14 ms·

I'm paying over 10k to stare at a screen and be told to “teach myself”

90 points by r_singh 6y ago

tinus_hn 6y ago
Safety before everything!
KnobbleMcKnees 6y ago
I suppose it wouldn't help much to tell them that, even had they been attending classes in person and gaining the benefits of cohabitation, they would still be getting financially destroyed by a broken system. This is really just shining a harsher light on what was already there. I feel for these students for the _additional_ pain they have to endure.
sebmellen 6y ago
Given the nature of the HN community, I'm actually surprised by how many pro-college comments I see here. There's maybe a 50/50 split, of pro vs. anti-college sentiment, mostly because colleges are the only place where things like medicine, real STEM, and so forth can be taught. But I'm floored that college remains such an established institution. With the ridiculous cost and unhelpful nature of a college degree post-graduation (at least for most non-tech/STEM/medicine majors), why haven't universities long since given way to models like Lambda School, but for every discipline? The amount of people I know saddled with student debt who do nothing remotely close to their major, and who didn't even enjoy studying to begin with, is astounding. And this pattern repeats itself in Europe, though somewhat differently. There, instead of starting companies, people get a 6-year long Masters in Entrepreneurship or Marketing or Business, and go on to work unfulfilling middle-management jobs for stagnant, uninspiring companies. I'm sure this is a prevalent malaise in Asia and developed parts of Africa and LatAm as well. I don't think free college would fundamentally solve the problem, which is that college delivers very little value for most, and a lot of value for very few. For most studies, it's no longer a good system (IMO).
- pasabagi 6y ago
  I think universities have a sort of impossible position. One direction, heavily pushed by industry and government, is that they should be a sorting mechanism, identifying the best and most capable students so they can be discovered by industry. Another direction, pushed by government, is that they should be centers of learning and scholarship, capable of producing high quality research and researchers. These two goals are not mutually exclusive, but they are not particularly compatible, either. Exams are essentially a giant distraction and stressor on the whole learning process, but they are also essential for the first objective. Deep, foundational course material is basically mandatory for the second objective, but the first objective prefers material closer to vocational training. For the first objective, parents and students know that the best institution is the most prestigious one. For the second one, the best institution is the one with the best researchers and teachers. For the first objective, it's better (if you can afford it) if the course is incredibly expensive. The biggest predictor of success is the wealth of your parents, so when your peers all have wealthy parents, you are likely to be connected to a large number of successful people. For the second objective, it's best if school is free, so the truly interested and talented are not excluded.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    No doubt, universities are not in a good place. For me, the position of the university as a societal institution is threefold: 1) Foster deep, foundational learning in an interested and talented portion of the populous. 2) Fund basic research, give academia a home, and further scientific progress. 3) Act as a filtration mechanism. But I think these goals are different, and are now becoming so clearly differentiated they must be split apart. The university as an institution is probably best suited to fund research and science. Filtration mechanisms can be established with independent standardized testing and learning programs like Lambda School and OpenClassrooms etc. Deep, foundational learning is possible online, and parts of this learning could be delegated to colleges specialized in specific fields (medicine, technology, etc.). I would also expect things like community colleges to spring up for associates-degree level education and vocational training.
    - 6y ago
CincinnatiMan 6y ago
Freshman class sizes have to be way down right? If I were a parent to a kid of that age, I'd be encouraging them to take a gap year or knock out credits at a community college.
- notenoughhorses 6y ago
  The freshman class at the university I’m currently attending is the largest one they have ever had. Now, we are a more “affordable “ state university, but it’s still $6k tuition for a semester, plus many people seem to have gotten duped into paying for campus housing even though it seemed like high chance classes would end up online one way or another.
- achenatx 6y ago
  Some universities are preventing this by saying that your spot the next year is not guaranteed. So you would have to reapply. You will be competing with all incoming freshman and everyone that deferred. We have friends paying 60K for online school. They consider it to be paying 60K to hold their spot.
  - notyourwork 6y ago
    $60k for a single year? I can’t help but shake my head as the absurdity of that. We’ve done a disservice to younger generations if it cost that much for a single year of education.
    - awinder 6y ago
      That’s not a normal college expense, and in fact a lot of schools with expenses that high do so while offering means-based scholarships. So when you read a story about someone at a $60K school paying $60K, usually it’s a signal that you’re reading a story from a very wealthy individual circumstance — not to opine positive vs. negative but context is important.
postalrat 6y ago
Does anyone here support work from home and not learn from home? I'd like to hear why one works and the other doesn't.
- randomdata 6y ago
  'Learn from home' works very well. College is not about learning, but being among a wide range of people in their prime looking for mates, though. I am not sure we have entirely figured out how to replicate that at home.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    Tinder?
    - randomdata 6y ago
      I admittedly haven't personally used Tinder, so do correct me if I am wrong, but from what I have learned from reading about it and listening to others who have used it, Tinder seems more like the high school mating pool. Which is to say that you get everyone who happens to live within some geographic area thrown into a pile and leaves you to sort through the mess. The upsell from colleges is that they filter out the "undesirables", for lack of a better way to put it, and bring the desirable people together from around the country and even the world. The more entrance requirements placed on the students, the more desirable the school is to attend for access to the highest calibre mating pool.
      - webmaven 6y ago
        Tinder Select, then? Or any number of other "more exclusive" services: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/tinder-select-is-a-secret-members-only-version-of-the-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/tinder-select-is-a-secret-...
- notenoughhorses 6y ago
  I love school and work from home, but school from home doesn’t work as well for a couple reasons: - the professors are completely unprepared to do it effectively. I’m surprised they are struggling as much as they are. Many don’t seem to be drawing on any departmental prior experience, or even taking simple training on stuff like how to run a Webex meeting. Some professors clearly know how to do it better and it makes a HUGE difference. So that’s a big issue with the current situation. Some profs are doing a stellar job this semester, others are doing a completely awful job. - for me, face time with fellow students is really helpful for learning, more so than face time with coworkers being helpful to work. However, in lectures you don’t get that much time to interact with other students anyway, so to me it’s not worth the time of getting to campus
seibelj 6y ago
We decided to save exactly $0 for our kid’s college education. Our theory is that by the time he goes the system will have imploded and far cheaper options will emerge. The whole system is on the verge of collapse. Also recent reports of parents negotiating between colleges for discounts like you do at a car dealership have annoyed me immensely. This whole thing is disgusting and insane.
- rwmj 6y ago
  This sounds very foolhardy. Why not save the money in case? In the (IMHO) highly unlikely situation that the system collapses, you'll have a pot of money you can spend on something else.
  - oneoffcoder 6y ago
    Exactly, why bet on your child's future. Maybe whatever the trend is around then costs equivalent amount of money that you need to pay for college now. Also, as far as other professions which require licenses are concerned, you'll always have to go through some institution to do that job, lawyers, civil engineers, doctors, etc.
- awinder 6y ago
  If you’re really that worried about it, save it in a joint taxable account. That way you’re “just” gambling away the preferential tax treatment (substantial) of 529 because you’re pretty sure you’d take the 10% penalty when it blows up. That’s much more equal bet than not saving.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Havoc 6y ago
  Betting that a system that has stood for decades collapses on a time line that suits you seems bold to say the least
newintellectual 6y ago
Have any of these people talked with a lawyer rather than blindly paying? Breach of contract, dangerous living conditions, etc. come to mind.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jl2718 6y ago
Frame your acceptance letter and move on. I don't know what's in, but school is out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oo8QzDHimQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oo8QzDHimQ
DeonPenny 6y ago
You could pay 10k to be told to teach yourself in person.
aaron695 6y ago
Lockdown is destroying a year's worth of education across the world. That's how many lives? I'd say a million? Anyone bothered to work it out? It's complex, there is total loss. There are delays. It'll be over the next 3 years, give or take a year. International students might never come back.
sinker 6y ago
Colleges are one of the few structures where the normal relationship between a provider and a customer is inverted such that it would appear that the person paying for the service is under the obligation to perform for the person receiving the payment. To give an example. The student is the customer, paying 30k a semester, yet if they go into the bursar to get some record corrected they are treated as if they are the hindrance in the system by way of long lines and apathetic clerks. Another example: a student comes into class 10 minutes late each day because the class overlaps with his job. The professor or TA reprimands the student for essentially putting their needs first, despite the fact that the student is almost directly paying the professor's salary. Another example: student falls asleep in class. Professor stops the class to embarrass the student. In all these cases it's as if the professor is paying the student to be apart of the school and the obligation of performance is on the student. In reality, the institutional responsibility of providing value should be on the professor and university. The individual responsibility of performance should be on the student. And yet the roles are the same as if a college were a public school, as if the professor and the school does not have a strong and direct responsibility to their customers/patrons. That it were the student's responsibility to validate the school and teacher. Schools really are a "unique" form of business. The virus has uncovered what a lot of us knew all along; mainly that they don't provide the value even remotely close to what their price tag suggests. They perpetuate because their customers are essentially still children, people being routed in society by society, and have not had the experience of having any real, consequential responsibility in the world. People who don't need to perform any cost-benefit analysis because the decision is already made for them and the cost is usually hoisted onto someone else. Otherwise, few sane and independent people would willingly enter into a contract where you pay so much to be treated like an agent-less underling. Like a lot of large organizations, universities exist so that they continue to exist. It's foolish to think that they have the interests of individuals in mind. Or so at least that has been my regretful experience excitedly waiting to be spit out of high school to learn the depths of programming in a place that sincerely respects learning, and instead spending 4 years in yet another purgatory to the real world. At least I never have to hear the words again is this going to be on the final?

90 points by r_singh 6y ago

Safety before everything!

I suppose it wouldn't help much to tell them that, even had they been attending classes in person and gaining the benefits of cohabitation, they would still be getting financially destroyed by a broken system. This is really just shining a harsher light on what was already there. I feel for these students for the _additional_ pain they have to endure.

sebmellen 6y ago

Given the nature of the HN community, I'm actually surprised by how many pro-college comments I see here. There's maybe a 50/50 split, of pro vs. anti-college sentiment, mostly because colleges are the only place where things like medicine, real STEM, and so forth can be taught. But I'm floored that college remains such an established institution. With the ridiculous cost and unhelpful nature of a college degree post-graduation (at least for most non-tech/STEM/medicine majors), why haven't universities long since given way to models like Lambda School, but for every discipline? The amount of people I know saddled with student debt who do nothing remotely close to their major, and who didn't even enjoy studying to begin with, is astounding. And this pattern repeats itself in Europe, though somewhat differently. There, instead of starting companies, people get a 6-year long Masters in Entrepreneurship or Marketing or Business, and go on to work unfulfilling middle-management jobs for stagnant, uninspiring companies. I'm sure this is a prevalent malaise in Asia and developed parts of Africa and LatAm as well. I don't think free college would fundamentally solve the problem, which is that college delivers very little value for most, and a lot of value for very few. For most studies, it's no longer a good system (IMO).

pasabagi 6y ago
I think universities have a sort of impossible position. One direction, heavily pushed by industry and government, is that they should be a sorting mechanism, identifying the best and most capable students so they can be discovered by industry. Another direction, pushed by government, is that they should be centers of learning and scholarship, capable of producing high quality research and researchers. These two goals are not mutually exclusive, but they are not particularly compatible, either. Exams are essentially a giant distraction and stressor on the whole learning process, but they are also essential for the first objective. Deep, foundational course material is basically mandatory for the second objective, but the first objective prefers material closer to vocational training. For the first objective, parents and students know that the best institution is the most prestigious one. For the second one, the best institution is the one with the best researchers and teachers. For the first objective, it's better (if you can afford it) if the course is incredibly expensive. The biggest predictor of success is the wealth of your parents, so when your peers all have wealthy parents, you are likely to be connected to a large number of successful people. For the second objective, it's best if school is free, so the truly interested and talented are not excluded.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  No doubt, universities are not in a good place. For me, the position of the university as a societal institution is threefold: 1) Foster deep, foundational learning in an interested and talented portion of the populous. 2) Fund basic research, give academia a home, and further scientific progress. 3) Act as a filtration mechanism. But I think these goals are different, and are now becoming so clearly differentiated they must be split apart. The university as an institution is probably best suited to fund research and science. Filtration mechanisms can be established with independent standardized testing and learning programs like Lambda School and OpenClassrooms etc. Deep, foundational learning is possible online, and parts of this learning could be delegated to colleges specialized in specific fields (medicine, technology, etc.). I would also expect things like community colleges to spring up for associates-degree level education and vocational training.
  - 6y ago

CincinnatiMan 6y ago

Freshman class sizes have to be way down right? If I were a parent to a kid of that age, I'd be encouraging them to take a gap year or knock out credits at a community college.

notenoughhorses 6y ago
The freshman class at the university I’m currently attending is the largest one they have ever had. Now, we are a more “affordable “ state university, but it’s still $6k tuition for a semester, plus many people seem to have gotten duped into paying for campus housing even though it seemed like high chance classes would end up online one way or another.
achenatx 6y ago
Some universities are preventing this by saying that your spot the next year is not guaranteed. So you would have to reapply. You will be competing with all incoming freshman and everyone that deferred. We have friends paying 60K for online school. They consider it to be paying 60K to hold their spot.
- notyourwork 6y ago
  $60k for a single year? I can’t help but shake my head as the absurdity of that. We’ve done a disservice to younger generations if it cost that much for a single year of education.
  - awinder 6y ago
    That’s not a normal college expense, and in fact a lot of schools with expenses that high do so while offering means-based scholarships. So when you read a story about someone at a $60K school paying $60K, usually it’s a signal that you’re reading a story from a very wealthy individual circumstance — not to opine positive vs. negative but context is important.

postalrat 6y ago

Does anyone here support work from home and not learn from home? I'd like to hear why one works and the other doesn't.

randomdata 6y ago
'Learn from home' works very well. College is not about learning, but being among a wide range of people in their prime looking for mates, though. I am not sure we have entirely figured out how to replicate that at home.
- webmaven 6y ago
  Tinder?
  - randomdata 6y ago
    I admittedly haven't personally used Tinder, so do correct me if I am wrong, but from what I have learned from reading about it and listening to others who have used it, Tinder seems more like the high school mating pool. Which is to say that you get everyone who happens to live within some geographic area thrown into a pile and leaves you to sort through the mess. The upsell from colleges is that they filter out the "undesirables", for lack of a better way to put it, and bring the desirable people together from around the country and even the world. The more entrance requirements placed on the students, the more desirable the school is to attend for access to the highest calibre mating pool.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      Tinder Select, then? Or any number of other "more exclusive" services: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/tinder-select-is-a-secret-members-only-version-of-the-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/tinder-select-is-a-secret-...
notenoughhorses 6y ago
I love school and work from home, but school from home doesn’t work as well for a couple reasons: - the professors are completely unprepared to do it effectively. I’m surprised they are struggling as much as they are. Many don’t seem to be drawing on any departmental prior experience, or even taking simple training on stuff like how to run a Webex meeting. Some professors clearly know how to do it better and it makes a HUGE difference. So that’s a big issue with the current situation. Some profs are doing a stellar job this semester, others are doing a completely awful job. - for me, face time with fellow students is really helpful for learning, more so than face time with coworkers being helpful to work. However, in lectures you don’t get that much time to interact with other students anyway, so to me it’s not worth the time of getting to campus

seibelj 6y ago

We decided to save exactly $0 for our kid’s college education. Our theory is that by the time he goes the system will have imploded and far cheaper options will emerge. The whole system is on the verge of collapse. Also recent reports of parents negotiating between colleges for discounts like you do at a car dealership have annoyed me immensely. This whole thing is disgusting and insane.

rwmj 6y ago
This sounds very foolhardy. Why not save the money in case? In the (IMHO) highly unlikely situation that the system collapses, you'll have a pot of money you can spend on something else.
- oneoffcoder 6y ago
  Exactly, why bet on your child's future. Maybe whatever the trend is around then costs equivalent amount of money that you need to pay for college now. Also, as far as other professions which require licenses are concerned, you'll always have to go through some institution to do that job, lawyers, civil engineers, doctors, etc.
awinder 6y ago
If you’re really that worried about it, save it in a joint taxable account. That way you’re “just” gambling away the preferential tax treatment (substantial) of 529 because you’re pretty sure you’d take the 10% penalty when it blows up. That’s much more equal bet than not saving.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Havoc 6y ago
Betting that a system that has stood for decades collapses on a time line that suits you seems bold to say the least

newintellectual 6y ago

Have any of these people talked with a lawyer rather than blindly paying? Breach of contract, dangerous living conditions, etc. come to mind.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jl2718 6y ago

Frame your acceptance letter and move on. I don't know what's in, but school is out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oo8QzDHimQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oo8QzDHimQ

DeonPenny 6y ago

You could pay 10k to be told to teach yourself in person.

aaron695 6y ago

Lockdown is destroying a year's worth of education across the world. That's how many lives? I'd say a million? Anyone bothered to work it out? It's complex, there is total loss. There are delays. It'll be over the next 3 years, give or take a year. International students might never come back.

sinker 6y ago

Colleges are one of the few structures where the normal relationship between a provider and a customer is inverted such that it would appear that the person paying for the service is under the obligation to perform for the person receiving the payment. To give an example. The student is the customer, paying 30k a semester, yet if they go into the bursar to get some record corrected they are treated as if they are the hindrance in the system by way of long lines and apathetic clerks. Another example: a student comes into class 10 minutes late each day because the class overlaps with his job. The professor or TA reprimands the student for essentially putting their needs first, despite the fact that the student is almost directly paying the professor's salary. Another example: student falls asleep in class. Professor stops the class to embarrass the student. In all these cases it's as if the professor is paying the student to be apart of the school and the obligation of performance is on the student. In reality, the institutional responsibility of providing value should be on the professor and university. The individual responsibility of performance should be on the student. And yet the roles are the same as if a college were a public school, as if the professor and the school does not have a strong and direct responsibility to their customers/patrons. That it were the student's responsibility to validate the school and teacher. Schools really are a "unique" form of business. The virus has uncovered what a lot of us knew all along; mainly that they don't provide the value even remotely close to what their price tag suggests. They perpetuate because their customers are essentially still children, people being routed in society by society, and have not had the experience of having any real, consequential responsibility in the world. People who don't need to perform any cost-benefit analysis because the decision is already made for them and the cost is usually hoisted onto someone else. Otherwise, few sane and independent people would willingly enter into a contract where you pay so much to be treated like an agent-less underling. Like a lot of large organizations, universities exist so that they continue to exist. It's foolish to think that they have the interests of individuals in mind. Or so at least that has been my regretful experience excitedly waiting to be spit out of high school to learn the depths of programming in a place that sincerely respects learning, and instead spending 4 years in yet another purgatory to the real world. At least I never have to hear the words again is this going to be on the final?