told students we'd only be offering classes online this fall because students, by an overwhelming majority, want the in-person experience. We know we would lose enrollment if we went fully online this fall, and the drop would be significant enough for the university to declare bankruptcy. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and other big names have enough reputation and big enough endowments to weather a storm of a temporary drop in enrollment due to shifting instruction online. Many universities cannot.

jstepka 6y ago
businesses go through these challenges all the time. the fat that gets trimmed is what makes them better.
- jimmar 6y ago
  I agree that universities should do more to control costs. I'll push back just a bit that trimming all "fat" would make universities better. Where I am, the "fat" proposed for trimming is support for study abroad, music education, research conferences, and other things that enrich the lives of students and (hopefully) benefit society as a whole.
  - csa 6y ago
    That’s sad, since that seems more flesh that fat to me. The real “fat” is the admin bloat at most universities. Most schools will continue to be in a precarious financial situation until that fat is cut, imho.
    - mindslight 6y ago
      The fundamental problem is that music teachers tend to care about music, while administrators tend to care about protecting their own jobs. So any budget cuts tend to cut services, rather than reducing the overhead. This dynamic plays out everywhere with overgrown middle management.

nradov 6y ago

College students have to be somewhere. They don't magically disappear when schools are closed. So this just means they will be getting infected and transmitting the virus in other places. How is that better?

dharmab 6y ago
Undergrads are usually required to live in dense, on campus housing. Even in normal times, campus dorms are a hotspot of disease transmission.
- randcraw 6y ago
  Navigating dorms often requires close contact (elevators, dining halls, shared bathrooms, shared rooms). Social gatherings in near-campus bars, fraternities, and on campus parties will invite infection, as party events at various summer hotspots have demonstrated already. Classrooms are probably the easiest venues of campus infection to mitigate.
jmull 6y ago
The virus doesn't spread at a constant rate just because people exist. An infected person comes into contact with other people to a sufficient degree to transmit the virus. Those people, in turn come into contact still other people to a sufficient degree to transmit the virus to them, etc. At a school, groups of students form, both officially (e.g., in classes) and unofficially (socially), often in ways that are friendly for transmitting the virus. Then groups reform (students go to their next class, or meet with another group of friends or attend another activity), then reform again... and again... and again, etc. Of course, this doesn't entirely go away when students are off campus. But the transmission vectors are so much smaller -- classes and groups for. other organizations don't occur; social groups tend to be smaller, more stable and with less overlap into other groups.

williesleg 6y ago

Weird, with all that brainpower they can't figure it out. Oh well, c'est la vie

kingkawn 6y ago

The self-righteous smugness on display in this thread about what is valuable to learn and what isn’t is mind boggling. Apparently humility and curiosity about things you don’t know aren’t on the stem curriculum y’all took

chrisjarvis 6y ago
Also its much easier to say every should go to school online when the person saying it most likely already got to go to college for real.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I am currently trying to convince a friend with teenagers that the 'going away' part of 'going away to college' is part of the entire point. Keeping your kid in town is just infantilizing them. And god knows we have enough enfants terribles in the world, and especially in tech. She's going to end up with a 28 year old son still living at home playing video games all day, while his degree rots away, wondering what went wrong. Maybe I should start logging dates and conversations. "Here it is, July 15th, 2019..."
  - ausbah 6y ago
    sorry, but this is wildly out of touch. going to a local university while living at home is not infantilizing anyone. it is a very financially smart and sensible plan that meets the needs for many people's goals in life. balancing classes, extracurriculars, a job, and other college activities that don't depend on your living situation is more than enough of sampling what "adulting" is like not everyone needs to, or can, move across the country for school living in their own place right out of high school
    - hinkley 6y ago
      There's a huge financial difference between going to school at a better school in-state than going out of state. I went to school an hour from home. And if we're going to talk about out of touch, I'm not sure where you're from where you think everyone who goes to school has a university in the same town as them, let alone with the degree program they want to attend. Changing your degree to one that's 'good enough' so you can stay in town? That's setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment. As far as I've heard, parking on campus at my alma mater is even worse than when I attended, so being 10 minutes off campus is more conceptual than factual. It's probably true that Uber is far cheaper than a dorm, even if you averaged 3 rides a day, especially these days, but there are loads of semi-spontaneous interactions that become stilted when you have to worry about getting back and forth across town. It's not doing your own laundry, it's the people you meet while doing your laundry.

known 6y ago

No vaccine = No school

notassigned 6y ago
If my school requires taking the vaccine, I will not be returning

halfFact 6y ago

Is there a rational reason behind this? The hyper scary emotional reaction is to close everything down, but given the at risk population is well understood- is this a money grab?(less brick and mortar costs) The 70 year old professors and obese 50 year old professors clearly are able to online teach, why make everyone lose? Heck if students went to college we'd get closer to herd immunity.

wuxb 6y ago

More or less, the "top" universities have maintained an ecosystem that attracts so many people over the course of their live and makes people believe that's the "road" to a better life. The problem is not about the pandemic, it's about what's in the mind of average people. People start to have doubts. It doesn't really matter what's the decision afterwards. People start to think about the next level things.

m0zg 6y ago

Reduce prices. Expand the number of students. Most STEM work does not require that you be present on campus. Heck, even "gender studies" degrees do not require it, if you'd like more of that. This is once in a decade opportunity to increase the throughput, _and_ increase the quality of their creme de la creme (because with more throughput more high performing outliers will randomly be caught). And they'll 100% squander it.

non-entity 6y ago
> Most STEM work does not require that you be present on campus I was under the impression that the reason more STEM degrees weren't online because you can't effectively replicate science or engineering labs at home very well. Most engineers (not software engineers) I've talked too said they wouldn't take an online degree very seriously.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  > I was under the impression that the reason more STEM degrees weren't online because you can't effectively replicate science or engineering labs at home very well. True, you can't. But I have a BS degree in physics, and I took a grand total of one physics lab in four years. (I also took one in chemistry.) True, that's not engineering. But then, most math people don't take many labs at all. So maybe this is true of the "TE" parts of STEM, and not so true of the "SM" parts.
- m0zg 6y ago
  And that's why I said "most" STEM and not just "STEM". I'm sure labs could be set up to do experimental work. You just don't need the rest of the campus (and the blood sucking administrators that go with that). > they wouldn't take an online degree very seriously They would, if that was the only degree available. And I'm sure Stanford, of all places, can do it as well as anybody.

grensley 6y ago

A high school teacher once told us "Only half of what you learn here is in the classroom" and for college, I think that drops down to about 20%.

eitally 6y ago

My experience in engineering grad school (industrial) was that the most valuable things I learned were engineering econometrics and statistical simulation, both of which apply to nearly everything.