My understanding is a lot of universities are playing bait-and-switch, announcing unrealistic plans to reopen in the Fall in order to get deposits/tuition, but secretly knowing they'll be 'forced' to move everything online again. I admire Harvard's transparency, although having a multi-billion-dollar endowment does make this decision easier for them than it would be for struggling institutions.
FWIW, I personally think distance learning is underrated, although I have been doing it for years so I've had time to become accustomed to it. I can understand why some students (including my wife) do not like it, and may never like it.
From a strategic perspective, I can see universities like Harvard strengthening their brand by opening up more of their classes to the general public (and maybe even giving credit for a bigger chunk of them via the Extension School). This might hurt a lot of the smaller institutions and lead to consolidation, but I'm undecided on whether that would be a bad thing.
The pandemic is particularly challenging for a school like Harvard, as it makes the implicit thing obvious: a prestige school like Harvard is about the social connections far more than the education. If you get one semester on campus, maybe, then what’s the point? You can get an online education anywhere, for far less money.
Harvard is fairly cheap to attend, less than a state school for most, and free if your parents make under $65K. They were forced to do that a few years ago so the government wouldn't start taxing their endowment.
Yeah I had a friend attend for like $800 a year. My understanding at the time was that some other prestige schools were similar, like Stanford.
Others have followed suit - Northwestern recently announced that they would just grant financial aid recipients whatever part previously would have been loans.
When I was applying to college in early 2010s as someone who received financial aid (parents made ~$100k total), I could attend:
* [top 20 school - private] for ~18k a year
* [top 50 school - private] for ~18k a year
* [sub 200-rank school - the main in-state school] for ~$9k a year
* [top 20 to top 40 schools - state - out of state] for $30k-$40k...
These big state schools were the most surprising to me because everyone always says "if you're smart they'll have so many scholarships for you it'll nearly be free!"
But when it came down to it the good state schools weren't even in the running. I took the more prestigious school name for half the price.
Yup, and the reality becomes winners take all. Really starts to suck for us that ended up going to a ~200 ranked institution because we couldn’t get in to the prestigious ones (which, in all honesty, is much harder than finding a way to pay for an expensive school).
Sounds like an r/K selection thing. If you can't afford an Ivy and aren't elegable for assistance, then it may be more worthwhile to do community college and laterally-transfer into a different school.
I knew a dude who did community college in Northern VA (NVCC) and transferred to Cornell. Shaved off a lot of costs, got a scholarship, and walked out with an Ivy League diplo. All of those hills were good for his leg strength, too.
Doesn’t only apply to ivy leagues. I have a coworker than attended cc for 3 years and then transferred to a super elite/expensive private school in Oregon for his final year.
Ok, I didn’t think there were any elite schools on the West Cost apart from Stanford and after googling “most prestigious colleges Oregon” the only one I’ve heard of before is Reed, which USNWR ranks #68 among National Liberal Arts Colleges. This isn’t a knock on the students or the quality of education in Oregon or on the West Coast generally, just a statement of social reality. If you go by Lauren Rivera’s research on hiring practices of elite professional service firms the super elite are HYPS, with the remaining members of the Ivy League, Northwestern, MIT, Cal Tech and some others sometimes being included depending on who was hiring. No one’s transferring to any of those schools after three years at a community college. I doubt that’s ever happened at Reed.
Reed is among the top tier of liberal arts colleges.
Liberal arts college rankings aren't comparable to large university rankings. There are thousands of them, and many have specialized niches.
You need to adjust your scale when looking at colleges versus universities, and even then USNWR rankings are a crude metric if you are interested in a specific program.
Also, the idea that "elite professional service firms" and Ivy/Ivy-tier Universities have similar selection criteria doesn't seem at all surprising to me. But I don't think that's a model that's appropriate or useful for most HN readers.
Reed is #2 in the country for the number of graduates who go on to earn PhDs.
It's a more prestigious school than their USNWR ranking would indicate. Reed refuses to fill out the USNWR yearly survey, and is ranked lower because of it.
It would be better to norm "getting a PhD" by undergrad department. Ivy league stem graduates often go straight to work because their salaries are basically as high as a phd
BTW, this is anecdotal and happened a long time ago, but I attended a "national liberal arts college" that's ranked _above_ Reed and had at least one classmate that completed two years at a local community college then transferred to this school for the final two years.
For that matter, my local community college system offers _guaranteed admission_ to several respected (and selective) universities. I.e., not only _can_ you do two years at community college and transfer to one of these more prestigious universities for a four-year degree, you can enroll in programs that guarantee it. (And several schools apparently found this useful enough to actively create a pipeline for it.)
Which means that in the city I live in, if both parents work full time minimum wage jobs, their child might be able to go for free, since the minimum wage here is $15. It would even be slightly harder if the parents worked in San Francisco, since minimum wage is a few cents more there. I doubt anyone in that situation feels like that minimum wage is making it easy to live in the area.
Programs meant to accept people from across the nation that peg goals/limits to specific income amounts don't seem to make all that much sense to me. :/
There are thresholds and guidelines, but in my experience financial aid officers have a lot of flexibility and discretion. They look at the complete picture, including assets, number of other siblings that are dependents/in college, etc.
You can also appeal the financial aid decision, and just going to that trouble will often get you a bit more aid if you have a decent reason.
The depressing part was how many people obviously lie and misrepresent their financial situation to try to cheapen their student's aid cost. Not that I can really blame them, even if you make enough money that your kids don't qualify for aid, $70,000+ per year per child is just out of hand. And there's basically no risk to trying, the aid officers just look at it and are like "obvious lie, rejected" or "possible lie, ask for supporting evidence/documents".
> Not that I can really blame them, even if you make enough money that your kids don't qualify for aid, $70,000+ per year per child is just out of hand.
At a high enough income level, is it out of hand? If the parents' income is, say 7 figures per year, why not charge even more, and in doing so increase the assistance to those making closer to the median household income?
> why not charge even more, and in doing so increase the assistance to those making closer to the median household income?
Simple solutions like this readily suggest themselves. However, iiuc, in top-tier universities, tuition doesn't seem to be the significant proportion of revenues, so increasing fees wouldn't really enable anything and might have diminishing returns. For Harvard in 2019[0], the sources of revenue were:
- Philanthropy : 43%
- Research: 17%
- "Other": 18%
- Tuition: 22%
Also:
- number of students nationally has plateaued.
- tuition costs have reached limits of affordability.
2) at many income levels that are too high to qualify for aid, $70k per child per year still really stings and I can understand the reaction to try to cut the corners a bit.
Inflated relative to what? The cost of providing the education? Or relative to its perceived value? The latter ultimately dictates the price. Perhaps $70k is the point after which really wealthy people say rebel and refuse to send their children there, regardless of how small a portion of their wealth it is?
> 2) at many income levels that are too high to qualify for aid, $70k per child per year still really stings
I agree, which is why I wonder why the $70k limit for those well above the income level where it stings.
Then again, a higher top-level tuition depends a lot on the distribution of very wealthy parents whose kids attend Harvard vs the just upper middle class (there is a large difference between the income/wealth those two groups after all, bigger than between the middle and upper middle-class, given the exponential shape of the wealth distribution curve).
And perhaps the very wealthy (let's say in today's terms net worth in the mid 10 millions and up) already make significant donations to the University, so it would be meaningless to raise tuition to i.e. $90k in that case.
There is a likelihood that many parents submit/falsify the financial aid application/documents. Hard to prove the student did it, and worse to rescind based on a parent's actions.
By the time I was applying for colleges, my parents made around $250,000 combined, which went to mortgages and other expenses, including retirement plans. I was therefore not eligible for any FAFSA loans, as they do not factor in zip code, cost of living, the kinds of assets or liabilities anyone has, nor inflation.
Affordable, to me, was in-state tuition at $3,000 per semester at a state school, with a few community college classes. This was mixed with scholarships, and my parents subsidizing books and on campus living some semesters as that could more than double the cost of tuition.
Are you saying that Harvard could have arbitrarily and unilaterally spit out a number close to that? And routinely does for people whose parents make more than $65,000?
My comp sci degree has the same utility as anyone else that didn't go to Ivy League / Stanford.
Your household income would be more than 96% of all Americans today and likely more than that when you were applying for college.
I'm not arguing that Harvard isn't expensive for affluent families, but even with an income like that you would still probably get financial aid. Harvard doesn't charge anything like full tuition to families under $200k a year, the point is just that they charge nothing at all if you make under $65k.
Again, it’s just a “fuck you” to students who grew up in an upper middle class household in a high CoL area.
Harvard’s assumption that the parents can shill out tens of thousands for their kid is just dumb. They don’t realistically take into account parents that don’t care much about education, large families, parents with lots of debt, etc.
My whole post was about how "income" doesn't factor in the liabilities and obligations or cost of living of anyone. Why would you respond with that reductionist answer? Why would a university penalize a student whose parents won't shift their budget, and that's assuming it is so simple?
I also asked a specific question, which you completely skipped, while doubling down on a fairness argument that this thread wasn't even about. You act knowledgeable in the matter and then aren't able to dive in, only defend your position. Its fine to say "I don't know", but right now what are you doing?
Were you saying that Harvard's "affordability" was anywhere close to the $3,000 tuition / semester I ended up paying? And that's because Harvard routinely makes up any number based on a variety of financial variables (which aren't as simple as "income") and ultimately feelings?
It's a price-segmentation system. It's not about fair. They have to target limited grants without much information to get the best set of students they can (plus probably keep some politicians happy about their demographics).
Household income of parents is obviously a bit of weird proxy for an almost-adult child. But, I bet it works quite well at finding academically inclined people who assumed they couldn't afford X University and persuading them that they can.
The alternative would probably be something like requiring all parents to buy "education insurance" for their children, which turns into a lump sum at 18, and then giving people with lower incomes a discount on that insurance. (This is a terrible idea, don't do it. Make education cheap or free instead.)
> My comp sci degree has the same utility as anyone else that didn't go to Ivy League / Stanford.
Based on my experience going from one state school to another, there can be a night and day difference in access between even state schools. I would be shocked if going to any Ivy League school didn't open up many, many doors that are closed to us plebs.
Mortgages and pension plans are not strictly speaking an expense, you're paying towards an asset. It would be incredibly unfair if wealthy parents could camouflage their wealth just by taking out a big loan on a big house.
The irony that you can study abroad for about $12,000-$20,000 a year (including rent and other cost of living) in some countries (notably Germany) that do provide equal or better education than the state school and most importantly also provide life experience local education would not.
I wonder why not many Americans go study abroad, if studying in their own country is so incredibly expensive and studying abroad can be cheaper and a richer experience. Especially comp sci is taught in English in many non-english speaking countries.
Did you consider going abroad when you were evaluating costs back then?
While the education is likely equal or better, college is also about starting your network, especially for those of us not going to traditionally elite schools.
Thinking about my personal career trajectory, my first job came from an internship set up by my university. A coworker from that job left and pulled me to my second, and when I left there it was because an old classmate referred me to a third.
Had I studied abroad and returned home I would have lacked that network, and that feels like a risk.
No, I didn't consider studying abroad back then and ultimately I was able to graduate without any student debt, much like my European peers do without thinking about it.
But yes I've become a fan of what Germany and some other countries offer. I've seen something that made me even more envious: a friend in neighboring Austria was in University there (for free) and it turned out the school was like a sister school to NYU and she wanted to go there and was able to go to NYU for free.
We are really getting the short end of the stick in America right now, amongst developed nations.
55% of students receive aid, and of those that receive aid the average expected contribution is ~15K. So technically most students do not pay that amount, although 45% is higher than I was expecting to be honest.
"Average expected contribution" is not precisely defined in the Harvard document you provide, and thus does not commit Harvard to any particular course of action.
Harvard does not cost full-sticker for most people who attend. Most people who go are very rich, sot hey pay a substantial fraction of full-sticker, but if you aren't, you won't.
Yeah I just added the parent expected contribution and the student work contribution to get around 15K, either way it is pretty clear that students on aid (the majority of all students) aren't paying anywhere near 60K.
Also per that NYT article on wealth at colleges ~15% of Harvard frosh come from the top 1%, so that's a decent chunk of the remaining 45% that clearly don't need aid and likely did not even apply for any.
I doubt you will find many people out there that feel they paid too much for Harvard. Certainly there are bigger fish to fry as far as college tuition rip offs.
Tuition is $60k/year or 240 total. If the average grant is 53k, then that means the average cost is 187k.
I went to a school with this weasel language all over their content. My kid was offered $3k/year in financial aid because the school said I should pay 65% of my annual gross to cover tuition.
It’s nice that they have some token poor and working class, but Harvard is for the rich...
“ According to The New York Times, the median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% of students come from the highest-earning 20% of American households. About 15% come from families in the top 1% of American wealth distribution.” [0]
Living with and going to class with classmates from wealthy families is part of the value-add of going to Harvard for all the students.
> I should pay 65% of my annual gross to cover tuition
Harvard's financial aid is very clear cut and no one would be expected to pay 65% of their gross income.
> 67% of students come from the highest-earning 20% of American households
A household income about about $130,000 is enough to be in the top 20%; how well off you are with that income depends on where you live.
Some high-income families (top 5% of households), with an expensive mortgage and other bills, may have difficulty with paying the full amount, or close to it. Good luck finding sympathy for how those rich people chose to spend their money instead of saving for their child's education.
> Good luck finding sympathy for how those rich people chose to spend their money instead of saving for their child's education.
Sounds to me like a rich person saying “works on my machine.”
This is pretty unrealistic for a family making $130k at the time the first kid hits college to tell them they should have saved more. Especially since tuition is growing faster than inflation or average market returns.
For example, if a family was prescient and knew their kid would get into harvard from conception, and they would have 18 years to save that $200k. If they already made $130k and are fortunate to keep a job all 18 years and if their income grew at the average rate, that’s $15k/year or, assuming they live in NY or CA, about 20% of their net income.
That’s if they only have one kid.
Asking middle class families to forego retirement while 15% of students are in the US 1% is callous.
A $130K household would pay no more than 10% of the sticker price, less if they had other kids. A family paying the full rate would probably have triple that income.
> For example, if a family was prescient and knew their kid would get into harvard from conception
They wouldn’t have to know they’d get into Harvard but they’d hope their child would go somewhere and at their income level Harvard would be cheaper than many state schools.
> They were forced to do that a few years ago so the government wouldn't start taxing their endowment.
Harvard College was not forced by federal policy to dramatically increase their financial aid back when they did. The 2017 tax bill did include a new tax on university endowments tailored to only apply to the wealthiest universities, including Harvard (it has the largest endowment but I'm not sure it's the largest per student).
>The pandemic is particularly challenging for a school like Harvard, as it makes the implicit thing obvious: a prestige school like Harvard is about the social connections far more than the education.
I wouldn't say "far" more. There are multiple valuable components to a top tier education:
1. Social connections with your peers, as you mention.
2. Social connections with your professors, their graduate students, and their network.
3. The education itself, which should be intellectually challenging (more or less depending on subject, with STEM subjects usually moreso, especially at top tier schools)
4. The pedigree, which is a factor of the previous three, and should prove to employers etc that, at minimum, you can handle a large and difficult work load with precision and attention to detail, regardless who your connections are.
5. Various support services tailored to the stresses of a demanding undergraduate education.
Of those, an online education from a top tier school still gets you some of #2 & #5, and all of #3 and #4. A 20-30% tuition discount for losing #1 may be fair, but I think it's still worth it for students who get into a top tier school to finish their degree there, even online.
> 3. The education itself, which should be intellectually challenging (more or less depending on subject, with STEM subjects usually moreso, especially at top tier schools)
Your implication that non-STEM fields are less intellectually challenging is pretty insulting. Have you enrolled in a non-STEM degree? Do you have evidence that writing a treatise on comparative literature or archeology is less intellectually challenging than pushing out some code or solving some derivatives? Please choose your words carefully when communicating.
Whilst I agree the wording could have been better, I think the parent has a point.
I did a double-degree in Commerce (Finance and Economics), and Computer Engineering at Sydney Uni.
English is my first language, and I've always liked economics/finance. However, I found the commerce side of things much easier to cruise through (I was working full-time as well). The material was easier, contact hours were much less, you could fluff your way through essays (to a degree), and it was obvious many of the students there (i.e. international students) just wanted to finish, and get their degree (nothing wrong with that in itself). Many people didn't bother showing up, and just studied online, and sat the final exam.
Engineering...oh man. The material was tough, the maths was tricky, and there was many mandatory contact hours or mandatory tutorials (> 20 a week). If you didn't show up to weekly classes, you got marked down, which is basically a fail. And while you can fudge an essay in commerce (assuming some basic grasp of first principles), try fudging an answer on Fourier transforms, or gradient-descents. However, many people genuinely had a passion for the subject, and the lecturers/tutors really did push you hard.
Also - look at the dropouts rates for fields - a lot more people dropped out of engineering degrees by year 2/3 versus say, Commerce. I can't speak to other fields/areas.
This experience may not apply to everybody - but as somebody who did a degree in both fields, I think it's telling.
I'm comfortable making that claim, and yes I had a mixed education of roughly 1/3rd hard STEM (CS, math, stats), 1/3rd soft STEM (Econ, Law), and 1/3rd non-STEM (economic history, philosophy, required undergrad writing elective).
Things like the Sokal Hoax are difficult to impossible in hard STEM fields. Non-STEM fields are more difficult to falsify and thus more difficult to apply similar levels of rigor. Smart and clever undergrads figure out their professors' biases and are constantly submitting lesser versions of the Sokal Hoax for their writing assignments (been there, done that). You can't do that in hard STEM fields, and its more difficult in some logically rigorous soft-STEM ones like law classes. Non-STEM fields tend to be held in the fuzzy-logic-based natural language you grew up with and know intimately, while STEM fields require learning an entirely new language (math, code) where fuzzy logic does not work and precise logic is required. It's more difficult for a variety of reasons.
If you have the aptitude for it, I'd argue that being constrained by clean, cold, infallible logic makes STEM subjects much easier, not harder, than the messy human whirlpool of the humanities and social sciences. Sure, it might be easier to get away with BS in those fields — but what if you actually want to learn something or make a tangible impact? No matter how you slice it, humans live in the world of "fuzzy-logic-based natural language," not bits and bytes. (Incidentally, this might reveal why some engineers struggle with things like UX, technology ethics, or algorithmic bias.)
I also have a mixed education of 1/2 CS and 1/2 Music. I found some of my music classes way harder (and often way more enjoyable) than many of my CS classes, despite the fact that the latter dealt with well-scoped problems.
When I was in college I dropped an almost-finished comp-sci degree to switch to the humanities exactly because it was harder. I was damn bored in those classes studying interrupts and recursion. Arguing about ideas was way more fun (I know in grad school you get to that in comp-sci and other maths, but I was not planning on going there).
You have a point with aptitude making hard logic easier than fuzzy logic for some. But I would observe that such folks are the minority, not the majority, making hard logic more difficult for the population on average.
> you can handle a large and difficult work load with precision and attention to detail
This part may be true, but I doubt it's determinative: over a long career I've not found much difference between Ivy folks and State folks in engineering roles, and I can easily think of a few Ivy-Leaguers who ended up in very high office and whose fulfillment of your criteria was, at best, questionable.
I didn't say State STEM grads couldn't perform equally, nor did I say "Ivy" anywhere. Only that a "top tier" (of which Ivy is a subset) STEM degree is reliable proof of ability, and implicitly that it is one of the most reliable proofs of ability.
I read your comment as saying a "top tier" STEM degree is a more reliable proof of ability than some other STEM degree, and I was using "Ivy" as shorthand for "top tier by American reputation" -- granted, inaccurately, but it's common to do so.
And if you were saying that I still disagree. It's not that a math degree from Stanford isn't a good indicator of ability, but that it's not any better an indicator than one from Cal Poly or for that matter Arizona State.
> It's not that a math degree from Stanford isn't a good indicator of ability, but that it's not any better an indicator than one from Cal Poly or for that matter Arizona State.
It would really require an in-depth curriculum and grading comparison to answer that question definitively. But one thing I do know from anecdotal experience is that top tier STEM programs carry a stronger expectation that their students not just master a body of knowledge for competent commercial application, but for continued theoretical research. The top tier programs are usually research universities oriented toward making breakthroughs in our understanding of particular fields and driving humanity’s knowledge forward.
Students at normal universities tend to be there to get the grade, get a good GPA, and get a good job. Anecdotally again, I’ve heard professors at such universities complain about that. STEM curriculums at top tier research universities tend to be designed to weed out ones not capable of advancing the state-of-the-art, which is quite a high bar. I’m not sure that standard is applied elsewhere. Though again, would take a comprehensive curriculum and grading comparison to know for sure.
> 2. Social connections with your professors, their graduate students, and their network.
This isn't going to hold for most undergraduates, since you're not going to interact with professors enough unless you're participating in undergraduate research. And getting sufficient attention to get into those programs is probably going to be harder in an online-only environment.
> This isn't going to hold for most undergraduates, since you're not going to interact with professors enough unless you're participating in undergraduate research.
In my experience professors at top tier research universities encourage and enable this, as one of the most fulfilling parts of their job is finding and grooming future research collaborators. Students are also incentivized since getting jobs or especially into grad school requires strong references from their professors. The extent to which it happens depends primarily on the student’s initiative though.
> And getting sufficient attention to get into those programs is probably going to be harder in an online-only environment.
That’s certainly one of the main problems that needs to be solved by online education, but I believe it’s one of the things everyone will adapt to out of necessity. Professors don’t want to stop grooming promising students for research careers just b/c of an outbreak, so they are finding new ways of doing that online. And we know from some fields like software engineering that remote collaborations are possible, so we’re starting from that point already.
Isn't some part of the value just the "badge appeal" of a Harvard degree? If you are Harvard 2024 won't that open just as many generously compensated doors as usual, even if there was a year less networking?
Might the networking value even increase because now there is a shared bond (had to deal with 2020) connecting the less-connected and the more-connected?
I agree Harvard grads will be significantly better off in a job market than peers at lesser-known schools. However, one point of bitterness is that the value of attending Harvard next year is almost surely less than attending last year. Despite that, tuition is not being adjusted for students. In fact, it will cost more than last year.
A prestigious school like Harvard has all the best professors, all the best resources (libraries, computer labs, machine shops, laboratories), and all the best opportunities (more research positions, more interesting academic work to be done), etc. A small school just can't afford all that stuff.
So you're right that a good school is much more than just the things you learn in class. But to boil that down to some "all the elites go here just to meet the other elites" is closer to a conspiracy theory than the truth.
The undergrads don't see the best professors. The best professors there, as everywhere, often do what they can to evade teaching. Many of the real-world resources are, of course, unavailable online, (computers being a likely exception).
>>If you get one semester on campus, maybe, then what’s the point? You can get an online education anywhere, for far less money.
First, Harvard didn't choose this. It happened and its for everyone. Maybe they should offer a 25% discount and cut salaries as well...or just dip in the endowment. What's the point on having it if you don't use for these events?
Second, you're a Harvard grad for life and no one will know or care that 2 years were online (everyone is in the same boat)
Harvard chose their response. All colleges and university have to, and anything involving in-person classes is just nuts now. I understand why they do it, but it is inarguably dangerous.
About "Harvard grad for life": That's connections -- the ones you make in school, and the ones you can make afterward. But as for intellectual capability? I would argue that college is completely irrelevant after a couple of years in the work force. Or stated another way: if I am interviewing for your second job as an adult, and you are trying to impress me with what you did in college, then something is very off.
I have interviewed job applicants for many years, and the only time I cared about college at all is for kids who just graduated. You have to talk about their college experience because they almost never have anything else relevant. And even in those cases, I don't care at all whether the degree is from an Ivy or a lesser school. I care about what you know, how you think, and your potential for doing good work as revealed by talking about things you worked on in college.
Yes. The grandparent post's contention that this is an elaborate bait and switch is silly. This is decision-making under vast uncertainty. It all sucks, but changing outcomes when some of the dozens of factors change is perfectly normal.
Social connections sure. But how about simply having the name on the resume? You could do it online and still get the name. Although with enough class years of this, the name will stop signifying the social connections, and might start being worth less.
My understanding is a lot of universities are playing bait-and-switch, announcing unrealistic plans to reopen in the Fall in order to get deposits/tuition, but secretly knowing they'll be 'forced' to move everything online again.
I don't know about big universities, but we (a small TCU - Tribal Community College) do expect to open in the fall. The problem is going to be if we see a spike or get directions from the federal, state, or tribal governments late in summer.
The second problem a lot of people don't talk about is if the institution is accredited for 100% online courses. We got an exception that allowed for the summer, but we would need it extended into Fall. Being an accredited institution doesn't automatically mean you can teach 100% online courses.
Honest question: yesterday the US saw the most cases in a day since this started. If that doesnt constitute a spike then what does? Or is the planning more about anticipated levels 6 weeks from now as compared to now.
The new cases aren't evenly distributed. California just saw over 11,800 new cases yesterday but New York saw a few over 500 new cases - despite having a record of 11,400 in one day at its peak two months ago. Some regions have it under control and can begin to reopen slowly.
However, I think it's pretty clear that those regions have it under control only because they've shut almost everything down. The second schools begin reopening and pupils start criss crossing the country, it'll bring the "second wave."
NYC had a 20% antibody rate back in April; the disease being under control in NYC may be due to having built up some level of immunity and (sadly) having the vulnerable population die off.
I don't know how this misinformation started spreading but I'm pretty sure 20% is nowhere near enough for herd immunity and I have not seen anything authoritative to the contrary. Barring something compelling to the contrary I see no reason to believe that the disease couldn't spike in NYC again.
There is no compelling evidence proving that the disease cannot spike in NYC.
There are small hints that it MIGHT not be possible. The antibody tests measured the infection rate around April 15 or so, the number should be higher now. Second, there is some evidence that a percentage of people don't develop antibodies (only T cells) but are immune. Finally, we don't really know what is required for herd immunity.
None of this is to say you are wrong, just why it MIGHT be possible that NYC cannot have a second spike.
The point is that if the disease spreads so quickly, and our best evidence from months ago is that 20% of the city was infected, it stands to reason that much more of the city was infected than 20%.
How much more is up for debate. A competent government would be regularly conducting these surveys and publishing the results.
We have been more open, with many protests, streets full of open air bars, etc. for months.
I would bet $100 that NYC, if we could do a full antibody and t-cell assay, would show the majority of the population was infected.
Furthermore, I would submit that R0 as a crude instrument ignores network effects. I'd wager anyone who is a "super spreader" in NYC has been infected at this point.
Some papers have suggested a 20% herd immunity threshold taking into account the network effects. I doubt it's that low, but it is an important factor to consider.
NYC had a 20% antibody rate in a sample of people who were out shopping and consented to giving their blood for the study. That is enough potential sources of bias that assuming the general population had a 20% antibody rate strains credibility.
People out and about shopping or working are also more likely to be the ones spreading the virus. So even though the 20% rate may be an overestimate, if the people more likely to be 'superspreaders' are now immune, that may reduce transmission.
I remember seeing something recently that said the 20% number was an overestimate, as they were surveying people who were out and about at the grocery store, etc. I believe the correct number is 13%.
Sadly, I don't have a link. Hopefully my memory is accurate.
Well, from what I read here in Orange County CA, the state forced the county to count people who have tested positive with Antibody tests to now be counted as a positive COVID-19 test, even if the tests were done long ago.
You should check your sources [1]. Every single time someone has claimed that a federal or state government has "forced" someone to inflate COVID numbers, it's been blatant nonsense.
Not calling GP out specifically, but generally asking someone hell-bent on re-opening to check their sources or facts is pointless. They will just go out and find another rationalization. This isn't just about this school--it's happening all across (at least) the USA. We should be coming up with objective, measurable milestones that support re-opening, tracking towards them, reviewing periodically and then making a decision to re-open based on whether the criteria were met.
Instead, people are simply starting with a foregone conclusion of "We must re-open!" and fishing for any nugget that might justify this pre-ordained decision. So far in this thread we've already seen:
1. The cases are not uniformly distributed, therefore it's OK to re-open in areas that currently seem good! [many variants of this one]
2. Cases are spiking but deaths are not up, we should ignore the non-fatal consequences of the disease and re-open!
3. Cases only look like they are up because testing is up, therefore the numbers are in question, so re-open!
4. Governments are conspiring to inflate case numbers, therefore the numbers are in question, so re-open!
We are already starting to see the disastrous effects of prematurely re-opening, but the public just won't accept any story that doesn't end with "...and we re-opened everything as soon as we could!"
Part of calling this stuff out is to not let bad arguments (or outright disinformation) go unchallenged to people who are just reading along and haven't formed an opinion yet.
What you say is true, but you can’t directly compare the numbers of confirmed cases today to the numbers from 3 months ago. We are currently testing 600-700k people each day. At the beginning of April we were only testing less than a quarter of that, around 125-150k people per day.
There has certainly been community spread. But the average age of a confirmed case has also dropped enormously.
At this point we have seen cases dramatically spike, yet deaths have not. I think if/when we see deaths start spiking, then the decision to force closures will start happening.
Honest question: if there is really an increase in cases across the US, shouldn't we see an increase in positive test result rates (# confirmed / # tested)?
The positive test result rate continues to decrease across the United States, albeit more slowly as of late.
(1) It's important to make sure the numbers you're using are directly comparable -- e.g., if #confirmed is the count of unique individuals who are confirmed to have the virus and #tested is the number of tests administered rather than the number of people who have been tested then you won't get the expected results.
(2) There can be confounding variables like choosing to test people with milder symptoms.
(3) False positive/negative rates can be a factor (though they shouldn't be in a halfway decent test). If your false negative rate is x and your false positive rate is greater than 1-x then your positive test result rate will fall as your true positive rate rises.
(4) Etc. The problem is that the numbers you're measuring (reported test results) aren't the numbers you care about (true infection rates). They might align, and they will mostly align with good tests and unbiased data that are correctly and honestly reported, but they don't have to.
Caveat: I haven't been closely following covid news and have no idea how much any of those potential discrepancies might apply IRL.
The significance of positive test rate rates is extremely dependent upon the slectiveness & availability of testing, which has trended higher but has varied in extreme ways.
Initially, only the sickest patients, most obviously suffering from COVID-19, were eligible for testing. We would of course expect positive test rates to be sky-high during this time, as we were only testing those whom we were pretty certain were infected and were suffering life-threatening symptoms.
Now, tests are more widely available. Testing is no longer tightly constrained to the most obvious suspected cases. So, with a wider swatch of the population being eligible for testing, we would probably expect the % of positive test rates to fall even as the number of infected goes up.
Looking at only the US numbers hides some of the picture. For example, there's this chart from about a month ago showing that only looking at US numbers without breaking them down can be misleading: https://www.axios.com/us-coronavirus-new-cases-second-wave-n...
Those are national stats, and we are very rural. Plus, we have a whole set of problems that can make it worse if certain events happen. Add to that we've been under a travel ban for months which requires people to self quarantine at home for 14 days if they leave the state or go to certain cities. And yes, figuring out what is going to happen 6 weeks out is a problem.
The media isn't inclined to pitch it this way ("DOOM! GLOOM! FIRE IN THE SKY! News at 11!"), but technically, the ideal outcome is essentially everybody has already had it and deaths (and serious hospitalizations) are at zero.
Remember "flatten the curve"? It's not "eliminate the curve". We're pretty much all going to be exposed to it at some point. Lots of people testing positive without ever having had to go to the hospital or even having been aware they had it is a good thing, not a reason to go shutting everything down again. It means the crisis is nearly over, not the worst it's ever been.
After all, consider what that would imply; for all infectious diseases, the level of crisis starts low, then monotonically goes up and never goes back down? Clearly that does not describe the real world we see, which is not still in crisis over the Spanish Flu, Black Death, and every other plague ever. The level of crisis can't be solely a function of the number of people testing as positive.
Hospitalizations and deaths are the bad numbers, not number of positives.
Many Asian countries as well as Europe have managed to get cases down to levels where it's entirely within reach to completely eliminate the virus. And they did so with less disruption and costs than the US.
Except for high-risk activities such as nightclubs, life has mostly returned to normal. In the US, however, retail sales (as just one indicator) are stagnant at 50% of previous levels. Economic activity will be far from normal until people feel safe again.
As to hospitalisations and deaths: hospitals in Arizona, Nevada, Florida, and Texas are quickly filling up and/or full already.
> Many Asian countries as well as Europe have managed to get cases down to levels where it's entirely within reach to completely eliminate the virus.
On a per capita basis the only large European country with a lower death rate than the US is Germany. Italy, France, Spain and the UK are all higher. Comparing US and Europe, all of whom messed up badly, to the competent governments that ignored the WHO is absurd. Asia did much, much better than the USA and Europe, which are basically comparable.
25% of COVID hospitalizations are pregnant women who test positive when they go in to deliver. We're just counting people who go into the hospital for other reasons who happen to test positive. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...
The cause and effect may not go the way you think.
I was just reading, about Houston I think, that hospitals were continuing to have elective surgeries to avoid sending a message that people should panic. And to make money, because they may not be able to keep the lights on with only COVID-19 patients.
I don't think one should go around saying that information is fraudulent, but maybe people should suspend judgment one way or another.
There are quite a few countries with minimal reported cases, and it makes me think about the study that found "the state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian records."
South Africa has by far the most reported cases in Africa; is it possible that has some relation to how well they track them compared to other countries, and not just the underlying numbers?
I doubted their numbers originally because well... the govt hasn't been that honest in the past.
But, I've spent the last 4 years living there (came back to the US for work at the end of January). I'm in tons of Vietnam related facebook groups and I have friends there.
Whole country is open internally, nobody is wearing a mask, plane flights are full. If there was a single infection, it would be all over the news and my friends would be notifying me.
I'm pretty confident, that at this point, the govt isn't lying. They admit when they import new cases (repatriation flights) and they quarantine everyone with multiple rounds of testing. If anyone 'escapes' quarantine... it is a full on manhunt. They aren't playing games.
People commonly complain about actual observations and dismiss them as anecdotal. Sometimes I think that is going to far, and an anecdote is in fact a datum. But it's a datum, not a universe of data.
One reason I'm more confident of statistics in some countries is not just general prejudice, but that these countries have various levels of government, and statistics are reported by the lower level divisions independently, and third parties who are not the central government can and do compile them.
So, for instance, when you read about US statistics, they may have distortions or issues, but you're not (at least my sources are not) getting them filtered through the very top of the hierarchy.
This could in principle apply to Vietnam as well, but I notice you didn't make this sort of argument, that information flows out independently from centralized control.
I also notice you say you came back in January, and yet living there for four years means you know what the situation is. That sounds odd. I used to live in Virginia, and have a relative there but that doesn't mean I have particular insight into the epidemic there.
Not only do I follow global covid news very closely (like I'm sure many people do), I have very very close personal and business contacts in Vietnam and I follow all their (english) govt news, some local news that I can google translate and facebook groups, etc. I also want to go back to Vietnam. I'd know. It isn't anything like a relative in Virginia.
...and I belatedly thought, because I read an article about, some places are checking sewage and estimating orders of magnitude more cases than they thought.
So if there was somebody independent doing that in Vietnam, or wherever, then I would take claims of no cases more seriously.
Join a few expat vn facebook groups. They talk about everything happening in Vietnam. Plus, after 4 years of living there and doing business for 2 years prior to that, I have tons of friends there. I'd hear something from them.
One thing about Vietnam culture is that they gossip like no other. Everything is in the open. As soon as one 'bad' thing happens, everyone knows about it. When one girl came back from Europe and infected a bunch of people, the govt got right on it and quarantined everyone who could have potentially came in contact. Someone turned in a UK friend of mine because they heard him coughing.
After 80+ days, I haven't heard a peep from anyone to suggest that the news isn't exactly what they say it is. My friends are flying around the country like nothing is happening. People are going out and socializing. Look in the news... you see parties and clubs going off. Look at restaurants and night club facebook pages... everyone is out.
If covid was affecting Vietnam, we'd all know, immediately.
> Many Asian countries as well as Europe have managed to get cases down to levels where it's entirely within reach to completely eliminate the virus
I can't speak for Asian countries, but as far as Central Europe, e.g. in Slovenia, cases are spiking again (most positives since April - the point about low deaths from GP still stands but deaths used to follow positives with a delay)... probably precipitated by tourism & economy-driven reopening of borders and relaxation of most counter-measures (opening restaurants, etc. as well as unofficial parties & gatherings).
Their point was that Asian countries are more in the “eliminate the curve” camp that you are arguing against, and that they are doing much better economically and health wise as a result.
That's the past. In the present, that's not a choice anymore.
I strongly encourage everyone everywhere to evaluate our response when we are done with this. It was deeply suboptimal. However, in the current position we are in, there is no chance the virus is going to be eliminated in the US. With that, the best possible news is that everyone's already gotten it.
And what will happen when these people get infected a second or a third time? Will they still be symptom less, or are they likely to start gassing problems? Unfortunately, we don't know yet. That's why we need to err on the side of caution.
Please remember that we still know little about this virus, about long term effects, about how long immunity lasts, about the risk of auto-immune responses etc.
It's never, ever a good idea to let a new disease spread along the population of you can help it at all.
To you, and some other repliers, I suggest reading this carefully again: "but technically, the ideal outcome is essentially everybody has already had it and deaths (and serious hospitalizations) are at zero."
If the long term effects put a lot of people in the hospital, than that would not be the ideal outcome. You can't just drop clauses out of my definition of "ideal" then turn around and tell me about how that's not ideal. I agree, actually! Something other than the ideal I described would in fact be less than ideal!
The point remains; on its own merits, the ideal would be that it turns out everybody's already had it, because that would prove that the currently-known negative impact is also the total final negative impact. Since the total known negative impact is basically a given and can't go down and is thus a minimum, finding out that's also a maximum would be good news. On the whole, more people having been exposed without hospitalization or even awareness is good news. Maybe earlier in the cycle that wouldn't be the case, but with where we are now, it is.
At least, for this pandemic, for a disease that happens to affect a small set of people badly but, to all evidence, most people not at all. In terms of weathering a pandemic in which it was actually bad news for a majority of people, this has been a rather disheartening experience. That's a problem for another day, though.
(Which is not a synonym for "not a problem at all". But it's a problem for another day. Trying to solve COVID-19 with measures appropriate for EvenMoreBubonic-2022 is not a win.)
> Hospitalizations and deaths are the bad numbers, not number of positives.
Sort of, but the fact that "deaths are lower" is likely a cohort problem.
Let's say I am looking at the bread in my cupboard and trying to figure out what percent goes moldy. I've got one moldy loaf, and I buy 9 fresh new ones. Boom, current moldy-rate is 10% what a relief, looks like mold is less of a problem than I thought--only 10% of bread goes moldy! Looks like the previous estimates of mold-rate were misleading.
If a vaccine is forthcoming, it is not at all inevitable that we will all be exposed to it.
I don’t understand what “deaths are lower is a cohort problem.” What cohort? We’ve known for months that
- corona is not dangerous for people under 85 except with pre-existing conditions
- corona is widespread, 10-20x higher than reported cases
- infection-fatality-rate ~0.5%
It’s harder to fudge death numbers compared to case numbers.
That's not the cohort I'm talking about--I'm not talking about age based cohorts.
The cohort I'm talking about is the number of days since a positive test result. When you have many new cases (loaves of fresh bread) and you use simple math, bread/moldy you get the wrong idea about death rate. Click-baity articles, and those with motivated reasoning for "it's just a flu" get breathlessly excited about this as if it were some sort of useful data. See ops assertion that the level of crisis "is independent of the number of people who test positive" for an example of what I mean.
People testing positive is a leading indicator for the size of the crisis.
Of course, there's no guarantee that the course of the epidemic in Texas will look like New York City's. But a sharp rise in hospitalizations does seem to presage a lot of deaths.
>>The media isn't inclined to pitch it this way ("DOOM! GLOOM! FIRE IN THE SKY! News at 11!"), but technically, the ideal outcome is essentially everybody has already had it and deaths (and serious hospitalizations) are at zero.
That's literally the worst case endgame, where everyone vulnerable has received the full brunt of the disease lessened only by medical care.
The ideal outcome is that the spread is minimized by a mix of general and targeted social distancing and containment measures until a vaccine, effective treatment, or both are deployed widely enough to eradicate the disease.
The majority don’t, though. The country did not sign up for a quarantine until vaccine was released, if ever. People are free to quarantine until vaccines are out, but please don’t force this oppression on everyone else.
How many more people would additive if they received the kind of financial aid that companies are receiving? For example, even a freeze on rents would probably significantly reduce the number of people who are desperate for work at the moment.
Can you or they explain to me what was meant then, because I’ve read the two comments over and over and the only conclusion I can reach is exactly what I replied with.
>The country did not sign up for a quarantine until vaccine was released
Approval of quarantine until vaccine was released =/= approval of social distancing in any form.
The poster claimed that most people are not in support of quarantine until vaccine, not that they oppose any quarantine.
The poll you linked did not ask about quarantining until the vaccine was available. In fact, 50% of the poll respondents expected social distancing to last no longer than 2 months. Note the poll was taken in March.
Exactly. It takes 3-14 days for symptoms to appear and 10-14 for happy path resolution.
The big protests were about two weeks ago. Hence the spoke. The holiday just passed. So two weeks from now you’ll see a big wave of deaths and increasing caseloads.
If we are fortunate, the hospitals in the south will keep up with the surges in caseload and limited beds. If not, you’ll have the freezer trailers with stacked corpses like you saw in Queens.
I'm pretty doubtful that there was a spike. The states like Texas, Florida, California, and Arizona have just been increasing gradually all the time. And NY didn't spike, even though there were protests. The national "spike" appears to me to be a phenomenon of adding up the individual states, where the declines were overtaken by the rises.
Do you/we have any good reason to believe that outdoor gatherings are much of a problem? The impression I've gotten is that indoors is where most instances of large amounts of people getting infected at once happens.
I’m not sure why a child-comment got killed:
>>> Not true. Deaths only lag cases by 5-10 days. For example, in Italy daily new cases peaked on March 21st and daily deaths peaked on March 27th.
This is correct. People are expecting a step function of deaths exactly 4 weeks from the peak of cases? This is not statistical. Peak of deaths lag peak of cases closer to 1-5 days. If case growth is a matter of true rise of infections we would see modest increase of deaths about 2-3 weeks ago (cases started growing 4 weeks ago). We’ve only seen deaths drop on a exponential decay trend.
Isn't it plausible this could be affected by other the changes in infection demographics, testing capability, and treatment options we've seen since then?
Yes, it’s related to all those things including the never-talked-about problem that the lockdown is ineffective at suppressing the inevitable spread of corona
Doesn't that depend a great deal on testing capability? If testing is quick and widely available, then I'd expect the lag to be larger as people get diagnosed earlier.
Presumably students coming from high-prevalence areas will be forced to quarantine for the first two weeks, and high-frequency testing and contact tracing will be mandatory. It might be manageable.
Deaths are trending upwards, however, in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and all the other Southern hotspots.
This is an example of Simpson's paradox. You're looking at the sum of two different timelines, the virus in the Northeast (deaths declining) and the South (rising, but slow).
Isn't Simpson's Paradox when something is true of both parts but not of the whole? Wouldn't that make it not apply if the death rate is falling in the Northeast but not in the South?
1) Avg age of infected is 36-37 now instead of 60+ as in April, so there is a lower death rate (plus, infections today will only translate into deaths in three weeks or so)
2) Test positivity rate is UP, so testing has gone up "a little" while cases have gone up a lot.
You're completely skipping over the positivity rate; many countries are testing a heck of a lot more than the US is; and they're showing positivity rates in the 1-5% range.
If your hypothesis is correct, and infection rate is going up just because of more testing, then we should be pacing with other countries that are also testing more. We're seeing positivity rates of almost 25% in Arizona and 19% in Florida and Texas; which way out strips countries that have this more under control. At that rate of 15% or more, how many people are being missed (or are you also assuming we're catching 100% of all cases)? The more likely interpretation of the data is that not only are we testing more, but there are more cases; which fits with the overall data trend of BOTH more tests AND more infections.
I'm going to nip your goalpost moving in the bud here - since I'm sure you'll come back with "yeah, but deaths are going down."
Just because mortality has been going down doesn't mean that it isn't affecting the younger group and they're just magically recovering back to baseline. There's good evidence that there are lasting lung and immune response issues post "recovery" if it doesn't kill you. Further, deaths are a lagging indicator, and unfortunately what timeframe on that is unknown now because the age group is skewing younger and a large portion of our dataset is skewed towards the 65+ group due to how the initial wave of the disease spread.
Younger people aren't locked down and are more likely to be social ATM. Since they are more likely to carry without showing symptoms, test positivity going up makes some sense, it is plausible at least.
No. Stop spreading disinformation and inform yourself.
It’s pretty easy to compute normalized infection rates for populations based on samples of data, which haven’t changed materially with the testing ramp up.
Additionally, antibody testing allows for an assessment of past infection rates at a community level.
By your own source, test positivity is up over the last 4 weeks.
> Now we have more tests than we know what to do with
A coworker related about a month ago that when his wife, who works in a hospital and showed some symptoms of covid-19, asked to be tested, she was told that the nearest place with available tests was a 2.5 hour drive away.
That’s a particular challenge with this virus: it takes a long time between being exposed and actually suffering from the disease. Which makes it really easy to dismiss the impact because the side saying “it’s a big deal” has to wait two weeks or more while the side saying “it’s not a big deal” gets to claim victory for two weeks before being proved right or wrong.
The fact is we don’t know a lot about how this virus operates or why it does what it does. What we do know is that there are fates much worse than death that come from this disease (reduced lung/heart/organ function, long hospital stays with very expensive bills at the end, etc). We know it spreads quickly and we know it’s spreading uncontrolled right now. We know at least 130,000 people in the US have died and many more will be permanently injured. We know the countries who handled the response right, because they are opening back up. We know the countries who handled it poorly because their cases are still going up.
All of the things we don’t know are problems and we need to keep learning. All the things we DO know tell us this is bad and it’s going to get worse before it gets better unless people start taking it seriously. Unfortunately many people are taking the opposite approach and claiming victory based on the unknown factors we still don’t know answers to.
As far as I can tell, nothing you wrote addressed the post you responded to.
The claim was that deaths having been going down. They have for 90 days. We know that deaths lag diagnosis by 7-14 days.
The out of control growth "side" has lost it's credibility.
>All the things we DO know tell us this is bad and it’s going to get worse before it gets better unless people start taking it seriously.
Deaths is the most accurate data we have and it shows us things have been continuously getting better for 90 days. Of course we are not out of the woods, and should continue to implement reasonable controls.
Doesn't this indicate that the information we used in weeks and months past to open up and make decisions about the fall was flawed, since we may not have understood the full severity of the infection rate?
I'm glad that death rates are down, but unless universities completely waive all attendance policies (and adjust grading systems accordingly) infections can't be ignored. Additionally, not dying doesn't mean a quick infection: there are long-term effects.
Not really. We’ve known the cases were much more widespread for months now from anti-body testing. Some estimates are 10-20x higher. CDC now quotes an infection-fatality-rate (IFR) of 0.3%, or about 3x the flu.
Initially the lockdown was enabled to flatten a curve of a disease we had little information about. Months later, we have lots more info about it. Treatments are better. Flattening the curve won’t change the area under the curve, and the majority of the US did not sign up to lockdown until a vaccine was released.
"Treatments are better" very much means the area under the serious illness/death curve is smaller.
And deaths are a lagging indicator. It takes up to two weeks, median around one week to show symptoms, and then another two weeks, median a week and a half or so, to become seriously ill.
The outcome after that depends on predisposition and quality of care. But one developer I know spent forty days on a ventilator.
So if lockdown isn't being observed and masks aren't being worn, it's going to take 4-6 weeks for that to start significantly increasing deaths.
There are rumours in the UK of another national lockdown in September/October, but I suspect local lockdowns will become a thing long before then.
Because the number of positive cases is rising faster than the increase in testing.
Also, make sure to split out the data per state/region. The decline from NYC for example made up a huge amount of the decline. Otherwise you run into Simpson's Paradox.
It’s not “front page” news because it is inaccurate.
Deaths have declined for various reasons, including improved treatment (rolling patients and avoiding ventilators). Also we have not had the overwhelming of hospitals that took place in NYC and Italy repeat yet. Between the protests and people cutting loose over the holidays, I certainly hope we don’t see a repeat of that.
For what its worth, NYC had large protests through all of June and saw no spike. Mask usage was also high through them + regular use of hand sanitizer (handed out by organizers in some cases). It would appear that spikes are a function of either indoor activity or large crowds without masks.
Please for the love of god stop repeating this extremely misleading claim. The increase in new cases cannot simply be explained by the increase in testing.
>> Deaths, which happen regardless of how many tests you run, are down and have been trending down for months.
Deaths are a lagging indicator. Cases started to spike recently. Deaths will start to increase soon, especially when ICUs fill up and non-covid patients can no longer be treated in intensive care either.
> yesterday the US saw the most cases in a day since this started.
More positive tested cases.
They also tested more people yesterday alone than they did in any given week in April(the previous spike) while seeing a similar number of cases. The truth that no one wanted to talk about 2 months ago is that we can't reopen fully until we get a vaccine or natural herd immunity. a vaccine is likely still 6-10 months off from mass production, so if we wanna open up normally in anyway we need to go for natural herd immunity.
Or we can just stay 50% open, that works for countries where people respect the government (like most of the EU) but here in the US everyone thinks they know better, so there's no way to to enforce something like that.
It hasn't been shown yet that achieving natural herd immunity is even an option. Even in countries where they have been very lax on measures there hasn't been enough build-up for HI and it also seems that the antibodies go away quite quickly.
Herd immunity would require that over half of the population get the disease.[1] (Probably closer to 70% based on the virus's R0.) With an IFR of 0.5%, that would mean around 0.25-0.35% of the population has to die before we get herd immunity. No country has come close to that many deaths yet, so we shouldn't expect any of them to have herd immunity.
> Herd immunity would require that over half of the population get the disease.
Doesn't this also assume that those people remain inoculated to further viral infections after being infected the first time? From my limited understanding, that is not a given for SARS-CoV-2.
Correct. This is an optimistic scenario for herd immunity. It assumes low mortality (probably true), no permanent damage to those who survive (unclear, but probably untrue), and immunity lasting a couple years (long enough to remain immune until a vaccine is available).
If you don't mind me asking, what TCU are you at? I've been keeping an eye on my alma mater (Salish Kootenai College) and I think they were already doing decently with their online offerings after pushing the instructors more than 5 years ago to transition their teaching materials to Moodle.
CCCC in ND. Salish Kootenai College always struck me as a group that knew their business well. Also, it was nice having another Moodle user. A lot of the TCUs are using Canvas. We did the same push and it paid off. Still looking at how to do some of the VocEd that way (more from an equipment perspective).
No we cannot. Tribes cannot ignore the state, particularly since we are pretty integrated with the overall state-wide higher education. There are areas of jurisdiction that don't affect the tribe, but there are things that do.
> The problem is going to be if we see a spike or get directions from the federal, state, or tribal governments late in summer.
The US is well into a second wave of infections, which is dwarfing the first wave. The US is stuck between state governments making noises about lockdown fatigue (When the first lockdown wasn't even implemented correctly) and a federal government that is doing absolutely nothing.
I do not foresee a future where things are going to look any better in September.
My understanding is a lot of universities are playing bait-and-switch, announcing unrealistic plans to reopen in the Fall in order to get deposits/tuition
Yes, they are. You nailed this. UCSD forced my son to choose classes at the beginning of June, with the selection being in two piles: in-person and remote. He called their bluff and chose remote.
I will say that UCSD had really crappy online classes, according to my son's experience. He didn't like it at all. I think he would prefer well-run remote classes, but many of the professors were just terrible at it.
> FWIW, I personally think distance learning is underrated, although I have been doing it for years so I've had time to become accustomed to it. I can understand why some students (including my wife) do not like it, and may never like it.
When I was a student after first time I took I immediately did not like it. Online courses should instead be called "study yourself" courses, because that's what they really are. In many cases teacher uses services where s/he doesn't even grade submissions. Why teacher is even needed, in fact why paying for the tuition, you could get almost the same experience by just purchasing a book and studying on your own.
The online classes could be a better experience if teachers would have to actually teach.
I personally think distance learning is underrated, although I have been doing it for years so I've had time to become accustomed to it. I can understand why some students (including my wife) do not like it, and may never like it.
The ingestion of facts is actually only a minor part of the college experience. Exploring concepts with your peers in organised and ad-hoc groups is a huge, huge part. Not to mention if you go to a name-brand college like Harvard the networking opportunities, and at every college, the social side and the experience of living away from home for the first time.
It is absolutely not worth paying the tuition at Harvard to get what you could get on EdX or Coursera.
Harvard divides its credentials into "tiers", if you will. There are students who go through the competitive admissions process, and there's the Extension School which is basically open enrollment, even if you want to take courses for-credit. You only have to apply if you want to pursue a full Bachelors or Masters, and even then you're given the chance to prove yourself by doing good in a handful of courses.
I personally never thought I could experience Harvard before I found out that CS50 (and tons of other CS courses) could be taken for-credit and even lead to a degree.
Harvard also has online-only, non-credit programs like Harvard Business Online (formerly HBX) and HMX (Medical courses).
Harvard can, and does, strengthen its brand by opening itself to the public. There's a huge spectrum between being a totally-closed institution and being completely open enrollment.
Without being on campus and making friends / contacts with these people how is the brand useful?
"Oh man that looks like dilhead3112 from my M&A, I thought e worked here and that is definitely their green poomoji face, we should go talk to him! Probbably saved this company!"
But seriously if their brand is networking, having a tight well filtered network I think would be a lot better for them. And if no one meets in person isn't that also bad for their brand? Everyone essentially becomes 2nd contacts (via harvard) on linked in.
It's Harvard. It doesn't matter how they accounted it, they have not changed the Tuition cost with this announcement so it's the same money and they are not hurting for students.
The average student at Harvard doesn't pay even close to actual tuition, most of the endowment is earmarked for student aid.
If I remember right, something like under 90k earned by the student's family, they pay nothing. I haven't worked there in 2 years, so the math is a bit fuzzy but the concepts are accurate.
while most students do pay much less than sticker price, saying 'most of the endowment is earmarked for student aid' feels misleading. in fy2019 harvard spent $193M on student aid (https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy19_harvard_fin...) -- compared to a $5.2B operating expense spend and a $41B endowment size.
That is only undergraduate aid applied directly to tuition. Per Note 12 on page 43, "Total scholarships and other student awards" was $613,243k, of which $457,639K was in direct credits to expenses.
That said, I don't know where the GP got the idea that most of the endowment is earmarked for financial aid. Per page 11, that earmark is specifically 19%.
they have other operating income, e.g. tuition from everyone else, and are consistently doing capital raises. the single largest chunk of spending goes to employee wages (approx $2B); in fact, the $193M number is the smallest of all the line items in operating expenses.
as another comment points out, some of the salary and wage spend could be considered part of 'financial aid.'
Yes, but for the 50% of students that are not on financial aid, this must be pretty galling. These students may be rich, but a lot of them are not multimillionaire-rich. Even a family earning 200k a year will feel the pinch.
Many students would be much less willing to go to college if it was online only, and would instead take a gap year or do something else. If you can keep them hooked until after the tuition is billed and after the refund period expires, and then transition online, then you get that money which you would not otherwise get (now). This entire thing seems a bit like a conspiracy theory, but American universities are pretty greedy so idk. I've just accepted that I'm paying for the diploma so I personally won't mind if the classes are online for the same price - less time wasted in useless lectures, and I've already done much of the networking & connection building part of the experience in past years.
The thing is that Harvard’s actual instructor to student education is far worse than many universities like liberal arts colleges that focus on instruction. Nobel Laureates are just very hit or miss on teaching while colleges like Amherst or Reed or Davidson hire only for teaching skill. The reason you go to Harvard is for the name, and for what you get from other students — that when the next Mark Zuckerberg hires his first ten employees he’s looking to you, or when your college roommate is looking to hire a portfolio manager for his $700 million inheritance he feels that he can trust you because you did kegstands together. You’re not getting anything but the Harvard name in this model, and it’s uncomfortable for everyone involved to admit that it’s all about in-group signaling.
Seconding this comment. The quality of the undergraduate academic instruction at Harvard has a reputation for not being very good. I wish more people knew this.
You'll get a better education if you go to a state school for undergrad and then Harvard for grad school.
I don't think you'll get a better education at a state school. The state school has hiring criteria similar to Harvard but at a lower bar. You'll get a better education at a four year teaching-focused college.
Because my academic friends have almost never gotten a top-tier private university (Ivy-class) without also getting state school offers but the reverse has happened many times.
So top-tier -> state school but state school -/-> top-tier. I don't think that implies anything about hiring bars. My philosophy professor from community college graduated from a top-tier university and he chose to teach at a community college because he knew he would do much more good that way instead of being a professor at a top-tier university.
More generally, associating prestige with educational institutions is why they've started to decline because optimizing for prestige is not the same as educating the next generation of visionaries.
Their endowment is $40 billion and they have 22,000 students (both figures from Google). That's about $2m per student, which is surely enough to offer free tuition to all undergrads from a small fraction of the interest payments?
I work as an external examiner for CS students, and one year I was assigned first semester exams. To brush up my knowledge on freshmen CS stuff I completed the CS50x course from Harvard on EDX.org and I can easily say that it was taught so much better than my own freshman year in a Danish university.
I wonder how much that plays into universities wanting to keep physical attendance. Once you go digital, you don’t really need a lot of lecturers. You still need someone to answer questions and mentor of course, but you could frankly have a handful of professors teaching the entire world.
I'm not sure your anecdote matches the reality that for traditional college-aged students, remote/online/distance learning yields a poorer result. There's a lot of maturity that has to exist prior to enrolling in online courses that the majority of traditional students don't yet possess. [1][2][3]
Calling plans to reopen 'bait-and-switch' is a bit unfair. I sincerely hope you don't think campus administrators are sitting in backrooms with dollar signs in their eyes thinking about 'pulling one over' on all these students and their families.
Basically, schools and school systems (and students/parents) at almost all levels of education are being forced to make decisions between alternatives that are mostly pretty crappy across multiple dimensions, won't be easy to pull back once they get moving, in conditions of extreme uncertainty.
If financially viable to do so, I likely would not enter college as a freshman this year and I'd probably hesitate period unless I thought I could graduate after fall term.
There are also many many soft skills and experiences you get at a proper university which you aren't going to get through zoom.
In fact, it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that the things you learn out of books and are tested on are secondary to everything else you learn and experience at university.
Students will still be on campus, while teaching is done online. Sounds like a win win for students who get to interact with their peers, and professors who get to stay safe.
I cannot comment fully on remote learning - I haven't done it in a way that is "forced", in other words, being held to account by studying and taking exams and having remote sessions with TAs, etc. I am having a hard enough time focusing on remote work, and I am being held to account daily.
Also recall that the University is, among many other things, a social and growing experience that provides expansion of the mind, a new location to experience the world away from home, and an opportunity to build social networks and connections for friends and work. It also fulfills the mission, hopefully, of a well rounded education in civics, arts and sciences, and your field of expertise.
I therefore understand the drive to do as much as possible to provide some of that, and it is telling they give Freshmen and Seniors the priority (to experience campus life, and to say goodbye and push through, respectively).
We hope this will only last until mid 2021. Philosophers and leaders need to be thinking about what the world may need to look like when this happens to us again.
FYI: I work in higher ed. I take some classes for free as a benefit.
It’s not a bait-and-switch at all. My employer had been completely transparent throughout this whole transition and has been more than welcoming and accepting of comments and criticism. I was actually asked for opinions on a class I took 2 years ago so they can normalize the criticism.
My opinion as a student: I’m doing exceptionally well. Given the do-it-yourself pace I’m able to take a comfortable amount of time to answer questions. I’m genuinely understanding my questions. My instructor feels more accessible given that my only way of communicating is digitally. I’m honestly trying to get as many classes in as I can with this online format so I can benefit the most from it. If all the top 10% universities can offer online classes for free at DIY paces we’ll be so much better off. It’s one of the few ways we can emerge from this disaster better off as a society.
Maybe "Harvard is different" but a friend went back to school (Metro State U in MN) a few years ago to get his comp sci undergrad after practicing for over a decade professionally. They were trying out online learning for full time students for many intro and secondary classes for the major, saving only the most "keystone" classes for live lectures held weekly.
The key thing was they required the students to respond to three questions for each class for each of the five days of the work week and those were graded. He loved this and excelled at it. He didn't want to sit in a lecture hall. The vast majority of the undergrads hated this and often blew off the questions. Many of them failed. Some A students were getting Cs.
There was a revolt, the students were angry and they decided to ditch the online learning and go back to traditional classes...
> I admire Harvard's transparency, although having a multi-billion-dollar endowment does make this decision easier for them than it would be for struggling institutions.
I think a lot of this comes from their having waited until now to make a decision (which they feel comfortable doing because, as you say, they're sitting on a billion-dollar endowment). My university has been engaging in a lot of mixed messaging, but I think a lot of that came from feeling rushed to make a quick decision, not so much from an attempt to deceive people (although I'd be surprised if there weren't also some tacit understanding that it's easier to tell people what they want to hear now and change it later than it is to tell them to wait until later and then give bad news).
> FWIW, I personally think distance learning is underrated, although I have been doing it for years so I've had time to become accustomed to it. I can understand why some students (including my wife) do not like it, and may never like it.
I appreciate distance learning, it's the distance testing that doesn't work ;).
We went online at the start of the year and while some classes were ok to evaluate online, classes which require coding for example, weren't. Since you have access to an IDE they tend to test other things than what was taught - it becomes more theoretical rather than practical even though the class demands the latter.
A class would need to be fully changed to support online learning, and evaluating, say for example more focus on assignments.
Exactly what I've said. Top 10 schools have tons of untapped brand equity they can unleash for 30% of on prem education. Get a premier remote education for $20k/yr or get state school with risk of Covid for $27k+....
> From a strategic perspective, I can see universities like Harvard strengthening their brand by opening up more of their classes to the general public
The most important part of Harvard's brand is the prestige of their exclusivity
In a way, distance learning is a much more valuable skill though. Young people have this illusion that they go to college and in 4 years be "done" with learning. In STEM fields today that's simply not true. The learning doesn't end when you get a diploma, and college is just the beginning.
Self-paced, asynchronous learning is where things are going to go, IMO. MOOCs aren't quite it, but they are a move in the right direction.
Also from the page:
> Tuition will remain as announced for the 2020-21 academic year.
My friend who goes to USC says that this sort of bait-and-switch happened, with them updating their plans very close to the deadline when people had to make housing decisions.
Opening up to a larger group of students will weaken Harvard's brand. Many of these top institutions are valuable because rich, well-connected people go there, so going there allows one to meet them. There are companies where it is an unspoken rule that they hire only from Harvard, law offices that recruit only from Yale, etc.
I doubt "Harvard-only" companies and "Yale-only" law firms of any considerable size exist. Sure, 3 Harvard friends might start a company, or 4 Yale lawyers may start a firm, but eventually they will have to venture outside their bubble. If you have evidence of an organization with, say, 35+ employees maintaining that kind of exclusivity, please post a link.
Aren't endowments for elite colleges mostly tied up in hedge funds or real estate to make them even bigger? Weird for me that they could have billions in the bank and still ask for tuition.
Sure, they’re managed investment funds. You couldn’t run a university just on the income from bank interest. Also, most endowment funds are not unrestricted. Donors often attach strings to what can be done with the money; it’s donated for specific purposes. Harvard is even more restricted in a way because each school has its own endowment. FAS (most undergraduates) has the biggest, but they can only spend their own money.
Also, income from the endowment doesn’t cover the whole cost of operating the university.
Harvard is actually managing a little better than they did in 2008. When Larry Summers was president, he made some skeezy deals to finance the Allston campus expansion, and it went way bad when the market collapsed. Now they do have some emergency cash set aside.
>Weird for me that they could have billions in the bank and still ask for tuition.
if you make something free, people don't value it. Harvard has a lot of financial aid for students who legitimately can't afford the tuition, and charges a lot for students who can.
Lab classes should at least be performed. It feels like the professors care more about alleviating 100% of their own personal risk than the thousands of students whose educations and livelihoods are on the line. Set up some plexiglass borders, open the windows, take some other precautions, but there has to be a tradeoff at some point in my opinion.
I don't think high risk people should "consider the tradeoff" at all. Of course they're interested in alleviating their own personal risk...do you understand what's they're risking? Would you show up to work if you were 70, just because some students wanted to take bio?
There's an old adage about planting trees you know you won't live to sit in the shade of, but unfortunately it's not a popular sentiment these days.
Merely administering lab classes isn't even that risky. Doesn't even necessarily involve being in the same room at the same time. So yes, I'd show up and do what had to be done.
I think there's a kind of adorable naivety to equating planting a tree with administering a lab at an American college.
If you yourself are conceding a professor "doesn't even necessarily involve being in the same room at the same time", then A.) Why does the professor even have to do it at all, as opposed to say, a young, not at risk grad student?, and B.) Does it really "need to be done" ?
My professors were totally uninvolved from my labs. They would define them in advance, but each lab was administered by a grad student. Professors being uninvolved with labs isn't new or exciting.
You pay a larger percentage of income tax your entire life for this "free" benefit. You could argue the costs and outcomes are better, but it's not free.
In addition Harvard is a private institution and not a government school.
I left college for a semester, then re-enrolled and graduated. It's incredibly easy to do.
If I were a current Harvard student, I'd drop out for the next year. Take some community college courses, work, travel (in a COVID-responsible way...maybe road trips only).
This is a unique opportunity to get off of the well-trodden path and far preferable to sitting in front of a computer in your parents' house for a year.
There is a huge safety net once you've gotten into an Ivy or other top school. Best case scenario, you start a business and no longer need Harvard, a la Zuckerberg or Gates. Worst case scenario, you graduate broke at 23 (with some great stories), rather than broke at 22 (without the stories).
The value of a college degree is:
1) Signaling/exclusivity (the diploma)
2) The connections you make
3) The subject matter that you learn
4) The social environment – all of the benefits of adulthood with none of the responsibilities
Distance learning only hits #3 on that list. Harvard can get away with charging full tuition for its classes because...it's Harvard. So it also hits #1. But the majority of schools are in for a rude awakening when they realize that students were paying for the social environment and aren't willing to, in the words of Good Will Hunting, "Waste $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."
Bingo, this is what every college student should be doing right now. Most colleges have a well established process for deferring your education for a year or more due to various exigencies that can arise during those years.
I would also argue, that this is what most parents should be doing for their younger kids too. We all know that remote learning sucks for young kids. You basically have to sacrifice one parent to just sit at home and help the kids through their online coursework. At that point, you're better off putting them in daycare for a year, working, and then re-enrolling them for the next year. Will they be behind a year? Sure, but they'll also have a big advantage over their peers who got a half-assed education from the past year and were forced into the next grade.
I would do this except I would lose my $12,000 a semester in scholarship from my university. Most scholarships do seem to require continuous enrollment.
Also, students with deferred loans would need to begin paying those back.
I think it really depends on the specifics of your situation, which no one online will be able to help you with... At the very least, you could probably drop to a part-time student, which would maintain your scholarships and student loan status, while avoiding the full financial commitment.
Right. To be clear I wasn't seeking advice as I've already decided what I'm going to do. I was merely pointing out that it's more complicated than pausing enrollment and resuming when things get back to normal.
When I was a student (over a decade ago now) part time status only deferred my financial obligations if I was in my last semester and about to graduate.
You might very well be right, but it isn't obvious to me that putting off some key foundational learning while your brain is still forming is as reasonable as putting off a year of college. (Though I also have some vague memory of studies showing people who were older for their grade got more benefit than the younger students? This is a very vague memory, though.)
In fact, students admitted to Harvard this year will not need to drop out to pursue the plan you lay out. Harvard is giving new admits the option to defer admission until the following year. This decision was made, I believe, with recognition that the value of Harvard is in large part the social environment and connections you experience in person.
gap years, if done responsibly as you say (not in front of the tv), can be extremely life enriching. i'd highly suggest spending some time abroad. getting out of your "only lived at home, now in college" bubble can expose you to other things when you're still young and impressionable while being open to new things.
Unless you urgently need to start a business right now, I don’t see how this has a higher expected value compared to doing the same after you graduate.
I'm not the original commenter, but I'd bet their logic is that the value of being at Harvard for 2020-2021 is less than that of Harvard for 2021-2022.
The expected value of a startup (heavily dependent on what type of startup...) is the same either this year or next, but the opportunity cost is less.
It doesn't have higher expected value and I wouldn't necessarily advise going down this path in normal times. But calculating the expected value only takes into account the diploma and learning subject matter, none of the other benefits.
The decision right now is between a) paying full price for a watered-down college experience (graduating earlier) and b) gaining some life experience and potentially getting "the full" college experience in a year or two for the same price (albeit with the drawback of a later graduation date).
Hopefully you're being metaphorical with the use of the term expected value, or are you really suggesting that a young person plans their education based on what's more profitable? Not that money isn't something to consider, but the "value" you get out of your education and other formative experiences isn't measured in dollars.
> I'd drop out for the next year. Take some community college courses
Harvard students have better things to do other than taking community college courses... it is absolutely a waste of time to take classes that are a joke.
I went to Harvard, and I've taken classes at community college. You're either vastly overestimating Harvard or vastly underestimating community college.
Yes - there's unfortunately some notion that as you move lower down the "prestige ladder", the easier / less rigorous the academic content becomes.
I've studied at both good and "poor" schools, and my experience has been that both have their strengths and weaknesses. I've taken classes that were extremely rigorous and in-depth at the low-prestige (or rather, no-prestige) school, pretty much identical to the same classes offered at the big-name school. Only difference was that the first school had a 50% failure rate, whereas the latter school had much better pass-rate, along with grade distribution that was shifted more towards the A.
This is probably due to the caliber of students, the work was the same.
Were these computer science classes? My experience is that the difference between top and “poor” schools is much wider in CS (likely because the academic job market in the humanities and sciences is so tough that you get highly qualified teachers even at “poor” schools).
But with that said, there's a ton of variance within school themselves. Courses can be different from year to year, depending on who's in charge.
One thing I noticed was that the lifers - that is, the older professors, usually had very predictable classes. They'd use the same lecture notes, hand-ins, etc. year after year, often running on decades. They knew their audience, so to speak, and had extremely structured classes. These classes tended to be quite comfortable to take...no surprises, to put it that way.
Then you had the freshly minted professors, that would have a class here and there, usually new classes every other semester. These guys tended to be much more rigorous, and assuming on the level of competence (of their audience) - at least in grad school.
I took classes at community college both during high school and after I graduated from college. You can learn a lot of practical skills at community college that higher education looks down on. I learned to weld at Harvard through the physics lab and didn't realize how much I sucked at it until relearning it from a community college instructor. The person who taught me at community college was far more qualified.
Coincidentally, I first learned TIG welding at Williams via the physics machine shop. One of the memorable pieces of advice from my earnest instructor (the Buildings and Grounds guy who did the necessary welding) was something like "Only weld galvanized at the end of the day because you'll feel like shit afterwards. It helps if you go home and drink lots of milk."
The wisdom of his health advice aside, he was a decent welder taught me useful techniques. But when I later took a community college TIG course from a former nuclear welder, I was astonished by the precision the instructor demonstrated. I got a lot better, not exactly because of the quality of instruction, but just from having seen what excellence looked like.
I took networking courses at a community college. The professor was fantastic, a former IBM employee who'd been doing network stuff at AT&T for 20 years. He wasn't a professor, but this guy knew his stuff. It was the perfect way to get some "hands-on" experience with routing and switching.
Community colleges don't do everything well, but when it comes to building hard skills, it's hard to think of a better bang for your buck. (Particularly if you live in NY like me, it's free!)
While in I high school, I always held the impression that college would be full of immensely enriching educational experiences. Courses, primarily those by world renown universities, would be so transformative that they would compensate for the substandard education system of the United States. However, after living with students at various universities and eventually attending an Ivy League University, I found that many of the courses were quite comparable to any simple online course I found on the topic, no matter if it was being taught by another top 50 university, top 100, or random high school teacher. Many Ivy League students worked incredibly hard to attend their respective universities, however, like any other school, there are many that exist far from that stereotypical characterization. Likewise, I know many brilliant people who attended lesser known universities of far less prestige. Harvard students are probably better than average students but definitely not special enough to think they have nothing more to learn, no one is. I would highly encourage everyone to keep an open mind and look for what others can teach you.
It's not a waste of time to get done with some general classes that you don't care about at all yet need to graduate. In fact you will be saving money. Do I need the harvard version of Calc I when they teach the same exact rehashed AP calculus stuff at the community college and the credit counts the same as taking Calc I Harvard?
Seeing as they still count for course credit, I don't think Harvard considers them to be jokes. I will take the highly paid accreditors at Harvard's opinion over yours, sorry mate.
I've taken classes at community colleges and I have a degree from an Ivy League school. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the community college classes, and I learned a great deal from them. I don't know where you got the chip on your shoulder, but I hope no one reads your words and gets the mistaken impression that community college is somehow lesser.
COVID-19 will likely be a watershed moment for higher education in the US. Many colleges and universities will likely never return to what they had before. There will be immense pressure to rethink how the whole system works and the cost structures therein.
At many schools the cost increases over the last few decades have very little to do with increasing the quality of education and a lot to do with unnecessary expenses and ever growing administrative bloat. It’s going to be hard for schools to justify their cost when they’re running essentially an online school and that’s the first step towards the whole house of cards falling apart. Expect to see a lot of changes in the coming years. It will be painful but for the best in the long term in getting schools back to basics of providing education.
Schools like Harvard will be fine but outside the top tier it’s about to get real ugly.
> unnecessary expenses and every growing administrative bloat
This is a problem, and yet, I’m unsure how “unnecessary” that administrative overhead really is. If you went to college in the 70s you didn’t have all that. But college wasn’t a requirement, it was an entitlement (loosely speaking) and the people who attended largely reflected this - they were entitled, privileged. Even at a public school they were from comfortably middle class homes, white, etc. If you were poor, non-white, you were largely excluded. If you had mental health problems, you were on your own. In fact if you had any sort of special need you were on your own, there was no support from the school - they were academic institutions!
So much of the work over the last 50 years has been to bridge these gaps. College is now practically a requirement for a comfortable middle class existence in the US. So we try to make sure everyone can go, even graduate, and this is the result. I still view schools as being pretty lean on staffing, for what they provide. All these problems with schools are symptoms of a larger societal issue in my mind.
I graduated from an expensive-but-not-elite private school (with a full scholarship). By the time I graduated it was over half international students, particularly in the MBA programs.
Not sure what they'll do now. I think these institutions have to massively change their priorities in the coming ten years to survive.
That said, a friend of mine has a cousin that's an international student from China. Apparently her school (large state school) is offering online classes in China time!
ICE's decision is going to radically impact this. In-person classes or bust. I cannot imagine the migraines that sub-50 university presidents are having today.
I certainly hope so. I have been saving education money since before my children were even conceived and it is truly disheartening to watch tuition increase by leaps and bounds. My wife and I both greatly value education, and I am certain that my children will obtain some sort of scholarship on their own merit, but I would not shed a tear if the University bubble popped before then.
My oldest is enrolled in online classes at a large state school, and will be graduating from high school in two years. At worst I have saved enough money for both of my children to attend the school of their choice. If it all falls apart, I've secured education expenses for them and their children if they choose that path.
I would love to see some sort of regulation on endowments and either taxing them or forcing Universities to spend at least a portion of them on a yearly basis.
Feel sorry for the students right now having to face all this.. but it's for the best overall.
College needs to be massively re-imagined in this country. The costs are so out of control it's insane. As a parent with 2 younger kids, trying to save to help them with college some seems monumental.
I find it completely absurd that so many people are happy about remote classrooms.
Online videos and assignments at most top universities have been available for free for years now. Universities are entirely about the advantage of learning in person, peer groups and signalling.
If the value of university when remote remains the same for your major/university, then it is a scathing indictment of the in-classroom experience the major/university offered.
If I found myself in such a situation, the first thing I would do is un-enroll and reflect on the stupid financial decisions I've made.
I hope this is a wake up call for middling private universities and non-lucrative majors that can be easily made remote. A $100k+ fee for something that can be accessed online for free without any real loss in value is highway robbery.
> Online videos and assignments at most top universities have been available for free for years now. Universities are entirely about the advantage of learning in person, peer groups and signalling.
If anyone seriously doubts this, consider that pretty much any young person in America can just walk into a university lecture hall, and sit through all the classes they could ever wish for, without paying a cent. [1] Nobody takes attendance, and if you look like a student, nobody's going to notice that you're not actually enrolled in the class.
And yet, nobody actually does this! Instead, millions of people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, so that their attendance will be officially recorded.
Those people aren't stupid. They aren't paying for the education, they are paying for everything besides the education.
[1] Okay, it may cost you a few hundred dollars per year to buy second-hand, old-edition books, if you can't be arsed to study at the university library. This is much less of a financial hurdle than having the luxury to devote 20-40 hours/week on attending classes, and doing classwork.
> Universities are entirely about the advantage of learning in person, peer groups and signalling.
As long as "learning in person" includes one-on-one time with your professors and access to a university library I agree with you 100%.
> without paying a cent
It's pretty easy to get into hot water with the university if you have any legal ties to them (e.g. by having been a student). It's common to require some fraction of ordinary tuition to sit in on classes.
> Nobody takes attendance, and if you look like a student, nobody's going to notice that you're not actually enrolled in the class.
Enough people do take attendance, or at least take a look at the roster ahead of time (in smaller classes). I had a better success rate speaking with the professor ahead of time and asking if they minded. It's also worth mentioning that not all professors are willing to put in extra one-on-one time with an unofficial student.
> nobody actually does this
Admittedly the slip of paper at the end was important to me, but I saved a little money taking some of the classes I wanted unofficially, and I wasn't the only person in my university peer group to do so. It was also a nice way to sidestep some bureaucratic prerequisite issues for classes outside my major.
Many university libraries don't check ID at the door, and many paying students don't take advantage of 1:1 professor or TA office hours.
Yes, this sort of thing is discouraged - but my point is that anyone who wanted to learn what is being taught in CALC 405, or what-have-you can currently do so, under the table, for essentially free.
I totally agree that anyone who wants to learn the contents of most courses can do so for free, including the 1:1 interactions, networking, and library access (many universities not only don't check ID but actively encourage the broader community to visit and research).
My argument was a mild push-back, pointing out that it's more difficult in some respects (e.g., you might not have access to some of your preferred professors), and that it _does_ actually happen occasionally.
Do you have any insight into why more people don't take advantage of that opportunity? Anecdotally, before I attended university I didn't value a college education beyond the slip of paper at the end, and even if I had wanted just the education without the degree I wouldn't have known that I could just sit in on my classes.
> Do you have any insight into why more people don't take advantage of that opportunity?
Because they correctly value the learning to be worth ~$X,000, but the accreditation to be worth ~$YZ,000.
When you put things that way, the 20-40 hours/week of time that goes into getting an education becomes a lot less of a good investment, if the only payoff is that you get to learn.
I would say any class that's big enough to where you just blend into the crowd, meaning just a lecture class, is pretty much useless to attend and the same content can be found for free online and with the textbook.
The academic value of college comes from small class discussion (you don't get this in large lectures), direct 1:1 access to professors/TAs, and the ability to work together with other students. If you don't get these, then there's no benefit of attending a lecture in person.
I think people selfishly like many aspects of the covid lockdown. But they may regret it later. I know many school teachers that have enjoyed a very light workload this spring and are rooting for something similar in the fall. It may go on for a while, but at some point administrators and tax payers will realize there is no reason to pay for so many teacher salaries. It’s going to be rough.
There is some amount of capture of returning students. Due to the difficulties of transferring, it may be easier and collectively cheaper for a senior to return for their final year.
I'm friends with quite a few Harvard MBAs now (think what you will, but the ones I know are all great people :) because my partner is a Harvard MBA. Without a doubt, they all said they'd take a gap year if they were in the current situation. Half the value is the credentialing, but the other half is the experience and network you build through it.
Unfortunately, Harvard's offer to admitted MBAs was to defer til 2021 or 2022, but the specific year would be up to Harvard. That's not uncertainty that many people with families and advanced careers can or should plan around. People in their mid-20s should definitely defer regardless.
It's not just Harvard. I feel bad for anybody who was due to go to pretty much any university this year because they're going to miss out on so much of the experience.
If it were me I'd be looking to defer and reapply later, but then I went to the University of Nottingham and, if they'd chosen not to accept me when I reapplied, I'd probably have been just as happy in Bristol or London. If you're due to attend a high prestige institution like Harvard or Cambridge, where demand far outstrips supply, it becomes a much more difficult decision. Attending those schools is an end in itself and if your heart is set on that end you might feel you're risking a little too much by deferring.
Nepotism means showing favoritism towards family members, e.g., a nephew hired or promoted instead of a more qualified person.
Sorry to nitpick. I just see that word misused a lot online. I doubt that you're implying that a person would be effectively disowned by family members for taking a semester of their Harvard MBA program online instead of on site.
Nepotism also refers to preferential treatment of friends and loosely defined "family" members (e.g. members of your tribal group), and universities like Harvard are certainly involved in laundering that kind of behavior.
Beyond nepotism, there's a lot of actual learning experiences you can gain from your peers by debating them in case study lessons, working with them on projects and participating in simulations etc.
I think determined individuals could, but it's much harder without ready access to pre-designed course material (e.g. case studies) and a learned facilitator, ideally one who has a mix of hard won industry experience, academic/research rigour and is a great teacher to boot.
This doesn't come close to describing every single professor, but I imagine (albeit without any sources to back this up right now) that the ratio of such unicorn professors is higher at Tier 1 univerities vs. non-Tier 1.
Perhaps with a larger supply of determined students willing to tackle this on their own, this is the year where a larger number of focused case-study groups could be formed and sustained online.
I didn't get an MBA from HBS, but I did cross-register into a class there while getting a different degree. The classroom experience there is sui generis, and it definitely couldn't be translated into an online format without diminishing its value. It's not just a matter of transmitting and absorbing information. If I were an incoming MBA student, I'd defer a year rather than going online.
Online communities self-select and self-censor. A student with a contrary, incorrect, or controversial viewpoint in a classroom has a voice and can spark discussion given they operate with best intentions and have a decent instructor. They can be wrong one day, come in the next day and continue to speak. Such a user in an online community gets downvoted, muted, banned, ignored, hidden, or any of those things that keep the chamber full of its own echoes.
In theory these communities can exist online. In reality, the vast majority of online communities are not open to being a classroom setting.
Agreed entirely, but the cost of a US college degree is often more about the credential level signaling and showing that you were tenacious enough to win the college entrance competition than it is about acquiring skills.
I don't know how I would have learned how to become an RF engineer if it weren't for a four year BSEE that focused heavily on DiffEq, Complex Math, Fields & Waves, and Discrete Systems... and access to patient and friendly (mostly) professors for help during open office hours, which were a necessity (for me, anyway).
I'm pretty sure I would not have been able to teach this to myself with YouTube videos. But maybe you've had better luck?
Some fields are exceptions to this rule. Those fields represent a small fraction of all degrees awarded per year. Yours (and mine) are part of that exception.
> RF engineer if it weren't for a four year BSEE that focused heavily on DiffEq, Complex Math, Fields & Waves, and Discrete Systems
You can learn all of this by yourself.
> I'm pretty sure I would not have been able to teach this to myself with YouTube videos.
YouTube videos suck for serious learning of non-visual activities. Written resources, particularly books, are optimal. People like to pretend that it's hard to figure out what you need to learn, but just taking a look at syllabuses and assigned readings and what the "best" books in the field are will get you plenty far.
> access to patient and friendly (mostly) professors
For many majors you can find decent help online, but often crossreferencing between different books will provide just as good results as talking to a professor.
Lectures are extremely inefficient.
The hardest part is not being able to find answer manuals, particularly with graduate-level books. Usually you can find alternatives.
No, and I know this for a fact because I'm me, and you're not. But thanks for telling me I'm wrong that I can't learn something without a tutor. That's a new twist on mansplaining. I guess I'm happy for you that you are so smart.
I agree with you. I learn by listening and collaborating. That is an environment you don't get online or learning by yourself. I learned best when I went to school and even though I totally had access to all the resources outside of school, just reading something doesn't mean you understand at it. Having an expert being able to sort of validate your way of thinking (or invalidate if you are stuck on an issue) is really valuable to me.
I really missed out by not asking for help my first year as an undergrad. With very few exceptions (maybe 2 out of 20?), every single professor was excited to explain things 1:1. My current partner is a professor and feels delighted when students don't give up and ask for help. If it weren't for freshman year I would have been a 4.0 (er, out of 4.0), so it really galls me that the arrogant commenters above insist that college is worthless or just a name game. Yes, I agree prices are out of control. That's an absolute fact. And were there boring lectures? Sure, once and a while: hell, I was 18 when I started. But overall the lectures, recitations and labs were spot on. It was like drinking from a firehose, and sometimes you need help. But to just shit on the entire institution as a scam overall is just plain sad and IMHO a political posturing of the right wing trying to demonize education. Yep, I went political.
In theory it's surely possible to do so. As you mention having professors to help you when you see having issues understanding things, etc. can be amazingly helpful, but I imagine someone sufficiently motivated could teach themselves. The difference is they will unlikely be able to find gainful employment as an RF engineer, which goes in hand to what GP suggests.
Everything I have in life is from networking effects in college, from landing my first research position in undergrad. Grades don't matter, I was an average student. Networking effect is everything in life, in any field. Maximize your ability to network.
>Networking effect is everything in life, in any field. Maximize your ability to network.
Networking isn't everything but it's definitely the lion's share. Anyone who paints the world as a meritocracy is disillusioned, but it helps to have merit to fall back on. There are many who get through life and succeed financially almost entirely through networking and situation.
I'd add some nuance to that - in my experience, networking is a multiplicative (not additive) effect to your actual skills. You can get a letter of recommendation from a Nobel Prize winner, but even then it has to say something other than "Liz Lemon numbers among my employees", you know?
Interesting. Did you go to an Ivy league, cause I went to a state school and I haven't used networking for anything ever. Granted, I've only worked at GAFAM and they hire tons of people so that could be part of it.
I went to a state school, and my entire professional career is due to the friends I made there. College was a very rough time for me, and I wasn't getting many interviews with my resume (really poor GPA, no internships, no extracurriculars, etc). A friend hooked me up with a job at a startup and landing interviews since has been no problem.
This isn't a glamorous story where my network made me a millionaire, but my life would be much worse having not made those friends back then.
Internships definitely help (GAFAM uses them like extended interviews for full time offers). I also think it helps that my gpa was ok (3.05) and the school i went to (purdue) was highly ranked enough and big enough that we had entire recruiting teams come out to our career fairs which is where I got my first internship. Some companies even sent out employees for an entire week to our campus to do interviews for internship and new grad hiring.
I went to a state school, albeit R1 which has a lot more funding and therefore opportunities, but I believe every state flagship is R1 anyway. Actually this in state school was cheaper than some other in state schools that were considered party schools/easier academically. Were you recruited at a career fair? fangs always had a big presence at our biannual fairs and people I knew seemed to have no issues finding internships coast to coast.
I went to purdue so we had absolutely massive career fairs and I got my first CS internship at GAFAM through one. After that, it hasn't been hard getting interviews at the other ones.
Agree that one should maximize networking, but college is not required to do so. Find like minded people where ever you are, always be seeking opportunities (learning, revenue generating, and all others) and avoid credentials and their associated costs. Be able to get the work done, learn how to when you can’t, and be enjoyable to work with, that’s most of what a job is.
This is my experience too. I haven't exactly avoided credentials as a principle (I have a BEng), but I totally agree with "Be able to get the work done and enjoyable to work with".
Do a good job, be secure in your abilities, have empathy for others. I'm a freelancer of 13 years with a lot of happy clients and – before I started living off-grid – I'd earn a month's rent in half a day. Now I don't have rent or mortgage.
Sure, I haven't climbed any corporate ladder, but I hope that in a decent company you can be those things and also do well.
8/9 went to law school at Harvard or Yale (the Notorious R.B.G. went to Columbia Law).
For undergrad, 3 went to Princeton, 1 to Columbia (not RBG, interestingly), 1 to Harvard, 1 to Yale, 1 to Cornell, 1 to Stanford, and 1 to Holy Cross.
That's evidence that signaling matters in a law degree, but the larger context of this discussion is of an undergraduate degree and I don't think the signalling is as strong there.
I agree regarding undergrad mattering less than law school, but as long as we're splitting hairs about RBG, let's split them correctly! =)
She and her husband both went to Harvard Law, though the husband started and graduated one year earlier. He then got a job at a New York law firm and RBG transferred to Columbia to stay near him. She completed her third year at Columbia and received their law degree.
Harvard Law actually has a rule (adopted later) where you can complete your third year elsewhere and still receive a Harvard degree. They offered this degree to RBG, who refused it[1]. So technically you're right that she's a Columbia Law grad, though it's not a stretch to call her a Harvard Law grad as well.
I think for the 99% university contacts are not a useful "network". What good are a bunch of entry level employees to you? By the time anyone you've graduated with is in a position to help you out you've already been working for at least 10 years, and your more recent professional network is where the value will be.
So unless you are in the Skull and Bones and your frat bro's uncle is an executive at Goldman Sachs, and that uncle was a frat bro with your Dad who's an executive at Morgan Stanly, no.
But, a college education is still a valuable thing for getting a job. Depending on what classes you take anyway.
> Genuine question as I haven’t been to college (yet?): is this actually a thing? I’ve also heard it doesn’t help with that.
As someone who DIDN'T network in college and compares to peers who did - it is utterly devastating. It is hugely influential.
Admittedly, your networking won't matter as much if there isn't high movement from the school to your work region... In my case, I went to a school where most of the student body had no intentions of leaving the region. I was also in an extremely anti-social department that was overly competitive.
Speaking as a UK university grad (14 years ago), this was absolutely not a thing for me. I made some friends, but went into web development at a small company rather than a large grad training scheme. I spent a year there and I have been self-employed ever since. I think precisely none of my career development has been due to my university-related network.
But perhaps it is different at US colleges (or for others in the UK). I personally couldn't wait to put academia behind me and get into the real world.
I now live off-grid in Central Portugal. I have clients I still work for, and I get referrals to new clients too. I'm also starting a wireless ISP here, which is great for networking and meeting people :-)
Yes, it's absolutely a thing. I don't know how experiences vary, but Alex Azar, the current secretary of health and human services, former president of Eli Lilly, was an alumni of my frat.
I've also hit up random alums at various companies who have given me referrals, there are a lot of friends of friends who are in pretty good positions, such as founder/CEO/partner at various companies and VCs that will be willing to chat with you if you happen to know someone they're connected to that can vouch for you. I was actually interviewing with a company, and I found out the CEO was an alum of my school, and we had a lot of fun talking about college.
You can learn almost everything you can learn in university outside of it. The true value are the people you’ll meet that share the same interests as you do. Life is hell a lot of easier if you know the right / enough people.
My connections helped me little. If I just worked during that time I think I would have been way farther up on the hard metrics of career progress.
Not to say that I didn't get anything out of college. The campus radio stations introduced me to people who have had a tremendous amount of influence on me.
Sure. Read bios to research career trajectories. For example, read the bios of billionaires of who made a lot their money via renumeration. Cheryl Sandberg, for example. Steve Ballmer. Made their connections in college.
In most cases, you participate in the world through other people. How much you use your connections is up to you, but such connections allow you to traverse quickly and deeply through the space of opportunities.
I depends on the school, but networking matter a lot. I'm not saying that it should, but it really seems to.
Outside of ambition, the people matter too.
I know a lot of marriages that started in college. I've met a lot of my best friends there too. Some of my professors changed my life, and not in a textbook way, but in a human way. I made a lot of mistakes there, and I know a lot of people did too. But it was college, you're kinda supposed to make mistakes and grow from them. Take the wrong major, kiss the wrong person, say the wrong thing, etc.
I'm not saying that you can't have those experiences elsewhere. Most people do.
But the structure of the place makes it a lot easier to meet other people your age, fall in love, fall out of love, have your opinions challenged, listen to some great/terrible music, imbibe too much of the wrong thing, get help on classwork, etc. You can still not opt into it, of course. And you can do that almost anywhere too.
But it's a lot easier.
Virtual classrooms aren't going to replace that. Honestly, until we get a vaccine, that's all kinda on hold. Sorry class of 2020 :(
> Also about networking and friendships formed during college
I've never been as lonely as I had been during my first few years of college. I had no friends basically. People always got up and left the classrooms after classes were over -- no one hung around to socialize. I was depressed and extremely lonely, and rarely talked to any human beings, and mostly spent my free time on my laptop filled with an ocean of sadness. In my later years in college, I did make some friends, a few of which (like around 3 or 4 friends) have turned into life-long friends. And I'm extremely happy about those.
But people seriously need to stop selling/touting college as some great social place. It emphatically was not during my first two years). The "social aspect" absolutely does not justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on college. You can find friends through events on meetup, or joining a social group (like a club that teaches to code, or a writer's group, or a music/singing group, or a church/religious group, etc). There are plenty of groups like this that are open to anyone in most major metropolises in the US. I've also made online, on Reddit and other sites. People randomly start chatting with me after seeing one of my comments.
You absolutely don't need to and shouldn't spend hundreds of thousands just for the social aspect of college.
That is extremely contrary to my experience. I could code a little bit before college but I learned more math, abstraction, theory of computation. I have never encountered anyone from my school professionally, but it was a modest state school. I did a ton of programming and that always mattered the most when I interviewed for jobs - what could I do and demonstrate right then. I have to ask, were you in engineering, where your connections mattered?
I tend to agree but online courses allows school to admit more people. Therefore the value of that limited resource should go down, along with the price. Although Harvard hasn't announced an increase in first year admittance, I suspect if this is succesful they will start to increase enrollment and therefore should bring the cost down.
Not without increasing capacity of professors, TAs, and administrators, and then the facilities to support all that new staff. Campus facilities for students is only one part of the cost structure.
Stanford's all-online CS106A ("Code in Place") in the Spring quarter was organized in about two weeks and fairly successfully scaled all aspects of instruction to ~1000 online learners.
Curious how they scaled. Just threw money/TAs at it? The limiting factor in my department with expanded online offerings is the number of people willing and able to sacrifice currently strictly limited on campus research hours to TA. There are a finite number of students that a given TA can handle, and it quickly can be an overwhelming amount of work responding to emails and grading.
I would think the majority of non-rich Harvard students don't pay much. For undergraduate studies if you want to attract the best students you have to offer very generous scholarships. Otherwise they would lose students to other top schools. This is true for all schools, but the rich schools like Harvard have the funding to actually do it. I've met a couple of students who paid full tuition at Harvard, but both came from very wealthy families so it wasn't an issue. Schools know in advance the financial situation of applicants and plan accordingly.
I'm sure no small number of people will defer next year. Looking back at college me, I would lean on the side of not signing my college town lease, deferring for the year, and living with my parents in my hometown for a year along with the rest of my local friends (many of which have in fact escaped NYC and other cities rents and returned to their parents home for this work from home period).
Maybe you could work on something on github for your resume during this gap, but I'm anticipating given the absolute chaos this pandemic has caused worldwide, employers aren't going to care if you've failed to secure an internship in a time when no one is hiring, or that you preferred to take more engaging in person coursework rather than watch live action youtube lectures for exorbitant fees.
On the other hand, if there are a lot of students deferring, there is a huge line behind them willing (and able!) to get into Harvard. Harvard and other elite institutions will not suffer for students for quite a while.
If you want to take a year off you can come right back the next year if you've already been admitted. I'm not sure what incoming freshman are thinking, but for current students, why the hell would you not take a year off?
If anything, I'd think the choice of incoming freshman is even clearer assuming they can defer--including financial arrangements. I'm sure they could find something better to do than severely compromised campus activities that might revert to full-on remote a month into the fall term.
The price isn't set on the cost to deliver, at all.
It's based on ability to pay, which is based on available credit, which is based on whatever bankers can get away with saying lifetime earnings will be.
For whom? We're going to save ~0 QALY with this decision, but we're going to derail a lot of people's life plans and probably contribute to a lot of deaths of despair.
With any knowledge worker job posting, there are hundreds of perfectly qualified candidates, maybe thousands. The knowledge taught at Harvard is already disseminated. You don't learn anything different with an undergraduate degree at Harvard than you would with a degree at directional state. The difference is now you know professor X, who lets you work on his super cool project Y, then employer Z sees you did project Y with well known professor X, who wrote a letter with nothing but high praise of your intimate accomplishments on project Y and why you are therefore extremely qualified, and you get a great job.
To break the system would be to snap your fingers and will more knowledge worker jobs into existence to meet the oversupply of qualified candidates, but given our free market society and increasing disfavor of public engineering and public research, that just isn't ever going to happen. So you try and play the game as it is the best you can, and apply to schools like Harvard with faculty who can push your life forward.
In a world of imperfect information, how do you prove to a stranger that you are knowledgable, in less than a full day of interaction?
That remains the problem, and credentials/prestige remain our best way of dealing with it. In other fields you develop portfolios (e.g. github repos) perhaps that's what education will evolve to, developing a student work portfolio to prove you are knowledgable.
As someone without a degree and making market rate or better, I agree (and I started when there weren't so many online options)
Of course the hard part is getting hired without that rubber stamp, but there are many options (many have an idealized idea of what your career will look like, but that's often disconnected from reality)
Having taught a semester online, I think you can do really good teaching online, but you need a few things:
1) Small class sizes. Mine was under 15. Otherwise, very little discussion happens
2) A lot of work & learning assigned outside of class
3) Time each class for sub-groups
I do think they will have to adjust the tuition. It is hard to justify paying 60k or whatever Harvard charges for online education. It is objectively much, much cheaper to deliver.
Schools will need to invest in a lot more online tools and training, however.
I don't understand how larger class sizes will happen, unless they are going completely lecture.
The other thing I did with my small class was set up a Slack channel. I was available daily to chat about whatever and give feedback and work through concepts.
I spent a tremendous amount of time chatting with students on Zoom and Slack inbetween classes when I taught online last semester.
The idea that good online teaching is just like some free MOOC is not reality-based. It needs to be very hands-on.
My friend just did a full course load remote summer semester it was significantly more taxing.
Group study is harder. Keeping attention in class is harder. Having your eyes stuck to a screen the whole day is harder.
> The idea that good online teaching is just like some free MOOC is not reality-based. It needs to be very hands-on.
Kudos to you. From what I've seen, online courses continue to be MOOC-esque or even worse. At least MOOCs have mature systems in place that facilitate learning through their system, however inefficient.
I had a very similar experience teaching a class of 23, including the Slack, which students found very helpful. I was also a student in a class of 60 and quality of discussion suffered, although I'm not sure it's 100% because of the online format (I think the instructors could have done a better job facilitating discussion)
Well, there are some consequences we must consider.
Foreign student populations contribute a great deal of money to Universities. It is typical at many private institutions that foreign students pay 100% sticker price.
If that institution goes full online, many international students may be unwilling to give up their immigration status and transfer. Likewise, institutions with large immigrant cohorts may be pressured to remain in-person to retain these financials (compounded by the fact that they are financially struggling as is).
Similarly, access to broadband is often taken for granted in the United States. You cannot guarantee in other countries that you will have sufficient access to fast and free (as in unrestricted) internet access. At which point, you simply cannot remain enrolled at your current institution. (Essentially you would get deported, and lose a year of your education)
The social issue of immigration aside, I think in economic terms this could be pressuring universities, and in perhaps the wrong way.
Well it means if Harvard goes through and is 100% online it won’t be able to have international students attending from the US. So it is essentially forcing universities to have at least a hybrid schedule (universities won’t pass on the nice 100% sticker price tuition paid by internationals).
If I'm reading this correctly, all incoming Freshman will spend Fall semester living on campus and all graduating Seniors will do likewise for Spring semester, however all courses will be online only. I can't imagine doing online coursework from the dorm and I'm not sure what kind of safety is being gained by just avoiding the classroom while social interactions continue.
I'm confused why there is still so much fear and abnormal life in the US when the US CDC says the mortality rate is miniscule, e.g. [1]. We're not completely back to normal yet in Vietnam, but a lot closer.
1. There isn't much trust in what the government is saying at the moment, especially since their communication is usually mismanaged, incorrect or contradictory. For example, some states have passed laws/orders blocking the public release of COVID data.
2. People are also afraid of simply getting COVID, not just dying from it. It has been shown to cause permanent health issues even in young people.
It really has not at all. How can we show "permanent" issues for something less than half a year old? Anyone who's had pneumonia before knows it causes a lot of upfront damage. I had it back in University and it took a week before I could get out of bed and nearly a month before my lungs didn't feel like bricks. I was still coughing for 2~3 months after.
Today I am 100% recovered. Everything I've seen in the fear-mongering "permanent damage" news articles looks to be the same effects as any non-covid pneumonia. We won't KNOW if any of this is permanent until March 2021, but I think it's highly unlikely.
But it's important to note, permanent damage is literally impossible to determine right now. Simply not enough time has passed.
Not OP but a quick Google search found this. I have also read plenty of articles of a similar nature. It doesn't take much work to find a reputable source for this type of information.
Long term may be a better description than permanent. But we don't know and won't know for a while what long term complications are caused. Look at HIV, you get a cold and then nothing maybe for years, then everything falls to pieces. It may not be as severe as HIV and it may be more severe than pneumonia. Why do you want to take that risk when you can avoid it with some simple precautions? If it turns out that these aren't permanent then you can go and catch it next year, no need to rush in now is there.
You can use Google. It's not hard to find. As for true studies, there probably aren't any. We're talking about a virus that has only been known about for less than a year.
The horrific death totals early on have completely skewed people's opinions of the severity of this disease. It's not a binary live/die, there are all kinds of other complications associated with it and too many people seem to think that spending 3 weeks in the ICU is no big deal because "hey, you survived".
Abnormal does not even begin to describe it. At least on the West Coast. No one is doing anything, most people remain in their houses all day, every day. The few people I see out are simply buying groceries or going for a walk.
A lot of bars and restaurants where I live have SELF ELECTED to re-close even after the county allowed them to open back up under very strict regulations.
It's a nightmare. There's really no other way to describe it. Either the West Coast is entirely different from the East Coast or we haven't even begun to realize the economic impact this situation is going to bring. Anything short of a complete collapse will be a miracle.
The CDC report lists a number of planning scenarios.
> Are estimates intended to support public health preparedness and planning.
> Are not predictions of the expected effects of COVID-19.
> Do not reflect the impact of any behavioral changes, social distancing, or other interventions.
The number you're quoting is derived from (but not quoted in) one of the scenarios, which is described:
> Scenario 5 represents a current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States, with the same caveat: that the parameter values will change as more data become available.
You can work it out if you read the article. It says the high infection/death rate estimates were based on no interventions and no change of behaviour i.e no voluntary social distancing and working from home. Looking at the reaction to the lockdown, from some sections of US society, it is pretty obvious that without the lockdowns enough people would have made no changes to their behaviour and would therefore contribute to higher infection levels and desths. Further, plenty of employers would not have allowed working from home and would have expected people to attend work or lose their jobs. So infected people, predominantly poorer people, would have had no choice but to work when ill and with the atrocious healthcare system would have been unable to access help even if they didn't have to work. So those huge numbers we saw estimates of at the beginning could easily have been achieved in the US, and possibly still could. Florida saw over 10k cases a day this week. This isn't tailing off or going away, it was slowed.
Vietnam had a quick response to the problem, but it also doesn't have the same level of international travellers passing through it so it is easier to contain. The US could have contained it but that means shutting 150 airports, as opposed to Vietnams 3 airports.
Vietnam gets about 45k visitors per day, in comparison the US/Mexico border crossing in California/Tijuana has 75k crossing per day. That's one border point and there is also the US/Canada border too.
So it is in part because Vietnam handled the pandemic better than the USA, but that was also more easily achieved due to the size and complexity of each nation.
Do you have anything more recent? We're about 45 days past that estimate and the fatality rate for people who test positive is holding steady at 4.5% if you divide it out. Clearly that doesn't include anyone who never got tested (and likely people w/o symptoms didn't), so I'd like to see if the CDC still stands by the numbers here from May.
nyc said 21.6% antibody on 6/13. 32k deaths, 8.4M ppl => 1.8% IFR. CFR is much more complicated because policy changes on testing and hospitalization will make cause CFR to bounce around. Anyone argue that's a worse case scenario?
(1) Why are you ONLY looking at the fatality rate?
I don't have all the links here, but just because you don't die doesn't mean there aren't other serious consequences (especially for people with existing conditions). People are losing their taste/smell etc. There's a lot of unknowns but it doesn't seem like it's that benign. You are treating it as binary either you live or die.. seems like it's more complicated than that.
(2) A fatality rate of 0.3% to 0.4% might not seem to bad, but you can't look at that alone. The contagion rate is HUGE compared to other viruses. So while the rate alone might not seem terribly bad, the fact is that with how contagious it is the vast majority of the population will/would have ended up getting it if proper precautions are not taken.
Because the case rates are almost entirely worthless. They're combining PCR AND antibody tests into the case rates!
A lot of people who are finally able to get elective procedures (some which are critical health procedures) are getting tests because everyone is required to now when you go into some hospitals. If they test positive for antibodies, they're counted AS A NEW CASE!
That's insane! They may have had it at one time and never even realized it. Even now, the fatality rate is 0.001% for all Americans and it's much lower if you're under 40.
This is absolutely, 100%, mass-hysteria.
Let us look at the numbers and decide our own risks!
Go to the beaches of Indiana or Florida or Texas. 1000s of people have been out there every week for over a month, and there are no massive increases in fatalities. The Texas numbers are skewed because people are coming in for normal accidents, happen to be CoV2 positive, and then suddenly someone in a car wreck in an ICU is now a Covid19 case as part of the "Second wave" bullshit.
Ok I guess just ignore what I said and spout off random stuff.. great response.
>Even now, the fatality rate is 0.001% for all Americans and it's much lower if you're under 40.
Uh, 0.001%? Are you dividing like deaths by the full population? Not sure what you are trying to infer from that. Maybe if the country had done nothing in response then looking at the death rate like that after a long time makes some sense.. but that's not the case.
Think about it this way. Let's say there is a virus with 100% death rate. It starts killing people, but then we are able to quarantine the people that have it and stop the infection. You would be like.. omg the death rate is only 3 / 330,000,000 it's sooooo low!
Well no, it's because we stopped the outbreak early. Are you going to sit here and tell me that locking down a lot of the country for months did nothing to vastly reduce the death rate, and you are going to act like lockdown deathrate = death rate of doing nothing?
>Go to the beaches of Indiana or Florida or Texas. 1000s of people have been out there every week for over a month, and there are no massive increases in fatalities
It's a beach. Outside. People are not packed right next to each other. It's windy. People bring their own things, they aren't going around constantly touching things other people are, etc. A beach is probably one of the sanest things you can do right now.
Have you noticed that since things like bars have opened up now cases are rising like crazy in Florida/Texas because people are packed in breathing the same area and touching all the same stuff?
Look- we have LEADING EXPERTS in the fields who basically dedicate their lives toward this kind of virus and what should be done.. but oh you are claiming it's 100% mass-hysteria. I guess you are the smartest person in the world who no one listens too. Must be hard to be you every day.
Why is there this laser focus on Fatality rate as a talking point for anti-mask anti-lockdown types? Is death the only undesirable outcome? Polio had historic mortality rates around 5% in children, would you want your children to catch polio? Would you push for herd immunity for polio and have >60% of the children in the country catch it? It's simply absurd! There are other health risks besides death to consider. How does no one see that?
Half of the US seems to think this is just a GLOBAL conspiracy to hurt Donald Trump, like are you dense? You think the entire world would torpedo their economies just for the chance to hurt Trump? These people need help.
I am consistently disappointed by the lack of critical thinking in HN comments.
Fatalities is the best data we have, has common definition, and can be used to set policy. Everyone in the US knows that there are other undesirable outcomes besides death, but there is a lack of data on the rates, duration, or importance.
>Everyone in the US knows that there are other undesirable outcomes besides death
You can't really believe that. Maybe a small fraction of the population seems to be aware of this. The rest parrot some version of: "95% of people survive, its just the flu!"
I really do. Being hospitalized and recovering is an undesirable outcome, and for that matter, so is having pneumonia or the flu like symptoms at home.
Nobody denies those outcomes exist.
I agree there is a longer list of negative health outcomes, such as chronic fatigue, shortness of breath, diabetes onset, ect. The association of these with covid-19 is less understood in the medical community, and less widely known to the public, and their importance when setting public policy is less clear.
It makes sense to focus on fatalities, because while they are not the only negative, it is the most significant, any other outcomes would roughly track with it.
> Polio had historic mortality rates around 5% in children, would you want your children to catch polio?
No, nor would I want my children (or anyone) to get covid. This is a separate question from whether the current lockdown measures increase life expectancy and if so, whether they’re worth it.
> There are other health risks besides death to consider.
Yes, there are. Again, a reasonable person might think the probability of those occurring is either (1) low enough to begin with or (2) not much decreased by the lockdown, that the negative effects of the lockdown outweigh it. Do you have any non-anecdotal discussion of (1) how common permanent disability from Covid is, and (2) how many severe covid cases are prevented by lockdowns?
> Half of the US seems to think this is just a GLOBAL conspiracy to hurt Donald Trump
Nobody in this thread said that covid is not serious or that it is a conspiracy, or anything about Trump, so this is a complete non sequitur. Certainly, there are people in the US who believe that covid is a global conspiracy to hurt Trump, which is absurd, but it’s an obvious fallacy to argue like “some people make absurd arguments for proposition P, therefore P is wrong”.
>Again, a reasonable person might think the probability of those occurring is either (1) low enough to begin with or (2) not much decreased by the lockdown, that the negative effects of the lockdown outweigh it.
If you think your average anti-mask anti-lockdown American is making that kind of analysis then frankly I think you are disconnected from reality...
>Do you have any non-anecdotal discussion of (1) how common permanent disability from Covid is
Permanent disability is obviously impossible to prove at this point.
Perhaps the best microcosm we've had to learn from so far is the Diamond Princess cruise ship. The Japan Self-Defense Forces Central Hospital did an in depth study: "Of 104 cases, 76 (73%) were asymptomatic, 41 (54%) of which had lung opacities on CT. Other 28 (27%) cases were symptomatic, 22 (79%) of which had abnormal CT findings."
54% of asymptomatic cases had lung opacities, and 83% of those were ground glass opacity. That usually indicates pretty nasty lung damage. Symptomatic cases as expected showed more and worse damage.
Here's an analysis, what is the expected economic cost of achieving herd immunity? If you expect 60% infection rate to provide herd immunity thats 196 million cases in the US. Play with the numbers, 1-5% mortality rates, 50% of asymptomatic and 80% of symptomatic cases had some degree of lung damage. We're talking 500K - 1M+ deaths and tens of millions of people with lung damage. Have you actually factored that into your "The stonks must go up so lets sacrifice grandma" argument?
This is also a pointless exercise because virtually every major developed country on the planet has basically beaten this thing with... wait for it... LOCKDOWNS and MASKS. Crazy right?
> If you think your average anti-mask anti-lockdown American is making that kind of analysis then frankly I think you are disconnected from reality...
I never said anything about what the average anti-lockdown American believes. Frankly, I have no idea. Again, what does this have to do with whether lockdowns are good policy or not? If 99.9% of people believed the earth was round based on some flawed argument, would you conclude that it must be flat?
> virtually every major developed country on the planet has ... beaten this thing with lockdowns and masks
Nobody has beaten it, since the pandemic isn’t over. Once places that had very few cases start opening up, it stands to reason that the outbreaks will start again, as happened in Arizona for example. It seems clear that the only way to truly beat covid without it naturally burning out due to herd immunity is to impose a strict lockdown until a vaccine is widely deployed, which I believe to be impossible.
(Unlike probably anyone who thinks this is a scam to hurt Trump, I hope I’m wrong and a vaccine comes out quickly, because things going back to relatively normal in the near future is a much better outcome than various jurisdictions stubbornly locking down until their unemployment systems collapse, causing mass unrest...)
We've had nearly 3 million cases with over 130k fatalities. If the numbers are being grossly underreported, then it's certainly possible the mortality rate is < 1%, but given the numbers we have now, our mortality rate is closer to 4.5%.
There are a lot of overcounts. People who die of gunshots are COVID-19 deaths if they test positive. A huge number of people have died from secondary effects: being unable to get essential heart surgery, suicide, some people have even died of Malaria because doctors assumed it was COVID and told them to not come in.
I was wondering if we were undercounting too, but the more I look at the data, to more it's likely we're overcounting fatalities by a large amount.
It's virtually certain that Covid deaths are undercounted in the US. Excess deaths are nearly 30% higher than expected. Belgium has used extremely strict counting for deaths, their per capita death numbers are likely the most accurate in the world and are ~2 times higher than the US' numbers.
“Our (DOH COVID-19) dashboard numbers do include any deaths to a person that has tested positive to COVID-19.”
“We don’t always know the cause of death for a death when it is first reported on our dashboard. That is true. Over the course of the outbreak, we have been monitoring and recording the causes of death as we know it. We currently do have some deaths that are being reported that are clearly from other causes. We have about five deaths — less than five deaths — that we know of that are related to obvious other causes. In this case, they are from gunshot wounds.”
> We have about five deaths — less than five deaths — that we know of that are related to obvious other causes.
That's a strange phrasing. Less than five? Did they forget the word "four"? Or is it three, two, or one? Why beat around the bush if they have a number?
I get it for bigger numbers, if somebody refers to 997 of something as "about a thousand, less than a thousand", I get that. "nine hundred ninety seven" is a mouthful. But "about five, less than five"? Give me a break.
That section of the article is a quote of someone speaking. It could have been phrased more accurately, but reading that sentence as a quote of someone speaking it just sounds like they did not quite remember the exact number when they were asked the question, and their word-for-word response was written down.
The mortality rate so far has been under the assumption that those who need to be hospitalized can be. If everyone catches it at the same time and we can't treat them, the mortality rate is bound to rise significantly.
Considering that COVID has killed nearly two Vietnam War's worth of Americans in 7 months and is surging by the day in many areas, I think we could stand to have a bit of fear and spool some things down for now.
With that very dubious estimate, that's still over a million deaths and millions more occupied ICU beds if everyone in the US got infected (which we are trying hard to do, apparently).
Even at 0.3% IFR you're still talking about ~700k total fatalities in the US alone, assuming 70% of the population needs to be infected to achieve "herd immunity" without a vaccine.
It's premature for anyone, anywhere, to declare victory over the virus at this point because: 1 - there is a very high likelihood that we will have at least one more major global wave of the virus before we get an effective vaccine, 2 - we still do not know how effective said vaccine(s) will be, 3 - it's entirely possible that we will never get an effective vaccine (or it will arrive too late to mitigate most of the damage), at which point the only option will be to let the virus run its course.
> Even at 0.3% IFR you're still talking about ~700k total fatalities in the US alone
Yes, there are a lot of people in the US, so even things with a very tiny chance of killing you will cause large numbers of deaths in absolute terms.
On the other hand, to be fair, if you’re considering absolute numbers of deaths, you _also_ have to consider absolute quantities of suffering from the lockdown. Take the probability of a person being thrust into poverty, or developing serious mental health problems, or just spending some of their precious time on earth unable to socialize normally... and multiply that by 300,000,000.
There would be many ways of saving 700,000 or more lives that are much less invasive than the current lockdowns, like heavily restricting meat consumption or driving. However, we don’t implement them because the per-capita increase in life expectancy is judged not to be worth the decrease in life quality.
No one is denying that the lockdowns are having serious repercussions throughout all of society. There will definitely be many unintended deaths from other causes that would not otherwise have happened without Coronavirus.
That said, you are just flat out wrong about how many people die in the US from driving and Coronary Heart Disease each year. Together, those two account for ~400k fatalities each year. In the best case scenario, Covid may cause almost double that number in less than 12 months. In the worst case scenario, it could be many times that number. Also, we need to keep in mind that while covid predominately kills the elderly, some younger people will still die from it. CHD pretty much only kills the elderly.
This is incredibly disingenuous comment mahaganapati. You have many responses to your initial statement, most of which explain why your simplistic comparison of Vietnam Vs USA is not valid, but you have replied to the one commenter who confirms your own opinion. I hope you read the other responses and understand why I am calling you out on this.
When I made that comment there were not many other replies yet. However I still remain unconvinced that this is not just another product of American hype media.
The elderly have a massive hold on the American political system that outweighs the fraction of the population they represent. They are typically consistent voters, and if you go to a polling place, it will likely be an elderly lady or gentleman running it. Given that they represent they vast majority of casualties, putting them at risk is a political non-starter, even if the most logical realpolitik solution.
This has been my thought as well for some time now, but a lot of the most strident voices for "control it all costs" seem to be coming from the young (at least online), maybe it's different in real life?
I recently talked to someone who worked in higher ed administration, and they said that Covid may sink hundreds of smaller private colleges across the country that have quietly been on the financial brink this whole time. So they are all focused on keeping as much revenue coming in as possible.
On the other side of all of this, I am imagining a world where higher education is not nearly as important as we pretend it is now.
> plans to bring up to 40% of our undergraduates to campus, including all first-year students, for the fall semester. Assuming that we maintain 40% density in the spring semester, we would again bring back one class, and our priority at this time is to bring seniors to campus
I'm not sure what exactly is achieved by having 40% density if that decreased density isn't evenly distributed. Unless I'm misreading, the incoming Freshman classes will all be at 100% density.
Why would the density need to be distributed across classes? I think the idea is to have fewer people in the dorms, so that e.g. no one shares a room, to reduce potential for spread of disease.
I think you make it sound more ill intentioned than it is. Freshman year is crucial to forming new connections, finding organizations to join, and adapting to a new environment. It's not just about "dealing with remote learning"; it's also very much about meeting new people face-to-face and making friends they can lean on over Zoom for the semesters to come.
Unfortunately, much of the social substrate that builds freshman bonding is facilitated by older students, from dorm events and parties to students groups and office hours.
Apparently ICE won't let international students stay in the US in an "online only" school [0]. Makes me realize that as convenient as it is to be able to get education online, having fast internet speed is a privilege.
I hope they and other universities increase vision insurance/benefits. From experience, staying glued to a Zoom screen for over >6hrs a day for an extended period of time places tremendous strain on the eyes.
I've been attending online courses this semester (I'm a part-time masters student) and it has been interesting comparing them to my on-campus courses. At first, I was glad to not have to make the trip down there after work since the buses don't run often enough in the evening and it can be easy to be stuck waiting in the cold. But as time went on, I began to be frustrated. I'm paying frankly exorbitant amounts of money and getting basically, a live Udemy course with 20-40 other people at the same time. Previously, a lot of the value was the interaction with the professor and my peers. While I do think virtual education, done right, is indeed highly undervalued but also rarely done well. I don't think I should be paying the same amount for a frankly worse product.
I'm curious to see how universities adapt to this in the future.
I would hope that Harvard students could adapt pretty easily. The public school my kids go to will only be open 2 days per week next year, mostly for tech support. That is a real travesty for the kids, especially with Mom and Dad going to work, the kids will be one their own often trying to get it done. I'll be spending my evenings playing teacher after a full day of work. I refuse to let me kids fall behind, its obvious that the government won't do anything but send kids home and hope for the best. The kids need the classroom and need to be social. Not looking for my family to get covid but we need to do more to educate the next generation.
What would be a good strategy? I think this makes sense for students and for professors, think of vulnerable people, the cost of going there and then the later canceling.
I have two children in college. One college announced a similar plan, half of students on campus at a time. If the plan is followed through, then, the class of 2022 will spend 17 straight months on campus, from January 2021 until graduation in May 2022. The college held an online question and answer for parents. The question of burn out for the class of 2022 came up. The school president's answer was: That's a problem we would love to have. Basically, the school thinks there will be several more complete shutdowns over the next few years.
looking back at all of the things i most appreciated about going to university, classes are near the bottom of the list. you cant put a price on the relationships you form, the labs, the teams and companies that you spin off, the hands on activities with tools and technology and artifacts you could never access otherwise, even simply being away somewhere you didnt grow up. you dont just put that on the internet anymore than you can expect cybersex to yield offspring
It's crazy how much the entire country is outraged over Harvard's tuition during COVID. Maybe worry about getting in first? Or even better, focus your anger on your state university system's funding and tuition costs.
The majority of Harvard students receive financial aid anyways, and a fifth of them pay nothing. Whether online classes are worth it or not remains to be seen, but it's not a decision the country's masses have to make.
With more companies going to WFH and distributed models (even before coronavirus), I think its important for people to learn the skills needed. So I don't see why more (high) schools and universities don't do WFH at least some of the time.
Obviously there is more to university than logging in and watching a video lecture etc. But given the new normal, airs not a bad thing to have to do that sometimes...
So first year students can live on campus in the fall semester but not attend classes in person.
I understand all classes having an online option, but am surprised they aren't mixed modality so the students on campus can be in person.
Is it more difficult/expensive to make a classroom safe than the rest of the campus? Or professors have pushed back on mixed modality (due to health and/or logistics concerns)? Or something else?
Probably the first MA college that I've seen to say only freshman coming back. Mine, (WPI) still has been telling every undergrad that everything is only optionally online, and that they would just convert triples to doubles and the usual covid guidelines. Freshman-only seems to me more realistic although disheartening to hear as a rising senior.
So here's a question how are they going to prevent people from sharing the online courses? Like is there anything that stops someone from sharing or restreaming their classes?
I mean given what the value of a Harvard education is considered I would think there would be a lot of people interested in getting access to these courses.
I think most people would say the value of a Harvard education is in the name on your degree, not the content of the courses.
That said, there's a quote from Good Will Hunting that seems appropriate here: "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."
Most of the value is the friends you make and the informal relationships you develop with professors and other people at the university. For someone who already has friends to talk about academic things with, and who doesn't need the structure of a curriculum, Will is right.
Harvard already provides many of their courses for free on EdX[0], so anyone who wants to access them already can. The lectures themselves are only a small part of the value of a Harvard education, so they don't seem concerned about "piracy" of their courses.
They're not free. That was a lie. Right now, most edX courses have switched to models where homework (the key value of the courses) is paid.
A lot of people supported edX with time and money, including much of the early team and course contributors, based on this lie. Coursera was at least honest about it.
Aside from that, most Harvard online courses have amazing production value (fully staffed video teams), and preciously little learning value. That's reflected in the hiring too. How many Harvard professors care about teaching-and-learning, much less online.
I predict ASU, SNHU, Georgia Tech, and other schools which try to do online well will eventually eat Harvard's lunch unless something changes. With "eventually" being 50-100 years, since that's how long university reputations last :)
They’ll have had an entire summer to improve online course work; I expect last spring’s online semester was, at best, scattershot.
Somewhat related, Amherst is bringing back 60% of students; Reed wants all back, but is limiting to one student per dorm room (and is encouraging nearby apartments for others.)
Bottom line, it seems the small liberal arts schools (less than 5,000 students or so) are bringing students back. The big unis (Harvard, Stanford, Cal), not so much.
I was listening to a Radiolab the other day talking about college in the time of the pandemic. Not surprisingly, colleges like ASU, SNHU and Georgia Tech, who already had online degree programs set up saw their enrollment rise in the time of the pandemic, while other schools were scrambling and dipping into their rainy day funds, worrying about sports boosters and admissions. They were piece mealing together online classes, with poor security and having to charge more for classes to cover the costs and the lost revenue from the loss of sports.
I don't think edX was deliberately misleading people about the "free education" aspect. They are a non-profit, and I think they genuinely wanted to open up education to people around the world. They tried that for over 5 years, only charging for verified certificates. The switch to charging for full course content happened after many years of trying to compete with Coursera (and to a lesser extent, Udacity).
All the execs make for-profit salaries, and profits flow back as investments of the MIT/Harvard endowments. They qualify as a not-for-profit on paper, but they're no different than any other investment of the MIT/Harvard endowments.
Virtually everyone at edX who was mission-driven left in the great purge of 2017 (or was it 16? or 18? I might be off by a year). More than a third of the organization, including the author of the platform, left around that time.
The CEO walked around, publicly announcing he'd switch to paid models as soon as Coursera did. If that's not an attempt at market collusion, I don't know what is.
Whether intentional or not, it's a pretty frustrating experience to not able to do all the course work, and for many courses you can't even pay to do it. bec they're archived the course that's it. You get just the partial class.
Additionally despite being an online platform that ostensibly allows you to work on your own schedule, they still cut off access after some arbitrarily predetermined amount of time and there's nothing you can do to extend it. Again, for many courses, you can't even pay bec they're archived. the only way to finish the course to create a new account.
Half the value of attending at least if not more is the famous name on your resume. Everyone knows it's extremely hard to get into. It's not hard to point to famous people in tech from there like Bill Gates, but Harvard on your c.v. is vastly more important if you aren't an engineer.
MIT has been doing that with a big chunk of its courses for years and yet the value of its degrees have yet to depreciate. The value is in 1. the people you meet there and 2. the value of "MIT" on a piece of paper. The same is true for other elite institutions.
It wouldn't matter if the courses are shared. Anybody in the world can now get access to the very highest tier of educational materials from sites like MIT OpenCourseWare. Universities sell credentials.
This move will unveil the commoditization of education.
The value any school provides is campus connection. These campuses become part of a student’s identity, and drive strong loyalty for life. What happens when they’re no longer on campus? How does that connection happen?
I personally think the value of a Harvard education is not necessarily what you learn, but who you meet. That's why it's critical for majority of the student body to be in close proximity to one another. I wonder if they could crack the challenges of building rapport between students remotely.
With the new ICE Directive, I wonder how much of “this is the right thing to do” will change.
From a physical well being perspective, remote is right.
But with International student visa statuses at risk, the onus is now on Harvard to enable in person classes for those at risk?
I love seeing all of these random meaningless "safe limit" numbers with regards to reopening things. Yeah, 40%, that sounds good right? Sure why not! Is this based on anything at all but an arbitrary bureaucratic decision? Nope!
Well, it was going to be a minimum 25% to allow all the first-year students in, because Harvard saw that they were going to defer in droves if they couldn't go on-campus.
Preferring seniors to attend the campus and all you fees to stay at home and learn remote is illogical. Seniors can finalize their exams much easier from home than juniors who do need the campus and direct contact with many. Seniors only need their advisor.
But I never thought that Harvard can think logically.
Aren't healthy young adults for the most part isolated to a single area sort of a decent path toward herd immunity while minimizing the death rate of Covid-19? Wait, but Harvard, they're rich. I forgot it was poor and minorities charged with face risks for white upper class. Oh, sorry I meant, "essential" people.
> Aren't healthy young adults for the most part isolated to a single area sort of a decent path toward herd immunity while minimizing the death rate of Covid-19?
No, there’s no such thing. “Herd immunity by infection” is a failure endgame, not a success goal, and the people involved in in-person instructivo aren’t categorically young (especially not the instructors) or healthy, much less exclusively in the intersection of those two sets.
You want to know why people are having difficulty trusting science? Because the institutions that guide science in the United States seem to frequently come to self-serving decisions.
In this case, Harvard is not allowing all first years to come to campus because it's safer; they're doing it because first years are more likely to defer if they couldn't go to campus.
If scientists want people to listen to them, start helping them. Don't lie about mask efficiency, because you want the masks for yourselves. Don't make other people lose their jobs, while continuing to collect your own paycheck. Don't admonish protests as being unsafe when they're conservative, but bless them when they're liberal.
FWIW, I personally think distance learning is underrated, although I have been doing it for years so I've had time to become accustomed to it. I can understand why some students (including my wife) do not like it, and may never like it.
From a strategic perspective, I can see universities like Harvard strengthening their brand by opening up more of their classes to the general public (and maybe even giving credit for a bigger chunk of them via the Extension School). This might hurt a lot of the smaller institutions and lead to consolidation, but I'm undecided on whether that would be a bad thing.