Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 292 posts

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#271

Post by kart23 »

psim1 wrote: post #260
kingbirdy wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My University is still charging a "campus activities fee" of $800 that is meant to cover our gym access, intramural sports, tickets to basketball games, etc. All of those activities are obviously cancelled, but they kept the fee. How am I getting "full value" for that $800? Not to mention the $18,000 in tuition which includes access to our libraries, computer lab, maker space, and other campus facilities, which again…

Local university put as much library material online as possible and is doing check-out-by-mail. Computer clusters that were previously on-site only were reconfigured with a Citrix-like access. Gyms, no. Of course not. Maybe a refund of those kinds of fees is reasonable. I've been downvoted here so I can see that my view is unpopular. I think the university, at least the one I am familiar with, is doing everything sh…

See, this may be the experience that you have, but for plenty of students its not.

At a UC, we are paying ~1,000 dollars for services that simply don't exist. And don't get me started on out-of-state students. Add a zero on to that figure. These services, which have all been shut down include: shuttles, gyms, libraries, computer labs. We are pissed. Nothing has been changed from their usual online services for libraries, check out by mail isn't a thing. Computer access hasn't changed. And our school has not, and does not plant to refund any money. Keep in mind that they received $38 million from the government as part of the cares act, half of which was supposed to be given directly to students ASAP. Nothing has been said about that money.

I hope you can see why we are mad, and why we think the university isn't doing enough to address our concerns.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#272

Post by FireBeyond »

psim1 wrote: post #242
ColanR wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that no one likes remote classes, but there is no sense in which those students are "getting their full value."

Is it reasonable to say "full value under the circumstances"? I'm trying to understand the limits of entitlement in a pandemic scenario. I live near a large (50,000 undergrad students) state university. They have means to survive, but are losing money at an amazing rate right now. If students come at the university with lawsuits and demand refunds en masse, it will be bad for everyone -- including the students. This…

So is it entitlement for students to be subsidizing the operating costs of a multi billion dollar university (in many cases a private organization) with their student loans?

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#273

Post by zjaffee »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #11
supernova87a wrote: post #2

I remember wondering aloud at MIT/Harvard putting their courses online for free for anyone to listen to, and saying, well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which…

I know this might not be received well by the HN crowd, but I feel like the classes and networking are secondary, the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé.

The main value is extra curriculars being of a higher caliber at top colleges than at lower tier ones. Getting to engage with other very talented people building organizations and so on in a much more serious way matters.

There's a reason why ivy league college newspapers are far more impactful than at lower tier schools.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#274

Post by user5994461 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #247
user5994461 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All students and pupils are forming a chain where each promotion is expected to move up one year, replaced by the next promotion. There ain't a pause capability in the educational system, things MUST move forward every year at a define schedule. If anything, that's a good example of what a "deadline" is. It can ignore a few months of disturbance, as demonstrated by long strikes or major events. It can't skip one cycl…

We can't skip a cycle, but we can move the students up even though they haven't actually completed their education? Make no mistake, the situation sucks for everyone. But it seems to me that actually educating people should take priority over meeting an arbitrary deadline.

Apparently schools can let children move on no matter what. When unable to hold end of year exams (end of middle school and high school), they will use the current grades so far and do away without any exam.

For universities, it's gonna be a lot more tricky. They shouldn't get away with charging up to 50k a year for nothing. They can't deliver labs and practical trainings. There is no continuity between an undergraduate and an postgraduate, probably somewhere else.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#276

Post by Wowfunhappy »

user5994461 wrote: post #274
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't skip a cycle, but we can move the students up even though they haven't actually completed their education? Make no mistake, the situation sucks for everyone. But it seems to me that actually educating people should take priority over meeting an arbitrary deadline.

Apparently schools can let children move on no matter what. When unable to hold end of year exams (end of middle school and high school), they will use the current grades so far and do away without any exam. For universities, it's gonna be a lot more tricky. They shouldn't get away with charging up to 50k a year for nothing. They can't deliver labs and practical trainings. There is no continuity between an undergradu…

> Apparently schools can let children move on no matter what.

Colleges could also snap their fingers and mail everyone diplomas in exchange for nothing, if they felt so inclined.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that schools aren't just meaningless certificate factories and that the students who attend them actually learn stuff. Just because the students are being moved up doesn't mean they're adequately prepared for next year.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#277

Post by 3minus1 »

fluidcruft wrote: post #209
hysan wrote: post #198

Not too surprising that the experience wasn’t good. Having taught in-person and online before, I can guarantee that these students ended up with a sub-optimal experience at best. Teaching online is drastically different than in-person and is not something you can easily pick-up in short notice. Made worse is that they were in the middle of a syllabus designed for in-person instruction. How material is delivered, what…

What resources did you find helpful for learning about teaching online?

The best online class I ever took had this thing called "muddy buddies." Basically each week we were required to post questions about something we "didn't understand" from the assigned reading, and your assigned muddy buddy is supposed to answer. The genius thing about it is I would be reading the textbook and trying to find something I "didn't understand," but I didn't want to post a question that was too easy. So any potentially confusing part of the reading I would think about more closely until it was no longer confusing. Basically I was motivated to read everything closely because I was trying to find something that was actually hard to understand.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#279

Post by agumonkey »

ghaff wrote: post #145
cblades wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't claim they weren't, but I just want to point out how each of those points is very, very subjective. For me: - I'd much rather be in-person, where I can better gauge what others are communicating and more readily have two-way communication about the material. - I'm way less focused when on my own computer, on my own time. - I find I communicate way less purely online than I would in-person. - Automatic grad…

The main thing MOOCs do well is a solved problem with or without MOOCs--namely lecture videos. Discussion boards are mostly a tire fire; they're mostly useful for dealing with platform problems. They can probably be better when you restrict access to a qualified class but they don't really scale. >Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming I'd probably say automatic grading sucks, "even for programming." At…

I concur with boards being useless in general. It's too slow, not predictable. That's why I liked the moocs IRC channels. It was a live place where we could discuss things and resolves issues quickly.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#280

Post by pochamago »

pwthornton wrote: post #266
peterwoerner wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not so much that anything is wrong with college, it is that the cost isn't commiserate with the expected payout (for most). Yet we, as a society, push people who are barely adults into a lifetime of debt slavery like sheep to the slaughter.

The expected payout for the average bachelors is huge over a high school diploma. The gap is widening.

This stat is pretty much always just a direct comparison between grads, right? I wonder how different it would be if you took into account confounders like economic class. I assume much of the widening is college becoming standard, and therefore the only people who don't attend are those who either can't and are disadvantaged in general or those who don't feel particularly ambitious about their career
Post reply on HN