7 ms·

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

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".
    - wil421 3y ago
      Typo!!
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  > At most that's 1,790 students per year taking the class each year Anyone in the world can take CS50 for credit via Harvard Extension [1], and if you happen to be in the Boston area you are welcome to come to campus and attend lectures, sections, office hours, etc (but they also have everything you need fully online). Like other large classes at Harvard (Stat 110, etc), these operate just like the weed-out courses at the big state schools. Unlike the state schools the deadline to drop a course without it showing up on your transcript or affecting your GPA is really, really late in the semester. So it's not uncommon for 50+% of the kids to be gone by the final exam/project. [1] https://cs50.harvard.edu/extension/2023/fall/ https://cs50.harvard.edu/extension/2023/fall/
  - eesmith 3y ago
    The pricing doesn't make sense. Harvard Extension charges $2,040/4 credit course[1]. I estimated this course cost Harvard students $5,000, for low-quality access to educational staff. Does that mean Harvard Extension students get even worse access? Surely paying twice as much in tuition should mean something more than getting to say "I graduated from Harvard." [1] https://extension.harvard.edu/paying-for-school/ https://extension.harvard.edu/paying-for-school/
    - Kon-Peki 3y ago
      No, they get the same access to the courses they are enrolled in. An extension student doesn’t have access to the full course catalog, and doesn’t live in one of the undergrad houses, doesn’t develop the same network of friends etc. But they do attend the same morning graduation exercises in Harvard Yard and get the same lifetime benefits (if they carry through to graduation, that is).
      - eesmith 3y ago
        > access to the full course catalog That would (to me) only make sense if the extra $3,000 for the CS course subsidizes the other courses. > and doesn’t live in one of the undergrad houses Which is why I only compared tuition, and did not include the housing fee.
- chefandy 3y ago
  Not that many students on campus. From Wikipedia "The on-campus version is Harvard's largest class with 800 students, 102 staff..." they probably have that many or more online students but they aren't the ones in annenberg, the freshmen dining hall, waiting for TAs. (That hall is a dead ringer for the great hall at hogwarts.) At the events, there were Facebook and Microsoft logos everywhere. I'm pretty sure corporate sponsorship took care of a lot of it.

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".
  - wil421 3y ago
    Typo!!
Kon-Peki 3y ago
> At most that's 1,790 students per year taking the class each year Anyone in the world can take CS50 for credit via Harvard Extension [1], and if you happen to be in the Boston area you are welcome to come to campus and attend lectures, sections, office hours, etc (but they also have everything you need fully online). Like other large classes at Harvard (Stat 110, etc), these operate just like the weed-out courses at the big state schools. Unlike the state schools the deadline to drop a course without it showing up on your transcript or affecting your GPA is really, really late in the semester. So it's not uncommon for 50+% of the kids to be gone by the final exam/project. [1] https://cs50.harvard.edu/extension/2023/fall/ https://cs50.harvard.edu/extension/2023/fall/
- eesmith 3y ago
  The pricing doesn't make sense. Harvard Extension charges $2,040/4 credit course[1]. I estimated this course cost Harvard students $5,000, for low-quality access to educational staff. Does that mean Harvard Extension students get even worse access? Surely paying twice as much in tuition should mean something more than getting to say "I graduated from Harvard." [1] https://extension.harvard.edu/paying-for-school/ https://extension.harvard.edu/paying-for-school/
  - Kon-Peki 3y ago
    No, they get the same access to the courses they are enrolled in. An extension student doesn’t have access to the full course catalog, and doesn’t live in one of the undergrad houses, doesn’t develop the same network of friends etc. But they do attend the same morning graduation exercises in Harvard Yard and get the same lifetime benefits (if they carry through to graduation, that is).
    - eesmith 3y ago
      > access to the full course catalog That would (to me) only make sense if the extra $3,000 for the CS course subsidizes the other courses. > and doesn’t live in one of the undergrad houses Which is why I only compared tuition, and did not include the housing fee.
chefandy 3y ago
Not that many students on campus. From Wikipedia "The on-campus version is Harvard's largest class with 800 students, 102 staff..." they probably have that many or more online students but they aren't the ones in annenberg, the freshmen dining hall, waiting for TAs. (That hall is a dead ringer for the great hall at hogwarts.) At the events, there were Facebook and Microsoft logos everywhere. I'm pretty sure corporate sponsorship took care of a lot of it.