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"Plenty of people self-teach from MOOCs".

Are there studies (not from the MOOC providers themselves) that demonstrate that this works?

I got the impression that the MOOC thing wasn't working out as well as expected. The hype around them certainly seems to have cooled off since their peak a few years ago.

My hunch is that it's only a small subset of people that thrive with MOOCs.

Outside (mostly) of CS, there is a lot of engineering/science coursework that requires access to labs and other physical plant that can't be replicated online. Even in the humanities, I'm not sure the degree to which you can replicate in-person seminars with videoconferences.

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in the humanities at a university in Japan. We don't know yet what will happen with our new school year, which begins in April, but some of the faculty have already started to experiment with online tools to see what might be feasible.

Each semester I teach a graduate seminar that typically has about a dozen students, all sitting around one table in a cramped room. The format is ideal for discussions, as we can all see and hear each other and read each other's expressions and gestures in real time. (Needless to say, the format also seems ideal for spreading coronavirus infections.)

If I had to, I could teach the seminar using Google Meet or a similar service, though it would be difficult to replicate the spontaneous interaction of the in-person discussions. However, there might be advantages to online discussions, such as allowing people more time to compose their thoughts before speaking or writing. I won't know until we try.

My bigger concern is with two freshman courses that I am scheduled to teach starting in April. While graduate students are already socialized to university life, first-year undergraduates are being exposed to it for the first time. I worry how well newly admitted students would be able to adjust to the university if they are still sitting at home by themselves in front of their computers. (Most students at our university live at home or in their own apartments, not in dormitories, so the housing issue is not so serious.)

Other commenters here have noted the difficulty of moving lab classes online. To those I would add foreign-language classes that emphasize spoken interaction and practicums in subjects like nursing, medicine, physical education, etc.

To me what you write are great arguments for tuition free universities, like the ones in Sweden. It makes society much more equitable and egalitarian. This whole artificial scarcity thing is such a lose-lose for everyone in society.

To me it highlights one of the big failings of markets, which is that a tool/credential/innovation only has economic value if it's used by some but not all producers in the market. Once it becomes universally adopted it becomes an opportunity for rent-seeking by the producer of that tool/credential/innovation.

In some ways this is the great strength of capitalism, because it provides an incentive to adopt innovations that helps overcome the status-quo bias that most humans have. But it also encourages firms to restrict access to their suppliers and tear their competitors down rather than building everybody up.

Agreed.

Have you read any Guy Standing?

“ …today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.

Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.”

What are some of your go to authors, areas of interest? Or in other words, who are you grateful for, for their influence on you?

This is perhaps one of the more ignorant comments on this thread.

> When you go to an elite college, you're really paying for the degree.

In many cases, you go to an elite college to pay for the experience to learn from, engage with, and collaborate with the world's best scientists, thinkers, engineers, and professors. In some cases, like Rice, if your parents make less than 130,000 a year - you don't pay a dime. Undergraduate tuition is pennies to these institutions whose endowments are orders of magnitudes larger than the revenue from tuition. I look at it like this... My degree cost quite a bit a year... in exchange for that I got to study, learn, work in labs with scientists doing things that without me paying the entry fee.. I would have never been able to do. It's not like you can just walk up to a group of NASA researchers and IEEE fellows and say... hey can you send me GBs of data from the Huygens probe and provide me hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing power to play around with that data? Will you let me use your multi million dollar clean room to learn about lithography? Will you let me use that nanotube growing lab to learn about growing carbon nanotubes? If you are just paying for the degree you are doing yourself an offensive disservice.. and I would suspect one day you will look back and realise what a waste you made of the opportunity.

> This is also why there are caps on admission: it creates scarcity value for graduates from that university. When there are fewer graduates with a credential, companies that want to employ them have to compete for a limited number of human resources, which drives up wages. Additionally, the university can impose selection bias on matriculating freshmen who will eventually receive the credential, which helps maintain the reputation of the university's graduates.

There are caps on admissions for a wide variety of reasons - but largely because the faculty of the individual schools within these Universities are working to create a culture and a learning and discovery environment.. these goals are threatened when you have too many students to support while at the same time supporting the research that actually makes the university a worthwhile place to study.

> If you don't maintain the selectivity of the institution, you end up with what's happening in the mid-tier for-profit colleges, where students take out massive loans for a degree but then it doesn't really improve their employment prospects much. If everybody has a college degree, its financial value is basically 0.

I'm going to argue that what is happening at the mid-tier for-profit colleges is that they are actually not providing their students with a quality education or network that improves their employment prospects.

I have a degree from an elite college (Amherst, #1 liberal arts college in the country at the time I went). I took a gap year before and worked as a professional software engineer, where I learned a massive amount. Then I spent 3.5 years taking a variety of interesting courses that have been utterly irrelevant to my future career prospects, before flunking out of my physics major, switching to CS, and completing that major in a semester using the knowledge I learned while working as a professional software engineer.

You're paying for the degree. If you want to take interesting courses, learn cool stuff, socialize with intelligent students, and meet Nobel-prize-winning professors, most professors will let you audit their course even if you're not a student at the university, particularly if you seem genuinely interested in the material. (Hell, I'd taken half a dozen college courses as a high-school student before I even got to college.) It just won't count toward the degree, because the colleges know that their business model is selling a limited credential that the rest of the world values very highly.

Honestly, I paid for access to labs and researchers and the network after graduating.

I dunno about Amherst but Rice students and alumni also have insane access to the worlds coolest toys - https://sea.rice.edu/instruments/all