“If I’m a leader,” McClure told me, “I better be prepared to have a really good explanation for why it is that I brought people back to campus—understanding the risks—if somebody falls ill and dies.”
I feel like that needs to be WHEN not IF. It's not an easy decision and I'm glad I'm not in any position to make it. But certainly, it's when, not if.
No, because the admin is the "management" and it will squeeze everyone else- students, profs, staff- before itself. Hence eg schools ceasing contributions to faculty retirement plans, and no consequences for management creating a model that is so incredibly revenue sensitive.
> because the admin is the "management" and it will squeeze everyone else
I participate in the research side of universities in various ways and this is exactly how it happens. The bureaucracy is absolutely the enemy when trying to get research done or preventing some arsehole in management from removing a useful service.
I am currently trying to get hired as a research assistant (basically a vague title covering people who do research as part of a lab but without the ambitions of an academic) and lab heads will routinely try to source talent in a way that avoids the official university hiring policy. They do this because the official way is slow, stupid, and gets administration people involved who just get in the way. Not only that, they deal with plenty of university administration already, and they think it is mostly useless or needlessly complicated.
Losing a year of revenue will straight up kill a bunch of universities, just like it would kill most businesses. However, the following year there will still be the same number of 18 year olds who want to go to college as usual, and so surviving universities will grow much bigger.
Bigger universities will grow bigger administrative arms, which will further isolate the leadership from students and academic and enable even more extractive policies, both because increased social distance makes cruelty more thinkable, and because the loss of competition makes it harder for students and academics to find an alternative.
In other words, wiping out a bunch of businesses reduces competition, and less competitive markets are more monopolistic.
If you think about it, tenure isn't really an obvious problem (since it only affects quality, which most don't care that much about). As for pay, at least at public schools, it's not very high.
Administrative bloat? Some of it, like the diversity infrastructure, is mandated from without (regulations and/or legal concerns). Some, like vanity recycling programs, will indeed get whacked.
In truth, though, the reforms that would really matter are (1) reduce college loan subsidies to a rational level, and (2) increase state funding of public universities.
Am I wrong to say that K-8 education faces a similar sort of problem, except that college students likely live with other college students, whereas kids are far more likely to live with family with older folk?
Why should colleges be expected to be safer than K-8? Why must they resort to impromptu web solutions?
Also, if there's a consensus on risk and response, shouldn't that be coordinated at a central level instead of institutions each making their own calls?
Which will create opportunities for leaner, slimmer, more efficient startup colleges to take their place.
I'm not talking about coding boot camps, I'm talking about institutions that are more similar to trade schools... Or European universities. All that you need to educate people is a large hall, an instructor, and a whiteboard.
With respect, while I am sympathetic to the creative destructive dogma of capitalism, I see reality considerably differently.
I don't mean to be banal but the business of colleges is not "education". A large hall, an instructor, and a whiteboard is not competitive from the perspective of the customer base, nor is it attractive from the perspective of those who would populate the whiteboard with whatever.
What parents and students pay for is essentially a moderately supervised, branded, summer sleepaway camp experience (full year) filled with nice sounding time-occupying activities and vague, often unfulfilled, and also unaccountable promises that at the end of the camp experience someone will be willing to pay to utilize the time of the student, rather than the student/parents paying to have their time occupied.
There are various ways to creatively package the elements of that experience into a product, but in the "lean" formulations- like Lambda School- there is no real estate, no large hall. Real estate is expensive.
I think what we actually would see- are already seeing- in the closure of the bespoke, idiosyncratic small private colleges likely to die is the chain restaurant version of the bespoke, idiosyncratic small family restaurants that have largely gone by the wayside in American culture.
They will have a consistent brand, will cost maybe a little less, will pay their mostly expendable teaching staff considerably less, with no tenure (though performance bonuses and maybe equity grants for the stars, the way any sensibly managed business operates these days), with a manufactured curriculum delivered consistently across the "franchises" and with lots of entertainment and parent-appealing safety/oversight options, lots of addons for extra fees (semester abroad, anyone?), and some structure around the time-occupying activities that may- no guarantees- lead to eventual employment.
Welcome to Olive Garden, can I take your classroom order please?
Mediocre consistency at scale is how America works.
I didn't articulate that well- it wasn't a comment on my experience or on college experience generally.
I do think the operational dynamics of colleges have changed, and the parent comment about the essence of education being someone at a whiteboard in a room- I just don't think that's sufficiently true anymore. It's not what people pay for.
But more to the point-
The Olive Garden analogy is what (I think) will happen. That prognostication is in line generally with the business trajectory that the US solves for.
All businesses are ultimately scaled and financialized.
So- as small private colleges will be the first to fail, their brands and their nostalgia will be picked up by the educational equivalent of restaurant chain operations. Chain operations will produce a product people will pay for- lots of people in the US go to chain restaurants- but the end result is going to be considerably different than what used to be called the college experience.
There is no legal or financial machinery in the US to defend the small. And that's too bad.
The quality of the American university system is foundational to why America is such a powerful and influential country. Suggesting any significant disruption to the university system that currently exists sounds like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Everyone ranks universities different, but the broad strokes shake out the same every time. The US university system is of unparalleled quality. Perhaps the American university system could be made better, but have you noticed that literally every other country on earth does way worse?
Not going to downvote, but I am going to disagree. For starters, most rankings have Oxford and Cambridge in the UK quite high up, and they run on a different model.
Next up, "liberal arts" today is not the same thing as it was a generation ago, and it's debatable whether it's still doing that much except credentialism (Bryan Caplan certainly thinks it isn't). This is not, by the way, a dog-whistle at social justice: I think that college SJ is a symptom of a deeper structural problem with the current university system.
The 25% who are going to fail (if the poster two levels above is right) are probably also not the Ivy League. In the UK at least, there are lots of places lower down the league tables who in my opinion could contribute a lot more to the nation if they were good trade schools rather than bad universities. Less sure about the US situation, but I think it was the case until not that long ago that there were ways to power and influence that didn't go through a university - including many examples of past presidents.
I agree that it's probably a smaller impact, but on the other hand the result is a bunch of teenagers and young adults with way too much time on their hands and no clear prospects for the future. It seems like it could turn into motivation for either a very good or very bad outcome.
There's no shortage of socially useful work to do, that does not take a bachelor's degree. There just seems to be an unwillingness for government to pay anyone to do it.
That’s a specious argument. Most parents (mine included) put massive pressure on working age kids to get summer jobs to fill those hours. The incentive for the kid is of course spending money too.
I would imagine with massive closures and unemployment that supply of summer jobs is close to zero now.
I suppose in our kids generation there is a mitigating circumstance- the wide availability of legal teenage heroin aka video games. Today’s “bread and circus” of inexpensive, endless content and games will keep us placated indefinitely as far as I can tell.
I know a couple people with teenage kids and they don't put pressure on their kids to get a summer job. My daugter's twelve, and i don't expect to pressure her to get a job in a couple years. I don't see much point-- the jobs she would be after are needed by people with rent to pay. Even when i was in highschool it seemed about 50:50 of kids working over the summer. That was before the current wave of unemployment, before 2008 too.
Because universities are billion-dollar funds with schools attached to them. They’ve generally expanded in direct proportion to the exorbitant student debt that kids sign up for, and now that entire system is going to be tested in incredibly difficult ways. Most K-12 students in the US live at home, which is a much safer option generally than on campus, as most undergrads do.
>>Because universities are billion-dollar funds with schools attached to them.
The market value of US endowments in 2016 was $542B, of which 120 of the richest accounted for a whopping $401B or 74% of the total endowment value in the US.[1]
The 26% remainder ($51B) was split between 2832 4-yr degree-granting colleges[2] for an average endowment (excluding the top 120 richest) of ~$19M/college.
Only 4% of 4-yr degree-granting colleges have endowments >$750M.
Yes, same problem in k-8. Slightly less risk in the student cohort, equivalent or higher risk in the staff and surrounding cohort.
Speaking as someone building one of those impromptu web solutions- it is a bad situation all around. For many colleges if they do not reopen in the fall they never will again, due to finances. And many are seeing demand from their students to reopen. So it is a matter of survival to do it- in that case it has to be done as safely and with as much consideration for harm reduction as possible. But there is little time and many people are working 24/7 just to get to "impromptu."
In terms of "centralized", the virus is a highly local problem. It spreads and has to be dealt with locally. Nuances unique to each locality dictate the mitigation measures. Hope that helps. Cheers.
At least in many (most) schools in the US K-8 education is pretty worthless. As a parent I would be just fine with my kids skipping a grade (uhm, zoom-ing through one, that is).
College though is a real education, and I want it to be face to face. I (and them) accept the risk, based on what is known today. My 2c.
I was only tolerable as a 9th grader because of the ladder of chaos that was middle school. While I may not have learned much in the way of academics, I grew immeasurably socially.
My children have learned far more than reading and basic math in their K-8 schools. This is an obvious fact and not open for debate. Distance learning is not an acceptable replacement. It's time to immediately reopen all primary schools. Education is essential and worth the risk.
Are you ready to take responsibility for all the people that would either die or have their health damaged by the virus? Including probably a significant number of teachers, parents, and even a few children?
You have decided it is worth the risk to your family in your judgement. Fine. But to which risk are you referring? The risk to your children? How about the risks to the teachers? How about the other staff? How about the child's grandparents? How about the other children in the classroom and their families? You are asking a large number of people to take considerable risk because you have decided classroom education RIGHT NOW is "worth the risk."
Nobody is suggesting the end of classroom education. The question is whether doing the best we can with distance learning for a time and postponement of classroom eduction until better treatments and/or vaccines come on line is a better choice. It is really not a big sacrifice to ensure the safety of about 4 million teachers and maybe another million or two staff persons.
Assuming the death rate is optimistically only 0.2%, that is about 12,000 teachers and staff deaths. Ignoring the thousands of other deaths originating from these cases, are you really saying that 12,000 deaths is a realistic price to pay so your child can go back into the classroom NOW rather than next year? Really?
The fact that this would be a very bad choice seems an "obvious fact and not open for debate."
GP isn’t proposing that only their child attend school. Instead, it’s an entire generation of children who will benefit from the delta of an extra in-person year of instruction.
Similarly, whatever factor you apply to count deaths, you can only count deaths above the baseline when considering the change in school policy.
It’s quite far from your side of “obvious fact and not open for debate”, IMO.
I quoted “obvious fact and not open for debate” from the previous note. Sarcasm on my part. My point is that this is NOT black and white and the net benefit of reopening is NOT an "obvious fact."
> This is an obvious fact and not open for debate.
Not with that attitude, nope sure isn’t.
It is up for debate. I know for a fact you’re wrong. I was educated outside of any schooling system until the 9th grade. I learned basic math and was a voracious reader. I walked into 9th grade without missing a beat.
>If you ask a current PhD student how hard things are and then wait 10 years and ask how hard their PhD was you will get totally different answers.
I'm not sure this is true. From my own experience studying math, I often heard people remark upon how hard it must be and how only a small subset of people would ever be able to understand the concepts in a graduate level math course. I don't agree with this at all.
In my opinion, the reality is that learning is incremental, and everything new builds upon something that you've previously learned (hopefully). This is particularly true with math. I don't think that I had to work any harder to learn linear algebra in undergrad than I did to learn differential calc in highschool. I think the delta in difficulty between geometry and algebra, pre-calc and calc 1, diff eq and real analysis, is basically the same. But that is only true if you have a solid understanding of whatever came before.
This is of course a minor nitpick with your last point, because I agree with your overall point that k-8 learning is important. I think it's important precisely because of the reasons I mentioned before: you need to have a strong foundation in 'last years' concepts if you are going to succeed in learning this years.
K-8 is primary school, right? Its value is mostly not in education. If it was it would look very different. Mastery based learning would be the norm, not unknown. Spaced repetition would be incorporated everywhere so what was taught was retained. There would be no social advancement.
The school system is enormously wasteful of time. It takes about 40 hours to teach a nine year old to read English and about the same time to cover the primary school Math curriculum with a 12 year old.
If we took Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development seriously we wouldn’t spend so much time teaching children things they’ll pick up tens of times faster in three years. I don’t know what primary school would look like if we cared about children learning but it wouldn’t look much like the current system.
I am just a parent of two K-8 children so not entirely up to speed on the latest theory and practice of ZPD. But when I first read about this before my first was born I understood ZPD to be "empathetic tutoring" which seems increasingly difficult to execute correctly when student:teacher ratios exceed 4:1, and ideally 1-1 for maximum benefit.
ZPD works, but nobody has been able to implement this at-scale, let alone in the K-8 public school system.
That’s a failing of the education system, not a victory. Math education is absolutely terrible. There’s no building of foundations and fundamental relationships to provide people with easy learning. It only gets worse further up the chain. It took 3Blue1Brown to make the connection for me between i, the unit circle, and e. They seem fundamentally linked, but no math education ever put them into the same sentence other than to give a few rote examples of famous equations.
Maybe my education was just garbage, but none of the stuff in k-6 was built upon. They threw out my foundation in numbers and handed me a list of valid rules in the form of equations and identities. If you do the quadratic formula, you get the roots. Cos^2 + sin^2 = tan, etc.
I was on the track to math, sure. But that’s because I was good at memorizing useless trivia and utilizing it on tests, not because I was good at math. Same goes for most of my classes. There was one dude that actually got it, but he definitely didn’t get it from our teachers.
College education is just as often useless as well. All that college education money hasn’t gone to teaching staff or classrooms or lecture halls. It’s going to administrative buildings, sports complexes, and dorms.
The teaching at colleges has stayed largely the same as it ever has been, with few of the professors actually passionate about transferring the knowledge to the next set of students. You only get a great professor every once in a great while, most of the rest are unintelligible or disinterested. I’m not willing to pay 150k to get one great educator maybe.
With Wikipedia, YouTube science communicators, and videos of actually great lecturers across the years, the knowledge portion of college education is covered for free. The other benefit of college is networking with people who might remember you enough to help you get a job in the future. For many it also increases their exposure to different thought, which is valuable in today’s society. I feel like something should replace college on the social aspects too, as it’s a hugely inefficient system for it right now.
I have a 6 and an 8 year old. We won't be sending them to school in September. My wife has a comorbidity and if she were to catch Coronavirus, she'd have hard time surviving it. We plan on homeschooling our kids going forward. Most of the parents I spoke to plan to do the same.
This week I went to a gym that just recently opened up. While attendance was way down (I'd say ~1/3 of usual) there were still a good amount of people there, and I was the only person, besides staff, wearing a mask.
At this point I see another explosion of coronavirus cases as just math. I mean, it's like stamping out most of a fire so you're left with only a few burning embers, so you say "Great, time to reopen, lets dump these giant bags of dry leaves onto these embers."
Yes, many (most?) people are still staying home where I live, but for many places that have opened up I see zero change in behavior - there were some viral videos last weekend of packed bars and events. I contrast that with other places (like Germany) that actually appear to have a plan in place of how they will be able to open up safely. AFAICT our plan in the US appears to be "thoughts and prayers".
I would say I've almost felt a degree of peer pressure to not stay home after the stay at home order lifts here. Even though I really am not comfortable with the measures everyone has taken here.
I’d love to hear your argument for doing anything other than opening up back to normal (not the new normal) while the elderly and at risk continue staying at home (in addition to anyone that feels more comfortable staying home).
How do you propose to go back to "normal" because of your own "(in addition to anyone that feels more comfortable staying home)."
It would get worse, there, too, if people did return to normal and cases spiked. Versus cities that are now in "new normal" and still full of people being much more cautious.
If cases didn't spike - there are those who believe the flattening of case rates isn't a result of behavioral changes but was some hidden factor - then "the new normal" will continue, but you won't be back to the old one.
If cases do spike, "the new normal" will get even less close to the old normal, because more and more people will self-select back into staying home.
Otherwise you have to get a way more coherent government plan to get on top of the spread. Like tracking and finding and isolating cases fast. And doing more to protect the people in essential jobs which are conducive for big outbreaks.
My wife and I planned to ride the local rails-to-trail bike path today. We pulled up to the main lot and even the overflow parking was full. Tried the entry point 5 miles up trail and it was just as packed. At that point, we decided to head home.
Technically, reopening phase 1 doesn't begin until Monday here.
The lockdown orders imposed on many beaches and parks were totally counterproductive because people ended up more concentrated in the few recreational areas that remained open. At least they're getting some exercise.
I share your sentiment. I recently noticed that many people in my area are returning to pre-pandemic behaviors; especially teenagers and young adults.
I pointed out to my kids that sometimes you can, and sometimes you can't, estimate how dangerous a behavior is based on whether or not lots of people are doing it. Especially where there's a delay between the behavior and observable consequences. E.g., smoking cigarettes in the 1930's, or unprotected promiscuous sex in the 1980's, or (I'm guessing) pre-pandemic behaviors right now.
the first wave never ended. we did almost nothing to actually stop it and have instead just rode it. now, it's going to keep going or even pickup speed.
imagine if a terrorist attack killed over 100,000 people in just a couple of months. instead, we're just like "wasn't so bad" after doing hardly anything.
it's an embarrassment in the u.s. to see people in south korea and china returning back to life as almost normal without danger. and the numbers are incredibly damning to the u.s.
Imagine treating a virus the same way as a terrorist attack. Stop pretending that governments can regulate viruses out of existence, or that armies and lockdowns are going to prevent microscopic, nanometer-sized viruses from traveling in the air. This is beyond asinine.
By the way, SK just kicked the can down the road, they are continuing to get spikes because they have no herd immunity:
"Coronavirus: South Korea closes schools again after biggest spike in weeks"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52845015
> Imagine treating a virus the same way as a terrorist attack.
i didn't. i said imagine the situation. i'm saying that people would pay attention and treat it seriously.
> Stop pretending that governments can regulate viruses out of existence
isn't that exactly what south korea did?
the point is that there is no excusing the u.s. response to the virus.
> By the way, SK just kicked the can down the road, they are continuing to get spikes because they have no herd immunity
point me to scientific evidence of herd immunity. or any evidence they've kicked the can down the road. look at their graphs and compare them to the u.s. how in the world is their response kicking the can down the road but the u.s.' isn't? that quite literally makes no sense.
I pointed to an article from today, where SK tried to re-open their schools and immediately shut them down again thanks to another outbreak. They have nothing under control. Their population is still vulnerable and has no antibodies. The U.S. did not have a monolithic response. Many states never shut down, and never experienced overrun hospitals. Many states had light restrictions and never experienced overrun hospitals. Some states sent sick people to nursing homes and then had overrun hospitals.
> The U.S. did not have a monolithic response. Many states never shut down, and never experienced overrun hospitals.
You act as if the pandemic is over; the places that never shutdown or had light restrictions largely were hit later and, though they are behind, also haven't flattened the curve (and, many of the places that reopened early and rapidly, rather than gradually, are also seeing rebounds already.) They may not have yet seen overwhelmed hospitals, but a number of places in both of those groups that didn't before are nearing that point now.
i think you have a vastly different definition of "under control" than i do.
> Their population is still vulnerable and has no antibodies.
again, do you have scientific evidence that backs such a claim up? i'm not claiming it doesn't exist, but it'd be nice if people making implications based upon such claims provide evidence for them.
> The U.S. did not have a monolithic response. Many states never shut down, and never experienced overrun hospitals. Many states had light restrictions and never experienced overrun hospitals. Some states sent sick people to nursing homes and then had overrun hospitals
Not the OP, but "not enough antibodies" is a crystal clear case: once antibodies get above HIT percentage, the epidemic dies out very quickly.
In general, a contagious virus, like COVID-19, can be stopped in only one of three ways:
(1) by acquiring herd immunity, which for most viruses requires exposure of 30-95% of the population (check HIT values for various diseases in wikipedia; initial COVID estimates are somewhere in 29-80%). Neither SK nor China is there yet. Even Sweden or Belarus are not there yet. Even Africa is unlikely to be there yet.
(2) by completely stamping it out (with aggressive decontamination, quarantines, etc.). Again, neither SK nor China is there (this is obvious, they do not even claim it; see school re-closing in SK, Jilin flare up in China, etc.)
(3) by vaccination. Again, no vaccinations in SK, China or anywhere for this matter.
So coronavirus is not "under control" anywhere. We might just accept that and focus on some other things that would be just as nice to get under control: heart disease, cancer, opioid addiction, etc. Just my 2c.
To be fair, you listed the requirements to "stop" an infectious disease, but then claimed them not being met meant it wasn't "under control". Those are two different things. The disease can be "under control" with the caveat that it only remains so as long as we continue to take certain precautions. Once it's "stopped", those precautions aren't really necessary.
Best of luck to it (no irony!). That said, it might not hold. Stamping out the virus (2) requires keeping a perimeter around all existing carriers. New Zealand, being naturally removed from other countries, has some advantages in this regard. But even there, as soon as travel restarts reintroduction is not unlikely. We will see...
For example, many countries kept mandatory smallpox vaccinations long after the disease was eradicated within their borders because otherwise a single traveler can wreak havoc. Check for example smallpox reintroduction to Yugoslavia in 1972 by a single pilgrim. A quick martial law and quarantines helped contain it, but even then it caused, according to Wikipedia, 175 infections and 35 deaths.
If COVID-19 is as virulent as it is claimed to be I would not bet on NZ staying COVID-free after travel restarts. My 2c.
SKs "biggest spike in weeks" is a small fraction of our daily new cases, even per capita.
Japan and China both managed to regulate the virus out of existence with more success than we have had at stopping terrorist attacks, doesn't seem like all that bad of a comparison to me.
Herd immunity kicks in at somewhere around 60-75% recovered, IIRC.
Unless the asymptomatic infection rate is at least an order of magnitude higher than anything remotely suggested, there's no possible way the US is approaching herd immunity. We're not even to 5% infected, let alone 50%.
Both of these comments are spreading misinformation about "herd immunity."
Any amount of immunity or resistance within the population will reduce the effective reproduction rate of the virus. This effect becomes more significant as the immunity rate increases.
Herd immunity is a colloquial term which refers to the point where there's so much immunity that the effective reproduction rate <1 and new infection clusters die out. The percentage of the population which needs to be immune to get R<0 depends on many factors, consider that many countries have managed to achieve this with near zero population immunity.
For example - if we imagine a hypothetical society which could indefinitely maintain measures like social distancing and mask wearing, the effective reproduction number will be low to begin with; the population immunity required to get to R<0 will therefore be lower.
Random antibody tests are how we found out it spread further than originally estimated, and is less deadly than originally estimated. The denominator increased, the numerator stayed the same, and R0 was revised upwards.
Really depends on the state. I think here in Oregon we have a pretty solid and (properly) cautious phased re-opening plan. Counties have to meet certain well-specified criteria before entering these phases.
Next door in Washington, we also have a properly cautious phased re-opening plan, with per-county metrics to meet before applying to move to the next phase. My county is still in Phase 1, and even so I've seen a fair number of people in close proximity in public without masks.
The universe tends toward maximum irony. If I had a nickel for every time I heard some variant of "That won't happen here"...
No, sorry, states that never locked down (WY, SD, AR, etc) have followed the same curve as those that did lock down. States that re-opened early (GA, FL, TX) have not seen a huge spike in cases. Vast majority of deaths were caused by nursing home incidents. Almost half the deaths are in three states (NY, NJ, and MA), which have had strict lockdown procedures. The curve was flattened back in April. There is no objective criteria being used to justify masks or lockdowns. There has been no threshold set where once hospital usage is below a certain amount, all restrictions are set. For this reason, I cannot support arbitrary lockdowns. They are violations of liberty and an abuse of state of emergency policy. In the meantime, 40 million people are unemployed, our economy is in tatters and it's going to take a decade to recover.
While that is true a 'right to work' is recognised in the International Charter of Human Rights as one of the big ones. Along with free movement and probably there is an implicit if not explicit right not to be mandatorialy isolated from other people.
These aren't "I want a house with 3 stories and I can only build two" style liberties. These are the "if I don't have these I literally do not have any liberty" incursions on liberties. The important ones.
Wyoming and South Dakota never locked down, and had the same infection curve as New York and California, which did? That sounds like a great argument in favor of lockdowns. To a virus, here is a strategy which turns Times Square into the Great Plains. That's amazing.
New York has 1,529 deaths per million population, California has 105, Wyoming has 26, and South Dakota has 67 (using the Worldometer numbers). So they certainly didn't follow the same curves, nor did the lockdown turn Times Square into the Great Plains.
On average, stricter measures seem correlated with higher mortality, not lower. That doesn't mean the measures kill people, just that governments don't tend to impose them until stuff gets bad. It's very difficult to disentangle the effects of the intervention from the effects of the pre-existing environment.
Viruses spread due to close contact so these stats need to be normalized for population density. The relevant number is deaths per million people per person per sq mile. New York state's population density is ~400 people per square mile, California ~250, South Dakota ~11, Wyoming ~6. So California's deaths per million are four times Wyoming's and less than twice of South Dakotas despite having ~40 and ~24 times the population density, respectively. New York is an anomaly because of New York City (~26,000 people per sq mile) and specifically Manhattan (~67,000 people per sq mile) - an order of magnitude more densely populated than the most densely populated cities in Wyoming (Jackson, ~3300 people per square mile) and South Dakota (Piedmont, ~3000 people per square mile or Sioux Falls with ~2000). The big states have several dense cities with populations larger than both Wyoming and South Dakota combined.
It's also disingenuous to include New York because it was the initial epicenter on the Western hemisphere and the majority of those dead were infected before complete lock down procedures could be implemented or from unavoidable close contact with family or building tenants.
Except that Japan has high population density, no significant lockdown, contact tracing that misses ~80% of the cases (estimating the total case count from their death count, using the IFR from serology elsewhere), and 7 deaths per million. So maybe it's the masks? The general culture of hygiene? The weather? Something else?
There's a lot we don't know here. I wish people would admit and accept that, instead of looking for false confidence, finding it, and then arguing with people who found a different falsely confident answer.
> Except that Japan has high population density, no significant lockdown, contact tracing that misses ~80% of the cases (estimating the total case count from their death count, using the IFR from serology elsewhere), and 7 deaths per million. So maybe it's the masks? The general culture of hygiene? The weather? Something else?
According to Worldometer Japan has tested ~284k people while New York and California have combined tested almost four million despite together having half the population of Japan. Last time I saw excess mortality statistics a few weeks ago they were lagging with several prefectures missing and bad normalization for aging and other factors.
Assuming the numbers are accurate, I'm more interested in how South Dakota and Wyoming are doing so much worse than Japan with such a low population density. I suspect the answer lies in the crumbling rural health infrastructure.
> There's a lot we don't know here. I wish people would admit and accept that, instead of turning this into yet another polarized political debate.
Mortality, population density, and basic division are not political and if by themselves they're polarizing, then we're too far gone already.
I'm not sure what you intend by those test counts? Japan has 874 dead. Assuming IFR of 1%, that implies about 87k infected. But they report 17k confirmed cases, so they're missing ~80% of the cases. I mentioned this to head off any suggestion that Japan's trace and test operation was responsible for their success, since at best it's decreasing R by that ~20%. Perhaps Japan is failing to catch some deaths too; but they're an open society with freedom of speech, so I don't expect their numbers to be grossly wrong.
So what could South Dakota and Wyoming's public health system be doing that's worse than Japan? I don't know the answer, but it's not clear to me at all that the difference is in their government responses vs. some aspect of their initial situations.
I gave deaths per capita because that's the probability that someone in that state will have died of coronavirus, which is what most people care about directly. Your (deaths/people)/(people/area) has no corresponding direct significance. To then call that "the relevant number" overstates the importance of population density, and also models population density badly when it's non-uniform (as you note for NYC). I agree that population density is an important factor, just not as determinative as your post would seem to imply.
Oh, and looks like you quoted my post before I edited it, sorry. But I believe false confidence is polarizing and would like to see less of it, as uncomfortable as the true uncertainty may be.
> I'm not sure what you intend by those test counts? Japan has 874 dead.
I'm saying I believe their numbers are inaccurate because they're undertesting and stats I could use to validate them (overall number of deaths to calculate seasonal excess mortality) are also currently inaccurate for unrelated reasons. I agree that the number of deaths will be impossible to hide in an open society like Japan but for bureaucratic reasons it will take a while to compile and validate those stats before normalizing them enough to compare between years let alone nations. Until then, I'm not convinced and any argument based on Japan as an example is also suspect.
> To then call that "the relevant number" overstates the importance of population density, and also models population density badly when it's non-uniform (as you note for NYC).
Uhm, what? Deaths per million lumps Wyoming in with New York City, making it even less accurate to what people care about. Manhattan will not be reopening on the same schedule as some town on the outskirts of Fargo. Someone in the middle of a dense city does not face the same risk as someone whose closest neighbor is 2 miles away. Also, it's a virus. There's almost a century of medicine and public health expertise that shows that all things being equal, density is the dominant factor.
I thought ending quarantine is what people cared about. Your false confidence about Japan's comparability to the US is not helping. Population density is why NYC and Wyoming aren't comparable yet you're trying to compare another country.
So what do you think explains the difference between Japan and NY? It's not population density. Even if Japan's death count is understated, there is zero chance that all of Japan's medical staff and press have somehow failed to notice and report NYC-level mortality.
And I'm not sure what you think is my "false confidence about Japan's comparability to the US"? I certainly don't believe Japan's response would work equally well in NY, considering that NY applied stricter measures and ended up with 200x the death rate. I believe the susceptibility of individual regions to the coronavirus varies greatly with factors we don't yet understand, including population density, cultural and behavioral factors, weather, maybe air pollution, maybe genetics. I'd guess these factors explain much more of the variation in mortality by region than variation in the governments' responses, though I'm not sure.
And you're missing my point about deaths per capita. That's an intrinsically meaningful number, because people care about the probability that they die (or get seriously sick, etc.). Other numbers are valuable only to the extent they predict something people intrinsically care about. Population density is one such input to the prediction, but it's clearly not the only factor, and your simplistic focus on that isn't useful.
> So what do you think explains the difference between Japan and NY?
There are a thousand factors but my bet is that Japan experienced SARS firsthand and just like South Korea or Vietnam, they learned their lesson. It became the epidemic case study for public health officials and doctors in the entire region (and Canada). Regulators went out of their way to make reporting easy and doctors were all trained to look for and treat viral respiratory diseases early. Wearing masks went from being an oddity to wide spread cultural acceptance. For those reasons, you can't compare the effectiveness of measures in California to those in Wyoming using Japan as a measuring stick.
There are far more differences between Japan and California than there are between California and Wyoming. The latter share their language, the majority of their healthcare regulations, political differences, the CDC, and so on. Right now, traveling from Japan to Wyoming is practically impossible but traveling from California to Wyoming is a medium length road trip or one hop in a a tiny plane with zero enforceable travel restrictions.
> Even if Japan's death count is understated, there is zero chance that all of Japan's medical staff and press have somehow failed to notice and report NYC-level mortality.
I'm not an expert on Japanese culture but I've got enough first hand experience to know that is a failure of imagination and the definition of false confidence. Read about Tepco, the Japanese nuclear regulators, and the series of unfortunate events that led to Fukushima containment failures. It was a systemic failure that shares many parallels to Japans's coronavirus response.
> And I'm not sure what you think is my "false confidence about Japan's comparability to the US"? I certainly don't believe Japan's response would work equally well in NY, considering that NY applied stricter measures and ended up with 200x the death rate.
You (imo) falsely believe that Japan's death rate is accurate (let's wait a few months for accurate general morality). You also falsely believe that their death rate can be used to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of measures in the United States. I'm not sure about the former but certain about the latter. New York had "stricter" measures based on cultural expectations that were practically cultural norms in Japan. There is simply no baseline or control group possible between the two demographics.
> I'd guess these factors explain much more of the variation in mortality by region than variation in the governments' responses, though I'm not sure.
There is less variation within nations than there is between them. That's why they became nations instead of going to war amongst themselves (modulo some geopolitics that apply to the Middle East and the Balkans, not Japan).
> And you're missing my point about deaths per capita. That's an intrinsically meaningful number, because people care about the probability that they die (or get seriously sick, etc.). Other numbers are valuable only to the extent they predict that. Population density is one input, but it's clearly not the only factor, and your simplistic focus on that isn't useful.
People care about ending the quarantine. The quarantine will end based on public health policy. Public health decision makers aren't basing their decision on deaths per capita, they're basing them on localized deaths per capita, which depends on the density in each city, metropolis, and states.
I honestly don't even know what point you're trying to make. Are we trying to end the quarantine or are you trying to make some ideological point?
Sorry, are you claiming that Japan might have experienced NY-level mortality but not noticed? Did you see pictures from NYC's hospitals? You can't not notice that. I'm not confident of much, but I'm very, very confident that coronavirus mortality in Japan has been dramatically lower than NY. If you disagree, then we're not in the same consensus reality, and there's no point in discussing further.
So I'm asking why they're different. You make a lot of statements, most of which are true but which don't specifically explain that difference. For example, you state that Japan's doctors have experience with SARS, and they do; but how is that helping stop the spread? What are they doing that Americans should copy? It's not the contact tracing, except for that ~20% reduction in R at best--and if deaths are undercounted, then they're missing an even greater share of the infections.
And then you seem to say that Japan and NY can't be compared anyways because they're so different? I agree they're different in many ways; so why not think about all those factors, and what we can learn from them? Would a heavy public campaign training people to correctly use masks (and enforcing their use) have brought us to Japan-level mortality with a Japan-level lockdown? Imagine the lives (and jobs, and hours of children's education) that could have been saved if yes. I agree that Japan has very different cultural norms, and those might explain much of the difference. So what are those norms, and how can we adopt them?
Or maybe the dominant factor is neither masks nor lockdowns but weather, and there's nothing in our response that could have helped? Maybe it's something about our speaking habits, and language really does directly make a big difference? That last one is deliberately outlandish, but I'm not even totally sure it's false.
The point I'm trying to make is that we know very little about this disease, and what we do know is confusing and contradictory. Unfortunately, most people seem to have latched onto preferred simple explanations, disregarding the evidence that doesn't support them. Given the earliness of our knowledge here, I believe that's likely to cause important opportunities to control the disease to be missed, and therefore harmful.
And following up to note the above is wrong--assuming heterogeneous spread (most patients infect no one, but a few super-spreaders infect many), contact tracers will naturally find those super-spreaders disproportionately, with disproportionate benefit. I still doubt that's the dominant difference, though.
In this context the epicenter is where something is most intense, not where it starts. New York City and Seattle peaked roughly around the same but NYC was seeing ~10,000 new cases a day at one point whereas King County was seeing 600 a day at most. Maybe if you normalize for population size and density it's comparable but epicenter is colloquialism that usually implies absolute numbers.
The context is important because most people have heard the word "epicenter" from earthquake stories, where the epicenter is usually singular and never migrates, thus strongly correlated in people's heads as the "start" of a major event.
The post I responded to specifically said initial epicenter. The post claimed that it was "disingenuous" to include NYC in statistics because, since they were the "initial epicenter", they basically didn't have any warning. Since NYC was not the "initial epicenter", this claim is false; they did have warning and it is perfectly fair to include them in statistics.
New York was pretty simple, the lockdown started late, when community spread had already started. At one point nearly 800 people a day were dying.
New York saw the curve decline start consistently in the beginning of May. Metrics are defined for reopening and that is in progress.
Armchair quarterbacks get the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but at the time the scope wasn’t understood and officials were worried about the impact of shutting down school breakfast/lunch programs, etc.
Places like South Dakota and Wyoming are lucky, there’s less people in those states than in my upstate NY county, and they aren’t big travel hubs. No surprise there. With other places, you should hold judgement until time has passed, the data is pretty awful in places like Florida. With political factors involved, you won’t know impacts until you have good vital record data re deaths.
The liberty argument is bunk, protecting the general welfare of the people is a core tenet of US governance. We were headed to a recession already and may be heading to a depression, but the rationale behind the lockdowns was the preserve life, and it worked.
New York sent Covid-infected patients into nursing homes, which massively inflated their death toll by subjecting the most vulnerable demographic to the disease. There’s a reason they account for 10-20% of the death toll.
In the US excluding New York, deaths have been basically flat for a month and a half. If we couldn't even stop the spread under quarantine, we're deluding ourselves if we think there's not going to be a huge spike over the next month or two. Most people are just not willing to take this seriously it seems, they flaunt the precautions, engage in all sorts of wishful thinking about 6-foot distances or cherry-picked stat declines, are unwilling to make personal or communal sacrifices. Its going to be a real shame when 1+ million americans die because we were unwilling to cut our own hair for a year.
You make it sound like cutting your own hair is the main hardship, which I suspect is not quite honest. What about being forced to walk outside in a mask, deferring medical care, not being able to hug your own {parents, grandparents, kids, grand kids} see other relatives and friends, not visiting many places you want to visit. And a pretty huge economic hit. And seeing more and more folks on the streets on the previously friendly town getting angrier and snappier; etc. etc.
I am not saying we should not "take coronavirus seriously" as you say. I do. But after taking it seriously I still see the current lockdowns in the US as counterproductive. Even if we could get this genie back into the bottle 3 months ago (which is not a given), you cannot now. Many states are open and people travel. Instead of forcing wide lockdowns we should focus on supporting those at high risk or worried and let others back to leading normal lives.
I am not aware of any restrictions on hugging your family. Either way, the virus is not going to worry about anyone's constitutional rights if they catch the virus from another family member.
> I am not aware of any restrictions on hugging your family.
If your family lives in elder supportive housing, there has been plenty of no visitor policies. Regardless, if you don't live in the same house with your family, visiting them may not be following the policies.
The point of lockdowns were to slow the spread and buy time to get more guided quarantine in place with contact tracing and to buy time for a vaccine
to be made available.
Without those things, we risk the NYC/Italy situation where the health systems locked up and you had mass death from COVID plus excess deaths due to the overwhelming hospital demand.
The risk factors are pretty widely applicable. The strategy of old people, overweight men, etc getting “support” isn’t going to work.
I just can't comprehend the whole "mask is great injustice and limitation that breaks it all down". It is almost emotional response to wearing it disproportional to actual minor inconvenience it is.
I could list commonly worn clothes and shoes that are more uncomfortable then mask.
Thinking back to my university experience - if you told me that I was going to be doing it in front of a screen, I'd have taken a gap year.
If I'd already paid and you refused to refund me, I'd use that gap year to travel to campus, administrators' homes, the lot, and let everyone know that you've stolen enormous amounts of money from hundreds of thousands.
Teenage me has a hell of a lot of energy, health, and time on their hands.
It's so ridiculous an idea as to be absurd. Do you want social breakdown? This is how you get mass riots.
Reading what's facing the US at the moment (I'm British) I honestly worry about whether there will be some sort of military standoff if the government doesn't step up _now_ and put together a coherent plan for the nation.
There are tens of millions unemployed, graduates are entering an economy that's essentially been deleted, and new students are having the knife twisted in them before they've even started.
People need _hope_. I'm angry on behalf of you guys.
Not sarcastic or cynical- chaos and violence is in Trump's express interest. He and his cohort- Bannon et al- have been saying it out loud for a long time now. They are just not taken "literally or seriously."
Re: downvote- as a factual matter Trump and cohort are saying that chaos and violence are their goals and have been for a long time. Stop being in denial.
War has been highly likely imminent since Crimea, but only overwhelmingly so (imo) since Hong Kong. I strongly feel there will be war. China and Russia both are invading other countries already. The US is splitting at the seams (likely with some bot help from the two former groups).
Ever since Hong Kong, I've been extra attentive and appreciative of the fact that this may be as close to peace as we will ever see the world again.
This. Right now. This may be as close to peace as we will ever see again.
Never-the-less, I have the utmost hope for project Earth, with or without humans.
Nazi Germany taught everyone that you can’t win a war alone and I’m not sure world alliances are strong enough that we’re in a WW1 situation. Countries continue to get upsetti spaghetti over events like Crimea, killing Soleimani, and SA starting/stopping oil production but the alliances just aren't there to back up the anger.
I don't think a major war is imminent, but the other side of your argument is that the alliances aren't very strong at the moment to oppose aggression either.
Eh I doubt it - I think people are just anxious cause we’re all cooped up but give it a year or two and people will settle back down. Coronavirus seems to have brought out the worst of the media and the internet but the real world isn’t so different than it was.
Here's the thing... it really doesn't take much to set off a tinder box. Tensions are high, people are anxious, and there is a lot of pent up unrest. We are definitely at a potential flash point.
So yea, I sort of agree, but I definitely also think the danger is higher than it seems.
I want you to be wrong. Your vision of present circumstances isn't what I want to come of age in. But I'm not sure I can definitively refute your claims. One thing that gives me hope is that the recent assassination of Soleimani didn't actually lead to war despite expectations that it could. I see all the problems you're talking about, and I don't think there are solutions, but I can hope that there will be and that things might change.
What would students do with a gap year right now? Travel? Work full time (presumably in a face-to-face service job)? I would think the only real options would be to self study or play World of Warcraft.
Generally, in an economic downturn people turn to education as a way to better themselves and wait out an economic recovery.
Probably all three - travel, self study, read, etc. That's what I'd do. Then again, I'm thinking UK.
The lockdowns here aren't such that you literally can't go outside, and the minimum cost of living (due to our safety nets) really isn't that high for a youngster willing to live on beans.
Education is great. I'll be learning until my brain gives out on me.
But if you want to tell me that my first year of university just became sitting in front of a screen and I'll be paying for it - yeah, sod that, I'll take the tent and the backpack and see you all when people have regained sanity.
In the outside world (including University) people do things like obtaining life long friendships, meeting partners, generally just sniffing the flowers of life.
If I had the pressure of my course and I was stuck in a box I'd go mental before week 3. No comraderie, no friends, nothing, it's all pixels mate. лол.
The chance of a college kid dying from coronavirus is exceedingly small. If they aren't sick in some special way (severe diabetes, HIV), then why are we even worried? Isn't this just an easy way to let the virus pass through a huge chunk of the population while they are away from their older, more vulnerable family members?
You're forgetting about the increased risks to campus workers, administrators, staff, professors, people with compromised immune systems, people who live or near or with the elderly or people with compromised immune systems, and the workers at local businesses just to name a few.
This is an interesting thought. However, the risk of spread to the communities that house said colleges is greatly increased. I got to school in Boston and can only imagine the spread via off campus activities, public transport, and use of community spaces. We could be sparing our parents and endangering a whole other population. But college students could be far enough removed from their communities for this to make sense, don’t know of anything to back that up though.
This is a USA-specific problem, but a lot of students are too poor to have health insurance. Getting covid for these young people would ruin their life permanently at a very young age.
The university I went to (USC) required that all students had to either submit proof of insurance or pay additional fees as part of their tuition to join the university's health plan. Not having health insurance was not an option if you wanted to enroll.
(This was about 15 years ago, though I just checked and they still have this policy.)
That’s a good point, but I thought laws were amended to allow them to start on their parents medical plan until 26 years old? While not the only cohort I imagine this is the bulk of university students
People attending 4 year universities generally have access to student health services and economical subsidized insurance-- in fact, are generally -required- to purchase the same as a condition of enrollment. (Not to mention any coverage they may get as part of staying on parents' health plans).
Even if the risk is objectively small, I think even those rare cases lead to an extreme response when you look at the way colleges react to other small risks. It would probably kill many times more students than alcohol poisoning does, to give some comparison. Alcohol poisoning deaths are incredibly rare but colleges spend a day teaching students about it. Scale that response up proportionately and it doesn’t surprise that a college shuts down to keep a few students from dying.
> It would probably kill far more college students than alcohol poisoning does, to give some comparison.
Maybe slightly more, but not drastically so. About 15 per 100,000 college students die each year from alcohol --- poisoning, motor vehicle accidents, other alcohol-related accidents. Compare to a death rate of about 30 per 100k people aged 18-35 infected with COVID-19 (and it's much lower in the 18-24 set than the entire 18-35 group, but we don't have a good number for how much lower).
And it's not like 100% of students are going to catch it in an academic year (some have already had it, herd immunity, etc).
I went to a college where students were required to live on campus and banned from having a car. My experience after attending multiple of these programs is that the numbers showing the dangers of drunk driving in the college age cohort are misrepresented as measuring the risk of alcohol poisoning among college students. Students were pretty much told that going to a frat party put them in mortal danger. In reality, every college student who dies of alcohol poisoning earns a local news story, and if the incidence were anything like 15 out of 100000 college students per year, the news would be full of such stories.
I worked as an RA - it was my job to enact policies addressing various risks facing the student body - and my perception is that extreme overreaction was the norm.
I sez: "About 15 per 100,000 college students die each year from alcohol --- poisoning, motor vehicle accidents, other alcohol-related "
But then you act as if I said they were all alcohol poisoning, when I was pretty explicit about the number.
Fatal alcohol poisoning (actually this is a number for unintentional poisoning in which alcohol is involved, so it's a tad broader than pure alcohol poisoning) in college is about 4 per 100,000 annually, for clarity. It is possible that the COVID-19 death rate could be lower than this in the college student cohort for 2020-2021.
> and if the incidence were anything like 15 out of 100000 college students per year, the news would be full of such stories.
K.
Your point re: colleges with few students with cars is a good one, but survey data indicates that more college students aged 18-21 and 21-24 drive under the influence than the general population 18-21 and 21-24.
Dying is not the only risk from Coronavirus. There are many people who survived but will never fully recover (link below). Many SARS victims were left with long term damage to their lungs, bones, or nervous system, and we're already seeing evidence the same may be true for Coronavirus.
The US military initially barred any coronavirus survivor from enlisting, for life, regardless of how long ago or their current health. That's something they never considered doing for the flu. They've since walked back on that, and I can't help but wonder if it's because they realized it would exclude too much of their potential recruitment pool.
You're talking about this US military policy like it wasn't just another panicked reaction at the height of the crisis.
The vast vast vast majority of young people with coronavirus don't have any of those long-term side-effects. Most of them don't get more than the sniffles, if any symptoms at all.
If you've looked at the anecdotes about how readily the virus spreads, you'll realize that avoiding people until a vaccine is ready is ridiculous. The public health plan, all along, has been for most people to get the virus, but at a slower rate ("flatten the curve"). Being this deathly scared of the virus for that long just isn't a feasible plan.
As long as the long term effects aren't even well understood because a) there has not even been a long term of a post-pandemic world yet, there's not even been a mid-term and b) research is in full swing, there will be any number of medical results and outcomes that may or may not happen to a particular group of subjects. Unless you're OK with being conciously part of a given subject group and/or want to be the first that gets it in this grand experiment, taking less risk still means taking less risk and/or delaying disease and possibly changing negative outcomes into positive ones.
It’s important to remember that death isn’t the only price to pay here. A sizable University outbreak might still see an unacceptable number of serious illnesses, and in Covid’s case, those cases can take months to fully resolve. The idea that healthy people aren’t seeing serious complications is dangerously false.
If you shut down all sports, all but something like the 5 top sports universities (and I think I'm being generous--if I remember correctly only UT-Austin is demonstrably profitable) would see a net profit--sometimes significantly so since the coaches are often some of the highest paid employees.
Profit is what's left over after salaries. Break-even sports would still be paying plenty of people for their time and giving them jobs to feed their families.
2. There are substantial knock-on effects for university donations during big years that are not counted in the profit or loss of an athletic department. These benefits are spread wide throughout the NCAA. Winning a championship (even league rather than NCAA), beating a rival, or just making the NCAA tourney in basketball can be a boost.
3. Sustained excellence can change the face of a university in ways that money cannot. The best recent example is the change of the student body at Alabama during Saban’s tenure.
Just some ideas that go beyond sports revenue dollars.
The teaching facility that I work, just a few days before the lock down it was business as usual. We all knew that we were supposed to distance, but how? The cafe was chock full of students, the libraries full to bursting. All lectures full. Tiny corridoors, limited parking, 20 busses full of students....
And we ALL knew it was crazy.
We can't magic up new buildings, or new classrooms or lecture halls. We lecture 20+ students in rooms that seat .... wait for it .... 20(ish) students. I have no idea how to social distance in there.
Half students in? How do I teach half a class, then the other half? Do they magic up a second Monday for me to teach in? And half students, they are still less than 2m apart.
Outside? Teaching IT and coding? Huh?
Exams?
Busses?
The car park?
Older / elderly lecturers - especially those in management. What do with they then?
A fair few of our students are nurses so they know the risks and are happy to inform everyone.
I think we'll open and just hope for the best. Some people are going to get sick and there's not much we can do to avoid it. Unless we stop education for a year.
Schools are screwed, this is just the perfect storm. Go spend $35yr on a middling state school or top 10 online program for $20k. Pretty sure the cachet of top 10 schools will make it an easy decision. They have tons of brand potential to unleash.
Yep. Thousands of schools are going to close down in the next decade unless they get a bailout. The elite schools will be just fine, this will all happen at 2nd and 3rd rate schools. No one is paying those prices for a severely reduced experience unless the brand is incredibly strong.
Maybe this is a perfect opportunity to cut costs and make college more affordable in the process. Higher education is getting quite expensive and I believe these costs should be rationalized. If you take the average cost of some higher end schools (say 150k) and look at the opportunity cost of investing that in the stock market for 40 years. That’s about 15x return (7% for 40 years). Thats $2.25M at retirement. Probably better than most end up with, no?
A couple reasons I don't think that's the correct comparison:
* There's a huge consumption component to college
* Nobody's lending you 150k to invest in the stock market when you're 18. (Not sure we should be lending it to them for college, of course.)
You're missing the point. The argument that your money would get you farther if you invest it over 40 years is inherently flawed because most people who don't go to college don't do that. Your earning power is higher with a college degree.
I never finished mine, and it took me a long time and a lot more work to catch up to my peers financially. I might never have done it if I didn't get lucky and make a few right choices in my 30a.
Kind of apples to oranges. Take the difference in salary between a college graduate and a high school graduate over those 40 years. Factor in inflation. Invest that at a 7% return. I'm sure it will easily dwarf $2.25M.
Why don't people have millions invested by the time they retire? Because no matter how much money people make (up to a certain point, depending on the person), they spend it. If you give the average high school graduate $150K and tell them to invest it for 40 years, I pretty much guarantee that it will be gone long before the 40 years are up.
To be fair, I don't have millions invested and I'm scarily close to retirement. So I'm not trying to be critical of others ;-)
I know people who retired as millionaires on a lower middle class salary doing just that - living below their means, and regularly investing the difference.
It does work.
But if you spent all your income, you'll never have money.
I suspect all you can argue nowadays is that it _did_ work. With housing costs increasing faster than inflation, forcing people to spend money on rent instead, which has no investment potential, I don't think it still works.
> Your own house isn't an investment because you always need to live somewhere
Ehhh, yes and no. Plenty of people who bought nice-ish houses in the Bay Area in the '70s and '80s sold them in 2014-2018 and retired outside the bay with a nice extra pile of cash.
You need housing, but you don't need a crazy expensive house in a crazy expensive area.
If not that it's an insurance against future rent payments and it creates different options. The total cost of ownership with a high likelyhood for an well-priced and appropriate property with appropriate mortgage payments is lower than runaway rents in hcol areas. Lastly, you can trade property value and QoL by neglecting upkeep at any time to make up a shortfall in income and even "run down" the property over quite some time, at extreme levels not even using utilities, which is not an option if you're paying rent -- try neglecting your rent payments.
Residential real estate is usually a good investment even if you happen to live in it. When you retire you can access the equity through a reverse mortgage.
> Take the difference in salary between a college graduate and a high school graduate over those 40 years.
There is no difference. Incomes have held stagnant for the entirety of those 40 years, despite the transition from people of equal calibre being only high school graduates 40 years ago to being college graduates today. $0 invested at 7% still leaves you with $0.
Saving for 30 years at 7% has happened precicly once in modern history post war when the world grew from 2bn to 7bn. Why do people keep repeating this? Where do you think you'll get 7%?
There’s an old story about a guy taking a smoke break with his non-smoking colleague.
“How long have you been smoking for?” the colleague asks.
“Thirty years,” says the smoker.
“Thirty years!” marvels the co-worker. “That costs so much money. At a pack a day, you’re spending $1,900 a year. Had you instead invested that money at an 8% return for the last 30 years, you’d have $250,000 in the bank today. That’s enough to buy a Ferrari.”
It's a naïve joke though because while few of the non-smoking colleagues are driving around in Ferraris many of them are discretely funding a secure retirement. So the joke really is on the smoker.
As a student, it sounds more and more necessary these days.
I am a student from Rural India, studying at an "engineering" "college" (obviously in urban area). The minimum cost for getting into engineering degrees is too much for rural income scales here. And the quality of education is PATHETIC (everything is rote learning based and everyone is trying to game the system, because edu system is so mechanical).
Since the formal education is so costly and ineffective[0], many people like me would benefit from a commoditization through online medium. I started learning programming one year before I joined the college in Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) program. And having seen the teaching methods and rat race, I am pretty sure I can learn better if I go on my own. But there are too many stakeholders in the ineffective process, that would prevent such a thing from happening.
But even if they conduct college through online classes for the next year, I would be happy, because I would save on accommodation expenses by staying at home :).
[0] The ineffective four years of education is probably why many people complain about Indian SWEs. The entire thing is rat race for sustaining jobs - then mechanically clearing exams, copying GitHub repos, lying on resumes etc... If all of these people chose their subjects with genuine interest, about only 10% would be studying in CSE and "Indian SWE" would've had a better image worldwide.
Flipped classroom should be explored more, both for effective learning experience and lower costs. In high-demand fields like CS, ML, and Software Engineering, experts who can communicate well are both rare and well compensated in industry. Many if not most colleges cannot afford or unwilling to pay competitively for them.
Learning from top experts who teach online classes that can be accessed from many institutions while having local tutors would allow students to learn from experts who are good teachers and get in-person help as needed.
And flipped classroom should be a familiar concept to anyone that has taken a 'seminar' class in college. Basically, everyone reads assigned material and then the teacher leads discussion during class. Flipped tends to use video instead of written material but the classroom experience is similar.
There are some similarities but I'd say well-designed MOOCs are quite a bit better that written materials for most students. Videos with regular quizzes & some automatic grading provide semi-interactive experience that is much more motivating to most than reading passive text.
For some, MOOCs can be better than live lectures. Many students dare not ask any questions in a lecture room anyway. They can pause to think, review materials if they get a quiz question wrong, and ask questions more openly in the MOOC forum.
In addition, the MOOC system can record student's performance in quizzes and some even have an AI designed to detect cheating, e.g. whether the typing pattern of the user is anomalous.
I think MOOCs are as good as a certain kind of live lectures; the kind where the professor copies the text on the whiteboard and students copy it into their notebooks, then repeat it in quizzes and exams.
But MOOCs can't compete with the best live lectures, where students have an opportunity for meaningful discussion, challenging and original projects, and building relationships.
I think I would agree although, but MOOCs can compete with the best lectures, they just can’t compete with the best interactive discussion. Can that be recreated or so we need intimate physical rooms with low class sizes to achieve it?
Decades ago, when I was young, we called this kind of thing "homework". It didn't need any kind of brand identity back then.
(In case anyone else is as pedantic as me about definitions: yes, there were two kinds of homework. The first was you read something at home, and then discussed it in the next class. The other was you learnt something and when practiced it at home afterwards.)
For anyone in India who is finding their current CS education ineffective: Please consider applying to the online software development bootcamp I founded: https://McLarenCollege.in
We don't charge any up-front fees. We only get paid as a share of your income after you graduate (or complete at least 60% of the course) so we have a strong incentive to provide effective tuition.
I'm glad it was posted. I like alternative methods. Everything is a shameless plug about something. In your case, you're just shamlessly plugging the established college industrial complex. Sorry. I like the alt-ed world.
I like the alt-ed world too, but the person you’re replying to is correct: a 12 week boot camp is the equivalent of what? maybe one or two courses? Not even the same ballpark
You get a job. I’m not implying you don’t work. I guess we need to compare marginal increase of college vs non-college salaries and career trajectories to be fair.
I have always been of the opinion that if colleges accept federally backed student loans they should be required to offer course credits at a federally mandated rate. As in, many have no problem the government dictating what hospitals can charge it for services and goods so why cannot the same apply to colleges?
You can guarantee that colleges would fall in line quickly. there would be also attempts to circumvent the charges but those can be dealt with. they could though try to up sell you on amenities you may not otherwise have chosen to pay for but do now through high tuition.
So summary, Federal student loans only apply to programs with set rates per course credit and degrees. fall outside of these degrees; lets be honest there are some degree programs we should never back; and you pay your own way and colleges can charge what they want.
> many have no problem the government dictating what hospitals can charge it for services and goods so why cannot the same apply to colleges?
Many having no problem with it does not mean it has happened or that it would work. You are talking about the only other industry in the US with similar cost increases to colleges.
Another option would be to financially penalize schools every time one of their students defaults on a federally backed student loan. That would incent schools to keep debt loads to a reasonable level.
1. It’s only fair to compare the retirement amount vs the average marginal increase of salary obtained from having a college degree. Not sure this is a large number these days.
2. Most don’t pay full ride but for those that do it’s hefty. And also, those that can afford it, typically have a lot of money to begin with.
3. I raise this question because unlike the smoker comment, I can determine if I just want to put money away for my kids (in a trust) and give them that lump sum when they are older (not 60 but maybe much older) as opposed to pay for college. I likely won’t do this but for argument sake, if you have a motivated kid, I’d bet they’d find a way to learn what they need to learn.
4. As from the “Silicon Valley” show. “The real value of education is intangible!”. I do think I gained a good amount from college but I think a majority of that was social/independence growth rather than learning. Although, one or two of my computer science courses really got burned in my head and I believe added a ton of value to my way of thinking.
Anyway, original comment was a bit in jest but it’s still an important discussion because I think we should be paying for education and not “branding” which, let’s be honest, is a lot what school is used for - a market-accepted currency for purchasing a good career.
The math on this doesn't add up because your career doesn't just have to finance your retirement, it also has to finance the decades of your life before that.
Sure, if you had 150k at age 18 and weren't going to need another cent until you turn 65, you could drop that money in the stock market and wait for riches to come to you. But as it is, you're going to need some kind of job. And while there's a few pleasant careers available without college these days (software engineering being one of them), for most jobs that aren't heavy physical labor or minimum wage drudgery, you're going to need that college degree.
Every college is desperately trying to justify charging MORE in this process. Goes to show how out of touch the system is. (They have legitimate reasons, but still)
The spread of Covid-19 appears to be heavily dependent on individuals who are "super-spreaders" and on "super-spreading events". For example, the guy who was involved in horse-racing at Yonkers, the choir practice in Washington, the conference at Boston.
So a simple model where each case results in R new infections doesn't capture this at all. Instead, networks of infection appear to be like other social networks where some nodes are much more highly connected than other nodes.
The task that colleges face is to ensure that students with large social networks don't infect their contacts and to ensure that large events conducive to infection don't happen. Otherwise, no amount of wiping doorknobs and fogging classrooms with disinfectant will be effective.
I get why this is bad for universities. For students though, the solution seems simple: take a gap year if you're just about to start, or a semester off if you're already in school. Gap years are tremendously valuable life experiences that for some reason Americans don't like, but that is really popular among Europeans. The value of university is primarily in the social bonds it forms and life experiences it provides (and the piece of paper you get at the end, for some). The education part itself is rarely applicable to real life anyways. What's the point of overpaying to slave over online classes and a compromised experience? Just wait it out…
The only problem about taking a gap year though is that it’s not clear what that will he like either this year...
Travel restrictions are probably still going to be around for some time, and the likelihood of getting a part time job to fund it is much lower than usual.
This is not a bad idea, and the way to spend that time may be youth corps. There are calls for youth corp in the US[1] and the UK[2], and it does seem like a valid way to contribute, learn and stay productive while universities arrange the new normal.
Gap years are a luxury for the privileged. A lot of American students lack the funds to sit around for a year. You can't get a student loan unless you're actually studying in an accredited school.
People who take courses which are online will be entering the workforce with a devalued degree. Employers already frown when presented with online courses but now the whole period will be like so. This whole period of online education is troubling as kids educated during this period will be disadvantaged academically and socially.
It's worse than that. I believe that in many cases the social connections developed in college are one of the most important collateral of education, sometimes rivalling degrees themselves. A fully online education don't enable networking at the same level. People from privileged backgrounds might not notice much of a difference (they can socialise in other ways) but students that could really benefit from strong social connections will suffer the most.
Will it still be that way though? B.C. (Before Covid) the thinking was you took online courses because you "couldn't get into a real college", but for a few years at least _everyone_ will be having online classes.
Huh, this is your opinion but it’s not true in reality. In many cases, you won’t even know that a degree was online. Some schools use a different title while others don’t. And as someone who does a lot of phone interviewers, who cares? Can they do the job?
I’ve been waiting patiently for the other shoe to drop on college tuition for more than a decade now. I still have another ten years until I’m in the thick of it again myself.
Unfortunately history so far has shown that tuition is surprisingly immune to what I would consider severe shocks to the rest of the economy. So I watch in shock as the price continues to skyrocket...
I am throughly horrified at the difference between the approaches of American and European schools. Most European schools have already moved fall semester online while American schools are scrambling to preserve their tuitions.
Many American schools have little choice. If they lose a substantial fraction of their students (especially rich international students) for a year, they may very well have to close, or at least decimate their programs.
Let it be. Lay off admins, restructure their loans, Stop building new buildings, lower costs, and use their endowments to fund the difference. And get rid of some programs
Everyone already knows the answer which is that the most adaptable schools will generate new revenue streams offering more online degrees. It’s stupid to assume that all students are willing to take the risk to show up in person when there isn’t even a vaccine. Most schools are scared about the money they’re going to lose yet they’re forgetting how much they could make if they just decided to be more adaptable and flexible.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadI feel like that needs to be WHEN not IF. It's not an easy decision and I'm glad I'm not in any position to make it. But certainly, it's when, not if.
I participate in the research side of universities in various ways and this is exactly how it happens. The bureaucracy is absolutely the enemy when trying to get research done or preventing some arsehole in management from removing a useful service.
I am currently trying to get hired as a research assistant (basically a vague title covering people who do research as part of a lab but without the ambitions of an academic) and lab heads will routinely try to source talent in a way that avoids the official university hiring policy. They do this because the official way is slow, stupid, and gets administration people involved who just get in the way. Not only that, they deal with plenty of university administration already, and they think it is mostly useless or needlessly complicated.
Losing a year of revenue will straight up kill a bunch of universities, just like it would kill most businesses. However, the following year there will still be the same number of 18 year olds who want to go to college as usual, and so surviving universities will grow much bigger.
Bigger universities will grow bigger administrative arms, which will further isolate the leadership from students and academic and enable even more extractive policies, both because increased social distance makes cruelty more thinkable, and because the loss of competition makes it harder for students and academics to find an alternative.
In other words, wiping out a bunch of businesses reduces competition, and less competitive markets are more monopolistic.
That’s by no means certain at all. It’s plausible that many will realise that the degree isn’t as valuable as it once was and pursue a trade instead.
Administrative bloat? Some of it, like the diversity infrastructure, is mandated from without (regulations and/or legal concerns). Some, like vanity recycling programs, will indeed get whacked.
In truth, though, the reforms that would really matter are (1) reduce college loan subsidies to a rational level, and (2) increase state funding of public universities.
Why should colleges be expected to be safer than K-8? Why must they resort to impromptu web solutions?
Also, if there's a consensus on risk and response, shouldn't that be coordinated at a central level instead of institutions each making their own calls?
Whereas you can close all colleges for a year, with a much smaller impact.
I'm not talking about coding boot camps, I'm talking about institutions that are more similar to trade schools... Or European universities. All that you need to educate people is a large hall, an instructor, and a whiteboard.
I don't mean to be banal but the business of colleges is not "education". A large hall, an instructor, and a whiteboard is not competitive from the perspective of the customer base, nor is it attractive from the perspective of those who would populate the whiteboard with whatever.
What parents and students pay for is essentially a moderately supervised, branded, summer sleepaway camp experience (full year) filled with nice sounding time-occupying activities and vague, often unfulfilled, and also unaccountable promises that at the end of the camp experience someone will be willing to pay to utilize the time of the student, rather than the student/parents paying to have their time occupied.
There are various ways to creatively package the elements of that experience into a product, but in the "lean" formulations- like Lambda School- there is no real estate, no large hall. Real estate is expensive.
I think what we actually would see- are already seeing- in the closure of the bespoke, idiosyncratic small private colleges likely to die is the chain restaurant version of the bespoke, idiosyncratic small family restaurants that have largely gone by the wayside in American culture.
They will have a consistent brand, will cost maybe a little less, will pay their mostly expendable teaching staff considerably less, with no tenure (though performance bonuses and maybe equity grants for the stars, the way any sensibly managed business operates these days), with a manufactured curriculum delivered consistently across the "franchises" and with lots of entertainment and parent-appealing safety/oversight options, lots of addons for extra fees (semester abroad, anyone?), and some structure around the time-occupying activities that may- no guarantees- lead to eventual employment.
Welcome to Olive Garden, can I take your classroom order please?
Mediocre consistency at scale is how America works.
Cheers.
I do think the operational dynamics of colleges have changed, and the parent comment about the essence of education being someone at a whiteboard in a room- I just don't think that's sufficiently true anymore. It's not what people pay for.
But more to the point-
The Olive Garden analogy is what (I think) will happen. That prognostication is in line generally with the business trajectory that the US solves for.
All businesses are ultimately scaled and financialized.
So- as small private colleges will be the first to fail, their brands and their nostalgia will be picked up by the educational equivalent of restaurant chain operations. Chain operations will produce a product people will pay for- lots of people in the US go to chain restaurants- but the end result is going to be considerably different than what used to be called the college experience.
There is no legal or financial machinery in the US to defend the small. And that's too bad.
Cheers.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/ra...
According to a website called “US news”. The US definitely has a few colleges in the top 20 say but so do a few other countries.
Next up, "liberal arts" today is not the same thing as it was a generation ago, and it's debatable whether it's still doing that much except credentialism (Bryan Caplan certainly thinks it isn't). This is not, by the way, a dog-whistle at social justice: I think that college SJ is a symptom of a deeper structural problem with the current university system.
The 25% who are going to fail (if the poster two levels above is right) are probably also not the Ivy League. In the UK at least, there are lots of places lower down the league tables who in my opinion could contribute a lot more to the nation if they were good trade schools rather than bad universities. Less sure about the US situation, but I think it was the case until not that long ago that there were ways to power and influence that didn't go through a university - including many examples of past presidents.
I think too many forget the risk of having ~1/4th of your youth population sitting around with no money, no goals and no life.
Its a powder keg and you dont know the likelyhood of ignition or in which direction sharpnel will go.
I would imagine with massive closures and unemployment that supply of summer jobs is close to zero now.
I suppose in our kids generation there is a mitigating circumstance- the wide availability of legal teenage heroin aka video games. Today’s “bread and circus” of inexpensive, endless content and games will keep us placated indefinitely as far as I can tell.
The market value of US endowments in 2016 was $542B, of which 120 of the richest accounted for a whopping $401B or 74% of the total endowment value in the US.[1]
The 26% remainder ($51B) was split between 2832 4-yr degree-granting colleges[2] for an average endowment (excluding the top 120 richest) of ~$19M/college.
Only 4% of 4-yr degree-granting colleges have endowments >$750M.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=73
[2] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84
Speaking as someone building one of those impromptu web solutions- it is a bad situation all around. For many colleges if they do not reopen in the fall they never will again, due to finances. And many are seeing demand from their students to reopen. So it is a matter of survival to do it- in that case it has to be done as safely and with as much consideration for harm reduction as possible. But there is little time and many people are working 24/7 just to get to "impromptu."
In terms of "centralized", the virus is a highly local problem. It spreads and has to be dealt with locally. Nuances unique to each locality dictate the mitigation measures. Hope that helps. Cheers.
College though is a real education, and I want it to be face to face. I (and them) accept the risk, based on what is known today. My 2c.
You’d be surprised all the things you learn k-8.
If you ask a current PhD student how hard things are and then wait 10 years and ask how hard their PhD was you will get totally different answers.
Very much depends on the school district. In many urban school districts, it's better than being in the house, but its hardly enriching.
Nobody is suggesting the end of classroom education. The question is whether doing the best we can with distance learning for a time and postponement of classroom eduction until better treatments and/or vaccines come on line is a better choice. It is really not a big sacrifice to ensure the safety of about 4 million teachers and maybe another million or two staff persons.
Assuming the death rate is optimistically only 0.2%, that is about 12,000 teachers and staff deaths. Ignoring the thousands of other deaths originating from these cases, are you really saying that 12,000 deaths is a realistic price to pay so your child can go back into the classroom NOW rather than next year? Really?
The fact that this would be a very bad choice seems an "obvious fact and not open for debate."
Unless most of your teachers are living in nursing homes, your numbers are way off.
Similarly, whatever factor you apply to count deaths, you can only count deaths above the baseline when considering the change in school policy.
It’s quite far from your side of “obvious fact and not open for debate”, IMO.
Not with that attitude, nope sure isn’t.
It is up for debate. I know for a fact you’re wrong. I was educated outside of any schooling system until the 9th grade. I learned basic math and was a voracious reader. I walked into 9th grade without missing a beat.
I'm not sure this is true. From my own experience studying math, I often heard people remark upon how hard it must be and how only a small subset of people would ever be able to understand the concepts in a graduate level math course. I don't agree with this at all.
In my opinion, the reality is that learning is incremental, and everything new builds upon something that you've previously learned (hopefully). This is particularly true with math. I don't think that I had to work any harder to learn linear algebra in undergrad than I did to learn differential calc in highschool. I think the delta in difficulty between geometry and algebra, pre-calc and calc 1, diff eq and real analysis, is basically the same. But that is only true if you have a solid understanding of whatever came before.
This is of course a minor nitpick with your last point, because I agree with your overall point that k-8 learning is important. I think it's important precisely because of the reasons I mentioned before: you need to have a strong foundation in 'last years' concepts if you are going to succeed in learning this years.
The school system is enormously wasteful of time. It takes about 40 hours to teach a nine year old to read English and about the same time to cover the primary school Math curriculum with a 12 year old.
If we took Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development seriously we wouldn’t spend so much time teaching children things they’ll pick up tens of times faster in three years. I don’t know what primary school would look like if we cared about children learning but it wouldn’t look much like the current system.
ZPD works, but nobody has been able to implement this at-scale, let alone in the K-8 public school system.
Maybe my education was just garbage, but none of the stuff in k-6 was built upon. They threw out my foundation in numbers and handed me a list of valid rules in the form of equations and identities. If you do the quadratic formula, you get the roots. Cos^2 + sin^2 = tan, etc.
I was on the track to math, sure. But that’s because I was good at memorizing useless trivia and utilizing it on tests, not because I was good at math. Same goes for most of my classes. There was one dude that actually got it, but he definitely didn’t get it from our teachers.
The teaching at colleges has stayed largely the same as it ever has been, with few of the professors actually passionate about transferring the knowledge to the next set of students. You only get a great professor every once in a great while, most of the rest are unintelligible or disinterested. I’m not willing to pay 150k to get one great educator maybe.
With Wikipedia, YouTube science communicators, and videos of actually great lecturers across the years, the knowledge portion of college education is covered for free. The other benefit of college is networking with people who might remember you enough to help you get a job in the future. For many it also increases their exposure to different thought, which is valuable in today’s society. I feel like something should replace college on the social aspects too, as it’s a hugely inefficient system for it right now.
At this point I see another explosion of coronavirus cases as just math. I mean, it's like stamping out most of a fire so you're left with only a few burning embers, so you say "Great, time to reopen, lets dump these giant bags of dry leaves onto these embers."
Yes, many (most?) people are still staying home where I live, but for many places that have opened up I see zero change in behavior - there were some viral videos last weekend of packed bars and events. I contrast that with other places (like Germany) that actually appear to have a plan in place of how they will be able to open up safely. AFAICT our plan in the US appears to be "thoughts and prayers".
I agree I think a second wave is imminent.
It would get worse, there, too, if people did return to normal and cases spiked. Versus cities that are now in "new normal" and still full of people being much more cautious.
If cases didn't spike - there are those who believe the flattening of case rates isn't a result of behavioral changes but was some hidden factor - then "the new normal" will continue, but you won't be back to the old one.
If cases do spike, "the new normal" will get even less close to the old normal, because more and more people will self-select back into staying home.
Otherwise you have to get a way more coherent government plan to get on top of the spread. Like tracking and finding and isolating cases fast. And doing more to protect the people in essential jobs which are conducive for big outbreaks.
Technically, reopening phase 1 doesn't begin until Monday here.
I pointed out to my kids that sometimes you can, and sometimes you can't, estimate how dangerous a behavior is based on whether or not lots of people are doing it. Especially where there's a delay between the behavior and observable consequences. E.g., smoking cigarettes in the 1930's, or unprotected promiscuous sex in the 1980's, or (I'm guessing) pre-pandemic behaviors right now.
imagine if a terrorist attack killed over 100,000 people in just a couple of months. instead, we're just like "wasn't so bad" after doing hardly anything.
it's an embarrassment in the u.s. to see people in south korea and china returning back to life as almost normal without danger. and the numbers are incredibly damning to the u.s.
By the way, SK just kicked the can down the road, they are continuing to get spikes because they have no herd immunity: "Coronavirus: South Korea closes schools again after biggest spike in weeks" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52845015
i didn't. i said imagine the situation. i'm saying that people would pay attention and treat it seriously.
> Stop pretending that governments can regulate viruses out of existence
isn't that exactly what south korea did?
the point is that there is no excusing the u.s. response to the virus.
> By the way, SK just kicked the can down the road, they are continuing to get spikes because they have no herd immunity
point me to scientific evidence of herd immunity. or any evidence they've kicked the can down the road. look at their graphs and compare them to the u.s. how in the world is their response kicking the can down the road but the u.s.' isn't? that quite literally makes no sense.
You act as if the pandemic is over; the places that never shutdown or had light restrictions largely were hit later and, though they are behind, also haven't flattened the curve (and, many of the places that reopened early and rapidly, rather than gradually, are also seeing rebounds already.) They may not have yet seen overwhelmed hospitals, but a number of places in both of those groups that didn't before are nearing that point now.
> They have nothing under control
i think you have a vastly different definition of "under control" than i do.
> Their population is still vulnerable and has no antibodies.
again, do you have scientific evidence that backs such a claim up? i'm not claiming it doesn't exist, but it'd be nice if people making implications based upon such claims provide evidence for them.
> The U.S. did not have a monolithic response. Many states never shut down, and never experienced overrun hospitals. Many states had light restrictions and never experienced overrun hospitals. Some states sent sick people to nursing homes and then had overrun hospitals
what is your point, exactly?
In general, a contagious virus, like COVID-19, can be stopped in only one of three ways:
(1) by acquiring herd immunity, which for most viruses requires exposure of 30-95% of the population (check HIT values for various diseases in wikipedia; initial COVID estimates are somewhere in 29-80%). Neither SK nor China is there yet. Even Sweden or Belarus are not there yet. Even Africa is unlikely to be there yet.
(2) by completely stamping it out (with aggressive decontamination, quarantines, etc.). Again, neither SK nor China is there (this is obvious, they do not even claim it; see school re-closing in SK, Jilin flare up in China, etc.)
(3) by vaccination. Again, no vaccinations in SK, China or anywhere for this matter.
So coronavirus is not "under control" anywhere. We might just accept that and focus on some other things that would be just as nice to get under control: heart disease, cancer, opioid addiction, etc. Just my 2c.
For example, many countries kept mandatory smallpox vaccinations long after the disease was eradicated within their borders because otherwise a single traveler can wreak havoc. Check for example smallpox reintroduction to Yugoslavia in 1972 by a single pilgrim. A quick martial law and quarantines helped contain it, but even then it caused, according to Wikipedia, 175 infections and 35 deaths.
If COVID-19 is as virulent as it is claimed to be I would not bet on NZ staying COVID-free after travel restarts. My 2c.
Japan and China both managed to regulate the virus out of existence with more success than we have had at stopping terrorist attacks, doesn't seem like all that bad of a comparison to me.
Herd immunity kicks in at somewhere around 60-75% recovered, IIRC.
Unless the asymptomatic infection rate is at least an order of magnitude higher than anything remotely suggested, there's no possible way the US is approaching herd immunity. We're not even to 5% infected, let alone 50%.
Any amount of immunity or resistance within the population will reduce the effective reproduction rate of the virus. This effect becomes more significant as the immunity rate increases.
Herd immunity is a colloquial term which refers to the point where there's so much immunity that the effective reproduction rate <1 and new infection clusters die out. The percentage of the population which needs to be immune to get R<0 depends on many factors, consider that many countries have managed to achieve this with near zero population immunity.
For example - if we imagine a hypothetical society which could indefinitely maintain measures like social distancing and mask wearing, the effective reproduction number will be low to begin with; the population immunity required to get to R<0 will therefore be lower.
Please start here before spreading additional misinformation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
Flagged.
When did the first wave even end?
The universe tends toward maximum irony. If I had a nickel for every time I heard some variant of "That won't happen here"...
These aren't "I want a house with 3 stories and I can only build two" style liberties. These are the "if I don't have these I literally do not have any liberty" incursions on liberties. The important ones.
On average, stricter measures seem correlated with higher mortality, not lower. That doesn't mean the measures kill people, just that governments don't tend to impose them until stuff gets bad. It's very difficult to disentangle the effects of the intervention from the effects of the pre-existing environment.
It's also disingenuous to include New York because it was the initial epicenter on the Western hemisphere and the majority of those dead were infected before complete lock down procedures could be implemented or from unavoidable close contact with family or building tenants.
There's a lot we don't know here. I wish people would admit and accept that, instead of looking for false confidence, finding it, and then arguing with people who found a different falsely confident answer.
According to Worldometer Japan has tested ~284k people while New York and California have combined tested almost four million despite together having half the population of Japan. Last time I saw excess mortality statistics a few weeks ago they were lagging with several prefectures missing and bad normalization for aging and other factors.
Assuming the numbers are accurate, I'm more interested in how South Dakota and Wyoming are doing so much worse than Japan with such a low population density. I suspect the answer lies in the crumbling rural health infrastructure.
> There's a lot we don't know here. I wish people would admit and accept that, instead of turning this into yet another polarized political debate.
Mortality, population density, and basic division are not political and if by themselves they're polarizing, then we're too far gone already.
So what could South Dakota and Wyoming's public health system be doing that's worse than Japan? I don't know the answer, but it's not clear to me at all that the difference is in their government responses vs. some aspect of their initial situations.
I gave deaths per capita because that's the probability that someone in that state will have died of coronavirus, which is what most people care about directly. Your (deaths/people)/(people/area) has no corresponding direct significance. To then call that "the relevant number" overstates the importance of population density, and also models population density badly when it's non-uniform (as you note for NYC). I agree that population density is an important factor, just not as determinative as your post would seem to imply.
Oh, and looks like you quoted my post before I edited it, sorry. But I believe false confidence is polarizing and would like to see less of it, as uncomfortable as the true uncertainty may be.
I'm saying I believe their numbers are inaccurate because they're undertesting and stats I could use to validate them (overall number of deaths to calculate seasonal excess mortality) are also currently inaccurate for unrelated reasons. I agree that the number of deaths will be impossible to hide in an open society like Japan but for bureaucratic reasons it will take a while to compile and validate those stats before normalizing them enough to compare between years let alone nations. Until then, I'm not convinced and any argument based on Japan as an example is also suspect.
> To then call that "the relevant number" overstates the importance of population density, and also models population density badly when it's non-uniform (as you note for NYC).
Uhm, what? Deaths per million lumps Wyoming in with New York City, making it even less accurate to what people care about. Manhattan will not be reopening on the same schedule as some town on the outskirts of Fargo. Someone in the middle of a dense city does not face the same risk as someone whose closest neighbor is 2 miles away. Also, it's a virus. There's almost a century of medicine and public health expertise that shows that all things being equal, density is the dominant factor.
I thought ending quarantine is what people cared about. Your false confidence about Japan's comparability to the US is not helping. Population density is why NYC and Wyoming aren't comparable yet you're trying to compare another country.
And I'm not sure what you think is my "false confidence about Japan's comparability to the US"? I certainly don't believe Japan's response would work equally well in NY, considering that NY applied stricter measures and ended up with 200x the death rate. I believe the susceptibility of individual regions to the coronavirus varies greatly with factors we don't yet understand, including population density, cultural and behavioral factors, weather, maybe air pollution, maybe genetics. I'd guess these factors explain much more of the variation in mortality by region than variation in the governments' responses, though I'm not sure.
And you're missing my point about deaths per capita. That's an intrinsically meaningful number, because people care about the probability that they die (or get seriously sick, etc.). Other numbers are valuable only to the extent they predict something people intrinsically care about. Population density is one such input to the prediction, but it's clearly not the only factor, and your simplistic focus on that isn't useful.
There are a thousand factors but my bet is that Japan experienced SARS firsthand and just like South Korea or Vietnam, they learned their lesson. It became the epidemic case study for public health officials and doctors in the entire region (and Canada). Regulators went out of their way to make reporting easy and doctors were all trained to look for and treat viral respiratory diseases early. Wearing masks went from being an oddity to wide spread cultural acceptance. For those reasons, you can't compare the effectiveness of measures in California to those in Wyoming using Japan as a measuring stick.
There are far more differences between Japan and California than there are between California and Wyoming. The latter share their language, the majority of their healthcare regulations, political differences, the CDC, and so on. Right now, traveling from Japan to Wyoming is practically impossible but traveling from California to Wyoming is a medium length road trip or one hop in a a tiny plane with zero enforceable travel restrictions.
> Even if Japan's death count is understated, there is zero chance that all of Japan's medical staff and press have somehow failed to notice and report NYC-level mortality.
I'm not an expert on Japanese culture but I've got enough first hand experience to know that is a failure of imagination and the definition of false confidence. Read about Tepco, the Japanese nuclear regulators, and the series of unfortunate events that led to Fukushima containment failures. It was a systemic failure that shares many parallels to Japans's coronavirus response.
> And I'm not sure what you think is my "false confidence about Japan's comparability to the US"? I certainly don't believe Japan's response would work equally well in NY, considering that NY applied stricter measures and ended up with 200x the death rate.
You (imo) falsely believe that Japan's death rate is accurate (let's wait a few months for accurate general morality). You also falsely believe that their death rate can be used to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of measures in the United States. I'm not sure about the former but certain about the latter. New York had "stricter" measures based on cultural expectations that were practically cultural norms in Japan. There is simply no baseline or control group possible between the two demographics.
> I'd guess these factors explain much more of the variation in mortality by region than variation in the governments' responses, though I'm not sure.
There is less variation within nations than there is between them. That's why they became nations instead of going to war amongst themselves (modulo some geopolitics that apply to the Middle East and the Balkans, not Japan).
> And you're missing my point about deaths per capita. That's an intrinsically meaningful number, because people care about the probability that they die (or get seriously sick, etc.). Other numbers are valuable only to the extent they predict that. Population density is one input, but it's clearly not the only factor, and your simplistic focus on that isn't useful.
People care about ending the quarantine. The quarantine will end based on public health policy. Public health decision makers aren't basing their decision on deaths per capita, they're basing them on localized deaths per capita, which depends on the density in each city, metropolis, and states.
I honestly don't even know what point you're trying to make. Are we trying to end the quarantine or are you trying to make some ideological point?
So I'm asking why they're different. You make a lot of statements, most of which are true but which don't specifically explain that difference. For example, you state that Japan's doctors have experience with SARS, and they do; but how is that helping stop the spread? What are they doing that Americans should copy? It's not the contact tracing, except for that ~20% reduction in R at best--and if deaths are undercounted, then they're missing an even greater share of the infections.
And then you seem to say that Japan and NY can't be compared anyways because they're so different? I agree they're different in many ways; so why not think about all those factors, and what we can learn from them? Would a heavy public campaign training people to correctly use masks (and enforcing their use) have brought us to Japan-level mortality with a Japan-level lockdown? Imagine the lives (and jobs, and hours of children's education) that could have been saved if yes. I agree that Japan has very different cultural norms, and those might explain much of the difference. So what are those norms, and how can we adopt them?
Or maybe the dominant factor is neither masks nor lockdowns but weather, and there's nothing in our response that could have helped? Maybe it's something about our speaking habits, and language really does directly make a big difference? That last one is deliberately outlandish, but I'm not even totally sure it's false.
The point I'm trying to make is that we know very little about this disease, and what we do know is confusing and contradictory. Unfortunately, most people seem to have latched onto preferred simple explanations, disregarding the evidence that doesn't support them. Given the earliness of our knowledge here, I believe that's likely to cause important opportunities to control the disease to be missed, and therefore harmful.
And following up to note the above is wrong--assuming heterogeneous spread (most patients infect no one, but a few super-spreaders infect many), contact tracers will naturally find those super-spreaders disproportionately, with disproportionate benefit. I still doubt that's the dominant difference, though.
No, it wasn't, Seattle was.
The post I responded to specifically said initial epicenter. The post claimed that it was "disingenuous" to include NYC in statistics because, since they were the "initial epicenter", they basically didn't have any warning. Since NYC was not the "initial epicenter", this claim is false; they did have warning and it is perfectly fair to include them in statistics.
New York saw the curve decline start consistently in the beginning of May. Metrics are defined for reopening and that is in progress.
Armchair quarterbacks get the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but at the time the scope wasn’t understood and officials were worried about the impact of shutting down school breakfast/lunch programs, etc.
Places like South Dakota and Wyoming are lucky, there’s less people in those states than in my upstate NY county, and they aren’t big travel hubs. No surprise there. With other places, you should hold judgement until time has passed, the data is pretty awful in places like Florida. With political factors involved, you won’t know impacts until you have good vital record data re deaths.
The liberty argument is bunk, protecting the general welfare of the people is a core tenet of US governance. We were headed to a recession already and may be heading to a depression, but the rationale behind the lockdowns was the preserve life, and it worked.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-sent-recovering-corona...
I am not saying we should not "take coronavirus seriously" as you say. I do. But after taking it seriously I still see the current lockdowns in the US as counterproductive. Even if we could get this genie back into the bottle 3 months ago (which is not a given), you cannot now. Many states are open and people travel. Instead of forcing wide lockdowns we should focus on supporting those at high risk or worried and let others back to leading normal lives.
My 2c, no offense intended.
If your family lives in elder supportive housing, there has been plenty of no visitor policies. Regardless, if you don't live in the same house with your family, visiting them may not be following the policies.
Without those things, we risk the NYC/Italy situation where the health systems locked up and you had mass death from COVID plus excess deaths due to the overwhelming hospital demand.
The risk factors are pretty widely applicable. The strategy of old people, overweight men, etc getting “support” isn’t going to work.
I could list commonly worn clothes and shoes that are more uncomfortable then mask.
If I'd already paid and you refused to refund me, I'd use that gap year to travel to campus, administrators' homes, the lot, and let everyone know that you've stolen enormous amounts of money from hundreds of thousands.
Teenage me has a hell of a lot of energy, health, and time on their hands.
It's so ridiculous an idea as to be absurd. Do you want social breakdown? This is how you get mass riots.
Reading what's facing the US at the moment (I'm British) I honestly worry about whether there will be some sort of military standoff if the government doesn't step up _now_ and put together a coherent plan for the nation.
There are tens of millions unemployed, graduates are entering an economy that's essentially been deleted, and new students are having the knife twisted in them before they've even started.
People need _hope_. I'm angry on behalf of you guys.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/21/16000914/s...
Ever since Hong Kong, I've been extra attentive and appreciative of the fact that this may be as close to peace as we will ever see the world again.
This. Right now. This may be as close to peace as we will ever see again.
Never-the-less, I have the utmost hope for project Earth, with or without humans.
So yea, I sort of agree, but I definitely also think the danger is higher than it seems.
I would, however, pay very close attention to Taiwan. That just might be the trigger.
Generally, in an economic downturn people turn to education as a way to better themselves and wait out an economic recovery.
Probably all three - travel, self study, read, etc. That's what I'd do. Then again, I'm thinking UK.
The lockdowns here aren't such that you literally can't go outside, and the minimum cost of living (due to our safety nets) really isn't that high for a youngster willing to live on beans.
Education is great. I'll be learning until my brain gives out on me.
But if you want to tell me that my first year of university just became sitting in front of a screen and I'll be paying for it - yeah, sod that, I'll take the tent and the backpack and see you all when people have regained sanity.
In the outside world (including University) people do things like obtaining life long friendships, meeting partners, generally just sniffing the flowers of life.
If I had the pressure of my course and I was stuck in a box I'd go mental before week 3. No comraderie, no friends, nothing, it's all pixels mate. лол.
The university I went to (USC) required that all students had to either submit proof of insurance or pay additional fees as part of their tuition to join the university's health plan. Not having health insurance was not an option if you wanted to enroll.
(This was about 15 years ago, though I just checked and they still have this policy.)
Maybe slightly more, but not drastically so. About 15 per 100,000 college students die each year from alcohol --- poisoning, motor vehicle accidents, other alcohol-related accidents. Compare to a death rate of about 30 per 100k people aged 18-35 infected with COVID-19 (and it's much lower in the 18-24 set than the entire 18-35 group, but we don't have a good number for how much lower).
And it's not like 100% of students are going to catch it in an academic year (some have already had it, herd immunity, etc).
I worked as an RA - it was my job to enact policies addressing various risks facing the student body - and my perception is that extreme overreaction was the norm.
But then you act as if I said they were all alcohol poisoning, when I was pretty explicit about the number.
Fatal alcohol poisoning (actually this is a number for unintentional poisoning in which alcohol is involved, so it's a tad broader than pure alcohol poisoning) in college is about 4 per 100,000 annually, for clarity. It is possible that the COVID-19 death rate could be lower than this in the college student cohort for 2020-2021.
> and if the incidence were anything like 15 out of 100000 college students per year, the news would be full of such stories.
K.
Your point re: colleges with few students with cars is a good one, but survey data indicates that more college students aged 18-21 and 21-24 drive under the influence than the general population 18-21 and 21-24.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2020/05/29/cor...
The US military initially barred any coronavirus survivor from enlisting, for life, regardless of how long ago or their current health. That's something they never considered doing for the flu. They've since walked back on that, and I can't help but wonder if it's because they realized it would exclude too much of their potential recruitment pool.
The vast vast vast majority of young people with coronavirus don't have any of those long-term side-effects. Most of them don't get more than the sniffles, if any symptoms at all.
If you've looked at the anecdotes about how readily the virus spreads, you'll realize that avoiding people until a vaccine is ready is ridiculous. The public health plan, all along, has been for most people to get the virus, but at a slower rate ("flatten the curve"). Being this deathly scared of the virus for that long just isn't a feasible plan.
I always laugh when I see this.
If you shut down all sports, all but something like the 5 top sports universities (and I think I'm being generous--if I remember correctly only UT-Austin is demonstrably profitable) would see a net profit--sometimes significantly so since the coaches are often some of the highest paid employees.
1. This article from 2015 (http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...) puts it at 24. That sounds closer to correct to me.
2. There are substantial knock-on effects for university donations during big years that are not counted in the profit or loss of an athletic department. These benefits are spread wide throughout the NCAA. Winning a championship (even league rather than NCAA), beating a rival, or just making the NCAA tourney in basketball can be a boost.
3. Sustained excellence can change the face of a university in ways that money cannot. The best recent example is the change of the student body at Alabama during Saban’s tenure.
Just some ideas that go beyond sports revenue dollars.
And we ALL knew it was crazy.
We can't magic up new buildings, or new classrooms or lecture halls. We lecture 20+ students in rooms that seat .... wait for it .... 20(ish) students. I have no idea how to social distance in there.
Half students in? How do I teach half a class, then the other half? Do they magic up a second Monday for me to teach in? And half students, they are still less than 2m apart.
Outside? Teaching IT and coding? Huh?
Exams?
Busses?
The car park?
Older / elderly lecturers - especially those in management. What do with they then?
A fair few of our students are nurses so they know the risks and are happy to inform everyone.
I think we'll open and just hope for the best. Some people are going to get sick and there's not much we can do to avoid it. Unless we stop education for a year.
I never finished mine, and it took me a long time and a lot more work to catch up to my peers financially. I might never have done it if I didn't get lucky and make a few right choices in my 30a.
Why don't people have millions invested by the time they retire? Because no matter how much money people make (up to a certain point, depending on the person), they spend it. If you give the average high school graduate $150K and tell them to invest it for 40 years, I pretty much guarantee that it will be gone long before the 40 years are up.
To be fair, I don't have millions invested and I'm scarily close to retirement. So I'm not trying to be critical of others ;-)
It does work.
But if you spent all your income, you'll never have money.
Ehhh, yes and no. Plenty of people who bought nice-ish houses in the Bay Area in the '70s and '80s sold them in 2014-2018 and retired outside the bay with a nice extra pile of cash.
You need housing, but you don't need a crazy expensive house in a crazy expensive area.
There is no difference. Incomes have held stagnant for the entirety of those 40 years, despite the transition from people of equal calibre being only high school graduates 40 years ago to being college graduates today. $0 invested at 7% still leaves you with $0.
“How long have you been smoking for?” the colleague asks.
“Thirty years,” says the smoker.
“Thirty years!” marvels the co-worker. “That costs so much money. At a pack a day, you’re spending $1,900 a year. Had you instead invested that money at an 8% return for the last 30 years, you’d have $250,000 in the bank today. That’s enough to buy a Ferrari.”
The smoker looked puzzled.
“Do you smoke?” he asked his co-worker.
“No.”
“So where is your Ferrari?”
- No, I spent it all on $SOMETHING_ELSE
I think that’s the point...
I am a student from Rural India, studying at an "engineering" "college" (obviously in urban area). The minimum cost for getting into engineering degrees is too much for rural income scales here. And the quality of education is PATHETIC (everything is rote learning based and everyone is trying to game the system, because edu system is so mechanical).
Since the formal education is so costly and ineffective[0], many people like me would benefit from a commoditization through online medium. I started learning programming one year before I joined the college in Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) program. And having seen the teaching methods and rat race, I am pretty sure I can learn better if I go on my own. But there are too many stakeholders in the ineffective process, that would prevent such a thing from happening.
But even if they conduct college through online classes for the next year, I would be happy, because I would save on accommodation expenses by staying at home :).
[0] The ineffective four years of education is probably why many people complain about Indian SWEs. The entire thing is rat race for sustaining jobs - then mechanically clearing exams, copying GitHub repos, lying on resumes etc... If all of these people chose their subjects with genuine interest, about only 10% would be studying in CSE and "Indian SWE" would've had a better image worldwide.
Learning from top experts who teach online classes that can be accessed from many institutions while having local tutors would allow students to learn from experts who are good teachers and get in-person help as needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
For some, MOOCs can be better than live lectures. Many students dare not ask any questions in a lecture room anyway. They can pause to think, review materials if they get a quiz question wrong, and ask questions more openly in the MOOC forum.
In addition, the MOOC system can record student's performance in quizzes and some even have an AI designed to detect cheating, e.g. whether the typing pattern of the user is anomalous.
But MOOCs can't compete with the best live lectures, where students have an opportunity for meaningful discussion, challenging and original projects, and building relationships.
(In case anyone else is as pedantic as me about definitions: yes, there were two kinds of homework. The first was you read something at home, and then discussed it in the next class. The other was you learnt something and when practiced it at home afterwards.)
We don't charge any up-front fees. We only get paid as a share of your income after you graduate (or complete at least 60% of the course) so we have a strong incentive to provide effective tuition.
On a more serious note, at least consider adding a "shameless plug" notice while promoting your own stuff on HN.
I am not really interested in this kind of stuff but looked at it.
> Our 12-week live online training course ....
No, thanks.. that's not the scope of a CS degree. You are promoting something irrelevant here - no offence.
You can guarantee that colleges would fall in line quickly. there would be also attempts to circumvent the charges but those can be dealt with. they could though try to up sell you on amenities you may not otherwise have chosen to pay for but do now through high tuition.
So summary, Federal student loans only apply to programs with set rates per course credit and degrees. fall outside of these degrees; lets be honest there are some degree programs we should never back; and you pay your own way and colleges can charge what they want.
Many having no problem with it does not mean it has happened or that it would work. You are talking about the only other industry in the US with similar cost increases to colleges.
Watch the pitchforks as administrators everywhere feel their cushy jobs are threatened
1. It’s only fair to compare the retirement amount vs the average marginal increase of salary obtained from having a college degree. Not sure this is a large number these days.
2. Most don’t pay full ride but for those that do it’s hefty. And also, those that can afford it, typically have a lot of money to begin with.
3. I raise this question because unlike the smoker comment, I can determine if I just want to put money away for my kids (in a trust) and give them that lump sum when they are older (not 60 but maybe much older) as opposed to pay for college. I likely won’t do this but for argument sake, if you have a motivated kid, I’d bet they’d find a way to learn what they need to learn.
4. As from the “Silicon Valley” show. “The real value of education is intangible!”. I do think I gained a good amount from college but I think a majority of that was social/independence growth rather than learning. Although, one or two of my computer science courses really got burned in my head and I believe added a ton of value to my way of thinking.
Anyway, original comment was a bit in jest but it’s still an important discussion because I think we should be paying for education and not “branding” which, let’s be honest, is a lot what school is used for - a market-accepted currency for purchasing a good career.
Sure, if you had 150k at age 18 and weren't going to need another cent until you turn 65, you could drop that money in the stock market and wait for riches to come to you. But as it is, you're going to need some kind of job. And while there's a few pleasant careers available without college these days (software engineering being one of them), for most jobs that aren't heavy physical labor or minimum wage drudgery, you're going to need that college degree.
So a simple model where each case results in R new infections doesn't capture this at all. Instead, networks of infection appear to be like other social networks where some nodes are much more highly connected than other nodes.
The task that colleges face is to ensure that students with large social networks don't infect their contacts and to ensure that large events conducive to infection don't happen. Otherwise, no amount of wiping doorknobs and fogging classrooms with disinfectant will be effective.
Travel restrictions are probably still going to be around for some time, and the likelihood of getting a part time job to fund it is much lower than usual.
Then, after all this, forget why you even wanted to go to college.
Sounds like a plan.
More importantly, though, you can simply live cheap in parents' basement or whatever, and study, study, study. You don't need a college to learn.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/29/corona-co...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/24/an-ope...
Unfortunately history so far has shown that tuition is surprisingly immune to what I would consider severe shocks to the rest of the economy. So I watch in shock as the price continues to skyrocket...
I mean, just compare their priorities.