> By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse.

What qualifies as a good college, for this description? Typical state school, e.g. Oregon State University? What counts in the 5:1 ratio? Because it sure isn't just teachers, that's probably more like 50:1.

Indeed, 300:1 is pretty common in large lecture courses, even ones at relatively high ranked schools in fairly important topics (algorithms, for instance). And that's with the teacher having to give a different lecture to every single section every year, instead of just recording one lecture for everyone for the next several years.

Even more time is saved if we unbundled university education in general, so that the various paths and credentials are their own thing. IE, Intro to Poetry 101 isn't necessary for someone who's pursuing finance credentials.

> Because it sure isn't just teachers, that's probably more like 50:1.

How do you figure that?

Mean class size at a university is probably in the neighborhood of 30 students. Yes, there are some classes that have monster, 200+ class sizes, but this is also balanced out by senior- or grad-level classes that have a dozen students in them.

Students also take several classes, and on average, each instructor only teaches ~1 class a semester (especially consider research professors who may not teach a course every semester). So if students are taking ~5 courses a semester on average, I'd expect to see a ratio somewhere around 6:1, nothing even close to 50:1.

I’ve never had a single class with less than 30 students except for ones where the students dropped out mid-quarter. (Ironically one of my smallest classes was one that was for 65+ students but the instructor was so bad that we had less than 20 by end of quarter)

I went to University of Washington - if it matters.

For the record, OSU lists their student:faculty ratio at 18:1. First year gen ed courses are huge but most upper level classes are a much more manageable size.

https://oregonstate.edu/about

It's been a while, but I don't remember any of my upper division CS classes at OSU being smaller than ~30 students. That's why I wondered if perhaps admins were counted somehow, or maybe grad students, to get to a lower ratio.

To be fair, replacing an expensive diploma mill with a free/public diploma mill isn't that bad an idea. Probably just too "socalist" for North America. Imagine if everyone could have access to higher education without going into massive debt!

Uninformed tech people are better than a lot of experts in many fields. Wouldn't be the first time. Bezos responded to COVID faster than the NIAID.