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

#111

Post by atemerev » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:01 AM UTC

blackrock wrote: post #6

outoftheabyss wrote: post #4

I’m doing a distance data science degree at a fraction of the cost and I would imagine I’m getting much more out of it than this September intake will. There’s been a revolution in remote working, will education follow?

I hope the education is free. Because without the human presence, paying $250,000 USD for a university education sounds like a ripoff.

I am a researcher and a lecturer in a Swiss university. Switzerland is famous for being expensive, and the reputation is well deserved. However, the price of education for our students is about $1200/year. Which includes famous schools like EPFL (where Scala was born and still developed) and ETH (which contributions to computer science are too many to mention here). The students can e.g. collaborate with CERN researchers as part of their projects. For $1200/year. Available for everyone regardless of their nationality.

The best part is that for many master degrees and some bachelor degrees you can study remotely while living in your own country, only coming to Switzerland once or twice a year.

I don’t know why there are so few American students studying outside the US. (We do have some Canadian and Australian students though).

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

#112

Post by oarsinsync » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:06 AM UTC

jasonv wrote: post #29

sumoboy wrote: post #23

So many of these teachers have become unqualified to teach remote classes since they can't adapt to virtual engagement to help students succeed. They don't answer emails, don't chat, leaving students lost. You get more from a youtube video in many cases. Remote teaching has made these teachers lazy IMO.

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.

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

#113

Post by bllguo » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:11 AM UTC

mdorazio wrote: post #58

outoftheabyss wrote: post #4

I’m doing a distance data science degree at a fraction of the cost and I would imagine I’m getting much more out of it than this September intake will. There’s been a revolution in remote working, will education follow?

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?

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

#114

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:18 AM UTC

DreadY2K wrote: post #10

chrisseaton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone genuinely paying a quarter of a million dollars for a degree? That seems extreme even for a non-scholarship medical doctorate degree, let alone a simple data-science degree.

I'm a current college student, and my school costs about $80k per year, counting tuition, room & board, supplies, etc., before financial aid. That would be $320k for 4 years, well over a quarter of a million. I'm personally getting a significant amount of financial aid, so that it will end up costing much less than that for me, but I know people who are paying full price. EDIT: I'm an undergrad at a 4-year university…

The place I went, quite a few years ago, now estimates undergraduate total costs (per year) of $25K, 60% of which is room and meals. That is, total tuition and fees is around $10K.

I don't really see the point of pointing to total costs and saying "look how expensive college is". You need food and shelter anyway.

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

#115

Post by ashtonkem » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

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.

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

#116

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:22 AM UTC

davesque wrote: post #110

kleinsch wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've lived here for about 30 years and I really doubt Boulder would last long without the university. And when I said "home", I meant condo, not house. The average tech employee in Boulder is still a long way away from house ownership in town. The real estate prices are not primarily explained by the tech scene.

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by cl3misch » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:29 AM 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…

That is interesting to hear! How large are the classes you are teaching live?

Our class has 100+ students and we decided in the beginning of the semester to focus on multiple, shorter (10-25 min) videos both for lecture and tutorial. There are specific live sessions for questions, but the initial presentation of the content happens in async videos.

Although participation in the live sessions is smaller than we hoped, we thought we would not be able to handle a large amount of students during live and interactive lectures. Which then also would have lasted the conventional 90 minutes, much too long according to studies on remote teaching. (searching for the source...)

How do you handle that? Did it just work?

Funnily enough, when my colleagues and me looked at recent polls from the students, most prefer one single long lecture video. Which totally goes against research findings.

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

#118

Post by pdonis » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:33 AM UTC

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…

You are assuming that academic institutions in general rely on tuition for income. Most of them actually don't to any great extent. They subsist largely on a combination of research grants and endowments. So a drastic cut in how much tuition they take in is not actually a huge threat to them as institutions.

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

#119

Post by an_opabinia » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:48 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #52

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…

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 interests expounding on the future of the academy are always dead wrong.

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

#120

Post by jackpirate » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 6:54 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #118

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…

You are assuming that academic institutions in general rely on tuition for income. Most of them actually don't to any great extent. They subsist largely on a combination of research grants and endowments. So a drastic cut in how much tuition they take in is not actually a huge threat to them as institutions.

This is not correct. Major R1 universities have grants and endowments as their primary source of income, but the vast majority of schools do not fall into this category. All liberal arts colleges, religious colleges, for-profit colleges, and most state colleges (i.e. non-R1 universities) desperately need tuition to pay the bills.