A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t • Hacker News Board

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#181

Post by blaser-waffle » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #119

sramsay wrote: post #92

Another twenty-year professor here. I would just like to point out that this article is articulating -- with absolutely accuracy and lucidity -- every college administrator's worst nightmare. They've all been discussing the possibility (that parents and students will make this very decision) for weeks. It might be the right decision to make, but it would be absolutely catastrophic for most schools.

Universities would seem uniquely capable of just going into hibernation for a while. They do it every summer, after all. That tradition is even because of infectious disease risk! What does it really cost to park a campus in "summer mode" a while longer?

> Universities would seem uniquely capable of just going into hibernation for a while. They do it every summer, after all. That tradition is even because of infectious disease risk!

Most don't go into hibernation at all I grew up in Ithaca NY and both Cornell and Ithaca College ran summer camp programs through the summer. I later went to school in VA and saw the same thing -- tons of folks using the Uni even during the "off" season.

Summer school classes went all summer and there were always non-trivial amounts of students on campus, including living in dorms.

Research didn't just stop because the students went away -- in many cases the research kicked into high gear since the profs didn't have to teach.

Colleges with agriculture programs don't just let their fields die during the summer; same for schools that have restaurant or hospitality management programs.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#182

Post by N1H1L » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

kurthr wrote: post #80

pfranz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) If you are studying a technical field, even if you are average, a degree has greater ROI than just about anything else. You can pay off your debt in the first few years out of school and continue earning dividends for the rest of your life. What's the downside to going to a community college? Where I grew up the credits were transferable. They did say, "Most people spend the first two years figuring stuff out".…

The downside is that you basically won't get into Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale... or most any other "top" college after going to community college. I know of one counter example, and I know of many very smart capable people who would have been capable and profited from such a degree, but missed their chance... which in turn made it VERY difficult to get any advanced degree. Maybe that doesn't matter in CS/programming…

> which in turn made it VERY difficult to get any advanced degree.

Absolutely false for STEM fields. Except for Stanford/MIT your flagship public school is probably a better tech school than any other private name-brand school. Yale is an ordinary tech school, with several public schools (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSB, UWash, UIUC, UMich, Ohio State, Penn State, Wisc-Mad off the top of my head) being significantly better and cheaper. And all will allow you in from community colleges.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#183

Post by wink » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 12:32 PM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #140

danaris wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get into Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale Based on everything I've seen over my roughly 20-year career in academia, plus the 18 years before that living in that world (my parents are both professors), what you get from going to Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and all the other "Big Name" schools is just that: the name. The education you get there is not better than the education you can get at a small liberal arts colleg…

I didn't study in the US, but having studied in college faculties staffed by professors who are at the cutting edge of their fields in my country, I can confidently say that the experience was unparalleled vs. my friends who didn't. In my undergrad one of my profs was a "may have been" Nobel prize winner. In my B-school, some of the profs essentially created the government's public policy in some fields. Their perspe…

How deep is your connection to that star professor though? I tend to believe I visited a good university, and we also have some leading researchers. The problem is that you wouldn't know beforehand if they are even giving the lectures you're interested in. The other people in the department can still be bad at their job. Being a researcher doesn't transmit to being a good teacher. Or not a complete idiot.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, also I'm not trying to deliberately shit on my uni education, but let's just say I didn't find it great for many reasons. One course by a "leading expert" could have been pretty great, just that it was done in not so stellar English (the prof was German, so am I) and so it wasn't so great to understand.

If you just show up to learn and don't plan to stay in academia there (do a PhD, get to know the faculty) I really don't see a point.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#184

Post by glofish » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #172

glofish wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of April 17, in the age group of 15-24, 13 deaths were attributable to COVID-19, 37 to influenza. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/ If you are a college student the risk of dying of alcohol poisoning is higher than of COVID-19.

If school was back in session, that number would probably be much higher. Remember, these are the numbers with the most massive pause on our economy and society that we’ve seen in our lifetime. Young people are not immune.

all the evidence points to an extremely strong age dependency on both infection likelihood, and most importantly on the severity of cases.

Nothing is ever 100% but if the rest of the population had the same characteristics as the youth there would be no reason for a lockdown to begin with. We are talking about death rates of 1 in 100K cases.

For young people the flu is far more dangerous than COVID-19. Of course for alarmists this is heresy that should be never talked about.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#185

Post by Hydraulix989 » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #171

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who grew up in a no-name mid-western town, I can't stop counting my lucky stars for becoming one of the first students ever in my high school's history to become accepted to a Top 10 university. Every job opportunity and connection I've made since graduating is directly attributable to my school's name. It wouldn't be an understatement to say that going there changed my life. I know for a fact that there w…

Sounds to me like you benefited specifically from what I mentioned: not the education you gained at the unnamed Top 10 school, but its reputation and connections got you where you are. I want to be very clear that I'm not saying "you shouldn't go to these schools"—I'm saying "if you go to these schools, recognize that what you're getting that you won't get anywhere else is not a better education, it's the school's na…

I would even go one step farther and say it's a mixture of both.

The classes at my uni could move at a more intense pace than other schools, and the problem sets and exams were also more difficult, given the academic aptitude of my class. Go on the MIT Open Courseware web site, and take a look at the physics problem sets to get an example. I'm not sure there are too many other freshman physics classes that require pulling all-nighters to solve the challenge problems.

Sure, I could always challenge myself more wherever environment I was in (I taught myself linear algebra and C++ coding in high school, even though nobody I knew in real-life could help), but there is a LOT said to be surrounded by peer pressure, mentorship from world-class professors, and other motivated, top-notch students with the same drive for success. I would not have pushed myself to do better to the extent that I did at my uni.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#186

Post by CardenB » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 6:58 AM UTC

glofish wrote: post #124

scott_s wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is at risk from Covid-19. Younger people are at less risk, but they are still at risk, both from suffering a severe case, and from death.

As of April 17, in the age group of 15-24, 13 deaths were attributable to COVID-19, 37 to influenza. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/ If you are a college student the risk of dying of alcohol poisoning is higher than of COVID-19.

But how many people had COVID vs influenza?

It doesn’t list case fatality rate, so your argument is just like everyone who says “the flu is deadlier than COVID”. Flu cases aren’t growing exponentially.

Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t

#187

Post by Chyzwar » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

rlanday wrote: post #135

Chyzwar wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kids that drink and smoke pot are paying in personal debt, the taxpayer is not really subsidizing this (at least based on what I was reading). For most career paths outside a small portion of the technology, college is the only way. Part of the problem is that the US is not spending enough taxpayer money into education. If the US spends a portion of it military budget 570B$ to enhance education spending 70B$ pr…

The US spends plenty of money on education. If the data on this site is accurate, local, state, and federal spending makes up about 6.35% of US GDP: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending vs. it looks like about 4.8% from Germany. Maybe there’s some discrepancy in how those numbers are calculated, but they’re at least not wildly different.

Universities in Germany are mostly free with generous system of funding for poor students.

From attached link most of the spending is on state and local level.

>Federal education spending: The federal government had little involvement in education in the early 20th century. This changed in the 1930s when federal education spending increased from less than 0.05 percent of GDP to over 0.3 percent of GDP. Federal education spending decreased during World War II but then increased to a peak of 1.03 percent of GDP in 1949 as it funded education for veterans in the GI Bill. Federal education spending declined in the 1950s to 0.3 percent of GDP, but began an increase in the mid 1960s reaching a peak of 1.2 percent of GDP in 1979. Thereafter federal education spending declined to about 0.6 to 0.7 percent of GDP in the 1980s and 1990s before increasing modestly to nearly 0.8 percent of GDP in the 2000s.

> In the early 2010s federal education spending declined to 0.7 percent in 2015, and is expected to be 0.5 percent GDP by 2020.