Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present • Hacker News Board

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#141

Post by nr2x » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

jgalt212 wrote: post #138

Full professorships, irrespective of institution eliteness, are a tough job to get. If I were the provost, I'd just sack the folks who refuse to show up to work this fail. Most of them would be very easy replace (certainly if you value teaching skills over research skills). Furthermore, the health risk to professors is much lower than it is to primary school teachers. 20 year olds can wear* masks for 45-90 minutes at…

As recent weeks have shown 20 year olds will be going to bars and parties and seeding new waves of infections. The vast majority of people in their age group have negligible mortality risk, and high incentives to socialize after being stuck at home with parents for months on end. The faculty on the other hand are in the demographic where COVID is a death sentence.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#142

Post by mdorazio » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

bllguo wrote: post #113

mdorazio wrote: post #58

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…

wow, berkeley has a $70k online DS program?? Does your comment change re: stigma if OP was in fact talking about said berkeley degree?

I believe it's actually about $76k. Yes and no. The brand recognition is certainly more valuable than getting a degree from a cheap school and would open more doors, but I believe that like many schools, Berkeley still distinguishes the degree as different than if you got it in-person. In this case, the degree name is different even though it doesn't say "online" anywhere, so it will depend on whether the hiring manager is aware of its online nature or not.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#143

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #132

dredmorbius wrote: post #52

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…

I think you might be underselling the total paradigm shift that is the internet. Nothing that came before it really compares when it comes to impact on education, except for maybe the printing press, but in many ways that probably strengthened university's grip on education. The internet does the opposite.

I'm going to suggest that the Internet is centralising rather than decentralising information flows. Not necessarily around the University, nut in direct contrast to the liberation many early tech visionaries advocated.

Much as the liberation of performance art from the confines of the theatre stage didn't result in a completely decentralised entertainment industry, but in the megacluster industry geonym of Hollywood (with a few culturally-defined satellites such as Bollywood).

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#144

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #119

dredmorbius wrote: post #52

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…

> Education generally, and universities specifically, are highly durable institutions which have undergone massive changes over time It's as though, if you concentrate a lot of smart and well-meaning people in one place, they make a great institution! Maybe not any particular university, but the idea of elite, sequestered scholarship itself has long outlived neoliberal capitalism. It was never about money. Moneyed in…

I think the persistence effect comes about from stronger and more complex dynamics than just "a lot of smart people".

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#145

Post by rst » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

tkgally wrote: post #67

dredmorbius wrote: post #52

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…

> I'm leaning more strongly to "major impact / selection event / paradigm shift" than extinction. I agree. I teach at a large public research university in Japan, and we're near the end of our first semester teaching all of our classes online. It has gone better than many (any?) of us expected. The university's decision in late March that all of our classes would be taught in real time using videoconferencing, with p…

Unfortunately, universities in the United States have unique problems. In much of the world, higher education is a largely government-supported thing. However, in the US, over the past fifty years or so, even nominally government-run institutions have become increasingly dependent on student fees (primarily tuition, but also lodging fees) to meet their expenses. If students stay away, or even stay remote, the schools may lose so much cash that they're no longer financially viable. (This in an environment where a number of smaller schools were already on the edge -- in Massachusetts, two reasonably reputable private universities, Wheelock and Mount Ida, were recently forced into mergers, and a third, Hampshire College, is on the ropes.)

Here's an overview from a few months ago -- but with recent elevated COVID rates in heavily populated states (Florida, Texas, California) calling the wisdom of reopening in doubt, the worst-case scenarios described here are looking a lot more likely then they were in it was written: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/...

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#146

Post by jasonv » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #112

jasonv wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, based on this: My high-school aged son was taking two in-person community college classes this last semester. When the SIP hit, his Spanish class just "ended". Nothing online, nothing from his teacher, it was just over. His math teacher worked diligently to keep things going, and I could see the adaptations the math teacher attempted to evolve his efforts with the unexpected conditions. If the CC is only onl…

I’m not sure it’s fair to characterise a change in circumstances as severe as what we’ve just been through, and the results of remote work, as a v0.9 beta. MVP feels fairer, and even that feels like a stretch for a lot of places.

Possibly -- but where a CC has a lot of adjunct profs, not staff, I'm not sure they're going to solve a lot of their issues over the summer.

Perhaps at a University, where tenured staff.. and those in the tenure-track, are likely to take the changed circumstances as a mandate to adjust and adapt.

One consideration we've had is signing him up for classes, and making a determination pretty quickly about how online-instruction ready the instructors he ends up with are. If we can drop enrollment for no, or little, $ outlay, we may give it a shot.

But our alternative -- returning to a tutor we used some time ago -- could be a more secure option, unless he's booked full. Which could be the case.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#147

Post by jlokier » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:34 PM UTC

nr2x wrote: post #141

jgalt212 wrote: post #138

Full professorships, irrespective of institution eliteness, are a tough job to get. If I were the provost, I'd just sack the folks who refuse to show up to work this fail. Most of them would be very easy replace (certainly if you value teaching skills over research skills). Furthermore, the health risk to professors is much lower than it is to primary school teachers. 20 year olds can wear* masks for 45-90 minutes at…

As recent weeks have shown 20 year olds will be going to bars and parties and seeding new waves of infections. The vast majority of people in their age group have negligible mortality risk, and high incentives to socialize after being stuck at home with parents for months on end. The faculty on the other hand are in the demographic where COVID is a death sentence.

And when they don't die, it can ruin their academic & intellectual lives by making them long-term ill & disabled, including neurologically. Some of the lingering symptoms are nasty.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#148

Post by OldHand2018 » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 1:20 AM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #115

davesque wrote: post #79

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…

Boulder at least is relatively well to do and has close economic ties to Denver, a lot of other college towns would be economically worse off if college stayed close. Lafayette Indiana (Purdue) and Athens Ohio (OU) come to mind, although there are others.

I think you are generally correct but need a lot more nuance in your examples.

Purdue is an R1 school with around 50k students in a metro area of over 150k non-students. It is the largest employer in the metro, but the large factories in the area employee far more in total. It's probably a lot more like Boulder than you think. Boulder is an hour from Denver, but Lafayette is an hour from Indianapolis (a larger city than Denver) and an hour and a half from Chicago.

Ohio U is an R2 school with around 30k students in a metro area of around 30k non-students. It's nowhere near any large city and doesn't have more than a small handful of other medium-sized employers.

The economic effect of no students on campus for a year would look vastly different between these two cities.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#149

Post by hiidrew » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 1:38 AM UTC

I’ve thought about this quite a bit, really interesting what will happen to higher-ed.

I’m currently a graduate student at a public research uni, which I imagine are the type of uni’s that may struggle (cause it’s not like ivy tech or other elite schools, may struggle to tract people if they start competing online only).

Another interesting factor are the increasing amount of bootcamps like Lambda and others offering technical education for the low. I wonder if companies like those will try to expand to other less technical subjects.

Think future higher-ed will be up to the experience and faculty, also makes you kind of worry about these public research institutions if tuition starts drying up.

Re: Colleges are reopening in fall, but many professors won’t be present

#150

Post by neilparikh » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 5:37 AM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #68

gbronner wrote: post #18

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…

Small liberal arts colleges may be extinguished but the major universities will live on. The sciences, medicine, and engineering fields still require facilities and equipment beyond the reach of the individual, particularly for cutting edge research. I could point to universities with their own wind tunnel for aerospace engineering, their own research and teaching hospitals, their own small silicon chip fab and so fo…

OT: which schools have their own fab?