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

Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

stanforddaily.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 482 posts

Re: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

#231

Post by analog31 »

celnardur wrote: post #99

I feel like I can offer a unique perspective on this because I go to Notre Dame and we are just finishing the first week of classes with everyone back on campus. It's gone alright so far. All the cases so far have been traced back to off campus bars or parties. However, I expect it to get worse soon as cases start spreading on campus. If you want to see how Notre Dame is doing with cases and testing we have a dashboa…

Everybody at every college is saying that it could work if the students behave themselves when they're not in class. Then in the next breath, they say: It can't work.

Oddly enough I went to ND for grad school, though it was many years ago. The campus was isolated from the surrounding town, but not completely isolated.

Re: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

#232

Post by epoch_100 »

v7p1Qbt1im wrote: post #58

Is there still a possibility to defer? I would‘ve definitely done that back in April.

Stanford student here. The answer is _yes_ -- afaik, they've extended the deferral deadline to August 19th to give people enough time to make a decision.

Re: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

#233

Post by Nasrudith »

netcan wrote: post #156
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US we pretend that class doesn’t exist here. We have risen above that, you see, anybody here can become anything they want. Much the same way we pretend that racism doesn’t exist.

In most republics we pretend that class doesn't exist, and it doesn't in the rigid ways that it did previously. It does however, always exist in some form. In the UK, class is still discernible immediately by accent, schools are mostly segregated by class, etc. In Ireland, it's not like the UK... though some Dublin neighborhoods still have very distinct class accents. Even this is dying off. But.. class still exists…

From the US outside looking in there is an ironic mirror of the usual commentary about US vacation time or lack of national healthcare. "Why do you accept this irrelevant bullshit?"

I have seen an apparent consensus that the upper class schools and such focus only on prestiege and signaling and then when they are placed in management by other from the background make a complete hash of it while thinking promoting someone who actually knows what they are doing would be an unthinkable faux pau because they might wear brown shoes in London or worse not coordinate their belt and shoes! It doesn't even seem to be a matter of capital given the fact there are apparently plenty of impoverished "patricians" and working class wealth to invest in and they were marrying into money from outside their silly class frameworks for generations.

It seems to be utterly useless on every level yet society still persists for some daft reason. Why not do away with it? Not in the "Get the gulitiones, senseless violence, and the full circle revolution started!" way but "A ignore the useless twits to stew in their own resulting irrelevance." way.

Re: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

#234

Post by maire »

LargeWu wrote: post #56
netcan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat different take. The student debt problem is not really related to the college format. The format existed in earlier decades, exists in other countries and exists in K-12 education without runaway costs and student debt. It's mostly a matter of policy. The US' method to expand third level education to most of the population was by government backed and/or subsidized loans, without price controls. This caused…

I disagree about the college format going completely online. There is so much about the college experience that is not directly related to earning a degree. It's a place where most people are exposed to new ideas, new types of people. It's a place where lasting friendships and relationships are formed. It's a place of growth that an online experience could never hope to replicate, and that's the REAL benefit of colle…

There are less expensive ways to get the social experience of college.

My husband and I both worked our way through college. I didn't get the social experience at school. There is nothing like working for your degree to keep you laser focused on the reason why you are going to college.

We were both reasonably paid for working class jobs as he was a machinist and I was an electronic technician. Post graduate was so much better - he in mechanical engineering and I in software engineering.

Most of our socialization came on the job. We were both lucky enough to work for great companies with wonderful people.

Re: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

#235

Post by mhh__ »

TomVDB wrote: post #197
Consultant32452 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's staggering to me how much people will publicly support government subsidized partying and friend making. At least in the past it felt like people pretended it was about education.

Partying in college is totally a new phenomenon!

I'm pretty sure I read in either Herodotus or Thucydides a paragraph documenting complaints that the students were drinking instead of training.

Sound familiar? (And that was several thousand years ago)

Re: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

#236

Post by watwut »

Nasrudith wrote: post #226
watwut wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a place where most people are exposed to new ideas, new types of people. I dunno honestly. Maybe it is different elsewhere, but the college was the most uniform place I have been at. I am not complaining, I liked the experience and did fit in. But it was not diversity in literally any sense of the word.

It depends on the college. In my experience one had a vibrant cultural meetin grounds of myraid intersts and approaches where you see things like a small but visible minority of unicyclists (this is not an absurd example for the generic, a real thing). While the other was a generic and bland sadness that suck the life out of the room and "binge drinking" is the closest form to a local culture and even things which sh…

No, not religious at all. And I would not call it bland either, as I told I liked it.

But pretty much everyone around you was, well, college student of roughly same age. And plus everyone was focused on math, computer science or something similar. The university itself had other fields of study, obviously, but they had own building so practically you rarely really interacted with each other.

The city it was in obviously had sports clubs, entertainment and whatnot where you could meet non-college students or people of different age or people who study something different. You was not forced to close yourself into some kind university bubble.

But university itself necessary collects similar people at one place. Because everyone there has to be college student and has similar choice of study.

Re: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

#237

Post by ipnon »

mikem170 wrote: post #139
InitialLastName wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The life expectancy of someone who is 75 is ~12 years [0]. Do we really want to argue that that decade of someone's life has no value because they're "on the cusp of death"? A 1% mortality rate in the US (if everyone gets it) is 4 million people. The US fought the longest war in their history over 3000 deaths. That all is ignoring permanent, non-fatal damage. There's reasonable evidence at this point that Covid infec…

>There's reasonable evidence at this point that Covid infections do long-term damage, even to healthy people It is already a known fact that diseases with fever and/or lung components leave a small percentage of people with long term damage. Covid is like the flu in this regard. From https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas... >COVID-19: Lasting damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, brain and other…

Would you consider 60-78% to be a small percentage?[1] Do you have any evidence suggesting that the flu's rate of long-term cardiovascular consequences is similar?

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

Re: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

#238

Post by timr »

room500 wrote: post #220
timr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can claim that the danger is over-stated, but young adults can and do get COVID-19" Yes, they can, and do. And they are overwhelmingly likely to have nothing more than a mild illness. The danger has been drastically exaggerated. In the US, fewer than 300 people under the age of 25 have died from Covid: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm Moreover, when you look at the data, nearly all of th…

This argument seems strange to me. Only 300 people have died because of the policies that were put in place. Relaxing those policies will increase that number. Now there could be debate about whether that new number is "acceptable" or not. But we shouldn't use the success of the quarantine-like policies to argue that quarantine-like policies are unnecessary.

"Only 300 people have died because of the policies that were put in place. Relaxing those policies will increase that number."

This is an assumption, and it's a bad one. The paucity of deaths in young people is true around the world, regardless of lockdown policy. Sweden, for example, does not have a higher proportion of young people dying.

Re: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

#239

Post by watwut »

fock wrote: post #192
matwood wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know people who went to college, but lived at home with their parents "to save money". In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards. They are the people that haven't changed at all since high school. They're the people that are afraid of everything in the world outside their small circle. I did exactly that. Lived at home, attended college,…

well, if you look closer, the people telling this bs are actually all coming from a more than well-off-background. Like the person playing in a local band, telling me "I moved out" - me: "nice, but how can you afford that" - "I work as a tutor" - "that 400€ is not supporting your apartment" - "oh, no, my father is paying for that". yessss . I would really liked to have moved out too for the aforementioned reasons (li…

Going to less good university just so that you leave home sounds to me like immature decision. It is the sort of thing teenagers do - doing something irrational just to prove that I am an adult.

I think that if you have good relationships with parents, do your part in the house chores, the school nearby is actually good, there is absolutely nothing wrong with staying at home. If you cant wait till you leave the family home, then maybe it is not that you are super mature, maybe simply relationships in your family sux. Which is not a badge of honor.

To add, living outside of campus have one big advantage - freaking uninterrupted sleep time.

Re: Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

#240

Post by watwut »

bumby wrote: post #206
fock wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, if you look closer, the people telling this bs are actually all coming from a more than well-off-background. Like the person playing in a local band, telling me "I moved out" - me: "nice, but how can you afford that" - "I work as a tutor" - "that 400€ is not supporting your apartment" - "oh, no, my father is paying for that". yessss . I would really liked to have moved out too for the aforementioned reasons (li…

Good point. I think many of the people who weren’t well off only afforded this experience by taking on debt. Besides, there’s more ways than just college to have that “real” growth experience. Military, mission work, peace corps. Hell, I’d even argue these are more of an experience because they aren’t built on the somewhat artificial backdrop of universities that can insulate you from the “real” world without all the…

Military will insulate you quite a lot from everything not military.
Post reply on HN