Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

Would it make sense for hospitals to do the same? Why not theaters next? In the end, if keeping the balance in check is the main thing an istitution is bound to do, why not stop doing education (= expenses) and just focus on investments?

> loquation

> Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else.

was responding to my perception that his or her written / implied sentiment was conveying that it's so strange that students would need to work to be able to afford to go to college. That we should have a system where students have a special right to get something for free as an entitlement of society.

Now, whether that is a good policy is a legitimate question. My response was to point out that the above kind of thinking regards students as a special class of people who should be insulated from having to work. While implicitly, it is ok for other people to have to work or pay taxes to fund that privilege. Often that attitude is easy to adopt when you forget who's paying the bills.

- Internships/co-ops prove that students in high-skill degrees can command high wages by working for industry. How can we capture similar sorts of value in other places, either by integrating real industry projects into class work or something else. My senior capstone project tried this, but integrating it across the entire curriculum is hard.

- Professors command high salaries, and are the largest single cost of most universities, but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors. We had a few student-taught classes at university, and in many cases they were regarded as better than professor-taught classes because student instructors can empathize with the other kids better. Again, scaling this to cover most classes is a hard problem.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "high". At most institutions, faculty will make $50K-$60K starting, max out at $100K, and often do not have access to a pension. In many states, you're really better off, financially, as a high school teacher or police officer.

Which, I mean, high school teachers are highly paid by some standards. But saying professors command high salaries on a tech forum where even new grads are probably making more than the average full professor is probably misleading.

> but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors... better than professor-taught classes

1. It really depends on the course; undergrad-lead core courses tend to be a disaster.

2. On that note, there's an important confounding factor: undergraduate-lead courses are often "topics" courses outside of the core curriculum, which naturally attract better feedback than "broccoli and spinach" courses regardless of the instructor. E.g., in CS, a course on game design or crypto will always attract higher ratings than "core" courses like Data Structures or especially Intro Programing.

3. Good faculty do a lot more than teach. And I don't even mean research. Industry relations and job placement are huge value adds of a good faculty member.

There's an important split between courses that need careful pedagogy and courses that really just need engagement. For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops. Sometimes an undergrad will pass through who could totally teach the course, but that tends to be an exceptional student.

Once you have a bunch of juniors/seniors who know how to program, and assuming you're teaching a course that's primarily about applied programming (eg, not a proof-based CS Theory or Algo course), engagement becomes more important than pedagogy.

Student-lead courses can be great, and ARE often way better than prof-lead courses especially for "applied programming" type courses, but it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state.