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Reply to "An ugly baseball thought ..."

For some people, college is about acquiring a set of facts and skills to do a type of job, and that's all.  For others, it is about learning in an interactive way, and about all of the social factors.  The latter is a luxury, but, if you look at the history of education, going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, it always has been.  The "best" education was learning from the best teachers, alongside the best other students.

Elite colleges that have been around for 100+ years began by catering to the wealthy; they only really let in other people after WWII, and only pushed to include lots of other people very recently (and some would argue that they still don't do that).  There is obviously still a market for that.  Older state universities took up that model; more recent universities are, in fact, less residential.  Those older universities are also the ones who started college sports, which was also about socialization, that's why they still push the "scholar-athlete" model, the whole point is that their students are supposed to be in classes with athletes as well as with other types of people (whatever that means!).  This does still work at small colleges today.

The model of having a close working relationship with really good professors still works, but, in larger universities, a student has to seek it out.  Working on a research project is a type of learning that you can't get any other way than by close mentoring, working in a lab, etc.  You cannot get that through online education, and I doubt that schools like Stanford will go for it, it would completely dilute what they stand for.  It's entirely possible for a student to get through a large university and not have that experience.  Those parents may well start wondering what, exactly, they have been paying for.  Some parents are fine paying for extracurriculars like sports, fraternities/sororities, etc., others might not be.  Small colleges, ironically including the ones that might go under now, usually build such research requirements into their programs.

It is important also that students learn from each other.  I proofread my roommate's senior research thesis, and I learned a lot about her subject.  Students do talk to each other about what they are learning, and they get to know each other in classes they take.  I would think that happens less in online classes.

One of the reasons that online classes right now seem like a joke is that professors literally can't figure out how to do testing and assignments that (a) don't disadvantage students without access to resources, and (b) don't open the door wide for cheating.  But online learning, even when done properly (not like what is going on now) has big problems.  The biggest is that it is so easy to cheat - that, I think, devalues it quite a bit.  Also, most students don't have the motivation to complete the courses.  

My grandfather left school at age 12 (in 1912) and went to work as an office boy.  He took classes at night, and became an accountant.  So, it was possible to do that then, and it's possible to do it today and succeed, if you have self-discipline.  He sent his children to residential colleges, because after WWII he could, but he knew that it was about more than learning the skills.

Having said all of that, if my son's college is still online next fall, I don't know what we'll do.  I hope that between testing and treatments, they will feel comfortable bringing the students back.

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