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I find it hard to reconcile "The weekly help sessions ended up being a million lost students in a giant hall waiting to see one of a few dozen TAs offering unev

I find it hard to reconcile "The weekly help sessions ended up being a million lost students in a giant hall waiting to see one of a few dozen TAs offering uneven pedagogical quality." with "very, very well-funded class". Why didn't the funding go to hiring more staff? My experience in a state school had far more access to education staff than what you describe, and for less funding.

vanviegen 3y ago
My reading is that this class just has a huge number of students, each bringing in a bit of funding. This allows for relatively large investments in the quality of the teaching materials, but teacher/student ratios will probably not be great. Hiring capable teachers is hard, especially at scale.
- eesmith 3y ago
  I must be missing something. Harvard has 7,153 undergrads says Wikipedia. At most that's 1,790 students per year taking the class each year. But surely not everyone is taking the course? So why does it need to scale? Harvard tuition is $54,269, says https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees . Assuming it's a 3 hour class with a 120 credit hours to graduate, that's 30 hours per year, so each student pays about $5,000 for what seems to be a horrible staff/student ratio. FWIW, I found https://cse.engin.umich.edu/stories/popular-intro-cs-course-continues-to-grow-over-870-students-present-final-projects-at-showcase https://cse.engin.umich.edu/stories/popular-intro-cs-course-... as a comparison, the EECS 183 course at the University of Michigan. Three professors (Dr. Dorf, Dr. Bill Arthur, and Dr. Héctor García-Ramírez), and 24 student instructors for the 870 students who finished the course. (It doesn't say how many started the course.) Full-time tuition at UMich is $8,780/in-state and $27,663/out-of-state. Without class size numbers for Harvard, I can't directly compare the two. I can understand that the distance learning version of the course does need to scale. But chefandy was talking about the in-person version of the course. (Unless "in a giant hall waiting" means some sort of VR-based course. :)
  - wil421 3y ago
    My coworker’s kid just graduated from Harvard. He said it cost about $315,000k. Does your number include all the fees and such most colleges tack on to tuition?
    - rocho 3y ago
      You probably mean $315k.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - chefandy 3y ago
        If they lived in off-campus housing in Cambridge then $315m would be on the low side.
    - eesmith 3y ago
      I linked to https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees which shows I quoted only tuition. That's the amount which most directly goes toward paying for educational staff salaries. The total tuition+fees for Academic Year 2023-24 from the same page, is $79,450/year, giving $317,800 for 4 years, and matching your number.
      - lelandbatey 3y ago
        I think they're pointing out that $315k is different from $315,000k as both include the k (for thousand) but one includes the thousands as 0's and the other does not.
        eesmith 3y ago
        I think wil421 made a typo. I don't think anyone believes Harvard costs $315 million for a degree. Instead, I think wil421 was asking about the difference between "tuition" and "tuition and fees".
vasco 3y ago
Feom what I understand of these universities with endowments they use money to hire administrative staff and to "last forever". Teaching staff is secondary to those.
- chefandy 3y ago
  Yes. They lay off scores of staff in nearly every economic downturn. There's a whole lot of 'blah blah blah' about why they can't use the endowment to avoid screwing people who've given decades of their professional life to Harvard, but I think it mostly comes down to their wanting a big shiny endowment balance long after everyone on earth right now has died.
chefandy 3y ago
Harvard is bizzaro land. I don't know what CS50s setup looks like internally, but after taking the course, and working there for a couple of decades— one full time— I think I'm pretty close. I learned that they always have money for stuff but rarely for staff. The class seemed to have significant corporate support from Facebook and Microsoft, and probably others— both Zuck and Ballmer have given guest lectures— but I'll bet that Harvard's governance rules didn't let them hire academic staff with outside funding or something like that. They def could use it on regular staff positions— I spent years in a full-time, permanent staff position that was funded through a project partner. The support academics in CS50 are all done by student TAs at the lowest level, or teaching fellows— grad students maybe— for lecturing or more advanced help. The staff are for things like video production, technical infrastructure, etc. There's only so many qualified students willing to do that work and no way you're getting existing faculty to do it. I'll also bet that they have rules about hiring staff to do anything resembling instructional work. Like I said, though, I don't know what the situation is exactly but I'm pretty familiar with Harvard.
- lioeters 3y ago
  > grad students Why buy the cow, amirite?
  - chefandy 3y ago
    Yeah though they're unionized now I think. I wonder if anything changed with cs50?
- chefandy 3y ago
  > I learned that they always have money for stuff but rarely for staff. (By "they," I mean Harvard, generally. I have no reason to believe CS50 is exempt from this, but I have no special insight, here.)
some_random 3y ago
Yeah, not exactly helping with my prior of "college is a massive, societal level scam"
- chefandy 3y ago
  College is great and very useful, it's just heavily abused by our society. I think that a lot of well-meaning people in the 80s and 90s saw that people with college degrees were better off, and confusing correlation with causation, insisted everyone needed to go to college so they could also be better off. Well, now we have way more people with college degrees than we need. They've taken on debt that their (government-employed) guidance counselors insisted would pay for itself. Decent paying white collar positions for non-degree holders, like administrative assistant, now require them because of lazy recruiting. And income inequality is worse because you can't resolve structural economic issues with credentials. So you have someone with an expensive English degree from BU answering phones in a CS pool for 35k, and the 'dumb' kids who went to trade school and became electricians have to turn away work at hundreds of dollars per hour because they're in such high demand.
devwastaken 3y ago
Harvard isn't about learning. It's about paying the TA. Connections and money.

vanviegen 3y ago

My reading is that this class just has a huge number of students, each bringing in a bit of funding. This allows for relatively large investments in the quality of the teaching materials, but teacher/student ratios will probably not be great. Hiring capable teachers is hard, especially at scale.

eesmith 3y ago
I must be missing something. Harvard has 7,153 undergrads says Wikipedia. At most that's 1,790 students per year taking the class each year. But surely not everyone is taking the course? So why does it need to scale? Harvard tuition is $54,269, says https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees . Assuming it's a 3 hour class with a 120 credit hours to graduate, that's 30 hours per year, so each student pays about $5,000 for what seems to be a horrible staff/student ratio. FWIW, I found https://cse.engin.umich.edu/stories/popular-intro-cs-course-continues-to-grow-over-870-students-present-final-projects-at-showcase https://cse.engin.umich.edu/stories/popular-intro-cs-course-... as a comparison, the EECS 183 course at the University of Michigan. Three professors (Dr. Dorf, Dr. Bill Arthur, and Dr. Héctor García-Ramírez), and 24 student instructors for the 870 students who finished the course. (It doesn't say how many started the course.) Full-time tuition at UMich is $8,780/in-state and $27,663/out-of-state. Without class size numbers for Harvard, I can't directly compare the two. I can understand that the distance learning version of the course does need to scale. But chefandy was talking about the in-person version of the course. (Unless "in a giant hall waiting" means some sort of VR-based course. :)
- wil421 3y ago
  My coworker’s kid just graduated from Harvard. He said it cost about $315,000k. Does your number include all the fees and such most colleges tack on to tuition?
  - rocho 3y ago
    You probably mean $315k.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - chefandy 3y ago
      If they lived in off-campus housing in Cambridge then $315m would be on the low side.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    I linked to https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees which shows I quoted only tuition. That's the amount which most directly goes toward paying for educational staff salaries. The total tuition+fees for Academic Year 2023-24 from the same page, is $79,450/year, giving $317,800 for 4 years, and matching your number.
    - lelandbatey 3y ago
      I think they're pointing out that $315k is different from $315,000k as both include the k (for thousand) but one includes the thousands as 0's and the other does not.
      - eesmith 3y ago
        I think wil421 made a typo. I don't think anyone believes Harvard costs $315 million for a degree. Instead, I think wil421 was asking about the difference between "tuition" and "tuition and fees".

vasco 3y ago

Feom what I understand of these universities with endowments they use money to hire administrative staff and to "last forever". Teaching staff is secondary to those.

chefandy 3y ago
Yes. They lay off scores of staff in nearly every economic downturn. There's a whole lot of 'blah blah blah' about why they can't use the endowment to avoid screwing people who've given decades of their professional life to Harvard, but I think it mostly comes down to their wanting a big shiny endowment balance long after everyone on earth right now has died.

chefandy 3y ago

Harvard is bizzaro land. I don't know what CS50s setup looks like internally, but after taking the course, and working there for a couple of decades— one full time— I think I'm pretty close. I learned that they always have money for stuff but rarely for staff. The class seemed to have significant corporate support from Facebook and Microsoft, and probably others— both Zuck and Ballmer have given guest lectures— but I'll bet that Harvard's governance rules didn't let them hire academic staff with outside funding or something like that. They def could use it on regular staff positions— I spent years in a full-time, permanent staff position that was funded through a project partner. The support academics in CS50 are all done by student TAs at the lowest level, or teaching fellows— grad students maybe— for lecturing or more advanced help. The staff are for things like video production, technical infrastructure, etc. There's only so many qualified students willing to do that work and no way you're getting existing faculty to do it. I'll also bet that they have rules about hiring staff to do anything resembling instructional work. Like I said, though, I don't know what the situation is exactly but I'm pretty familiar with Harvard.

lioeters 3y ago
> grad students Why buy the cow, amirite?
- chefandy 3y ago
  Yeah though they're unionized now I think. I wonder if anything changed with cs50?
chefandy 3y ago
> I learned that they always have money for stuff but rarely for staff. (By "they," I mean Harvard, generally. I have no reason to believe CS50 is exempt from this, but I have no special insight, here.)

some_random 3y ago

Yeah, not exactly helping with my prior of "college is a massive, societal level scam"

chefandy 3y ago
College is great and very useful, it's just heavily abused by our society. I think that a lot of well-meaning people in the 80s and 90s saw that people with college degrees were better off, and confusing correlation with causation, insisted everyone needed to go to college so they could also be better off. Well, now we have way more people with college degrees than we need. They've taken on debt that their (government-employed) guidance counselors insisted would pay for itself. Decent paying white collar positions for non-degree holders, like administrative assistant, now require them because of lazy recruiting. And income inequality is worse because you can't resolve structural economic issues with credentials. So you have someone with an expensive English degree from BU answering phones in a CS pool for 35k, and the 'dumb' kids who went to trade school and became electricians have to turn away work at hundreds of dollars per hour because they're in such high demand.

devwastaken 3y ago

Harvard isn't about learning. It's about paying the TA. Connections and money.