The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age

Ya&#x27;ll use University wrong.<p>The classes, etc. ... whatever!<p>During my time at Uni, I:<p>* designed a demonstrator car frame to show off a bunch of new manufacturing techniques, which was actually built in the end<p>* was part of a team who tested a new type of fiber optical vibration sensor on a sounding rocket<p>* worked with a PhD student on developing a sensor to measure water flow through a tank to validate his simulations<p>* wrote code that is now orbiting earth on board of a CubeSat we built with a team of ~100 students<p>We had groups who built race cars, a group who won ~all of the Hyperloop challenges, a group which builds rockets (seriously they have a lab in the basement of the cantina - the only rocket powered cantina in the world), a group that designs, builds and flies their own soaring planes (no-one died ... yet) - and that&#x27;s just the ones I considered cool. All of this groups get access to top notch workshop and lab equipment and some of these groups are so present at their respective chairs that they end up driving a serious amount of the research happening there.<p>University is a place where teachers and students who are interested in a field meet to learn and research together. Modern Uni has often forgotten that, but if the students treat it as such it works in this way. We have to tell students how they can get positive experiences out of the current system - by trying to do so, they will change the system from within.<p>I honestly regret wasting my first couple of semesters before I learned about all of this stuff.

I was having another one of those moments yesterday where I was questioning the value of higher education while reading a HN thread about teaching yourself CS. There was a healthy debate about whether the typical CS curriculum helps a modern software engineer at all. Some thought the degree was stuck back in the 70&#x27;s. Others thought there was value, but had trouble articulating it. It seems that when the information received was divorced from the credential, the value dropped precipitously. And this is a hard sciences degree with many &quot;universal truths&quot; to teach. Things get even more squishy when you get into the humanities which are much more idea, opinion and discussion based.<p>As the linked article points out, employers often look for the degree, but do not believe it is much of an indicator of quality and don&#x27;t expect new grads to walk in the door with the needed skills. As a former recruiter I think that sentiment is pretty spot on. I don&#x27;t think I ever asked a candidate about the details of their education. It was just never relevant in comparison to their experience.<p>So that leaves the on campus experience, which I personally think is amazing. It&#x27;s like living at a country club for 4 years, crossed with a huge expansion in your world from living at home and going to high school. The new ideas from the classes are just a small part of the new ideas you get exposed to from other students and campus events. Plus with the increasing independence, it&#x27;s a great gentle introduction to adulthood. Unfortunately all that is not available during the pandemic.<p>So the content of the classes is in question, the value of the credential is in question, the cost is ballooning and the on campus experience is on an uncertain hiatus. If ever there was a time to disrupt higher ed, that time is now.

&gt; as employers embrace new skills-based certifications, many students may question the value of the traditional four-year degree<p>Of course employers will embrace skills-based certifications, as they essentially offload the cost of any specialized training to the employee. Until now, it was not uncommon for the employer to pay (directly or indirectly) for the additional training.<p>But I&#x27;m not sure if getting a specialization certification without having a solid background on the topic is a good idea. It will be like the hordes of self-taught plugin programmers that made the Wordpress platform a liability to run.<p>In the end, the problem is not the value of the four-year university degree. The problem is its price. Pretending that the price can&#x27;t be lowered, so we have to investigate alternative modes of higher education, is both untruthful and undemocratic.

Looking back on my education 20 years later... obviously the math degree gave me the skill set to take advantage of the opportunities handed to me. (It’s how I got back into grad school &amp; out with a PhD in just 4 years; it let me work with Mike Abrash.) but the skills I learned in school that have helped me as a person were from the courses that weren’t “certificatable”: literary analysis, my beloved history, the philosophy I always hated.<p>I worry in a certificate-driven education that we’ll leave those things behind.<p>On the other hand, the person I know with the best grasp of history, philosophy, and literary analysis barely graduated from high school and did a 4 year stint in the Navy: apparently, being stuck on a ship for years gives you ample opportunity for self-study. Maybe what we need is just boredom, opportunity, &amp; books, and not more schooling?

University right now is a bundle deal.<p>* You get lectures and assignments.<p>* You get schedules and deadlines that discourage procrastination, if you&#x27;re the sort of person who leaves things until the last minute.<p>* You (hopefully) get detailed feedback on assignments from a real human.<p>* You get big manicured lawns and marble pillars.<p>* You get health insurance.<p>* You get in-person small-group discussions (at least in some subjects) of advanced topics.<p>* You get a bunch of people of your age and social background, all uprooted from home and looking to make new friends at the same time.<p>* You get subsidised gyms and sports clubs and interest clubs.<p>* You get to network and meet people.<p>* You get buildings full of academics with office hours where you can basically just walk in and they&#x27;ll explain almost anything to you.<p>* You get parties full of drunk young people, of all genders, some looking for relationships, others for casual sex.<p>* You get access to journals and databases and software that usually costs $$$$$ (and computer labs with it all already set up)<p>* You get a weird &#x27;future middle class&#x27; social status where you can drink and party and not get a job and go into debt - yet be treated as someone successful.<p>* You get a easily understood explanation for that gap in your resume.<p>* You get internship opportunities - where you can get your foot in the door at big employers, while being paid and taught how they do things.<p>* You get loans for your living costs, despite having no income or credit history.<p>* You get access to a library with more (serious, intellectual) books than you could read in a lifetime.<p>* You get to leave home, but with training wheels if you&#x27;re not ready to cook and clean and laundry and pay bills all at once.<p>* You get supply control, from &#x27;weed out classes&#x27; and limited numbers of student places.<p>* You get in-person exams that are at least moderately difficult to cheat on.<p>* And yes, you (hopefully) get a credential at the end of it. Maybe even with a good &#x27;brand&#x27;.<p>Online courses can certainly deliver lectures at a much lower price than the ruinous cost of US universities. But I think part of the reason the likes of Coursera aren&#x27;t on their way to replacing conventional colleges is because they&#x27;re missing so much else from the bundle.

It&#x27;s hard not to be pedantic here. CDs still have their place, and a lot of streaming is terrible; either there are advertisements, or DRM, or fidelity costs, or limited libraries due to licensing problems. etc.<p>I think the metaphor still goes the same way: the old fashioned way may not be perfect, but there is some real value there that is not necessarily replaced by steaming online courses.

The further in time I am removed from my university years, the more convinced I become that the social interaction was the true root of the experience&#x27;s value. To quote Stephen Leacock&#x27;s 1920 take on university life:<p>&quot;The real thing for the student is the life and environment that surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by the active operation of his own intellect and not as the passive recipient of lectures. And for this active operation what he needs most is the continued and intimate contact with his fellows. Students must live together and eat together, talk and smoke together. Experience shows that that is how their minds really grow.<p>[...]<p>If I were founding a university -- and I say it with all the seriousness of which I am capable, I would found first a smoking room; then when I had a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory, then after that, or more properly with that, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over that I couldn&#x27;t use, I would hire a professor and get some textbooks.&quot;<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.library.mcgill.ca&#x2F;stephen-leacocks-the-need-for-dormitories-at-mcgill-1920&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.library.mcgill.ca&#x2F;stephen-leacocks-the-need-for...</a>

&gt; This transition is likely to appear first in technical degree programs, where it is relatively easy for students to certify their skills online<p>This is dangerously false. The world isn&#x27;t software engineering.<p>Engineering disciplines are in many ways <i>fundamentally about</i> learning to use expensive, special-purpose equipment to design, monitor and control expensive, special-purpose, <i>reliability-critical</i> infrastructure. Sometimes, as in the case of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences (the topic of my undergrad degree), access to this equipment and training is regulated and restricted by the host nation-state.<p>Perhaps some disciplines (Mechanical, maybe Civil) are democratized enough that something like a Hackerspace membership could complement an online degree program, but for others (Aerospace, NERS, Biomedical) I just don&#x27;t see how you train people and verify competence without a centralized campus and training equipment.<p>Also, it may not be a good assumption that Software Engineering will remain as democratized as it does today. Web Development, sure, that&#x27;s in some sense inherently by-and-for consumer devices. But things like IaaS, Machine Learning, and physics &#x2F; engineering simulation (this last is what I now the most about) increasingly occur on specialized hardware that&#x27;s at best inconvenient and at worst impossible to learn on a typical consumer device.<p>Changes in consumer devices themselves are aso in some sense de-democratizing tech learning. My wife has worked in the higher education space in operations, and still does a lot of UX research there as well, and in her experience the technical competence of students with business-standard tech platforms (mainly e-mail, but also things like spreadsheets and word processing) is regressing, and COVID-19 is exposing how poorly current university infrastructure serves students whose only device is a smart phone (common among students from lower-income backgrounds).<p>We may have benefitted from a blip in history where a) B2B tech vendors were unusually successful at selling their budget B2B products to consumers and b) the performance requirements of a consumer product segment (i.e. games) drove the hardware innovations underlying a high-growth B2B market (ML on GPGPU)

Not the right analogy, but the article is mostly on point--higher education is in the process of being &quot;unbundled&quot;.<p>&gt; I need no convincing of the value of campus life and in-classroom education. I recognize that online platforms can’t perfectly replace what we deliver on campus. But they can fulfill key pieces of our core mission and reach many more students, of all ages and economic backgrounds, at a far lower cost.<p>&gt; Our industry has been so stable for so long that we’ve conflated our model with our mission.<p>The author then rhetorically asks what the mission actually is, and answers with<p>&gt; As educators, we strive to create opportunities for as many students as possible to discover and develop their talents, and to use those talents to make a difference in the world.<p>which sounds good and all but seems pretty far removed from the sausage that is actually being made on college campuses. I, for one, am looking forward to see what new models arise over the next couple decades and I hope my child has a wider variety of options than I did.

I still buy CDs and rip them to MP3s.<p>They work when cellular data isn&#x27;t available, they have excellent sound quality, they&#x27;re easy to organize, and there&#x27;s no vendor lock-in who&#x27;s spying on my listening habits.

University was a chance for me to grow up. I was a young 18. I got to leave home, meet a bunch of people, have some fun. I grew up a lot (kinda, ha) over three years and was ready to work when I was done. I also got a degree (which was far cheaper back then).<p>The paper degree never really opened any doors for me - meeting people probably did, growing up definitely did. 95% of the work I got&#x2F;did that followed was because I taught myself PHP (and WML, LOL) for my dissertation project. If I&#x27;d knuckled down, I could have learned that in a few weeks without the degree.<p>With all this in mind, how long before enterprising firms come up with a learn and work option? I&#x27;m sure with a bit of thought you could make money off a hundred or smart 18 year olds. Give them a campus environment, free meals and board, some pocket money - then 12 hours (or whatever) of lectures a week, and the rest of the time they actually work for you doing practical things, putting in to practice what they&#x27;re learning (or just doing a bunch of stuff that immerses them in a real life company). After a year or 18 months, they have something for a CV, contacts, they&#x27;ve got to grow up a bit, real life experience... Plus no student debt etc. I&#x27;d guess the company(ies?) involved could also have their pick of the smartest ones. Everyone wins.

&gt; Our industry has been so stable for so long that we’ve conflated our model with our mission.<p>This had already become apparent to me long before online education took off. Back when I called up the local university to ask if I could enroll in a few classes, <i>a la carte</i>, in order to flesh out my knowledge of some subjects that my alma mater&#x27;s program didn&#x27;t cover. They informed me that those classes were considered advanced, and therefore were only offered to students enrolled in the college&#x27;s degree program.<p>In other words, the only way they would let me take those one or two classes would be as part of a package deal for earning a second bachelor&#x27;s degree, majoring in the same area of study as the one I already had.<p>The only way I can make sense of a policy like that is if you think of the fundamental model of higher education as being essentially unchanged from what it was in the medieval period: A sort of atomic package that&#x27;s a rite of passage that gains you access to a certain stratum of society as much as it is an education. Under that model, no, maybe it didn&#x27;t make sense to take just one class, any more than it makes sense to walk into a jeweler&#x27;s and ask them to chisel a chunk off of a diamond ring and sell it to you. But, nowadays, that way of thinking about education is deeply anachronistic.<p>And classist, too. Failing to meet the needs of people who can&#x27;t afford to just drop everything and become a full-time student with anything more helpful than, &quot;Well, maybe you can dig a 500m deep financial hole, jump into it, and we&#x27;ll meet you at the bottom,&quot; is simply a travesty.

Every time I see articles like this I can only assume the writer either majored in CS or in a humanities major that doesn&#x27;t involve any physical work. If you study any sort of science or engineering you will find that even the simplest equipment used in lab classes cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Cost aside, you simply can not trust an undergrad to run a centrifuge without in-person training.<p>People also highly over-estimate the cost and speed of self teaching. Personally, I learned more in my introductory Mechanical Engineering courses freshman year than I did in all my attempts at self-teaching. This of course doesn&#x27;t even include the subjects I did not even know about before. There is an overhead cost per subject to self-teaching, and I&#x27;ve yet to see anyone self-teach themselves the number of subjects that a typical undergrad education involves.<p>College is also the first time someone finds themselves in the company of enough competent people to, say, do an engineering or CS group assignment that doesn&#x27;t involve major hand holding.

&gt; The University Is Like a CD in the Streaming Age<p>And that is a good thing! A great deal of the most interesting music is not available on streaming. Thanks to CDs (and the people who pirate them) we can still have access to unique recordings.

Top universities can still keep their most valuable asset: a piece of paper with their name on it, scarce. They likely will and be fine. Those degrees will still open many doors.<p>The lower tier universities that charged tens of thousands of dollars to offer a minor leg up for your resume among the pile of resumes when applying for a job though are in big trouble. Ultimately colleges will more clearly shift their value proposition from &quot;here is where you learn key material&quot; to &quot;here is where you learn to be an adult&quot; and survive I think. Most kids out of high school are idiots and need some sort of structure to latch onto as they leave adolescence &#x2F; the nest.

How much of a role do the certification bodies (the groups who decide who can grant a bachelor&#x27;s degree) play the cost of college tuition? I&#x27;m a big fan of the classical quadrivium, trivium, and Great Books model of education; why couldn&#x27;t one complete all of the studies at home, spend six to twelve months in an intensive course of examination and debate to validate the level of education (which could be done online) and receive a bachelor of arts in &quot;the humanities&quot; (or bachelor of letters or whatever one wants to call it)? I think we would have a much more powerful crop of critical and logical thinkers if education were handled thus.

Universities will survive. They do change. Originally U&#x27;s didn&#x27;t pay profs, but only gave them a stage to recruit students to tutor. Their money was made from tutoring. Many kids in U&#x27;s were 14 or 15 years old until the 18th century. Tests, standardized tests, and multiple choice tests didn&#x27;t always exists.<p>This might be a low point, but in 50 years I see them having great power. Democracy will once again shift from geographical ridings to a &#x27;guild system&#x27;. For example there might be a senate seat that can only be held by a licensed doctor, and only licensed doctors can vote for who will be in that seat.

Societies tend to see the most progress when a greater number of people gather together. While we may find a way to accomplish that through online instruction, our current attempts to do so have been spotty at best.<p>One of the reasons brought up for online education is likely one of the things that hinders it: the idea of being able to study where ever and whenever you want. As liberating as that may sound, it keeps people apart in both space and time. Granted, social factors probably play a greater role. For some reason, people don&#x27;t seem to form the same types of connections with each other in the digital world.

Students at elite schools do NOT attend &quot;to learn facts.&quot; Most such students are smart enough to learn anything they want to learn on their own.<p>Elite universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, etc. are attended mainly (a) to interact socially with and learn in-person from other individuals who are smarter, more talented, more knowledgeable, and&#x2F;or more connected in diverse ways, (b) to join a kind of &#x27;exclusive networking club&#x27; with lifetime membership benefits, (c) to learn the rituals and norms of this club, and (d) to get a credential that also confers lifetime benefits.

In this analogy, here&#x27;s the vintage vinyl version (for those who can understand French): the College de France, free since 1530. Adding some irony to the metaphor, their courses are available online via streaming.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.college-de-france.fr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.college-de-france.fr</a><p>No they don&#x27;t give out degrees but it&#x27;s one option among many of open knowledge sharing.

I&#x27;ve done a good bit of research into online programs and there seems to be, with a few exceptions, online CS programs and online Liberal Arts programs. Of those the only &quot;useful&quot; degree is CS and the quality of the programs vary greatly.<p>For the most part this makes sense, a lot of cool or useful degrees arent really possible to deliver a quality program online because of expensive equipment for labs that arent available to consumers (be that for price or other reasons).<p>On an interesting note, I&#x27;m disappointed there arent more math programs. It&#x27;s a moderately useful degree with wide applicability and doesnt have much of the way of physical constraints. The only issues I can imagine are ones that are common to online degrees in general. Yet only a few school have one.<p>&gt; Indeed, that unbundling is already happening. Employers such as Google, Apple, IBM, and Ernst &amp; Young have stopped requiring traditional university degrees, even for some of their most highly skilled positions<p>So... developers and tangential professions right? Self taught developers and those with non-traditional educations are hardly new. I doubt these companies are willing to waive for many &quot;highly skilled positions&quot;.<p>I think I read some time ago about Elon Musk claiming he was removing degree requirements from job listings[0] and yet if I search for engineering positions at Telsa many require a masters degree in an engineering discipline. Everytime i hear something about how usless degrees are and how much better other options are, I assume they dont know anything about the world outside software.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;elon-musk-college-not-for-learning-not-required-at-tesla-2020-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;elon-musk-college-not-for-le...</a>

Cynically speaking, the purpose of University has always been to connect very rich people with very talented people. In this way the elite can fertilize each new generation with fresh blood carefully selected from the masses. This is good for the very rich, as they know they need talent to remain at the top, and is also good for the very talented, as it gives them a path to that top.<p>Unfortunately, opening higher education to a much greater proportion of the population (50% in the UK?) has somewhat torpedoed this mechanism. The rich will become more stupid, and the talented will find less opportunity to establish themselves.

For some programs, like Georgia Tech&#x27;s OMSCS, online students in given courses are known to do better on written exams then the in-person class[1] This could have a lot to do with demographics: online students have a harder survivorship curve to contend with, already have employment, and face little reason to continue with the program if they are discouraged or stuggling. None the less, it&#x27;s an interesting data point!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;2876034.2893383" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;2876034.2893383</a>

This is a pretty bad take. The article doesn&#x27;t consider the numerous disciplines like chemistry, biology or physics for which often expensive physical resources, equipment and facilities are a necessity — really any course of study with a significant amount of time spent in a laboratory.<p>Call me paranoid, but I am very suspicious of the voices pushing for all-digital education. Of the students whom I know, none want this. It&#x27;s not what they signed up for, and many feel shortchanged by their universities continuing to charge them full price for a subpar learning experience post-COVID.

The best thing that college did for me is get me out from under my parents roof and their influence. College gave me a chance to develop my own beliefs and ideas by being surrounded by people from many different places.<p>College changed me, by forcing me to be surrounded by different thoughts and feelings of people that I normally wouldn&#x27;t have come into contact with in my home town.<p>In the few short years I was in college I went from a religious staunch conservative to an atheist liberal. This would have never happened to me had I stayed in my home.

One very dangerous thing about university I notice is that it encourage age discrimination. And that propagate to the industry hiring. Very few people with family will choose to go to university full time, and hence can&#x27;t further their knowledge. Also discrimination is so rampant that even online degree is not given same weight as the classroom even though the classes are exactly same (for example stanford SCPD). So definitely we need a movement to stop this discrimination and kill this so called universities.

I&#x27;d never gladly give up all of the things about college that had nothing to do with coursework. Yes, over the years the discipline, fluidity and acumen required and acquired from mentors was invaluable. But that was maybe one-third of the value.<p>To describe the rest? let&#x27;s say: the concentration of similarly-oriented students and the time to explore and grow in an intense and stimulating environment. But - then - college was <i>a lot</i> less expensive.

If I needed inspiration for a new online educational program I’d look to video games to see what’s going on.<p>Take Rocket League for example. This is a game that’s incredibly simple to get started: you drive a car and hit a ball. But to master advanced techniques, like dribbling in the air as a literal rocket, it takes hundreds to thousands of hours of practice.<p>To practice in a consequence-free environment there are standard and community-created training packs. To gain skills relative to your peers there’s a matching engine to create “fair online games”. To compete openly, there are ranked matches with precise criteria for getting into and falling out of a rank.<p>Furthermore, the community is incredibly supportive of questions, show-and-tell streams, and is light-hearted enough to create their own memes. There are even tutors who will review your games play-by-play with you to fix your game sense.<p>There’s so much good stuff here to pick apart on how to build good programs that are safe, inspiring, and lead to real skill progress for the participants. The university does a lot of it naturally but from what I’ve seen from Rocket League, you should be able to push a lot of those benefits into online formats.

I think vocational education could have been better conveyed online, but with perfect pre-recording and editing. Coursera and Edx are a good example for a forerunner though.<p>As a college student myself, this year, this semester is the worst for me -- I felt really lazy without any faith to keep me going, that with face-to-face activity I feel like I&#x27;m motivated to engage. But I hope this semester really is the exception.

I think the title is clickbaity. As mentioned in the article there is more to University than just classes, there is the social aspect of campus life etc. So it&#x27;s not like the Uni is getting obsolete because of online learning platforms.<p>That being said I think there is indeed a big potential to offer quality content at a reduce cost, and make knowledge accessible to more people, especially in countries where access to university is extremely costly, hence access to education not equitable.<p>Having social, human one to one interaction with professors like Deleuze, Grothendieck, who, in example, where both teaching in French Uni, is not quite the same as watching a video online. So I&#x27;d say Uni is the color dolby surround cinema experience, online learning is the black &amp; white TV at home.

The value of that $75k&#x2F;year was never from the classes themselves but from the social proof, networking, and opportunity to live among other like minded young people at similar stages of their lives (and exposure to different people&#x2F;ideas through that). The classes themselves are essentially commodities. A lot of highly ranked universities don’t even have great teachers for many of their classes.<p>Universities that derive much of their value for being a proxy for some combination of intelligence&#x2F;privilege can keep their value going into the future because they’ll likely remain just as selective if not more so over time. It’s the not-particularly-selective, small private colleges and universities which have their business model under threat, IMO

For those like me drawn in by the bad headline, FYI the article itself uses the obviously more correct analogy of live entertainment in the streaming age. (TBH I didn&#x27;t read it, just skimmed to see if they were really going to use only the bad analogy)

American higher education discussion is usually misplaced because it’s a middle class jobs discussion with extra steps.<p>create the factory jobs which don’t need a degree and many people will be happier and colleges will no longer be a part of a non-normally distributed outcomes market.<p>People learn in a variety of ways, and the abysmal completion rates from MOOCs clearly indicate that IT enables education does not solve the problem which causes the symptoms.<p>Gamification, intervention, multiple steps to keep completion rates up still Result in large drop out rates.<p>Online education will only work for a few people, and will fail far short of its promise for everyone else.

I heard a great thought experiment once: would you rather have a stanford degree without the education, or a stanford education without the degree?<p>20+ years of experience have taught me that anything but the first choice is utterly insane.

I like the distinction between a university and an institution focusing on practical higher education (German “Fachhochschule” seems to convey the concept). This should not be about difficulty and prestige, but one’s mindset and what they want to do in life.<p>Research-oriented higher education is not likely to become obsolete, and neither is applied practical education. What can (and, arguably, should) go away is expecting an institution originally intended for the former to provide the latter.<p>Unfortunately, in many countries universities have grown to become the default option, any other path is considered inferior.

I sometimes miss putting on a CD and listening to the whole thing. Not every album is good for that, of course. And I can do that just as easily with any media player. Something about the physical media made me more likely to listen to the whole album, though.<p>I was a student in a Physics class in the mid-nineties that used connected HP calculators to periodically survey the class to get a quick handle on everybody&#x27;s understanding of the material. I was a student in another class where the lectures were recorded, and once in a while if the professor was out of town, a TA would roll in a VCR cart, and we&#x27;d watch the lecture. It was interesting to watch new technology get adopted with very different approaches and outcomes.<p>Now we have K-12 classrooms using iClicker and there are open source solutions like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;qlicker&#x2F;qlicker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;qlicker&#x2F;qlicker</a>. This, to me, is one of the better potential uses of technology: helping educational professionals customize curriculum and pace.<p>We recently moved to a school district where there has been an investment in developing curriculum. It has been a learning experience for me as a parent to see how this can widen the subjects a student can cover, and the depth they can go into. It&#x27;s not obvious, nor is it easily measurable, so I fear it is an easy target during budget discussions. Examples include units on it being ok to fail&#x2F;take risks (I forget if this was 2nd or 3rd grade), using the bee bot (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.robot-advance.com&#x2F;EN&#x2F;actualite-beebot-educational-robot-from-nursery-school-112.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.robot-advance.com&#x2F;EN&#x2F;actualite-beebot-educationa...</a>) to teach teamwork and problem solving at a young age, and using Google Slides to create presentations about subjects like the weather.<p>As a parent of a 3rd grader and 6th grader, I see the differences between the educational approaches for the different ages, how people learn, etc. I&#x27;m in agreement with the author of the article that I&#x27;m looking forward to see how technology is integrated in such a way that it accelerates&#x2F;improves education, without removing some of the intangible benefits of collaboration, etc.

Like many things in life, this isn&#x27;t a black and white issue. Higher education isn&#x27;t for everyone, some people benefit greatly, for others it is a waste of time and money. It shouldn&#x27;t be a requirement for moving up in life but one of the options. There should be different paths for acquiring the skills required to advance in life. For some it should be university level higher education programs, for others it should be vocational schools and apprenticeships, etc.

While there is no argument that lectures can be done online. There is so much more than lectures at campus.<p>One thing that isn&#x27;t mentioned is Labs.<p>People aren&#x27;t going to be doing organic chemistry in their bathroom, nor are they going to be firing clay pots in their ovens.<p>I know I wouldn&#x27;t have had access to all of these things from home.

Serendipitous meeting of minds in the common room &#x2F; rose garden &#x2F; library cafe &#x2F; lab &#x2F; river bank &#x2F; Kings Arms &#x2F; The Mill &#x2F; student bar.<p>If you have no idea what this feels like, go back to your old University town and try to dip back in, COVID notwithstanding.

Is that an editorialized title? The title on hackernews doesn&#x27;t convey at all what the article&#x27;s title and subtitle do:<p>&gt; Are Universities Going the Way of CDs and Cable TV?<p>&gt; Like the entertainment industry, colleges will need to embrace digital services in order to survive.<p>Completely different meaning.

Yes, but like a CD I can get a very high quality experience at a university in person. Like streaming I can get a weak, self driven experience remotely. I guess a CD can still be real low quality recordings too but I was fortunate to enjoy being at university.

In that the people producing the content-- adjunct instructors and grad students-- don&#x27;t get paid much, but they get paid a helluva lot more than they&#x27;ll get in whatever hairbrained disruption scheme Silicon Valley comes up with for the university?

College is a huge scam imo. Paying thousands of dollars for a class on calculus that has 100 plus people in it is robbery. You can easily get that knowledge online for free. The only reason to go is for the piece of paper.

Obviously right?<p>I mean look at the state of universities today: Around the globe every semester a professor is standing in front of a class, presenting material and they will do this again and again.<p>Every professor is doing it a little bit different but the main message is the same. In Math its probably even closer between universities while history or social studies might be further appart.<p>Where is our central &#x2F; global learning platform? Which tracks all progress? Allows you to chose what professor explains to you certain topics? Tools to support you, nugget of wisdom explaining to you certain small parts of the lecture?<p>YouTube explained to me a few concepts i just didn&#x27;t get while listing to the professor.<p>This is ridiculous!<p>Try to find lectures for free online which are above 101 curses. The video quality is shit, no exercises nothing.

Check out Kettering university. Top rated engineering school in Michigan. You’re required to have 2 years of engineering co-op experience before you can graduate.

Until you can stream touch, smell, taste, vision and sound in a way that can pass the turing test, streaming is a cave painting if the university is a CD.

I don&#x27;t think they are like CDs. You interact with lots of people on campus, you have lots of laboratory classes, and much more.

I am wondering if contributing to a 529 plan still makes sense given where things are going.

It has always seemed a crazy disconnect to me that so many in academia will endlessly complain about the expectation that what they teach prepare their students to obtain a high-paying job while happily cashing the checks and asking for more.

Remains available when the Internet goes out ?

I just wanted to say: Derek Banas

The article doesn&#x27;t mention the political radicalization students are subjected to at university. Having attended a decent school for two years after the military, I never in my life saw such extremism concentrated in one place.<p>I believe that radicalization combined with the psychological effects of the lockdown is at least partially responsible for the social unrest we&#x27;re seeing today.<p>And now that I have my own children, I hope there are viable alternatives by the time they turn 18.

A good question! Just like the CD is just a vehicle for music delivery, the university format is a dated system for delivering advanced education.