One of my coworkers daughters is affected by this.
The big question this begs:
If there is no refund being offered for the content shifting online from in-person, why have in-person at all?
Is room and board going to be refunded?
If courses being taught online is an acceptable substitute, why have caps on admission at all?
Edit: Understood that infinite sized classes aren't workable for human intensive grading, interactions, etc.
Given the usual university budget and the going rate for overqualified, part-time, and temporary adjuncts, the staff is less limited than one might think.
Remote students and remote adjuncts--what do you need administrators for? Ah, yes, to collect the tuition, attend the luncheons, and issue the credentials.
It would at least put a small dent in the oversupply of Ph.D. holders in some fields.
Well if MIT/Stanford/Harvard are what they are because of the elitism of getting to study there, and the branding-power it brings to one's resume, it kinda seems obvious they will have 0 interest in have an unlimited supply of students/graduates, which surely would diminish/affect the branding power on a resume of any of those universities programs, if literally a lots of new graduates could be graduating from those schools.
Elitism works in a limited setting, probably not in an limited/open setting...
My point is that there is no supply-scarcity limit on university teaching positions. But you are correct that each university has a monopoly on their own brand, so they can restrict supply and raise prices up to the monopolistic competition limit (as the other universities are close substitutes). For the select few universities whose degrees are a Veblen good, the more they charge for their degrees and faculty positions (not just in tuition, but in time, application qualifications, and influence), the more they return in upper-class prestige (not just faculty pay and graduate earnings). You can't project that you only take the top 0.1%, if you admit 0.2% of all high-school graduates.
That prestige problem is especially dire with medical colleges in the US. The patient community (aka everybody) desires more numerous, cheaper, and better-distributed physicians, but the physician community desires higher-paying positions that are more costly to fill, with a remuneration premium for working in less desirable territories. So only some hospitals are teaching hospitals, and their residency programs have limited slots. (I think the Army/VA system could possibly break that cartel, by ordering qualified recruits that sign up for a longer term of service to become physicians, and routing their medical training outside of the civilian system. It would certainly drop ER visit prices when those stabilization specialists and trauma surgeons get their 20 and start to "retire" out to civilian jobs.)
If universities are going to order students and faculty to leave campus, they are removing a huge piece of their competitive advantage over universities that already have mature distance-learning programs, but with lower tuition. If MIT takes its campus off the table, the thing they have left is their brand name. That's enough to sustain them, specifically, but there aren't many other universities that could get away with it. The one just up Massachusetts Avenue, maybe, and a handful of others. And they still have to pay for grounds and facilities upkeep, even if they aren't using them as much.
Any other distance learning program could probably hire 1 remote adjunct for every 10-15 remote students and outdo "two sections of lecture hall plus office hours" tenured professors that have a 1:300 ratio. They can use some of the savings for cheap test proctors at distributed--and possibly also shared--evaluation sites. If every surplus Ph.D. can get a part-time remote teaching-support gig for 20 hours a week at $25/hour, they can still keep working the jobs they already have, that don't require their advanced degrees, because their graduate universities did not restrict Ph.D. output to just what the industry could bear.
A degree from MIT might open more interview doors, but there is less difference in switching between schools like Rose-Hulman and Georgia Tech. If campus location is no longer a factor, any student could study at any school. Schools that want to survive under such competition would have to bring down costs, fast.
At other schools the online offerings for courses can be more expensive than the in-person offerings.
Online doesn't mean that you have unlimited capacity for students. You still need to grade homework and exams, offer virtual "office hours", answer emails.
That still takes 'manpower', which is limited, and there's likely some stipulations that require the professors to actually do one-on-one time with students, not just always delegate to TAs.
I am at a (small) academic meeting right now and all of the professors in attendance fear how much extra effort this move to online-only classes will be and how it is going to cut into their research time.
Why should there be extra effort for online classes?
My university had a course where an external professor would deliver a mixed online/offline course. Videos were available on institute website. Professor would hold a class every week to go through that week's contents and clarify student doubts.
This saved a ton of effort on the professor's part.
For one thing, profs often teach some classes repeatedly, which means they dont have to put substantial effort into planning for subsequent offerings. If the planned content is somehow unsuitable for a different medium of delivery, this would take some planning that they weren't expecting at the beginning of the semester.
There is a reserved scheduled class room for the class, but there is no organized zoom meeting yet (or maybe not use zoom after all?).
There is a mail box to drop of home work assignments, but nobody has figured out where students should email things for grading (the prof, the TA or a function account?).
The prof has a set of notes that (s)he writes onto the white board, but not a set of slides to be emailed out. Or might have electronic slides, but they contain annotation that should not be sent out to students.
Everybody has to figure out how to make sure that 200 students can join the zoom session, but have their mic muted. And know how to unmute when they want to ask a question.
Exams for the mid terms might be printed but now need to be (e)mailed. And how do you prevent cheating in an exam that was meant to be taken under supervision with pen(cil) and paper only. Of course you can create an open-book exam where google doesn't help, but that is extra effort. And does not prevent collusion between students.
Somebody need to figure out how to replace lab courses.
And the list goes on. All of that can be fixed. And after a couple of semesters an online class might be no more (or possibly even less, but that is not proven) work than the current offline course. But switching in the middle of a semester with ideally no downtime IS a lot of extra effort.
The lab courses and to a somewhat lesser degree seminar-type classes are the really tough question. A course like 2.007 [1] which is one of the best known and most useful classes in the Mech Eng curriculum can't be replicated online to any meaningful degree--especially with zero notice and planning.
I'm honestly not sure what you do at this point. Finish up the semester as best you can and just give everyone a Pass? Force people to attend a summer session whether or not they can afford to not be working? There aren't any good options.
> At other schools the online offerings for courses can be more expensive than the in-person offerings.
The school where I earned my master's degree had two programs, one online and one in-person. There were several differences, but the most salient one was that the in-person program conferred an academic degree while the online one conferred a professional degree, and the online one had significantly higher tuition.
The fact that many state universities have policies limiting how rapidly academic degree programs' tuition can increase, but not the professional ones, is, I assume, just a coincidence.
Yes and no. It's been 10 years since I graduated, but I doubt much has changed. The curriculum is rigorous, the students are smart, and people are serious about learning. But nevertheless, going to MIT does signal something much stronger than the vast majority of other schools, and MIT students are highly aware of that, as is the institution itself.
MIT may not signal the same thing that an Ivy does, but it certainly signals something, and the faculty, staff, students, and graduates are certainly aware of and use that.
The signalling is definitely a thing, but the bigger thing is just getting together with lots of smart people and working together to learn this stuff.
Perhaps for some, but everyone I knew while I was an Ivy undergrad was doing their level best to take advantage of the benefits of that amazing environment of smart, educated people, both the profs, the visiting speakers, and the other students. Since then, it has been what I've learned, not what signaling I could do that has helped me most (tho I'm not the most social person, so YMV).
One thing I really learned there (among other places), is that it really pays to learn from the best -- you have to go through a learning process, and best to learn it once going directly to the top level, vs. a watered-down version and then re-learning. (of course, you can't instantly jump to the top level, but just getting the clues form those who work at the top levels as you work your way up the curve is a huge benefit).
This comment. All this nonsense about elite universities being just about the degree and signalling is absolute rubbish. Elite universities are elite because they are made of some of the most influential thinkers, scientists, engineers, and professors in the world. Getting to participate in problem solving with these people is what makes these educations valuable in my opinion. I learned more from watching my professors tackle hard problems and reason themselves through them than I did from the actual material they were attempting to tackle. There is something to be said about the techniques and culture of the worlds best academics.
Yet my above comment, a factual 1st-person account -- nothing more, nothing less -- earns multiple downvotes with no dispute/discussion.
Evidently, anti-intellectualism and 'anti-establishment' virtue-signalling is dominant even here on HN... Sad to see. (yup, let the downvotes begin --- sheesh)
We are getting to the point where lectures should be mandated to be recorded and put into the public domain, and the University's value proposition in admission, tuition, and residence should be the everything else involved which could raise the focus away from re-doing the same lectures over and over.
> We are getting to the point where lectures should be mandated to be recorded and put into the public domain
Does that really make sense? I thought MIT was a private institution. The research is often publicly funded but I don't believe that's the case for the tuition.
There's a lot of value in running through the lecture live with a new class. Different students, different needs.
If my undergrad CS Theory prof had used recorded lectures, it would've been great for 5 of us, and terrible for the other 30 or so. There were sections that they just did not get and needed repetition or clarifying examples. What's more, the students often don't know what they aren't understanding (sometimes they do, but often not). So they don't know how to ask for clarification because they don't know what needs clarification.
Waiting for test, quizzes, or homeworks is often too late. What worked out well for my classmates was the help of the professor and a couple of us who got the material faster. The three of us could observe the class and identify what material (by non-verbal reaction or by questions) needed to be delved into more. Try doing that with a set of recorded lectures.
In the end, perhaps you have a sufficiently complete set of recorded lectures that cover everything. But you still have the challenge of identifying what students need help with and helping them immediately, instead of failing a large portion of a class and hoping you do better the next time.
I mean, this is literally the waterfall vs agile debate. Classrooms are agile and responsive to student needs, recorded lectures are not.
This sounds pretty silly. There's bound to be a way to make online (or semi-online) learning agile too. Distance learning is basically a solved problem and has been done for hundreds of years.
How about recorded lectures and in-person small group recitations? Or longer office hours? Obviously you have to change the methodology of learning a bit, but I'm sure it can be figured out.
In any case undergrad level science lectures are basically a one-sided info dump where the lecturer is lucky to get so much as an ACK that someone is listening.
How do you handle things like chemistry labs? Vocational training and art curricula are also going to be very difficult to do remotely, since you're probably not going to have requisite materials at home.
It's a lot easier for students to understand lectures that they would not in-person, when they can pause or rewind video. A lot of misunderstandings are due to lapses in attention. This needs to be considered in any model of relative-effectiveness.
I don't think anyone believes online is an acceptable substitute to a traditional MIT education, but it's a lot better than nothing, and better than continuing the in person teaching.
I'm an MIT grad and know the benefits of being on campus. In fact I spent more time in the lab than I did in classes or my dorm and that just isn't possible online.
My son's school (Courant) has sent everyone home too, with online substitute, but like MIT that only really works for undergrads.
I don't know. But if they can solve it, then a true online degree becomes possible, not just in an emergency. That's going to be revolutionary. Twenty years from now, everyone having to move to a physical location to attend a university is going to seem insane... if they can solve it.
A key part of moving away from your parents and going to uni is moving away from your parents. You are thrust into a whole new world, and that forces you to challenge your world view.
I would have flunked out of Caltech without constant "troll sessions" with fellow students in the dorm helping each other understand the homework problems.
If I was in that situation today, I'd prefer the semester be outright cancelled and replaced with a summer semester.
Not to mention that many students will lose study time dealing with the move, and may likely end up performing poorer than they would have otherwise.
I hope MIT really does take this stuff on a case by case basis. The student who can relocate and be back on their feet in a day will be at an advantage compared to the student who takes longer to settle from the shuffle.
There’s no such thing as an objective standard. Professors change, course materials change, and as with here, circumstances can be different. That’s why we use a curve.
Caltech institute policy was no grading on a curve. The standard was to be decided on in advance. If half the students failed an exam (which happened) so be it. If half aced it, so be it as well.
Stack ranking in employee evaluations is unfair, and is the same thing as curve grading.
Stack rankings and curves aren’t anywhere close to the same.
Grading on a curve allows everyone to get a perfect score. Stack ranking means that if everyone is perfect only one person can get a perfect score.
They are in fact opposites.
Also, if half the class fails, that is a teaching failure, not a student failure. The teacher failed to teach the material and/or failed to write a good test.
At Berkeley, if 1/2 the class failed, the professor usually wasn’t allowed to teach that class anymore.
> Stack rankings and curves aren’t anywhere close to the same.
Sure they are. The best get a raise/A, the worst get fired/F.
> that is a teaching failure, not a student failure
Let's put it another way. Do you want the pilot flying you across the Atlantic 747 to be graded on a curve where he happened to be better than some of the other students, or graded against "met the standard / did not meet the standard"?
Me, I want "met the standard" every time for someone I trust with my life. The teacher failing to teach is not a reason to pass a pilot who didn't meet the standard.
> > Stack rankings and curves aren’t anywhere close to the same.
> Sure they are. The best get a raise/A, the worst get fired/F.
That's actually not at all how stack ranking works. The best might get an A, or a B or a C, and the worst might get a B or a C or a D or an F.
An example: You give a test that is out of 120 points. Here are the scores:
P1 = 100
P2 = 99
P3 = 98
P4 = 97
P5 = 96
Under a curve grading, they all get A's. Under objective grading, they all get B's. With stack ranking:
P1 = A
P2 = B
P3 = C
P4 = D
P5 = F
Should P5 be given an F or get fired? That's what happens in stack ranking.
> Let's put it another way. Do you want the pilot flying you across the Atlantic 747 to be graded on a curve where he happened to be better than some of the other students, or graded against "met the standard / did not meet the standard"?
A pilot is not the same as your undergrad physics class. The pilot was taught by instructor who has to teach in a specific way, often using specific words, developed over many years by a committee of pilots. They then take a test that 100s have taken over many years, written by a committee of pilots.
The pilot instructor has very little leeway on how they teach the class and has no leeway in the test.
Same with medical boards, or any other standardized test.
But your physics professor probably wrote the curriculum themselves, teach it a different way every semester, and use a slightly different test every time.
And as much as you wish it were true, none of your undergrad classes are life or death scenarios.
So yeah, it makes sense to grade on a curve for an undergrad class.
> none of your undergrad classes are life or death scenarios.
Except that bridges fall down and kill people when designed by incompetents. You bet your life every day on the competence of engineers.
Employers are NOT interested in curve ranking. They're interested in a degree as a mark of meeting a standard. Caltech's policy is that their graduates meet a standard of quality. A curve is not a standard. Someone who gets sympathetic good grades because of a bad teacher is not of interest.
If you don't accept that, there are plenty of other schools to attend.
But I suspect that if you think about it, you expect a standard of quality in everything you buy - goods and services. You're not interested in a flexible curve.
> I think you misunderstand what curve grading is.
I think you do. Curve grading is where the top score in the class determines the max score, and everyone is graded accordingly. It's a way of making sure that the test isn't so bad that even the top student can't get a perfect score.
> Except that bridges fall down and kill people when designed by incompetents.
That's true. That's why people who design bridges have to take standardized tests with objecting grading standards designed by groups of experts.
But that has nothing to do with the grading policy of undergrad classes.
> Employers are NOT interested in curve ranking. They're interested in a degree as a mark of meeting a standard.
No, they're interested in a degree as a mark of someone who can finish something that takes four years to complete. I don't care if you went to Caltech or MIT or Cal State Northridge, as long as you can write code.
> But I suspect that if you think about it, you expect a standard of quality in everything you buy
Again true, but I'm not buying people. College graduates are not a product to be bought and sold.
I went to MIT too and with the exception of about three classes, every single in-person class was a waste. The value the school offers is, in order:
- the people you meet
- the brand name on your resume
- the psets and structured guide to learning hard things
Notice that the last two still work over Zoom. If I were in the hard sciences this might be different but as a professional Software Engineer, the classes were almost entirely irrelevant to me.
Maybe your specialty is a different case, but there's no way on Earth that I would have gotten access to the equipment I used without the lab. Doesn't have to be MIT's lab, but someone has to have the ridiculous amounts of money necessary to construct and outfit advanced research labs if a student is to replicate that experience.
And that hypothetical, "someone", would have been unlikely to allow me to use it simply because I taught myself a bit about, say, nanomaterials online.
Let's be frank, if you need a lab, you're screwed.
That seems like the most difficult situation. I also assume that there are a lot of people who are/were on track to graduate who need to finish an undergraduate thesis. (I assume those are still required for some majors.) There are only two real choices at this point I would think: Pretend everyone completed the current semester's coursework/projects satisfactorily or require a summer session or some other form of make up time.
I’m sorry you felt that way because for me a huge proportion of the value was the human stuff, not just “networking” which wasn’t even called that back then, but doing pests with others (learning) talking to profs, being exposed via meatspace serendipity to hints I would not otherwise have seen or done, and the like.
I did skip most of the big lecture freshman classes (I was in ESG) which would not have worked for me (my HS graduating class was 39) but apart from them the classes tend to be relatively small.
I’ve never really noticed the value of the brand name but perhaps that’s a sign that it works so well :-(
These are good questions, but nobody is going to have good answers, at least not yet. We’re in an unprecedented situation, which means that over the next few weeks just about every institution out there is going to be doing a whole lot of improvising. It sucks, and it’s highly unlikely that everyone who has to make sacrifices will ever be completely made whole. All that can be said is that it beats the alternative.
> If there is no refund being offered for the content shifting online from in-person, why have in-person at all?
Most MIT undergrads pay no tuition, even though tuition is something like $70,000 a year there. They have a massive endowment and are thus on average one of the lowest cost colleges in the US, though not as low cost as Princeton. What refunds could they give?
> Is room and board going to be refunded?
Undoubtedly.
> If courses being taught online is an acceptable substitute, why have caps on admission at all?
Most of MIT's undergraduate course work is on line and free for anyone to take. Many take advantage of that. They also have a Masters program, the first year of which anyone who wants to can take it for free. Those who do well are admitted to the second year.
MIT's way ahead of other universities on online education and does extremely well with it. The main "problem" is that MIT is in the top two engineering schools in the world, their classes are extremely rigorous and it simply is not for everyone. 99% of the world population, to be blunt, are not intelligent enough to do well there. And MIT has no intention of dumbing it down to be more "fair and equal" in accordance with the democratic ideal of minimal expectations.
But yes, there are effectively no caps on admission if you want to take online classes there. You won't get an MIT diploma, but you will learn the material and what you do with it is up to you.
Most of the value of an elite education is signaling: it proves the student had what it takes both to get into MIT, and to graduate.
If MIT switched to an online-only format, that would erode the value of the latter (which, remember, is social proof, not something which is notoriously rational), while open enrollment would obliterate the former.
A semester of remote teaching won't damage the brand.
> Most of the value of an elite education is signaling
Not in my case (Caltech). It was clear when I got an industry job that a BS from Caltech was at about the same level as an MS from other institutions. But if the institution is large enough, one can get an elite education by careful selection of the classes and professors, and doing the maximum in those classes rather than just getting by.
For example, take honors calculus, not weeder calculus. Don't avoid the math heavy classes. Don't waste your time with easy-A classes. If you don't find yourself studying 6 hours a day, you're not getting an elite education.
> If you don't find yourself studying 6 hours a day, you're not getting an elite education.
Seems like an unhealthy attitude to me. I really dislike the perspective that education is at its best when the learning is most difficult. The best teachers are the ones that make things as clear and digestible as possible. Bad teachers are the ones that want to see you sweat.
It isn't about wanting to torture students. I never learned so much so fast before or since - and there was a lot to learn. I prefer teachers that expect a lot from their students.
It's not fundamentally different from athletics. If you want to be a good athlete, you're going to have to work your tail off. If you want to be an incredible engineer like Kelly Johnson, that ain't going to happen if you party through school. Nor would you have any chance of working with an engineer like him.
So ask yourself - do you want to design rocket engines? or cup holders?
---
BTW, as for health, I came out of Caltech a far more confident person than when I entered. I knew what I could do, and was happy about it.
It's wrong to treat the brain like any other muscle. It's more comparable to a neural network (pardon the tautology). You feed in data (knowledge) in hope that some of it sticks and forms new connections that you can use to better tackle new and existing problems. There's no rule of the universe that states that the process of feeding data into the brain has to be challenging.
Now, I'm not arguing that hard work has no merit. Clearly, working hard can increase your rate of knowledge-consumption and get you further faster. For some people, you included it seems, that works out great. For others, the ever-present "110% or bust!" attitude can have serious mental consequences. Accepting that education can happen without rigor won't harm those that intend to push themselves anyway, but it sure would benefit the constantly stressed-out students.
After what you just said, color me skeptical. I went to a state school and got an average-ish CS degree with average-ish internships and research, how far behind am I?
You're already far behind due to your insecurities or Will an internet forum really guide your life ?
An MIT grad will always have more gates open than an NCSU grad. You need to do other things in your career to lessen the gap. There is no moving past this point no matter who you ask. And no the amount of hard work you do doesn't matter. Everyone of the "elite" school students work hard.
1. I'm not calling you dumb.
2. It's prestige you're after. It's clear from your answers you want some validation from society. There are brands you can chase - BCG for consulting, Google (no Amazon doesn't carry the same weight), Rhodes scholar etc..
No I am just stating a fact. Also if someone perceives another person to be "better" than you, that doesn't make you dumb. There will always be people smarter than us. If you're chasing validation you can keep going and chasing degrees + institutions.
I stated a fact. You implied it meant you were dumb. The average MIT kid may as well be smarter than the average NCSU kid. But there sure may be NCSU kids smarter than some MIT kids. All of this is relevant to a certain degree. You keep on harping over the same points.
I don't know you, so I have no idea. Your employer and colleagues could give you a better assessment. But I can say that an average grade taking the top classes at school is much better than average grades in the minimum-to-graduate classes.
Education doesn't stop with the degree. Good engineers never stop studying to expand their expertise.
I've been working for several decades with other engineers. It's not too hard to see who are the good ones and who aren't. The "aren't" are the ones who solve problems using trial and error, and when they get it to work they don't bother figuring out why it's working.
The "are" engineers will do whatever is required to find out what is actually wrong, work to understand it, and will do a targeted fix.
What kind of engineer you want to be is entirely up to you.
One thing you can do is take the youtube MIT CS courses. It's free. I've taken some of them to fill in gaps in my education.
In my experience 4 years at Caltech, the ones who didn't flunked out.
Of course, there were a couple unicorns (like Hal Finney) who didn't study and aced the tests, but they are as far beyond you and I as we are from a first grader. Me, I tried studying less, and it simply did not work.
I also have a friend who flunked out of Caltech. About 10 years later he asked if he could try again, and they said sure. He got straight As this time. I asked him if he was any smarter - he laughed, and said no, just that the second time he was ready to work.
I'd guess that if you attended an elite institution and got a degree without studying 6 hours a day, you're either a unicorn or a victim of the institution's marketing department.
Categorically disagree with that. The most valuable aspect of an elite engineering education IMO is getting to participate in a culture of elite professional academics. The spirit and energy which you learn to tackle REALLY ABSURDLY HARD problems is the most important thing I learned from my Rice EE education. Being able to find folks who were putting probes on Mars and Titan and being able to work with them to help build algorithms and visualisations to show insights from the data collected from these foreign worlds... that was the most valuable thing about my elite education... Honestly, most people don't even look at the school or even recognise it when I apply for jobs... The experience and participating with really smart people tackling really hard problems remains the most valuable thing for me 15 years after the fact.
This is a mistake on my part which I should have seen coming.
I said "value", and that conflated value to oneself with value to and as perceived by others.
Which are definitely not the same thing, and I was referring to the market value of a degree from MIT.
I don't happen to think half a semester of working remote is going to do much to dampen the intrinsic value of an elite education, either. It will mark the cohort as remarkable, having shared the distinctive experience of being Extremely Online together.
It’s hard to get into MIT. Once in, it’s just not that hard to graduate. It’s a grind and parts are moderately difficult, but I think the hard filter is up-front (and lossy/random). (class of 1993.)
Yep. The 4-year graduation rate isn't great, but almost everyone gets there eventually. I know plenty of people who just kept plugging away, dropping classes in the 10th week if they were going to fail. One extreme outlier took 17 years.
> If there is no refund being offered for the content shifting online from in-person, why have in-person at all?
There isn't really a good reason other than some people being more disciplined when there's a human instructor that they see face to face every couple days. Plenty of people self-teach from MOOCs, MIT OCW, or just buying the textbooks and working through the exercises and get just as good an education.
When you go to an elite college, you're really paying for the degree. This is also why there are caps on admission: it creates scarcity value for graduates from that university. When there are fewer graduates with a credential, companies that want to employ them have to compete for a limited number of human resources, which drives up wages. Additionally, the university can impose selection bias on matriculating freshmen who will eventually receive the credential, which helps maintain the reputation of the university's graduates.
If you don't maintain the selectivity of the institution, you end up with what's happening in the mid-tier for-profit colleges, where students take out massive loans for a degree but then it doesn't really improve their employment prospects much. If everybody has a college degree, its financial value is basically 0.
To me what you write are great arguments for tuition free universities, like the ones in Sweden. It makes society much more equitable and egalitarian. This whole artificial scarcity thing is such a lose-lose for everyone in society.
To me it highlights one of the big failings of markets, which is that a tool/credential/innovation only has economic value if it's used by some but not all producers in the market. Once it becomes universally adopted it becomes an opportunity for rent-seeking by the producer of that tool/credential/innovation.
In some ways this is the great strength of capitalism, because it provides an incentive to adopt innovations that helps overcome the status-quo bias that most humans have. But it also encourages firms to restrict access to their suppliers and tear their competitors down rather than building everybody up.
“ …today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.”
What are some of your go to authors, areas of interest? Or in other words, who are you grateful for, for their influence on you?
Are there studies (not from the MOOC providers themselves) that demonstrate that this works?
I got the impression that the MOOC thing wasn't working out as well as expected. The hype around them certainly seems to have cooled off since their peak a few years ago.
My hunch is that it's only a small subset of people that thrive with MOOCs.
Outside (mostly) of CS, there is a lot of engineering/science coursework that requires access to labs and other physical plant that can't be replicated online. Even in the humanities, I'm not sure the degree to which you can replicate in-person seminars with videoconferences.
I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in the humanities at a university in Japan. We don't know yet what will happen with our new school year, which begins in April, but some of the faculty have already started to experiment with online tools to see what might be feasible.
Each semester I teach a graduate seminar that typically has about a dozen students, all sitting around one table in a cramped room. The format is ideal for discussions, as we can all see and hear each other and read each other's expressions and gestures in real time. (Needless to say, the format also seems ideal for spreading coronavirus infections.)
If I had to, I could teach the seminar using Google Meet or a similar service, though it would be difficult to replicate the spontaneous interaction of the in-person discussions. However, there might be advantages to online discussions, such as allowing people more time to compose their thoughts before speaking or writing. I won't know until we try.
My bigger concern is with two freshman courses that I am scheduled to teach starting in April. While graduate students are already socialized to university life, first-year undergraduates are being exposed to it for the first time. I worry how well newly admitted students would be able to adjust to the university if they are still sitting at home by themselves in front of their computers. (Most students at our university live at home or in their own apartments, not in dormitories, so the housing issue is not so serious.)
Other commenters here have noted the difficulty of moving lab classes online. To those I would add foreign-language classes that emphasize spoken interaction and practicums in subjects like nursing, medicine, physical education, etc.
This is perhaps one of the more ignorant comments on this thread.
> When you go to an elite college, you're really paying for the degree.
In many cases, you go to an elite college to pay for the experience to learn from, engage with, and collaborate with the world's best scientists, thinkers, engineers, and professors. In some cases, like Rice, if your parents make less than 130,000 a year - you don't pay a dime. Undergraduate tuition is pennies to these institutions whose endowments are orders of magnitudes larger than the revenue from tuition. I look at it like this... My degree cost quite a bit a year... in exchange for that I got to study, learn, work in labs with scientists doing things that without me paying the entry fee.. I would have never been able to do. It's not like you can just walk up to a group of NASA researchers and IEEE fellows and say... hey can you send me GBs of data from the Huygens probe and provide me hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing power to play around with that data? Will you let me use your multi million dollar clean room to learn about lithography? Will you let me use that nanotube growing lab to learn about growing carbon nanotubes? If you are just paying for the degree you are doing yourself an offensive disservice.. and I would suspect one day you will look back and realise what a waste you made of the opportunity.
> This is also why there are caps on admission: it creates scarcity value for graduates from that university. When there are fewer graduates with a credential, companies that want to employ them have to compete for a limited number of human resources, which drives up wages. Additionally, the university can impose selection bias on matriculating freshmen who will eventually receive the credential, which helps maintain the reputation of the university's graduates.
There are caps on admissions for a wide variety of reasons - but largely because the faculty of the individual schools within these Universities are working to create a culture and a learning and discovery environment.. these goals are threatened when you have too many students to support while at the same time supporting the research that actually makes the university a worthwhile place to study.
> If you don't maintain the selectivity of the institution, you end up with what's happening in the mid-tier for-profit colleges, where students take out massive loans for a degree but then it doesn't really improve their employment prospects much. If everybody has a college degree, its financial value is basically 0.
I'm going to argue that what is happening at the mid-tier for-profit colleges is that they are actually not providing their students with a quality education or network that improves their employment prospects.
I have a degree from an elite college (Amherst, #1 liberal arts college in the country at the time I went). I took a gap year before and worked as a professional software engineer, where I learned a massive amount. Then I spent 3.5 years taking a variety of interesting courses that have been utterly irrelevant to my future career prospects, before flunking out of my physics major, switching to CS, and completing that major in a semester using the knowledge I learned while working as a professional software engineer.
You're paying for the degree. If you want to take interesting courses, learn cool stuff, socialize with intelligent students, and meet Nobel-prize-winning professors, most professors will let you audit their course even if you're not a student at the university, particularly if you seem genuinely interested in the material. (Hell, I'd taken half a dozen college courses as a high-school student before I even got to college.) It just won't count toward the degree, because the colleges know that their business model is selling a limited credential that the rest of the world values very highly.
I am teaching a University course right now. Online is absolutely not a substitute for butts-in-seats, work on the blackboard, live questions, etc, type of style that an actual classroom affords. IMHO it is less work for everyone overall, because being in person and taking notes makes students focus and remember better. I think the outcomes are better.
I expect to see this at more and more universities in the US over the next couple of weeks. I have friends who work in the higher education technology space, and they mentioned that many schools are starting to plan for this.
There are students at MIT/Harvard that will temporarily be rendered homeless. Some are depending on the generosity of local friends/classmates to find temporary lodging.
can you please not spread misinformation. there's obviously exceptions in the policy for such cases. they're not going to toss students to the street. the goal is to drastically reduce the number of students living on campus and sharing dorm space (rooms, bathrooms/showers, eating halls).
This is not misinformation. The methods and procedures for appealing are not clear yet (we leave in seven days!) and there are students who are moving into local houses with friends. If you think MIT won't "just toss students to the street" you haven't been paying attention to the closures of Bexley Hall, Senior House, and the upcoming closure of Eastgate (which was only recently amended to be slightly better).
The source is that I am currently here and it is unfolding before my eyes and in my community.
Do you mean less privileged MIT students? I though MIT is pretty good about giving scholarships and grants to those who are admitted. If your family income is below some threshold they fully cover the costs.
Flights may be reimbursed to go home for low-income students, but not all students have a safe home to go back to. A common issue could be homophobia or transphobia. Some students are also highly reliant on on-campus jobs for income that makes gives them a living wage. This whiplash relocation may make finding new sources of income really hard for certain geographies/students.
The list of complications just goes on... and let it be known that there are still some classes that haven't canceled exams or other large milestones through this Friday.
For accuracy and transparency (since I can't edit the original): all exams and homework in the CS department are postponed until after Spring Break as of five minutes ago (March 28th).
I think the point was, what happens to working class or poor students who don't have a stable home--with broadband, adequate study space, food, etc--to go back to? Those needs were covered by MIT while the students were on campus; will they be covered by MIT now that students are forced to leave? If not, it seems like this is a ham-fisted response that ignores the needs of students who don't come from comfortable backgrounds.
That exception only specifies students with an "unsafe" home life. It doesn't say anything about students who aren't in danger at home but nevertheless will lose the income from a part time job, access to quiet study areas, good study partners, and many other significant downsides.
The letter explicitly calls out that undergrads may request an exemption so that they can stay on campus.
- International students who have concerns that they would not be allowed to return to MIT due to visa issues.
- International students who will have difficulty returning to their home country if it has been hard-hit by COVID-19.
- Students who do not have a home to go to, or for whom going home would be unsafe given the circumstances of their home country or homelife.
(just cutting down the dorm population by 90% will have a huge effect at slowing the disease, so I imagine there'll be plenty of room to give exemptions for students without safe/stable homes to return to)
There are probably only a handful of MIT undergrads that are actually underprivileged per year (its unlikely enough with a middle class upbringing). I doubt this will be much of an issue, at least as much of an issue as it would be if my alma mater did this. They'll be fine.
This is interesting data I hadn't seen, thanks. Intuitively its a little bewildering to see the Median family income of someone from MIT be around the same as someone from UNC (a school I got into) - I wonder how the median incomes of international admits factor in.
The bottom 20% of US incomes is between $0 to $25k a year for a household - call me a skeptic but I think its unlikely ~58 (938 x 6.2%) people came from backgrounds like that in America,
Confused, you think it’s just too improbable to believe that MIT admitted 60 kids whose parents make <25k yearly? MIT can cherry pick the highest achieving kids in pretty much any national, heck even global, cohort. It seems reasonable to me that there are (way more than) 60 such kids.
Top private US schools provide very good financial aid packages and are a very good choice for underprivileged students if they can get in. Schools in turn want such students for diversity and metrics.
These questions are framed in the wrong way. The filter isn't cost, it's getting in, and people from middle class and poor families are at a disadvantage in terms of accomplishments.
You may be interested in Paul Tough’s “The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us”. Tough makes similar points like this throughout the book.
>These questions are framed in the wrong way. The filter isn't cost, it's getting in, and people from middle class and poor families are at a disadvantage in terms of accomplishments.
Yes and no. In that there is correlation but probably not direct causality. For example, Asian middle and poor families seem to do fairly well in getting their kids to have the right achievements.
Or maybe you tried and it just didn't work out ? What were your test scores ? Did you have something that set you apart academically or otherwise ? Did you castigate MITs prestige in your essay as you seem to do on HN ?
MIT is going to be one of the first choices of any student who has a chance to get in. Even though the vast majority don't overcome their disadvantages, MIT still has more qualified applicants from any large background such that they cannot accept them all.
this is to protect the health care system and all of the residents of the region, by reducing the density of a very large very dense, externally densely connected and high travel community in advance of a serious epidemic that may (likely will) require more intensive care beds than the region has to provide.
It protects those at risk, the elderly and people with some preexisting conditions (eg. asthma). So probably some of each plus all the people in the area who fit the criteria.
I can see why the university is taking the actions that it is doing, but on the other hand, if I were still and undergrad, and suddenly told that I had to pack up all my stuff and move within the next 3 days, I can only imagine the chaos that entails. Every student on campus now has to suddenly not only find a place to stay, but also a way to move everything on short notice.
It's a very smart decision. You have to imagine the chaos that entails vs the chaos that could entail if they didn't. Err on the side of caution with this stuff.
What would happen if a good 5% of them have more than a runny nose, end up in intensive care and there is a shortage of beds?
Go read up for a bit on what is happening in Italy, then check where your country is and advance 4 weeks. See if you still think 'runny noses' is a good analogy.
I don't know if it's fair to compare MIT to Italy. Italy has a very aging population and MIT is very young and Boston has some of the best healthcare in the country.
The question is whether or not you are willing to take that chance. The people responsible decided - rightly, in my opinion - that they do not want that responsibility.
"and Boston has some of the best healthcare in the country."
I hear people say that all the time of all sorts of places, but what does that mean? Does Boston have (beyond some baseline) more respiratory aid machines than other places? More virus or respiratory system specialists? Better or more nurses? If they do, why? It doesn't matter if they have a bunch of world class brain surgeons. I'd imagine the area would have roughly the same level of materials and skills in this specific domain that other big developed areas have. I wonder what makes people so sure about the specific capabilities of all the areas they claim to be (much) better than other areas.
Massachusetts was one of the first states to attempt universal health care coverage. They also have some genuinely fantastic research hospitals. The best in the nation? Not sure and maybe not. But "some of the best", yeah, that's quite reasonable. And good enough? I'd say ... no.
"Massachusetts was one of the first states to attempt universal health care coverage. They also have some genuinely fantastic research hospitals."
shrug. The position you need to defend, the matter under discussion, in this case is: how does that relate to them being better equipped to deal with this specific virus/outbreak/pandemic/situation?
Totally agree. Massachusetts has some of the best healthcare in the country if you specifically benefit from some of the research going on at Mass General or another research hospital. But even then, just going to Mass Gen for a respiratory infection won't really let you benefit from the concentration of expertise. You just need 02, possibly a tube, and attention from non-sick healthcare workers.
You don't see the irony in sending students home to their parents when some of them might be asymptomatic, right? Or if they catch it during travel?
The correct method of action here is to tell professors to stay home and students to stay put. Not to tell students to leave and travel! That's absolute madness.
> You don't see the irony in sending students home to their parents when some of them might be asymptomatic, right? Or if they catch it during travel?
Most students are going to be traveling home in May anyways - moving this to now, while the risk of students being infected and asymptomatic seems like the lesser of the 2 evils.
Is it a good idea to send a campus of young potential carriers from an emergency zone [0] to the rest of the nation, if not the world? MIT and Harvard may be setting a precedent in the world's largest college town that the status quo is to send thousands of travelers from a disease epicenter to lesser-affected areas. I'm genuinely concerned - not for my health as a student, but for how I might be impacting the health of the geographies I'm returning to. Am I misguided in this?
After some reading, I've become slightly more sympathetic to the theory that flattening the curve via early dispersion is a good idea since students would have to travel anyways in May.
That said, I really do believe there could be several potential carriers on campus. Here are some reasons why:
(1) There were still large events and gatherings, like the Bitcoin Expo.
(2) Especially notable, large lectures were not canceled until very recently.
(3) Testing has been incredibly hard to do via campus medical services. If cases are identified later, I'd imagine it'd be under-reported since students are young and testing is hard.
(4) The carrier who was on campus a few weeks ago was in a very high-traffic building (MIT Sloan) and there was no timely warning of this.
But yes, I do actually see the merits of early dispersion now and understand the point you're getting across.
Every report I've read shows the risk factor for young adults is extremely low, and probably no worse than the ordinary flu. Closing down the school for a whole semester seems like an overreaction.
> Also the bit about being no worse than the flu is not true for any age group
It does appear to be true for the very young (ages 0-9), who are at relatively high risk from flu (especially <2), but at shockingly low risk at dying from COVID-19. Admittedly not the population in consideration here.
You're right about that. Children are practically immune. As I understand this has to do with innate vs acquired immunity. Children are born with very strong innate immunity and as we age innate immunity decreases while acquired immunity increases, untill old age where both decline.
Huh, interesting hypothesis. But I wonder why flu hits very young children so hard, then? Is SARS-CoV-2 more handily defeated by the innate system than flu?
New born child immune system is pretty weak. But from what I gathered, coronavirus deaths are all about pneumonia and lungs. Old peoples lungs are damaged due to being used for years.
Young adults interact with people who are not young adults. Young adults that need not be ill might end up in an ICU unit that an older person with a weaker immune system could have used to their advantage.
As long as there is no vaccine this is going to be a huge exercise in resource allocation.
Wouldn't it make sense for high risk individuals to self-quarantine and for the rest of society to carry on? There may not be a vaccine for at least another year. They've never successfully produced a vaccine for any coronavirus, whether that's SARS or the common cold.
Plenty of high risk individuals are doing just that. Even young people with immune deficiencies are at risk and are making these decisions all by themselves. But just like there is herd immunity in vaccinations there is a similar effect at work by simply ensuring that fewer people have the disease in the first place. That ensures that the chances that someone with an immune systems issue or simply an older person is limited and that when they do contract the disease that there is room for care if they should require it.
This is all about getting rid of a huge tsunami of people for which there would be no care. Once the situation normalizes or there is a vaccine it all changes. But right now we are simply utterly unprepared to deal with this at this scale, and fixing that will take time. Even high risk individuals need to eat, and need visitors. Quality of life, especially for people in such high risk groups is already hit hard, the least we can do is to try to make it easier for them to get the care they need should it get to that, at relatively little expense to the rest of us.
High risk individuals are everyone over sixty, plus anyone younger who has risk factors, such an autoimmune disorder. That’s a huge portion of the population that cannot entirely self-quarantine.
They might still get quarantined. Given the state of testing in the US, who knows if few days from now they won't discover there was a carrier on the campus.
I'm guessing part of the rationale is that there is no way to contain this in the US. It's going to go around. But, spreading it out in time and space will reduce the chance that local health infrastructure will become saturated, resulting in more deaths. Basically hospital load-balancing.
They’re providing packing materials and helping with the move.
Financially, they say:
> We understand that being asked to leave campus may pose a serious financial hardship for certain individuals. Students will receive a follow up communication on this matter.
It’s unclear what their solution is, but they seem to have thought about it...
The situation is unsettling. Realistically MIT made the right broad decision here, I think we can all agree on that. Classrooms (most of them) are an inherently remotable environment. Lecture halls and giant shared dormitories and shared meal facilities are just not a safe environment in a pandemic.
They made the right call. Demanding that they do it with perfect bureaucratic finesse is a bit much. Over the coming months, all of us are going to be asked to undergo some hardship, there is no getting away from that. And realistically that hardship not going to be distributed fairly. We all need to do the best we can and help where it's possible.
In Boston, I don't know. But Seattle for sure is crossing the threshold where Milan was 10-15 days ago, and there's no reason to expect things will evolve differently. These, literally, are the last days of calm before things start to blow up in the US too.
It would be nice if they had thought about it enough to offer some sort of concrete solution. I can only imagine how stressful and infuriating the situation MIT is imposing on its students must be for many of them.
I think there's a limit to how well thought out you can expect the response to a global pandemic that's emerged in just a couple of months to be. Sorry it isn't perfect?
Taiwan seems to be handling it extremely well, but over there they had first-hand experience with SARS, and they had plans in place for when it was going to be back, because consensus was that it was going to be back.
To be fair, MIT tends to handle this sort of thing pretty well, and informally. I expect it doesn't have clear policies, but that it will try to do right by people on a case-by-case basis based on people's individual circumstances. I wouldn't take this quite so cynically.
That's not to say the Institute isn't corrupt, evil, and horrible in other ways, but this is not one of the ways in which it's evil. The badness mostly starts with higher-ups and schemes in the many millions of dollars.
This is what institutions say right before they decide to fuck someone over. I've been burned too many times by people saying they'll do the right thing, because otherwise it wouldn't be right, only to later shrug and wash their hands of the matter.
As a non-US national I never really know what a "semester" is with respect to US universities. Not sure what a better title would be though. The key information here in my opinion is that students are being told not o come back in a few weeks following spring break.
U.S universities typically have two sessions per year: the "fall semester" (usually September-December) and the "spring semester" (usually January-May). Each course (e.g., Introduction to Chemistry) typically runs one semester. A full-time student usually studies 3-4 courses per semester.
Many universities also offer a small number of courses during the summer break. Some universities allow certain courses to be only a half-semester in duration.
Gonna suck for foreign undergrads, or anyone who doesn't have a "home" to return to. I think student loans or similar would pay/contribute to dorm living and eating, but living out on the economy might not. ?
probably MIT administration tries to CYA by "Doing Something" "out of abundance of caution". After all if people get infected while on campus some creative lawyer may probably sue whereis MIT would bear no responsibility for whatever happens as result of all those people forced to spread around the country and the globe.
Some commenters mentioned that that is a preparation for possible outbreak there. Well, i'd think that preparation for outbreak would be making sure that various resources are stocked up (e.g. masks, handheld non-contact infrared thermometers, etc.), necessary personnel brought up and trained, "civilians" educated and all the travel and mass gatherings canceled/discouraged, quarantine procedures and checkpoints are established and ready to be activated, etc... That of course cost money and other resources. An alternative is to kick the can out to somewhere else.
It's interesting that Harvard and MIT have done this. UW makes a little bit more sense, but the scale of the known outbreak in Cambridge isn't nearly as large at the moment (I live in Kendall Square and work next to MIT).
Interestingly, UMass Boston still hasn't done this despite having a student confirmed with it a few weeks ago. I wonder if the administrations believe Columbia/Stanford/MIT/Harvard students deserve more protection or something - that sort of attitude wouldn't surprise me.
Cynically, I wonder how big a role the fear of lawsuits is playing. Private institutions might be more sensitive to that possibility than state-run schools.
I think large decisive moves like this may seem to some to be an overreaction, but it will prove to be the correct decision in hindsight (like the early travel bans). Exponential growth is real, and anything we can do to slow the rate of infection will save lives.
As a current undergrad at UC Berkeley, they've moved all classes here online [1], and exams are either being postponed or converted to take-home assignments. I'm currently accessing lectures through Zoom.
The goal at this point should be to flatten the curve as much as possible to prevent overwhelming healthcare until a vaccine is developed and tested. Nobody thinks this is going to be a permanent measure.
I don't disagree with the flattening the curve bit, but I do wonder - my understanding is that a vaccine is at minimum a year out. Would we need to keep doing this for that entire time period, or are there other factors at play here?
I think that there is a rough relation between the infection rate and the percent of the population that gets infected.
Consider raw r0 of 3.0. Each case infects three other people. But as more and more of the population gets infected and acquires immunity the infection rate drops. Say half the population is immune due to prior infection. The rate is now half r0 = 3.0 * 0.5 Left unchecked 66% of the population will get infected and then the disease dies out.
Social distancing, hand washing, quarantine reduces r0. And reduces the total number that the virus can infect before is dies out. Cut r0 from 3.0 to 1.5 and the number of infected goes from 66% to 33%.
In the US that would be 100 million people. And maybe a million fewer deaths.
Scuttlebutt is China and Taiwan due to high early compliance have r0 down to about 0.3, which means the epidemic is in a state of exponential crash.
There are shortages in the supply chain; hand sanitizer, masks, and tests for coronavirus in addition to overwhelming hospitals by sick people. If there aren't open beds or staff (ideally who aren't overworked), people who otherwise would get medical attention will die.
If a vaccine wasn't even in the picture flattening the curve would help with these things.
There are a lot of things in the future. Antivirals show promise of working in a few months - but we don't actually know they will work (or for that matter that the virus won't evolve a new unique resistance to them). It will take time to figure out what works best for treatment.
Or even just more personal protective gears for medical personnel, more isolation wards, and more ventilators could be readied. The medical system can be built up and reconfigured to take care of this disease but it needs time.
They can just slow it down and prevent hospital systems from becoming overwhelmed. A lot of people will get immunity to it, which should confer some herd immunity that will protect older people.
They’re eventually going to lift quarantines after it burns out in different areas.
In the American context, a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction. The administration responsible (federal or state) would be blamed for the economic damage and voted out.
It would take a very strong leader who was willing to act without thought to reelection to really meet the crisis head on. That would be ... rare.
I think you're right, and that economic damage is something I think too many people are worried about. I've seen a lot of business magazines more worried about the dow-jones than the number of people who could die.
Did they end up being a "damp squib", or were corrective and protective measures implemented to slow them sufficiently so as to control them before they became endemic?
It may be that when the Boy Cried Wolf, the wolf didn't show up precisely because the villagers had turned out with torches and successfully scared it away, unseen.
The WHO predicted that 150 million people would be killed by avian flu [1]. Nothing happened. They predicted 750,000 people would die in the UK, it was more like 200. For swine flu it was minimum possible deaths of 11k but up to 70k. It was more like 400. They got upset when people wouldn't use their case fatality rates which turned out very wrong.
Over half a million people died of flu related deaths last year. Don't recall reading a single news article about it
In this case though we've examples of how bad it can get. Iran comes to mind. As this progresses we'll see what happens to countries who didn't attempt any quarantine or drastic measures at all.
That won't be the US though which is already quietly quarantining things. Conferences are being postponed. Companies are stopping all non-emergency travel. Nursing homes are not allowing visitors.
Yup, it's the same reason why most people now see the Japanese internment as unjust. They just know we won the war and fail to connect the dots that the internment was potentially critical to winning the war.
There was a widespread, mostly inaccurate perception in the West that Japan's incredible territory gains early in the war must have been due to fifth-column agents preparing the battleground.
Hopefully, we'll see articles like the recent articles talking about how closing schools during the 1918 flu saved lives. Specifically, closing schools before there were any identified cases were much more effective than waiting until one was detected.
It's a common thread in Incident Response & "Resilience Engineering" that preventative measures that reduce the blast of incidents are always blamed, especially if they work. Whatever ends up working to fix the incident, you should have done it sooner or it was too drastic a response. (No matter the fact that it _did_ fix the incident, outsiders will blame you that way).
One example is the Knight Capital trading disaster, where they eventually noticed (I don't remember the exact number) X minutes after the runway trading bot had been put into place, and shut it down, but got blamed for not shutting down the trading soon enough.
Can't find any links about this right now though :(
I see this in Programming/IT a lot. Also a very similar case whereby the person fixing the issue gets pressure to complete the fix and even blame after the fact.
It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick.
It depends. I blame the dentist that fixed my tooth in a substandard way and then I had to have it removed, because the bad fix had it broken a couple of years down the line.
I also blame him because, over the years, other patients of him had trouble for his sloppy work.
I absolutely praise the dentist I went after that one, who made his best to fix everything, explained me the pros and cons of every decision he made, and ultimately got me top notch (as best as could be done).
Sorry for he weird "counterpoint", but the example could be open to ambiguity. I still get the point: don't blame the guy fixing things when it's someone elses responsibility.
In my case: I'd be wrong to blame the 2nd dentist for the mistakes of the 1st.
Sure, I just wanted to say that the criticized behavior of blaming the problem on the person that is trying to solve it is something that also happen to doctor. Simply to say that it is not a prerogative of programming or safety.
I'm reminded of year 2000. Yes complete overreaction, but I'm also certain it would not have been such a non-event if it weren't for that extreme attention it got.
You mean Y2K? Yeah I remember there was even a Simpson episode about it being absolute chaos (one of the Tree House Horror episodes). And then pretty much "nothing happened" (a few ATMs here and there spitting money randomly, a few funny incidents, but nothing of scale) and the world thought IT people had been paranoid over nothing.
Fast forward to 2020, we still have Feb 29 bugs around (I saw a few posted on twitter, none in person). The response back then was huge and adequate, but totally underappreciated as time went by.
One of the Feb 29 bugs I saw this year was that when I logged on to Skype for Business Monday March 2nd, everyone in my company that had logged off their computers on Friday Feb 28th, had a message about being offline for anywhere between 20-40 days. It just didn't know how to handle that day.
Most of the bad things predicted by the media wouldn't have happened even if no effort was spent. However there would have been a lot of things not predicted by the media that would have been bad. The bad things the media predicted were easy to put into a sentence, while the bad things that would have happened would take books to explain. They would only really be bad because of the sum total happening all at once.
Everyday people in the leadup to y2k assumed it meant that every computer would somehow explode. Almost nobody stopped to actually reason through the real life consequence of a program getting the date and time wrong.
There is one thing that will help avoid some of this: across every county, state, and nation, there will be differing levels of response, and when it's all over it will be clear who got their medical systems overwhelmed as a result of denialism, and who wasted a bunch of money due to alarmism.
Hum. On the other side it is the story of the madman holding an umbrella in the middle of the summer. Someone asks him why he is holding an umbrella, it's not raining. He answers that it is to keep pink elephants from flying around. But there aren't any pink elephant flying. The madman responds: you see, it works.
It depends on how bad it gets, if people are dying by the thousand I think the conventional wisdom will be we should have done more. Even with these measures I fear it wont be nearly enough to avert catastrophe.
It should be noted that they have not moved lab classes online. For someone in the sciences, much of your classroom time is spent in lab classes. Unfortunately, there isn’t a good way to teach students how to run a gel, or do a titration, or identify minerals, etc. without in-person instruction.
There are students who are graduating this spring and the skills they learn in upper division or capstone lab classes are some of the most important skills they will learn at school. You can’t just cancel the classes (or those students won’t graduate), you can’t do a very good job at all teaching them online... What can you do? We haven’t figured it out here at my institution, and it looks like nobody else has figured it out.
Nor will in-person, small group seminars be moved on-line. It might be fairer to just extend spring break for 2-3 months, and pick up the semester again in May or June.
Or, refund this semesters’s tuition, room, and board, and give everyone a do-over until next fall. (I am assuming the virus will burn out in 2-3 months.)
Maybe the best outcome would be radically improve remote learning, this time with full institutional support.
Actually, that's extremely pessimistic. Unchecked exponential growth until it slams in to the population ceiling is both the worst-case scenario for fatalities, and also the scenario that would finish in three months.
Any option to install it onto a VM or a separate drive for dual boot? Windows 10 VMs are active for a few weeks (or edu discounts are often pretty steep). If it was in a VM you otherwise use you can snapshot and revert back after taking the test (I guess you could do this with a normal backup, too). That's usually my go-to for stuff like this (but for me it's often Linux/macOS).
VMs and Linux aren't allowed, and apparently the software can detect if you're using either. I'm probably gonna use my macbook for it, but I just hate willingly installing such garbage.
I took a quick glance at their website and it says:
"No non-religious head coverings"
Which makes me think that they record a video of you while you're taking it, which is kind of eerie.
That being said, it won't stop anyone who has a USB webcam you can just unplug, unless the software requires you to have a webcam plugged in and pointed in the right direction.
- Triggering any security features like looking "to the side or down" will result in human intervention asking you to do a 360 degree view of your room
- You are not permitted to cover or pause the video stream and you may be randomly asked to do things like blink or hold up fingers
Apparently during the Spanish flu cities that closed their schools early had 1/2 as many deaths as cities that waited until the first confirmed cars showed up in their city.
This might normally be true, but in this case, there will be some countries that overreact and some that don't. The ones that do will see what happened in the ones that don't and it will be harder for the former to be upset since they can observe the difference.
Israel is the best example right now. They have the strongest reaction of any country, essentially closing their borders, but their people don't seem to be outraged, at least not yet.
The "empty out campus" bit seems a bit overmuch to me. What's the epidemiologists' take on something like this?
I can see asking students who left for spring break not to come back. But asking students currently on campus to leave, and even demanding that they travel internationally, seems like it might just increase everyone's risk of exposure, and spread it around. Especially considering that, at least according to the stats they post on their website, about 75% of their international students are from Asia or Europe.
There is an exception for some international students as stated elsewhere in the thread, but yes I still agree. Even the domestic churn of thousands of schools from various schools going home is no good. Massachusetts surely has one of the highest hospital densities in the country, too.
I would cancel classes, but allow everyone that wants to to stay put.
Yeah, this sounds like a local optimization that is going to make things worse overall. Even if international students get to stay, you're still giving people a lot of reason to travel. Twice. A lot of people are going to go home and stay with Mom and Dad, I would expect.
Oh god, I didn't even think about how someone with Corona is going to go from spending all day around young, healthy individuals to their aging parents.
Not an epidemiologist, but a Boston resident. Generally, people under 30 completely ignore anything about the coronavirus here. You have people hitting a different nightclub each night, going to parties, and that sort of thing.
A college town full of students who see their risk as 0.1% is not what you want right now.
Now, a more sensible thing might be to close the nightclubs, bars, and parties. But the city hasn't done that. Patient zero will probably infect hundred here.
And the people who will die will be the elderly (which includes a lot of faculty too).
So you have tens of thousands of people, who all have been in close proximity, now exposing their risk to their family. And if these college students have any elderly family members, that could pose a serious risk.
By forcing people to go home, rather than shelter in place, everyone has increased contact with others and public infrastructure where the virus could be.
Now here, you have to consider who is making the decisions.
The president of MIT was born in 1950. The Chairman of the Board was class of '73. Virtually everyone in senior leadership are in categories with 10+% mortality rates.
I'm not cynical about everything about the Institute (see my other comments, correcting cynical theories), but this is a place where I know many of the personalities involved personally, and I'm definitely very, very cynical.
> By forcing people to go home, rather than shelter in place, everyone has increased contact with others and public infrastructure where the virus could be.
What situation are you referring to that would result in increased contact? This particular movement of students to a different location, often home? Or the long-term housing situation of the students throughout the rest of the semester?
MIT has an international student body. It might even mean that by telling students to go home, you're telling some students to go to CDC Level 3 country.
If there is no outbreak at MIT, having the on-campus students remain on-campus might be preferable to forcing thousands to make their way through airports, buses, and other public infrastructure.
Boston has had confirmed cases for quite some time; about 70 of them came from the same conference meeting. The area's "patient zero" event happened like a week ago.
Two weeks ago today Italy had 322 cases. Today they have over 10,000. This thing moves fast. The situation will be very different a week from now so maybe their only a few days ahead of everyone else.
I am skeptical of these things. I would have cancelled classes but left everyone in their dorms. All the travel is no good, and high density but young and healthy people (watch their health improve with no crushing amounts of homework!) I wouldn't expect to speed up an epidemic as long as they aren't traveling.
There's a multitude of good reasons to close the dorms. People are sharing bedrooms, common areas, bathrooms and kitchens with far more people than they would be in the average private domicile. The network effect of communal living, combined with the generally more lax sanitary/hygenic standards of a younger population, makes any dorm highly at risk for becoming a hotspot, of any infectious disease (and indeed it's quite common for colds, flus and even more serious diseases to cause epidemics in college dormitories).
My university (UC Santa Barbara) just cancelled all in-person classes minutes ago. I would expect students to start leaving campus soon, but it’s not required so I guess it’s better than this…
I never understood why US universities have so many more rights over their tenants than other landlords. Why do they have the right to terminate what's effectively a rental agreement with only a week's notice?
I don't get it either. It was especially irritating at my university because the dorms were several thousand dollars a semester more expensive than larger, better apartments nearby, but they were the worst landlords I ever had. They would kick me out all the time, while still charging me rent. During finals week you had to be gone within 24 hours of taking your last final or be fined. If schools in the US aren't going to be free, they should at least be held to the same laws that other institutions that provide the same services are.
They also don't charge me rent after that day passes. The finals at my school were from Saturday till the next Friday. So whether your finals were on Saturday or on the next Friday, it still cost the same. It sounds nitpicky, but our rent was about $1500 a month. A lot of students paid $375 to be homeless.
Surely they had better things to do than to try to figure out when people had their finals and check door-to-door every day to make sure people left when they should?
What's stopping you from lying and saying that all your classes have finals on Friday? It seems kind of stupid that they'll deprive you of a dorm you paid for because of how your schedule is laid out…
most schools have some sort of database with everyone's course registration and often finals follow a regular schedule that can be derived from the student's course enrollment. I don't know why they even bother to make students tell the RA. they could just send each student's exam schedule directly to the RA and require some written notice from the professor to document exceptions.
another question is why it even matters. what are they going to do with the fraction of dorms that are empty after the first day of exams that can't wait a few more days?
And the 180 other days the students were there, distracting eachother? Midterms? What about students that have their finals early, just have to have a disadvantage in study environment?
I think the idea was that once students are done with their finals they're going to want to celebrate and relax by throwing parties or drinking and it's best that they don't do that in the dorms and keep people up all night. Personally, I would just prefer students have single dorms so they don't have to worry about a loud roommate.
Oh I guess that gives more power if state ran but someone below this thread mentioned even regular apartments will fine you... and I assumed by regular apartments they mean private then.
Regular rentals can "fine" you by retaining the deposit. It used to be the case that universities in the UK would withhold your degree until you paid all fines and charges. I think this was only stopped in the last couple of years.
I have a hard time believing this is legal. Like 50% of MIT guys live in fraternities. At least my fraternity was owned by the alumni board so I don't know how they can force people out. Especially for the Boston-side fraternities, I can't imagine them enforcing this.
Even the Boston-side fraternities are subject to licensing as dormitories. It’s unlikely FSILG Alumni corporations would kick someone out but it could put the license at risk. If MIT says they’re closing Boston can consider that to be a suspension of the form license.
Aren’t tenant/landlord laws typically set by the state, though-Using your analogy or do I have it backwards? Aside from local zoning laws I don’t quite see the comparison to how a municipality would be able to “call the shots” on something like eviction rules.
Are you referring to Home Rule? I’ve heard of it, had no idea housing laws could be delegated this way; it seems rather problematic for a state to let local municipalities set their own varying and disparate housing laws, that sounds like an administrative nightmare for both entities.
They get the authority from the state. My alma mater University of Maryland had its own police force. They were sworn gun-carrying officers of the law same as the county cops and state troopers.
The same reason any other cop would need guns. Hell, we had a high profile death of an armed MIT police officer not that long ago (Boston bombings). Universities can and do face external threats, so even if the students themselves aren't packing heat (which is itself sometimes the case), there's non-student criminals who cause the same kinds of problems they would anywhere else. I remember there being lots of break-ins, robberies, even some rapes on-campus. UMD is in Prince Georges County, which has some pretty sketchy high-crime areas in it, and students are vulnerable victims.
The university cops are mostly there to protect the students (from off-campus trouble-makers, and also from each other; especially re: alcohol problems).
I have never need an AED device, but I know where the one is in my office and I know how to use it. A gun for a police officer should be the same: they have it and know how to use it, but almost all retire without even once having used it. A gun is almost never needed for police duty, but when it is nothing else will substitute and seconds are counting (police only use a gun when not killing someone fast will make the overall situation worse).
You can say leave it to specialists, but that is the job of the police.
> police only use a gun when not killing someone fast will make the overall situation worse
I'm not sure this is really true. I've seen quite a few news stories about them shooting when it didn't really look like there was any need at all. I think police officers also fairly regularly injure themselves accidentally with their weapons.
I fundamentally don't think a gun is an appropriate tool for a civilian community police force. Batons and electric stunners yes in an emergency if really needed. Actual firearms? Not really appropriate in my opinion.
In contract law, there's a concept called force majeure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure), which comes into play when the normal circumstances under which the contract was signed are changed by a sudden, unpredictable event -- the proverbial "act of God."
Most contracts have a force majeure clause, that either releases the parties from their contractual obligations in such an event, or substantially relaxes the penalties for failing to meet those obligations. The idea is, nobody could have seen these circumstances coming, so it's unfair to hold either party to obligations they suddenly find themselves unable to meet.
(Example. I contract with 5,000 people to give them admission to a concert, and then the night before the show an asteroid falls out of the sky onto the stadium I had contracted to hold that concert in. Force majeure means I'm not obligated to put on another show at my own expense despite losing all the money I'd already invested in the first one. It would be unfair to hold me to that promise, since it was invalidated by circumstances no reasonable person could have foreseen.)
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not privy to the precise language in the contracts between universities and students for residential housing. But I feel pretty confident that they have a force majeure clause in them. And seeing as how Massachusetts declared a state of emergency over the coronavirus today (https://www.boston25news.com/news/mass-gov-declares-state-em...), it seems like universities in that commonwealth would have a reasonably strong legal argument for exercising them.
IANAL either, but force majeure refers to being unable to fulfill a contract. The dorms are still standing and legally habitable so that doesn't really seem to apply here.
They may be "legally habitable" under the normal building codes, but those codes don't take into account the circumstances of a pandemic disease.
MIT has contracted with these students to provide them with housing. Part of their normal obligation under those contracts would be to provide them with housing that offers a reasonably healthy environment. MIT will have by now heard from a lot of Highly Credentialed Experts that, in the circumstances of a widely circulating coronavirus, normal dorm conditions don't provide that reasonably healthy environment anymore -- they instead put students at elevated levels of risk.
So if you're MIT, what do you do? You could say "hey, those dorms up to code!" and keep on housing people in them, sure. But if you do, you open yourself up to lawsuits from outraged parents if those students end up getting sick at greater rates than the overall population. And, when it inevitably comes out in the discovery process of those lawsuits that you were directly warned against doing that by the aforementioned Highly Credentialed Experts -- well, at that point you are boned, my friend, contract or no contract.
Or, alternately, you can point to the declaration of a state of emergency, declare that the dorms aren't fit for habitation under the current circumstances (which, you will take pains to remind everyone, were beyond your ability to predict), and kick the kids out. Yes, it'll suck for the kids, but not as much as drowning in their own fluids would. And if anyone comes after you with a lawsuit when the dust clears, you'll be on a much sturdier position from which to defend your actions.
Hospitalization rate for young people is small but not insignificant, and as Italy is now experiencing if the number of cases overwhelm the healthcare system then many of those who need to be hospitalized will die.
Interesting, also I thought some states don't consider dorms to be residential. So maybe that adds more flexibility for schools. Like I don't think you can use your dorm address on a state ID or driver license?
The Economist even wrote about force majeure a couple of weeks ago [1]. Gist was that Chinese firms may use it to void contracts, and Chinese courts may uphold these choices to the frustration of Western companies.
This probably also applies to firms in general now, but the article is specifically about its use in China.
Um, sucks to be them? The fact that doing business in China has no useful legal backstop is quite well known.
It's very hard to be sympathetic to people doing business with or outsourcing to China when that is KNOWN to be basically cashing out now and foisting the consequences/risk off onto your successors.
Western firms are running with no inventory and no contingency. The Taiwan quake several years ago showed that Western business managers suffered no consequences for that so why should they care?
> reasonably strong legal argument for exercising them.
I know terribly little about law. But from what I've seen, tenants have a great deal of rights as to their status quo living conditions. The property is not hazardous to inhabit, clearly their non-student neighbors couldn't be evicted for the same reason. Seems like a court would favor the tenant here unless the university provided evidence from the government that favored their eviction.
Many states in the US have laws that specifically exempt colleges and universities from the majority of tenancy protections that regular landlords must abide by.
I heard something like that before, like I guess there's states (maybe most of them?) where you can't use your dorm room on your driver license for some reason. Which seems annoying if you moved across the country and don't intend to return home. or your renewals conflict with other dates when far away.
Massachusetts considers out of state students as residents eligible for jury duty so maybe they should enjoy some more protections in exchange for the public service.
Yeah I heard that, I think they are the only state doing that. If you live there 50% of the year. Sounds kinda a odd thing to do if they aren't domiciled there, but I guess the locals support it. Was reading a random forum thread and sounds like they use more college students than local.
I was researching about domicile before Since the full time RV/digital nomad life interests me and looks like people decide on South Dakota, Texas and Florida or use a friends or family address even if they don't really live with them, and probably the only family member who's stable and I'd trust handling my mail isn't that computer savvy to scan them for me and security concerns - so going to a friendly state and paying a provider makes sense if you are going to get rid of all your stuff and be a nomad.
Kinda seems like discrimination in a way though. Some couple who retired sold their house and bought a RV and ran into issues with their state's DMV, so they had to hurry up change to a friendly one, but I guess their former state loses out more then they did anyways since they saved a lot of money since the new state has no income tax, and cheaper registration and insurance. Then homeless people or abused people escaping from their partner or family can struggle to get all their documents. I guess some DMVs were telling elderly people their birth certificates were no longer good and they had to buy new ones and wait.
Then also seems a form of voter suppression, some county in Florida said people who are homeless, living in a van, rv or boat wasn't allowed to vote. I'm a fan of one person, one vote though but seems like they need a better system for IDs. Also wouldn't surprise me if some workers would give you trouble for printed bank or credit card statements since so many people are paperless... Oh the DMV is such a annoying place, I think maybe could be right below going to the dentist. I know both Texas and Florida have online renewals every other renewal too, so sounds like when moving maybe factor in the DMV along with other things. Then Texas even offers online driving school too where you can take your permit test online even, so they seem maybe one of the more advanced states.
Still have that dream of full time travel though but building up passive income online would be needed, right now I think I rather focus on a startup and find a city I'd love like maybe Austin or Miami, warmer, focus on being happier - then travel a few weeks a year which would be way more vacation I have now.
There are an overwhelming number of comments here assuming this policy is enacted in such a way that it ignores the challenges of underprivileged students.
Who are these commenters. Why do they assume this.
What is going on.
MIT (and many other higher education providers) seem to be trying to preempt the spread of a disease.
If someone has specific, concrete, information about someone who is harmed by this and whose difficulties are ignored by administration, of course, comment!
But all this hypothetical speculation feels mean spirited.
Speaking of the underprivileged kids. Here in S.F where we have some really high rents, I heard a story from a friend that there was a student who was living in a van and spent most of his time in the lobby of the student center. I wonder if the MIT gang will start living in their cars. This could be the beginning of a new hyper mobile tech road warrior culture... Like all the MIT kids will meet up in random spots around the country and somebody will drive up a box truck with whatever laser or experiment they're working on. Total Bruce Sterling novel in the making here...
Sensible precautions. Multiple cases of people arriving from the USA to Australia with COVID19 suggest the virus is much more widespread than admitted by the government[1]. Large gatherings of any sort should be curtailed to prevent a similar crisis to what is occurring in Italy.
Isn't it way worse to make everyone travel? If any of the students had contracted the virus wouldn't it be better to keep it contained at the University rather than bringing it to where they're from?
From what I understand the mitigation strategy has moved from "containing the virus" to reducing peak transmission rate — spreading out.
In your scenarios:
1. "keep it contained at the university" would probably look like: thousands of students, staff, businesses get the coronavirus rapidly over the course of the next two months (possibly overwhelming local hospitals), proceed to spread across the other densely populated area universities, Boston, NY, Spring Break, summer internships, travel everywhere happens post-mass-infection phase. Many deaths attributable to the campus being open likely.
2. Single person brings it to where they're from - same effects of a single sick person traveling we're seeing in the US every day (including what brought it to Boston). Unless they're going to another densely populated university or conference, which if more measures like this take place they should not be, the impact will be far less.
At this point they aren't aware of any students who have it, so a likely scenario if nothing is done is that the student population GETS it from the Biogen outbreak in Cambridge, AND spreads it at a much higher rate across the local area, country, world.
This kicking students out of dorms by MIT is insane! They are a being a terrible landlord. How is having thousands of students packing up their stuff better than them just staying put? Won't this make passing on the virus easier?
Those dorms are going to be sitting empty after the students move out. Seriously, what is the logic behind this mess?
Coronavirus is far too vague (there are many coronaviruses) and it gets confused with a type of beer. Those other names, SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, are only slightly more readable than sha256 hashes and UUIDs. We also don't need the virus and the disease to have separate names, especially not ones that are so unrelated.
The common and original name is "Wuhan virus". That is easy to remember, easy to type, and specific enough. Use it, for better communication.
The real reason behind such a move is the culture of litigation in the US. Someone made your coffee too hot? Sue them. Someone stepped on your toe? Sue them. In this case, everyone is ducking for cover because they don't want to be the focus of a lawsuit that claims they didn't do anything to prevent the spread of the disease. The people who make these decisions at MIT are not unintelligent. They have all the resources and risk models at their disposal. They have obviously found that the financial risk to the school is greater if they don't send all the students away vs if they do.
That’s quite a nice sentiment. Unfortunately, “flattening the curve” is not what propels the world to action. People getting what they want is. It always has been, and that’s not changing for Covid-19.
I don't necessarily disagree with your overall sentiment here, but I always feel the need to point out that this is a really bad example of a frivolous lawsuit. That lady's car didn't have cupholders, which was pretty common on '90s cars, and the coffee was hot enough to fuse her labia together. You can look up pictures; it wasn't pretty. She also only sued for medical damages and nothing more, if I remember correctly.
"Sixteen countries have shut schools nationwide, impacting almost 363.1 million children and youth. A further sixteen countries have implemented localized school closures to prevent or contain the spread of COVID-19."
604 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadThe big question this begs:
If there is no refund being offered for the content shifting online from in-person, why have in-person at all?
Is room and board going to be refunded?
If courses being taught online is an acceptable substitute, why have caps on admission at all? Edit: Understood that infinite sized classes aren't workable for human intensive grading, interactions, etc.
Most assignments are not scored in an automated manner, and the number of staff is not unlimited.
Remote students and remote adjuncts--what do you need administrators for? Ah, yes, to collect the tuition, attend the luncheons, and issue the credentials.
It would at least put a small dent in the oversupply of Ph.D. holders in some fields.
Elitism works in a limited setting, probably not in an limited/open setting...
That prestige problem is especially dire with medical colleges in the US. The patient community (aka everybody) desires more numerous, cheaper, and better-distributed physicians, but the physician community desires higher-paying positions that are more costly to fill, with a remuneration premium for working in less desirable territories. So only some hospitals are teaching hospitals, and their residency programs have limited slots. (I think the Army/VA system could possibly break that cartel, by ordering qualified recruits that sign up for a longer term of service to become physicians, and routing their medical training outside of the civilian system. It would certainly drop ER visit prices when those stabilization specialists and trauma surgeons get their 20 and start to "retire" out to civilian jobs.)
If universities are going to order students and faculty to leave campus, they are removing a huge piece of their competitive advantage over universities that already have mature distance-learning programs, but with lower tuition. If MIT takes its campus off the table, the thing they have left is their brand name. That's enough to sustain them, specifically, but there aren't many other universities that could get away with it. The one just up Massachusetts Avenue, maybe, and a handful of others. And they still have to pay for grounds and facilities upkeep, even if they aren't using them as much.
Any other distance learning program could probably hire 1 remote adjunct for every 10-15 remote students and outdo "two sections of lecture hall plus office hours" tenured professors that have a 1:300 ratio. They can use some of the savings for cheap test proctors at distributed--and possibly also shared--evaluation sites. If every surplus Ph.D. can get a part-time remote teaching-support gig for 20 hours a week at $25/hour, they can still keep working the jobs they already have, that don't require their advanced degrees, because their graduate universities did not restrict Ph.D. output to just what the industry could bear.
A degree from MIT might open more interview doors, but there is less difference in switching between schools like Rose-Hulman and Georgia Tech. If campus location is no longer a factor, any student could study at any school. Schools that want to survive under such competition would have to bring down costs, fast.
Online doesn't mean that you have unlimited capacity for students. You still need to grade homework and exams, offer virtual "office hours", answer emails.
But all of the above can be done by TAs, and do not need a professor. Professor time is much more limited.
My university had a course where an external professor would deliver a mixed online/offline course. Videos were available on institute website. Professor would hold a class every week to go through that week's contents and clarify student doubts.
This saved a ton of effort on the professor's part.
There is a reserved scheduled class room for the class, but there is no organized zoom meeting yet (or maybe not use zoom after all?).
There is a mail box to drop of home work assignments, but nobody has figured out where students should email things for grading (the prof, the TA or a function account?).
The prof has a set of notes that (s)he writes onto the white board, but not a set of slides to be emailed out. Or might have electronic slides, but they contain annotation that should not be sent out to students.
Everybody has to figure out how to make sure that 200 students can join the zoom session, but have their mic muted. And know how to unmute when they want to ask a question.
Exams for the mid terms might be printed but now need to be (e)mailed. And how do you prevent cheating in an exam that was meant to be taken under supervision with pen(cil) and paper only. Of course you can create an open-book exam where google doesn't help, but that is extra effort. And does not prevent collusion between students.
Somebody need to figure out how to replace lab courses.
And the list goes on. All of that can be fixed. And after a couple of semesters an online class might be no more (or possibly even less, but that is not proven) work than the current offline course. But switching in the middle of a semester with ideally no downtime IS a lot of extra effort.
I'm honestly not sure what you do at this point. Finish up the semester as best you can and just give everyone a Pass? Force people to attend a summer session whether or not they can afford to not be working? There aren't any good options.
[1] https://me-2007.mit.edu/
The school where I earned my master's degree had two programs, one online and one in-person. There were several differences, but the most salient one was that the in-person program conferred an academic degree while the online one conferred a professional degree, and the online one had significantly higher tuition.
The fact that many state universities have policies limiting how rapidly academic degree programs' tuition can increase, but not the professional ones, is, I assume, just a coincidence.
Perhaps for some, but everyone I knew while I was an Ivy undergrad was doing their level best to take advantage of the benefits of that amazing environment of smart, educated people, both the profs, the visiting speakers, and the other students. Since then, it has been what I've learned, not what signaling I could do that has helped me most (tho I'm not the most social person, so YMV).
One thing I really learned there (among other places), is that it really pays to learn from the best -- you have to go through a learning process, and best to learn it once going directly to the top level, vs. a watered-down version and then re-learning. (of course, you can't instantly jump to the top level, but just getting the clues form those who work at the top levels as you work your way up the curve is a huge benefit).
Yet my above comment, a factual 1st-person account -- nothing more, nothing less -- earns multiple downvotes with no dispute/discussion.
Evidently, anti-intellectualism and 'anti-establishment' virtue-signalling is dominant even here on HN... Sad to see. (yup, let the downvotes begin --- sheesh)
We are getting to the point where lectures should be mandated to be recorded and put into the public domain, and the University's value proposition in admission, tuition, and residence should be the everything else involved which could raise the focus away from re-doing the same lectures over and over.
Does that really make sense? I thought MIT was a private institution. The research is often publicly funded but I don't believe that's the case for the tuition.
If my undergrad CS Theory prof had used recorded lectures, it would've been great for 5 of us, and terrible for the other 30 or so. There were sections that they just did not get and needed repetition or clarifying examples. What's more, the students often don't know what they aren't understanding (sometimes they do, but often not). So they don't know how to ask for clarification because they don't know what needs clarification.
Waiting for test, quizzes, or homeworks is often too late. What worked out well for my classmates was the help of the professor and a couple of us who got the material faster. The three of us could observe the class and identify what material (by non-verbal reaction or by questions) needed to be delved into more. Try doing that with a set of recorded lectures.
In the end, perhaps you have a sufficiently complete set of recorded lectures that cover everything. But you still have the challenge of identifying what students need help with and helping them immediately, instead of failing a large portion of a class and hoping you do better the next time.
I mean, this is literally the waterfall vs agile debate. Classrooms are agile and responsive to student needs, recorded lectures are not.
How about recorded lectures and in-person small group recitations? Or longer office hours? Obviously you have to change the methodology of learning a bit, but I'm sure it can be figured out.
In any case undergrad level science lectures are basically a one-sided info dump where the lecturer is lucky to get so much as an ACK that someone is listening.
Put it on the internet?
Some minor student issues that can be tolerated when lecture is not recorded, will be completely unsuitable in recording.
I'm an MIT grad and know the benefits of being on campus. In fact I spent more time in the lab than I did in classes or my dorm and that just isn't possible online.
My son's school (Courant) has sent everyone home too, with online substitute, but like MIT that only really works for undergrads.
If I was in that situation today, I'd prefer the semester be outright cancelled and replaced with a summer semester.
I hope MIT really does take this stuff on a case by case basis. The student who can relocate and be back on their feet in a day will be at an advantage compared to the student who takes longer to settle from the shuffle.
Stack ranking in employee evaluations is unfair, and is the same thing as curve grading.
Grading on a curve allows everyone to get a perfect score. Stack ranking means that if everyone is perfect only one person can get a perfect score.
They are in fact opposites.
Also, if half the class fails, that is a teaching failure, not a student failure. The teacher failed to teach the material and/or failed to write a good test.
At Berkeley, if 1/2 the class failed, the professor usually wasn’t allowed to teach that class anymore.
Sure they are. The best get a raise/A, the worst get fired/F.
> that is a teaching failure, not a student failure
Let's put it another way. Do you want the pilot flying you across the Atlantic 747 to be graded on a curve where he happened to be better than some of the other students, or graded against "met the standard / did not meet the standard"?
Me, I want "met the standard" every time for someone I trust with my life. The teacher failing to teach is not a reason to pass a pilot who didn't meet the standard.
> Sure they are. The best get a raise/A, the worst get fired/F.
That's actually not at all how stack ranking works. The best might get an A, or a B or a C, and the worst might get a B or a C or a D or an F.
An example: You give a test that is out of 120 points. Here are the scores:
P1 = 100
P2 = 99
P3 = 98
P4 = 97
P5 = 96
Under a curve grading, they all get A's. Under objective grading, they all get B's. With stack ranking:
P1 = A
P2 = B
P3 = C
P4 = D
P5 = F
Should P5 be given an F or get fired? That's what happens in stack ranking.
> Let's put it another way. Do you want the pilot flying you across the Atlantic 747 to be graded on a curve where he happened to be better than some of the other students, or graded against "met the standard / did not meet the standard"?
A pilot is not the same as your undergrad physics class. The pilot was taught by instructor who has to teach in a specific way, often using specific words, developed over many years by a committee of pilots. They then take a test that 100s have taken over many years, written by a committee of pilots.
The pilot instructor has very little leeway on how they teach the class and has no leeway in the test.
Same with medical boards, or any other standardized test.
But your physics professor probably wrote the curriculum themselves, teach it a different way every semester, and use a slightly different test every time.
And as much as you wish it were true, none of your undergrad classes are life or death scenarios.
So yeah, it makes sense to grade on a curve for an undergrad class.
I think you misunderstand what curve grading is.
> none of your undergrad classes are life or death scenarios.
Except that bridges fall down and kill people when designed by incompetents. You bet your life every day on the competence of engineers.
Employers are NOT interested in curve ranking. They're interested in a degree as a mark of meeting a standard. Caltech's policy is that their graduates meet a standard of quality. A curve is not a standard. Someone who gets sympathetic good grades because of a bad teacher is not of interest.
If you don't accept that, there are plenty of other schools to attend.
But I suspect that if you think about it, you expect a standard of quality in everything you buy - goods and services. You're not interested in a flexible curve.
I think you do. Curve grading is where the top score in the class determines the max score, and everyone is graded accordingly. It's a way of making sure that the test isn't so bad that even the top student can't get a perfect score.
> Except that bridges fall down and kill people when designed by incompetents.
That's true. That's why people who design bridges have to take standardized tests with objecting grading standards designed by groups of experts.
But that has nothing to do with the grading policy of undergrad classes.
> Employers are NOT interested in curve ranking. They're interested in a degree as a mark of meeting a standard.
No, they're interested in a degree as a mark of someone who can finish something that takes four years to complete. I don't care if you went to Caltech or MIT or Cal State Northridge, as long as you can write code.
> But I suspect that if you think about it, you expect a standard of quality in everything you buy
Again true, but I'm not buying people. College graduates are not a product to be bought and sold.
I suspect a lot of people believe that
- the people you meet - the brand name on your resume - the psets and structured guide to learning hard things
Notice that the last two still work over Zoom. If I were in the hard sciences this might be different but as a professional Software Engineer, the classes were almost entirely irrelevant to me.
Maybe your specialty is a different case, but there's no way on Earth that I would have gotten access to the equipment I used without the lab. Doesn't have to be MIT's lab, but someone has to have the ridiculous amounts of money necessary to construct and outfit advanced research labs if a student is to replicate that experience.
And that hypothetical, "someone", would have been unlikely to allow me to use it simply because I taught myself a bit about, say, nanomaterials online.
Let's be frank, if you need a lab, you're screwed.
Hundreds of thousands of people have graduated from MIT. I don't think you can categorically say in-person class is a waste for everyone.
As with many things in life, YMMV. Your one anecdotal experience is not going to be the same for everyone.
I did skip most of the big lecture freshman classes (I was in ESG) which would not have worked for me (my HS graduating class was 39) but apart from them the classes tend to be relatively small.
I’ve never really noticed the value of the brand name but perhaps that’s a sign that it works so well :-(
Most MIT undergrads pay no tuition, even though tuition is something like $70,000 a year there. They have a massive endowment and are thus on average one of the lowest cost colleges in the US, though not as low cost as Princeton. What refunds could they give?
> Is room and board going to be refunded?
Undoubtedly.
> If courses being taught online is an acceptable substitute, why have caps on admission at all?
Most of MIT's undergraduate course work is on line and free for anyone to take. Many take advantage of that. They also have a Masters program, the first year of which anyone who wants to can take it for free. Those who do well are admitted to the second year.
MIT's way ahead of other universities on online education and does extremely well with it. The main "problem" is that MIT is in the top two engineering schools in the world, their classes are extremely rigorous and it simply is not for everyone. 99% of the world population, to be blunt, are not intelligent enough to do well there. And MIT has no intention of dumbing it down to be more "fair and equal" in accordance with the democratic ideal of minimal expectations.
But yes, there are effectively no caps on admission if you want to take online classes there. You won't get an MIT diploma, but you will learn the material and what you do with it is up to you.
Mit was probably the first offering serious online courses with recognised certification. You can do their micromaster if you want:
https://micromasters.mit.edu/
So it's not like they don't offer the option. They also published opencourseware if you don't need the paper itself.
I'm not saying they don't provide value locally, but they do push for online education themselves and literally provide you resources for free.
If MIT switched to an online-only format, that would erode the value of the latter (which, remember, is social proof, not something which is notoriously rational), while open enrollment would obliterate the former.
A semester of remote teaching won't damage the brand.
Not in my case (Caltech). It was clear when I got an industry job that a BS from Caltech was at about the same level as an MS from other institutions. But if the institution is large enough, one can get an elite education by careful selection of the classes and professors, and doing the maximum in those classes rather than just getting by.
For example, take honors calculus, not weeder calculus. Don't avoid the math heavy classes. Don't waste your time with easy-A classes. If you don't find yourself studying 6 hours a day, you're not getting an elite education.
Seems like an unhealthy attitude to me. I really dislike the perspective that education is at its best when the learning is most difficult. The best teachers are the ones that make things as clear and digestible as possible. Bad teachers are the ones that want to see you sweat.
It's not fundamentally different from athletics. If you want to be a good athlete, you're going to have to work your tail off. If you want to be an incredible engineer like Kelly Johnson, that ain't going to happen if you party through school. Nor would you have any chance of working with an engineer like him.
So ask yourself - do you want to design rocket engines? or cup holders?
---
BTW, as for health, I came out of Caltech a far more confident person than when I entered. I knew what I could do, and was happy about it.
Now, I'm not arguing that hard work has no merit. Clearly, working hard can increase your rate of knowledge-consumption and get you further faster. For some people, you included it seems, that works out great. For others, the ever-present "110% or bust!" attitude can have serious mental consequences. Accepting that education can happen without rigor won't harm those that intend to push themselves anyway, but it sure would benefit the constantly stressed-out students.
No pain, no gain. You're simply not going to become an expert in any field, mental or physical, without a lot of hard work.
An MIT grad will always have more gates open than an NCSU grad. You need to do other things in your career to lessen the gap. There is no moving past this point no matter who you ask. And no the amount of hard work you do doesn't matter. Everyone of the "elite" school students work hard.
In the immortal words of Amy Klobuchar “are you calling me dumb?”
> You need to do other things in your career to lessen the gap.
Such as what exactly?
All your posts here disparage higher "brands" than what you have.
That's neither here nor there really. I'd appreciate an answer!
Education doesn't stop with the degree. Good engineers never stop studying to expand their expertise.
I've been working for several decades with other engineers. It's not too hard to see who are the good ones and who aren't. The "aren't" are the ones who solve problems using trial and error, and when they get it to work they don't bother figuring out why it's working.
The "are" engineers will do whatever is required to find out what is actually wrong, work to understand it, and will do a targeted fix.
What kind of engineer you want to be is entirely up to you.
One thing you can do is take the youtube MIT CS courses. It's free. I've taken some of them to fill in gaps in my education.
This is absolute nonsense and a garbage mentality, akin to gate keeping.
Of course, there were a couple unicorns (like Hal Finney) who didn't study and aced the tests, but they are as far beyond you and I as we are from a first grader. Me, I tried studying less, and it simply did not work.
I also have a friend who flunked out of Caltech. About 10 years later he asked if he could try again, and they said sure. He got straight As this time. I asked him if he was any smarter - he laughed, and said no, just that the second time he was ready to work.
I'd guess that if you attended an elite institution and got a degree without studying 6 hours a day, you're either a unicorn or a victim of the institution's marketing department.
I said "value", and that conflated value to oneself with value to and as perceived by others.
Which are definitely not the same thing, and I was referring to the market value of a degree from MIT.
I don't happen to think half a semester of working remote is going to do much to dampen the intrinsic value of an elite education, either. It will mark the cohort as remarkable, having shared the distinctive experience of being Extremely Online together.
There isn't really a good reason other than some people being more disciplined when there's a human instructor that they see face to face every couple days. Plenty of people self-teach from MOOCs, MIT OCW, or just buying the textbooks and working through the exercises and get just as good an education.
When you go to an elite college, you're really paying for the degree. This is also why there are caps on admission: it creates scarcity value for graduates from that university. When there are fewer graduates with a credential, companies that want to employ them have to compete for a limited number of human resources, which drives up wages. Additionally, the university can impose selection bias on matriculating freshmen who will eventually receive the credential, which helps maintain the reputation of the university's graduates.
If you don't maintain the selectivity of the institution, you end up with what's happening in the mid-tier for-profit colleges, where students take out massive loans for a degree but then it doesn't really improve their employment prospects much. If everybody has a college degree, its financial value is basically 0.
In some ways this is the great strength of capitalism, because it provides an incentive to adopt innovations that helps overcome the status-quo bias that most humans have. But it also encourages firms to restrict access to their suppliers and tear their competitors down rather than building everybody up.
Have you read any Guy Standing?
“ …today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.”
What are some of your go to authors, areas of interest? Or in other words, who are you grateful for, for their influence on you?
Are there studies (not from the MOOC providers themselves) that demonstrate that this works?
I got the impression that the MOOC thing wasn't working out as well as expected. The hype around them certainly seems to have cooled off since their peak a few years ago.
My hunch is that it's only a small subset of people that thrive with MOOCs.
Each semester I teach a graduate seminar that typically has about a dozen students, all sitting around one table in a cramped room. The format is ideal for discussions, as we can all see and hear each other and read each other's expressions and gestures in real time. (Needless to say, the format also seems ideal for spreading coronavirus infections.)
If I had to, I could teach the seminar using Google Meet or a similar service, though it would be difficult to replicate the spontaneous interaction of the in-person discussions. However, there might be advantages to online discussions, such as allowing people more time to compose their thoughts before speaking or writing. I won't know until we try.
My bigger concern is with two freshman courses that I am scheduled to teach starting in April. While graduate students are already socialized to university life, first-year undergraduates are being exposed to it for the first time. I worry how well newly admitted students would be able to adjust to the university if they are still sitting at home by themselves in front of their computers. (Most students at our university live at home or in their own apartments, not in dormitories, so the housing issue is not so serious.)
Other commenters here have noted the difficulty of moving lab classes online. To those I would add foreign-language classes that emphasize spoken interaction and practicums in subjects like nursing, medicine, physical education, etc.
> When you go to an elite college, you're really paying for the degree.
In many cases, you go to an elite college to pay for the experience to learn from, engage with, and collaborate with the world's best scientists, thinkers, engineers, and professors. In some cases, like Rice, if your parents make less than 130,000 a year - you don't pay a dime. Undergraduate tuition is pennies to these institutions whose endowments are orders of magnitudes larger than the revenue from tuition. I look at it like this... My degree cost quite a bit a year... in exchange for that I got to study, learn, work in labs with scientists doing things that without me paying the entry fee.. I would have never been able to do. It's not like you can just walk up to a group of NASA researchers and IEEE fellows and say... hey can you send me GBs of data from the Huygens probe and provide me hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing power to play around with that data? Will you let me use your multi million dollar clean room to learn about lithography? Will you let me use that nanotube growing lab to learn about growing carbon nanotubes? If you are just paying for the degree you are doing yourself an offensive disservice.. and I would suspect one day you will look back and realise what a waste you made of the opportunity.
> This is also why there are caps on admission: it creates scarcity value for graduates from that university. When there are fewer graduates with a credential, companies that want to employ them have to compete for a limited number of human resources, which drives up wages. Additionally, the university can impose selection bias on matriculating freshmen who will eventually receive the credential, which helps maintain the reputation of the university's graduates.
There are caps on admissions for a wide variety of reasons - but largely because the faculty of the individual schools within these Universities are working to create a culture and a learning and discovery environment.. these goals are threatened when you have too many students to support while at the same time supporting the research that actually makes the university a worthwhile place to study.
> If you don't maintain the selectivity of the institution, you end up with what's happening in the mid-tier for-profit colleges, where students take out massive loans for a degree but then it doesn't really improve their employment prospects much. If everybody has a college degree, its financial value is basically 0.
I'm going to argue that what is happening at the mid-tier for-profit colleges is that they are actually not providing their students with a quality education or network that improves their employment prospects.
You're paying for the degree. If you want to take interesting courses, learn cool stuff, socialize with intelligent students, and meet Nobel-prize-winning professors, most professors will let you audit their course even if you're not a student at the university, particularly if you seem genuinely interested in the material. (Hell, I'd taken half a dozen college courses as a high-school student before I even got to college.) It just won't count toward the degree, because the colleges know that their business model is selling a limited credential that the rest of the world values very highly.
I dunno about Amherst but Rice students and alumni also have insane access to the worlds coolest toys - https://sea.rice.edu/instruments/all
1. Students with financial difficulties or out of state students
2. International students
shrug, probably the best thing to do.
4. Estranged students
- International students who have concerns that they would not be allowed to return to MIT due to visa issues.
- International students who will have difficulty returning to their home country if it has been hard-hit by COVID-19.
- Students who do not have a home to go to, or for whom going home would be unsafe given the circumstances of their home country or homelife.
Lots of people don’t have a place other than school they can live & be successful.
It's getting kinda wild.
The source is that I am currently here and it is unfolding before my eyes and in my community.
The list of complications just goes on... and let it be known that there are still some classes that haven't canceled exams or other large milestones through this Friday.
> Students who do not have a home to go to, or for whom going home would be unsafe given the circumstances of their home country or homelife.
Some folks will go home to places with their own bedrooms, or even a family study, or a good local library.
Some will go home to nothing like anything of the above.
> Students who do not have a home to go to, or for whom going home would be unsafe given the circumstances of their home country or homelife.
The bottom 20% of US incomes is between $0 to $25k a year for a household - call me a skeptic but I think its unlikely ~58 (938 x 6.2%) people came from backgrounds like that in America,
These questions are framed in the wrong way. The filter isn't cost, it's getting in, and people from middle class and poor families are at a disadvantage in terms of accomplishments.
Yes and no. In that there is correlation but probably not direct causality. For example, Asian middle and poor families seem to do fairly well in getting their kids to have the right achievements.
(btw some of the MIT dorms have storage space in the basement)
A campus full of runny noses for a couple weeks? These are overwhelmingly young people of which the vast majority would be perfectly fine.
What's the typical age of the students parents?
What would happen if a good 5% of them have more than a runny nose, end up in intensive care and there is a shortage of beds?
Go read up for a bit on what is happening in Italy, then check where your country is and advance 4 weeks. See if you still think 'runny noses' is a good analogy.
Risk = impact times likelihood.
I hear people say that all the time of all sorts of places, but what does that mean? Does Boston have (beyond some baseline) more respiratory aid machines than other places? More virus or respiratory system specialists? Better or more nurses? If they do, why? It doesn't matter if they have a bunch of world class brain surgeons. I'd imagine the area would have roughly the same level of materials and skills in this specific domain that other big developed areas have. I wonder what makes people so sure about the specific capabilities of all the areas they claim to be (much) better than other areas.
shrug. The position you need to defend, the matter under discussion, in this case is: how does that relate to them being better equipped to deal with this specific virus/outbreak/pandemic/situation?
The correct method of action here is to tell professors to stay home and students to stay put. Not to tell students to leave and travel! That's absolute madness.
Most students are going to be traveling home in May anyways - moving this to now, while the risk of students being infected and asymptomatic seems like the lesser of the 2 evils.
Is it a good idea to send a campus of young potential carriers from an emergency zone [0] to the rest of the nation, if not the world? MIT and Harvard may be setting a precedent in the world's largest college town that the status quo is to send thousands of travelers from a disease epicenter to lesser-affected areas. I'm genuinely concerned - not for my health as a student, but for how I might be impacting the health of the geographies I'm returning to. Am I misguided in this?
[0] https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/03/10/coronavirus-latest-ma...
Right now the chances of many of them being infected are still relatively low. Give it a few weeks and it is pretty much a certainty.
That said, I really do believe there could be several potential carriers on campus. Here are some reasons why:
(1) There were still large events and gatherings, like the Bitcoin Expo.
(2) Especially notable, large lectures were not canceled until very recently.
(3) Testing has been incredibly hard to do via campus medical services. If cases are identified later, I'd imagine it'd be under-reported since students are young and testing is hard.
(4) The carrier who was on campus a few weeks ago was in a very high-traffic building (MIT Sloan) and there was no timely warning of this.
But yes, I do actually see the merits of early dispersion now and understand the point you're getting across.
Also the bit about being no worse than the flu is not true for any age group.
It does appear to be true for the very young (ages 0-9), who are at relatively high risk from flu (especially <2), but at shockingly low risk at dying from COVID-19. Admittedly not the population in consideration here.
As long as there is no vaccine this is going to be a huge exercise in resource allocation.
This is all about getting rid of a huge tsunami of people for which there would be no care. Once the situation normalizes or there is a vaccine it all changes. But right now we are simply utterly unprepared to deal with this at this scale, and fixing that will take time. Even high risk individuals need to eat, and need visitors. Quality of life, especially for people in such high risk groups is already hit hard, the least we can do is to try to make it easier for them to get the care they need should it get to that, at relatively little expense to the rest of us.
And by that time, most of the student body (with who knows how many asymptomatic carriers) will have been widely dispersed.
But you've got to get people out of environments where it is going to spread extremely quickly, like communal living in dorms, just the same.
Financially, they say:
> We understand that being asked to leave campus may pose a serious financial hardship for certain individuals. Students will receive a follow up communication on this matter.
It’s unclear what their solution is, but they seem to have thought about it...
Was evicting a large populace a good idea? Aren't there other options?
The situation is unsettling. Realistically MIT made the right broad decision here, I think we can all agree on that. Classrooms (most of them) are an inherently remotable environment. Lecture halls and giant shared dormitories and shared meal facilities are just not a safe environment in a pandemic.
They made the right call. Demanding that they do it with perfect bureaucratic finesse is a bit much. Over the coming months, all of us are going to be asked to undergo some hardship, there is no getting away from that. And realistically that hardship not going to be distributed fairly. We all need to do the best we can and help where it's possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_T...
That's not to say the Institute isn't corrupt, evil, and horrible in other ways, but this is not one of the ways in which it's evil. The badness mostly starts with higher-ups and schemes in the many millions of dollars.
That kind of badness tends to corrupt entire organizations if left unchecked.
> Please note: Any student who is permitted to stay may be required to relocate to another building on campus.
(Submitted title was "MIT moves all classes online, requires undergraduates to leave campus".)
Many universities also offer a small number of courses during the summer break. Some universities allow certain courses to be only a half-semester in duration.
* Has MIT ever suspended a semester before?
* Have they ever run a shortened or extra class year? I seem to remember something unusual happened during WW2?
Some commenters mentioned that that is a preparation for possible outbreak there. Well, i'd think that preparation for outbreak would be making sure that various resources are stocked up (e.g. masks, handheld non-contact infrared thermometers, etc.), necessary personnel brought up and trained, "civilians" educated and all the travel and mass gatherings canceled/discouraged, quarantine procedures and checkpoints are established and ready to be activated, etc... That of course cost money and other resources. An alternative is to kick the can out to somewhere else.
Interestingly, UMass Boston still hasn't done this despite having a student confirmed with it a few weeks ago. I wonder if the administrations believe Columbia/Stanford/MIT/Harvard students deserve more protection or something - that sort of attitude wouldn't surprise me.
Which reinforces my original thesis
As a current undergrad at UC Berkeley, they've moved all classes here online [1], and exams are either being postponed or converted to take-home assignments. I'm currently accessing lectures through Zoom.
[1] https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/03/09/as-coronavirus-spreads-...
If these actions are successful in curbing the virus' spread, most people won't appreciate how bad things could have really gotten.
Consider raw r0 of 3.0. Each case infects three other people. But as more and more of the population gets infected and acquires immunity the infection rate drops. Say half the population is immune due to prior infection. The rate is now half r0 = 3.0 * 0.5 Left unchecked 66% of the population will get infected and then the disease dies out.
Social distancing, hand washing, quarantine reduces r0. And reduces the total number that the virus can infect before is dies out. Cut r0 from 3.0 to 1.5 and the number of infected goes from 66% to 33%.
In the US that would be 100 million people. And maybe a million fewer deaths.
Scuttlebutt is China and Taiwan due to high early compliance have r0 down to about 0.3, which means the epidemic is in a state of exponential crash.
If a vaccine wasn't even in the picture flattening the curve would help with these things.
They’re eventually going to lift quarantines after it burns out in different areas.
In the American context, a successful response would be seen by the uninformed as an overreaction. The administration responsible (federal or state) would be blamed for the economic damage and voted out.
It would take a very strong leader who was willing to act without thought to reelection to really meet the crisis head on. That would be ... rare.
Seems likely. Since solving the problem would make it look like there was no problem in which case what was the point of all the work.
This is also one of those cases where you have to overreact to begin with because once you have an actual problem its too late.
This is what worries me the most. Is there a name for this bias? Seems similar to survivorship bias, I'm sure it's seen across all kinds of contexts.
1, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/emergency....
2, https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30036444
One example is the Knight Capital trading disaster, where they eventually noticed (I don't remember the exact number) X minutes after the runway trading bot had been put into place, and shut it down, but got blamed for not shutting down the trading soon enough.
Can't find any links about this right now though :(
It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick.
To be fair, I am sure doctors experience that a lot.
I also blame him because, over the years, other patients of him had trouble for his sloppy work.
I absolutely praise the dentist I went after that one, who made his best to fix everything, explained me the pros and cons of every decision he made, and ultimately got me top notch (as best as could be done).
Sorry for he weird "counterpoint", but the example could be open to ambiguity. I still get the point: don't blame the guy fixing things when it's someone elses responsibility.
In my case: I'd be wrong to blame the 2nd dentist for the mistakes of the 1st.
Fast forward to 2020, we still have Feb 29 bugs around (I saw a few posted on twitter, none in person). The response back then was huge and adequate, but totally underappreciated as time went by.
Everyday people in the leadup to y2k assumed it meant that every computer would somehow explode. Almost nobody stopped to actually reason through the real life consequence of a program getting the date and time wrong.
There are students who are graduating this spring and the skills they learn in upper division or capstone lab classes are some of the most important skills they will learn at school. You can’t just cancel the classes (or those students won’t graduate), you can’t do a very good job at all teaching them online... What can you do? We haven’t figured it out here at my institution, and it looks like nobody else has figured it out.
Or, refund this semesters’s tuition, room, and board, and give everyone a do-over until next fall. (I am assuming the virus will burn out in 2-3 months.)
Maybe the best outcome would be radically improve remote learning, this time with full institutional support.
This is a really optimistic assumption. I hope you're right, but I would hope no political unit is making plans based on it.
Not excited to install a rootkit on my computer to take finals, but oh well.
https://www.proctoru.com/proctoru-live-resource-center
"No non-religious head coverings"
Which makes me think that they record a video of you while you're taking it, which is kind of eerie.
That being said, it won't stop anyone who has a USB webcam you can just unplug, unless the software requires you to have a webcam plugged in and pointed in the right direction.
Unless maybe the requirement is to catch you looking elsewhere?
- Someone will watch you
- The entire session is recorded
- You hold up multiple forms of ID and rotate it / tilt it
- It's effectively a keylogger + mouse tracker + eye tracker + ..., basically malware
- Triggering any security features like looking "to the side or down" will result in human intervention asking you to do a 360 degree view of your room
- You are not permitted to cover or pause the video stream and you may be randomly asked to do things like blink or hold up fingers
- Yes, they can remote control your device
Israel is the best example right now. They have the strongest reaction of any country, essentially closing their borders, but their people don't seem to be outraged, at least not yet.
I can see asking students who left for spring break not to come back. But asking students currently on campus to leave, and even demanding that they travel internationally, seems like it might just increase everyone's risk of exposure, and spread it around. Especially considering that, at least according to the stats they post on their website, about 75% of their international students are from Asia or Europe.
I would cancel classes, but allow everyone that wants to to stay put.
Surely this, along with general hot-potato risk management, is what MIT's administration had in mind.
A college town full of students who see their risk as 0.1% is not what you want right now.
Now, a more sensible thing might be to close the nightclubs, bars, and parties. But the city hasn't done that. Patient zero will probably infect hundred here.
And the people who will die will be the elderly (which includes a lot of faculty too).
By forcing people to go home, rather than shelter in place, everyone has increased contact with others and public infrastructure where the virus could be.
The president of MIT was born in 1950. The Chairman of the Board was class of '73. Virtually everyone in senior leadership are in categories with 10+% mortality rates.
I'm not cynical about everything about the Institute (see my other comments, correcting cynical theories), but this is a place where I know many of the personalities involved personally, and I'm definitely very, very cynical.
What situation are you referring to that would result in increased contact? This particular movement of students to a different location, often home? Or the long-term housing situation of the students throughout the rest of the semester?
If there is no outbreak at MIT, having the on-campus students remain on-campus might be preferable to forcing thousands to make their way through airports, buses, and other public infrastructure.
This site is good for tracking the data: https://studylib.net/coronavirus
Click on a country to see the graphs.
another question is why it even matters. what are they going to do with the fraction of dorms that are empty after the first day of exams that can't wait a few more days?
—a former mit fraternity president
Universities are their own small towns - they provide food, housing, have police forces, a large staff, etc.
Put it the other way around, does it make more sense for a city official to be calling the shots, when campuses have their own special context?
Literally their own police forces? How does that work? Where do they get the authority to be police from? Who are they sworn to?
The university cops are mostly there to protect the students (from off-campus trouble-makers, and also from each other; especially re: alcohol problems).
So, none. Regular police routinely carrying guns is crazy. Leave it to specialists. You don’t need a gun to police a place of learning.
You can say leave it to specialists, but that is the job of the police.
I'm not sure this is really true. I've seen quite a few news stories about them shooting when it didn't really look like there was any need at all. I think police officers also fairly regularly injure themselves accidentally with their weapons.
I fundamentally don't think a gun is an appropriate tool for a civilian community police force. Batons and electric stunners yes in an emergency if really needed. Actual firearms? Not really appropriate in my opinion.
However that issue is unrelated what I was talking about.
And it's solved by not giving ordinary police officers guns to carry around.
Most contracts have a force majeure clause, that either releases the parties from their contractual obligations in such an event, or substantially relaxes the penalties for failing to meet those obligations. The idea is, nobody could have seen these circumstances coming, so it's unfair to hold either party to obligations they suddenly find themselves unable to meet.
(Example. I contract with 5,000 people to give them admission to a concert, and then the night before the show an asteroid falls out of the sky onto the stadium I had contracted to hold that concert in. Force majeure means I'm not obligated to put on another show at my own expense despite losing all the money I'd already invested in the first one. It would be unfair to hold me to that promise, since it was invalidated by circumstances no reasonable person could have foreseen.)
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not privy to the precise language in the contracts between universities and students for residential housing. But I feel pretty confident that they have a force majeure clause in them. And seeing as how Massachusetts declared a state of emergency over the coronavirus today (https://www.boston25news.com/news/mass-gov-declares-state-em...), it seems like universities in that commonwealth would have a reasonably strong legal argument for exercising them.
MIT has contracted with these students to provide them with housing. Part of their normal obligation under those contracts would be to provide them with housing that offers a reasonably healthy environment. MIT will have by now heard from a lot of Highly Credentialed Experts that, in the circumstances of a widely circulating coronavirus, normal dorm conditions don't provide that reasonably healthy environment anymore -- they instead put students at elevated levels of risk.
So if you're MIT, what do you do? You could say "hey, those dorms up to code!" and keep on housing people in them, sure. But if you do, you open yourself up to lawsuits from outraged parents if those students end up getting sick at greater rates than the overall population. And, when it inevitably comes out in the discovery process of those lawsuits that you were directly warned against doing that by the aforementioned Highly Credentialed Experts -- well, at that point you are boned, my friend, contract or no contract.
Or, alternately, you can point to the declaration of a state of emergency, declare that the dorms aren't fit for habitation under the current circumstances (which, you will take pains to remind everyone, were beyond your ability to predict), and kick the kids out. Yes, it'll suck for the kids, but not as much as drowning in their own fluids would. And if anyone comes after you with a lawsuit when the dust clears, you'll be on a much sturdier position from which to defend your actions.
I keep reading that the casualty rate for young people is miniscule. It's the nursing homes that are being decimated, no?
This probably also applies to firms in general now, but the article is specifically about its use in China.
[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/22/chinese-firms-...
It's very hard to be sympathetic to people doing business with or outsourcing to China when that is KNOWN to be basically cashing out now and foisting the consequences/risk off onto your successors.
Western firms are running with no inventory and no contingency. The Taiwan quake several years ago showed that Western business managers suffered no consequences for that so why should they care?
I know terribly little about law. But from what I've seen, tenants have a great deal of rights as to their status quo living conditions. The property is not hazardous to inhabit, clearly their non-student neighbors couldn't be evicted for the same reason. Seems like a court would favor the tenant here unless the university provided evidence from the government that favored their eviction.
I was researching about domicile before Since the full time RV/digital nomad life interests me and looks like people decide on South Dakota, Texas and Florida or use a friends or family address even if they don't really live with them, and probably the only family member who's stable and I'd trust handling my mail isn't that computer savvy to scan them for me and security concerns - so going to a friendly state and paying a provider makes sense if you are going to get rid of all your stuff and be a nomad.
Kinda seems like discrimination in a way though. Some couple who retired sold their house and bought a RV and ran into issues with their state's DMV, so they had to hurry up change to a friendly one, but I guess their former state loses out more then they did anyways since they saved a lot of money since the new state has no income tax, and cheaper registration and insurance. Then homeless people or abused people escaping from their partner or family can struggle to get all their documents. I guess some DMVs were telling elderly people their birth certificates were no longer good and they had to buy new ones and wait.
Then also seems a form of voter suppression, some county in Florida said people who are homeless, living in a van, rv or boat wasn't allowed to vote. I'm a fan of one person, one vote though but seems like they need a better system for IDs. Also wouldn't surprise me if some workers would give you trouble for printed bank or credit card statements since so many people are paperless... Oh the DMV is such a annoying place, I think maybe could be right below going to the dentist. I know both Texas and Florida have online renewals every other renewal too, so sounds like when moving maybe factor in the DMV along with other things. Then Texas even offers online driving school too where you can take your permit test online even, so they seem maybe one of the more advanced states.
Still have that dream of full time travel though but building up passive income online would be needed, right now I think I rather focus on a startup and find a city I'd love like maybe Austin or Miami, warmer, focus on being happier - then travel a few weeks a year which would be way more vacation I have now.
Who are these commenters. Why do they assume this.
What is going on.
MIT (and many other higher education providers) seem to be trying to preempt the spread of a disease.
If someone has specific, concrete, information about someone who is harmed by this and whose difficulties are ignored by administration, of course, comment!
But all this hypothetical speculation feels mean spirited.
That said, I also sympathize with administrators, who had to pick a course of action in a chaotic environment and make it work.
[1] https://twitter.com/hakeemangulu/status/1237367253374398465
[1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-11/coronavirus-infection...
In your scenarios:
1. "keep it contained at the university" would probably look like: thousands of students, staff, businesses get the coronavirus rapidly over the course of the next two months (possibly overwhelming local hospitals), proceed to spread across the other densely populated area universities, Boston, NY, Spring Break, summer internships, travel everywhere happens post-mass-infection phase. Many deaths attributable to the campus being open likely.
2. Single person brings it to where they're from - same effects of a single sick person traveling we're seeing in the US every day (including what brought it to Boston). Unless they're going to another densely populated university or conference, which if more measures like this take place they should not be, the impact will be far less.
At this point they aren't aware of any students who have it, so a likely scenario if nothing is done is that the student population GETS it from the Biogen outbreak in Cambridge, AND spreads it at a much higher rate across the local area, country, world.
Those dorms are going to be sitting empty after the students move out. Seriously, what is the logic behind this mess?
The naming of this thing is such a disaster, even MIT can't get it right.
- the virus is called SARS-CoV-2 (like HIV)
- the disease it causes is named COVID-19 (like AIDS)
- pretty much everyone calls both the virus and the disease coronavirus
The common and original name is "Wuhan virus". That is easy to remember, easy to type, and specific enough. Use it, for better communication.
https://www.flattenthecurve.com/
Universities are taking this extremely disruptive step because they have a very large influence on how quickly this disease spreads, and they know it.
Those 100,000+ students weren't going to voluntarily stop attending classes. The universities have now forced the issue for them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9DXSCpcz9E&feature=youtu.be
I don't necessarily disagree with your overall sentiment here, but I always feel the need to point out that this is a really bad example of a frivolous lawsuit. That lady's car didn't have cupholders, which was pretty common on '90s cars, and the coffee was hot enough to fuse her labia together. You can look up pictures; it wasn't pretty. She also only sued for medical damages and nothing more, if I remember correctly.
"Sixteen countries have shut schools nationwide, impacting almost 363.1 million children and youth. A further sixteen countries have implemented localized school closures to prevent or contain the spread of COVID-19."
https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-emergencies/coronavir...