1. Space just to get away and think
2. meeting other people
3. meeting people to date
4. Physical scheduled deadlines to ensure that you complete the task
When the online system provides those, I think it'll be game over.
I can see a hybrid though: my underused hotel turns into a dorm with high bandwidth connection to Stanford's curriculum and the local professor will give coaching when necessary.
5. Luxury student dorms.
6. High-end gym facilities.
7. Junior professional sports (Bonus: pay and benefits for the athletes is peanuts.)
The things I don't like about universities are the hardest to replace.
Having slept in many of those dorms, I would not call them luxurious.
https://www.housebeautiful.com/promotions/g21086931/best-col...
Just a little bit of context as far as "luxury dorms" go since I see WashU at the top of almost every list. Maybe luxury means your plumbing doesn't break when it gets cold and you don't get athlete's foot from the showers in the shared bathroom.
But they are seeing some pushback, with $1000/month price tags. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-07/texas-a-m...
While they don't get money, the athletes at top schools do get compensated in plenty of ways, including tuition, access to world class facilities, and individualized attention from coaches and staff.
If potential students come to visit a college and the dorms notably look bad, they might get a bad impression of the school, even subconsciously and end up going somewhere else. And if too many students decide to live off campus, it messes with student activities and general sense of school pride (which also messes with future alumni donations) and with the school's bottom line.
Your points made me curious, though - it'll be interesting to see if there's a shift to favor a certain type of individual who thrives in an online education system vs traditional, as well as what implications that has for workplace performance.
Would a 2-year, highly internship and industry focused program be able to offer the same social benefits while reducing cost?
I'm not in education atm but have a lot of experience working with students.
This is a real psychological effect even if it's maybe hard for tech types to understand. I think it has to do with the fact that social pressure is avoidable online (you don't have to show up and face the teacher whose work you didn't do). That perception has a strong effect on students; they feel shame for not doing their work even when teachers don't really give a damn about whether they did their homework/project.
Maybe not impossible to overcome, but a real problem. Education disruptors ignore these sorts of strong psychological effects around education at their own peril...
From my personal experience the difference is night and day. And not just for college courses vs online courses, but even for casual offline courses vs online courses.
The data apparently reflects my personal experience. I can't find any of the (numerous) studies I had seen before, but this link alludes to them:
https://www.usnews.com/education/online-education/articles/2...
1. Nature...have you tried it?
2. Meetups and other social gatherings around various interests and trades
3. OkCupid, Tinder, etc.
4. ...a job? Jira? One of a number of existing mechanisms for accountability?
There you go! I found game over for you!
As someone who didn't go to college until their late 20s, I would've foregone the whole thing if I could've done it online. I think people overvalue the "go to college after high school" thing just because it's become such an accepted practice, but it's a normality fallacy.
Here's what the latter looks like: http://cds.cern.ch/record/548966/files/0204295.pdf
Unfortunately, the great majority of young people only gets to experience the only former, and they are being cheated and don't even know it.