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A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

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Re: A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

#91

Post by q084yn39cptyth »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #12
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has made an effort to build a connection with my landlords, being a landlord is not in any way an easy job. Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. This is doubly so in a rural university town where the seasonally renting(2/3rds of the year) population is anywhere from 10 to 30 times the size of th…

> Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. Good landlords are hard to find. There is so much information asymmetry when choosing a rental property. They can get large troves of data on you, but the reverse is not so easy if possible at all.

Business opportunity in that current asymmetry?

Re: A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

#92

Post by kathe-rine »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #11
downerending wrote: post #5

I feel bad for the colleges. But anyone in their right mind that's going to college to learn things will take a gap year. Those going to college just for the paper are well advised to keep going. The next couple of years will be easy mode, for sure. You get an A, and you get an A--everyone gets an A!

If you are relying on scholarships to afford university, this is not an option. If you break full time status you essentially forfeit all of your scholarships and it is very unlikely you will get them back.

Perhaps this varies, but I was able to pause all my scholarships to take a year off from uni.

Re: A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

#93

Post by kathe-rine »

argonaut wrote: post #80
downerending wrote: post #5

I feel bad for the colleges. But anyone in their right mind that's going to college to learn things will take a gap year. Those going to college just for the paper are well advised to keep going. The next couple of years will be easy mode, for sure. You get an A, and you get an A--everyone gets an A!

Colleges are not going to let many people take gap years. So it'll be a choice between attending the school you want or reapplying next year (when it'll probably be even harder to get in). Usually most people who want gap years are allowed to do so, but usually there aren't many people who want to do gap years (at least in the US).

My university's policy is that for student-elected gaps, if you returned within three years, "re-admission" was guaranteed. It was a bit dicier if the university required you to leave due to health problems or disciplinary/academic violations.

Re: A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

#94

Post by x0x0 »

rjtobin wrote: post #33
HarryHirsch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll decide again when they have an outbreak in a dorm or when a few faculty members die. It's hard to imagine that presence instruction will be back in the fall.

I’m a little surprised by this sentiment (maybe I’m naively optimistic). I’m curious, do you (and others) think elementary and high schools will be back next fall?

I suspect there will be a lot of pressure from parents to reinstitute in-person schooling so they have daycare.

I suspect we'll also see our first couple of disease clusters and super spreaders with associated deaths clearly attributable to a child in school. (I hope to god we'll have some compassion and keep the kids' names out of this, but I doubt it.)

Once that hits the news, I suspect lots of parents will refuse to put their kids in school.

In CA, for example, this may have devastating effects on the school district: they get money on an asses-in-seats basis [1]. I suspect that home schooling is about to have an enormous boom.

[1] https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/how-do-you-...

Re: A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

#95

Post by imtringued »

cassiet wrote: post #23
malandrew wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be happy if this was the beginning of the end for humanities departments that have become overtly political. More resources should be shifted to more utilitarian degrees like engineering and hard sciences.

What a useless world that would create.

It's surprising to me that you can even think of a world that isn't useless.

Value judgements merely reflect the person that created them.

Re: A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

#96

Post by imtringued »

klodolph wrote: post #21
baggy_trough wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanities departments emit some of the most cryptic texts around. They should be worrying about that before trying to help engineers.

Tu quouque doesn’t make an argument. Gutting humanities in favor of “practical” degrees is short-sighted in the extreme. The problem with humanities is not that it doesn’t provide value to the community, the problem is that it is difficult to monetize skills in the humanities. There is a pathology that larger organizations often develop where they start investing only in ideas that where they can measure the impact o…

Or there is an oversupply of humanities graduates and that is what is causing monetization problems. Just think about how many poorly paid artists there are.

Re: A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

#97

Post by dsfyu404ed »

klodolph wrote: post #15
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has made an effort to build a connection with my landlords, being a landlord is not in any way an easy job. Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. This is doubly so in a rural university town where the seasonally renting(2/3rds of the year) population is anywhere from 10 to 30 times the size of th…

Being a good landlord is not an easy job, but individual landlords (good or bad) are in the minority. The majority of properties are owned by PMCs, and the difference is larger when you look at MDUs or college towns. By their nature, PMCs are after profit, and improvements are an expense to minimize. The nature of college towns mean that there is a constant supply of “fresh meat” in the market, often moving to or fro…

> The nature of college towns mean that there is a constant supply of “fresh meat” in the market, often moving to or from other cities, further disincentivizing improvement or good behavior on the part of the PMC.

I grew up in a tourism economy and absolutely hated it for this reason.

Not having to do repeat business allows businesses to do all sorts of sleazy thigns that would have gotten around and had them out of business in short order anywhere else. Because their bad behavior never comes back to get them the scumbags can out compete the honest businesses for all the things businesses need so the cost of commercial rent, a plumber's services, tires for a skid steer, etc, etc, all reflect an income level that a business needs to behave badly to obtain. Eventually the entire local economy runs in a mode where prices are massively variable because everyone rips everyone else off as much as they think they can and you can never trust anyone you do business with to give you a fair price and a massive amount of time and effort is wasted on price discovery because nobody can trust that they're not paying some integer multiple of what someone else got charged for an equivalent.

Deriving income from a large transient population is just an all around recipe for a crappy low trust society.

Re: A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

#98

Post by imtringued »

klodolph wrote: post #17
baggy_trough wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baffling comment. Providing rental property is a legitimate business.

Read more Adam Smith. In practice, PMCs in college towns are bad actors. At least, on average. They are basically sitting on an investment (land) and providing the minimum level of work necessary to keep money flowing. It’s a legitimate business in the sense that it is “legal”. However, the profits do not correspond to the value that they provide to the economy.

Ok, fine. Just shut them down then. It's not like anyone needs their services.

Re: A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

#99

Post by auntienomen »

moneytide1 wrote: post #54
downerending wrote: post #5

I feel bad for the colleges. But anyone in their right mind that's going to college to learn things will take a gap year. Those going to college just for the paper are well advised to keep going. The next couple of years will be easy mode, for sure. You get an A, and you get an A--everyone gets an A!

"... If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that…

If you don't have a Princeton ID, you aren't going to be allowed into their libraries. You _might_ be able to attend lectures, but basically everything else will be off limits. Good luck joining a study group.

If you are genuinely capable of learning everything alone, just from lectures, there's no need to move to NJ. It's all online anyways.

Re: A List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

#100

Post by Balero »

moneytide1 wrote: post #54
downerending wrote: post #5

I feel bad for the colleges. But anyone in their right mind that's going to college to learn things will take a gap year. Those going to college just for the paper are well advised to keep going. The next couple of years will be easy mode, for sure. You get an A, and you get an A--everyone gets an A!

"... If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that…

Is this still True? I didn't go to the institution in question, but we had ID cards that we had to show when entering the building.

Also I think a more obvious example of it being popular is the courses and lectures that are made freely available online.

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