101–110 of 151 posts
This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia. Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name and selectivity, and for the environment of other equally motivated high potential students. Other schools combine a school with a resort/cruise ship experience. Insofar as the school is no better than a bunch of videos, and the resort is mostly shut down, so long as employers don…
As a full-time resident of Boulder, CO (college town), this seems like an impossible situation. I can well imagine that the university here is under heavy pressure from local government to hold classes in the fall. This is because going a semester without all the students/faculty will be disastrous for the town's economy. On the other hand, the increase in coronavirus cases will also be disastrous. I don't have an an…
This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia. Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name and selectivity, and for the environment of other equally motivated high potential students. Other schools combine a school with a resort/cruise ship experience. Insofar as the school is no better than a bunch of videos, and the resort is mostly shut down, so long as employers don…
I got free access to a MOOC this summer that usually costs money just to view (HMX), and even at that scale the course forum is low quality and the "assignments" that have open ended questions just give you an automatic check mark, so you get zero feedback on your thinking. It's a solid class still and I'm enjoying it as a for fun learning experience, but it is not even close to what I would want out of a subject I am more seriously studying.
Anyway, I think a large part of that is just the lack of interaction with anyone trained in the material. Maybe I live in a bubble, but the best advice I got as a frosh at orientation was "if you only go to one thing in person, make it office hours", and I think many of my friends would agree.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be careful in your assumptions here. Online degrees still carry a huge negative stigma with them (which is interesting given that all students in the current cohorts at normal universities will have had several semesters of remote learning). Signalling of the college brand is also largely underappreciated by online students. You're getting a degree for a fraction of the cost of an in-person one, but it may or may not…
I believe they're specifically talking about data science and fields related? I'm a prior software development manager and degrees in general in this kind of field don't carry much weight outside of academic hires and very select companies. While some companies or hiring managers might frown upon this it doesn't matter if there is an active hiring group that doesn't put any weight on them. I guess one could argue tha…
On the flip side, med school or west point are less about getting in but more about exit value. It's not really that important as to whether you got in but whether you graduated from West Point. West Point / Navy Seals can essentially double the class size without losing any credibility. I think higher education is going in similar direction.
This is looking more and more like an extinction event for academia. Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name and selectivity, and for the environment of other equally motivated high potential students. Other schools combine a school with a resort/cruise ship experience. Insofar as the school is no better than a bunch of videos, and the resort is mostly shut down, so long as employers don…
> Elite institutions can charge whatever they want for their brand name Also, their brand names may be tarnished. For example, Yale and Stanford are named after men who abused black and brown people. If the Universities decide to no longer honor these men and remove their names from the university, they will have lost a lot of the brand that they built up over many years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time, whilst retaining recognizable elements from their origins. Specific universities are remarkably durable, with the oldest (Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Cambridge) dating to the 11th and 12th cen…
> In-place instruction of both explicit and tacit knowledge, remains the most effective method attained. Citation needed. I view today's colleges (including the university I attended) as little more than a racketeering scam. "It'd be a shame if you didn't pay us $200K and didn't get a degree, no employer would take you seriously". Most of the stuff I use on a daily basis I did not learn in the college, and there's no…
What you call a racketeering scam ... is an argument with merits, but it also reflects another persistent pragmatic informational reality: assessment costs of complex informational goods, such as highly-trained higher-education graduates, are high. Universities effectively play two simultaneous roles: both shaping and measuring (and certifying) educational accomplishment. The flipside of this which you note, is a perennial HN favourite topic: how broken the tech hiring process is from both sides. For the employee and for the employer. At another level, it's the problem faced by both VC and founders in startup launches, and for users and marketers in product. Branding, reviews, resumes, certifications, and other shibboleths serve as information-simplifying mechanisms. See Akerlof's "Market for Lemons". Discussed on HN here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895171 and in context of hiring here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671290
The resulting process remains ... highly frustrating and unsatisfying. For me as much as anyone else. But it's another of those persistent behaviours that is too enduring to be dismissed lightly. A classic case of Chesterton's fence.
On low-student:instrctor ratio in-person vs. large-scale, mediated, remote, independent, or other instruction: I wish I did have a good citation, I really don't, other than repeatedly encountering the claim as a simple statement of fact in my reading on educational methods: that one-on-one tutoring remains the gold standard to which all other instructional methods are compared. Hopefully someone with better familiarity with the field than I can substantiate this. Example citation in the opening of "Automated facial affect analysis for one-on-one tutoring ..." (https://inc.ucsd.edu/mplab/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011...) expressed as accepted fact, and in numerous Google Scholar cites: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="one%20on%20one%20tutor...
Reasons are various, but I think the real key is that educational systems aren't merely informational delivery systems, but tune what's being presented, closely and constantly, to how it's being received. This is a point lost on advocates of technologically-mediated educational methods dating to textbooks, audio-recorded lectures, filmstrips, instructional videos, educational software, and remote learning. Efficiency-minded public education administrators implementing 300--1,000 seat lecture halls with overflow televised satellite sections have foundered on this issue. My own experience has shown the distinct qualitative difference between large (100+ seat) lectures and more intimate sections of ~30 students, or more rarely, seminars of 8-15. The amount of focus and attention instructors can offer smaller groups, the personal relations formed, and interactions among students, are far stronger in smaller groups. Size isn't the only factor, but it's a major one.
The matter of what feedback is or is not perceived in online discussion is also huge, addressed in another current HN thread on "The Silence is Deafening": https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-silence-is-deafening and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728212
Thinking of universities as nothing more than skill factories is another long-standing flaw, and neglects the role of employers themselves in mentoring, training, and development. See the classic divide between the liberal and servile arts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23038380
I've addressed ancillary elements of my own uni experience some months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20959811
Sadly administrators have no skills to retrain people.
College currently sell an "experience" with clubs, restaurants, football teams, fraternities, housing, a nice campus with trees and lakes, etc. This isn't free. It has pushed up the price of education. If education turns remote, I would expect prices to fall (and layoffs for the administrative staff), unless a similar experience part can be replicated online (which I strongly doubt) This is the exact opposite of work…
If working from home becomes the default then wages will fall because employers will be able to select employees who live anywhere. Working in a physical office constrains the labor supply to workers who live nearby (or are able to relocate).
As a full-time resident of Boulder, CO (college town), this seems like an impossible situation. I can well imagine that the university here is under heavy pressure from local government to hold classes in the fall. This is because going a semester without all the students/faculty will be disastrous for the town's economy. On the other hand, the increase in coronavirus cases will also be disastrous. I don't have an an…
We’re moving to Boulder next month. With houses starting at $800K and larger houses going for $1.5M+, it seems like the local economy must be driven as much by the tech companies that flocked to Boulder bc of the school as by the school itself.