If all of what I learned came from sitting in a lecture hall, then sure. And that’s how I learned the basic ideas. But a lot of how I learned to apply concepts was from making friends and studying together, or group projects, etc. Learning the different ways that other people see the concepts can help solidify them to you. Things that happen spontaneously by being in close proximity to people in your same class.
Learning together is part of the learning process that can multiply the classroom side. But it’s basically impossibly to have a casual spontaneous connection on slack or zoom.
It’s been an artificially limited social club ever since distribution of the content reached roughly infinity. It’s also a test to see if you can keep up, on time.
It's also possible that online learning during the pandemic has ended up making online learning in general seem unpleasant.
Personally: in industry, in various software companies I've met about 10-15 grads from Harvard, MIT, and CMU. From meeting them, I assure you that they're just average people, just as dumb as you or I, and that the administration has no great secrets to give away.
At least, not to give away to the average student. Maybe I only met the rejects...
MOOCs seemed to have outlived their novelty value since before the pandemic rolled around. The fact that paywalls were added to some content and schools probably lost a certain amount of interest as well didn't help.
But of course the pandemic did add a huge amount of (mostly uncurated) video content to the commons.
And now they are expanding to medical sciences too! Imagine becoming a self taught doctor :/ https://dth.ac.in/medical/course.php
But yes, the value of attending a top university is not at all limited to these study materials. It is so much more.
This is one area in which the public’s mind is (for the most part) very, very wrong.
While there are certainly some excellent courses at elite schools, the general quality of instruction is quite low. Professors are not rewarded for good instruction and are not punished for relatively poor instruction. Class-oriented work takes time away from research work, and that’s the stuff that counts.
For students, elite schools offer the following (imho):
- incredible access to research resources
- access to top tier work and research opportunities during school and after graduating
- access to nationally and internationally powerful social networks
- a highly motivated peer group who often (re)define how high the high bar can be set
Note that some (perhaps many or most) students don’t avail themselves of any of these unique offerings, but some certainly do.
They aren't "elite", but regional R2s also can be really well respected (CSU campuses come to mind), and I'm not sure where to file excellent schools with a narrower scope like Rose-Hulman either.
I should have specified HYPS (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford). I think these are the schools that the “public mind” think of as elite. I would personally add a few more to the list, but I think that the “public mind” probably wouldn’t understand why I included them.
Williams and similar schools are colleges. I always tell people to go to colleges if they want great instruction. There are many amazing colleges in the US.
David Kosbie and Mark Stehlik are two of our most celebrated teachers, and the course creation has extensively involved veteran TAs from our intro undergrad courses. This is not a random unsupported student project.
For ambitious autodidacts hoping to do something like Scott Young's MIT challenge, this is crucial information to have.
It's designed to be a high school curriculum that doesn't suck. Many US high schools do an incredibly poor job of teaching computer science, if they even try at all.
Now, that said, the AP part of it is based upon our intro course, 15-112, and if you take the full year of it through CS academy, you're getting a big chunk of what we teach our students in one (often first-semester) course - and we'll give you CMU course credit for it. But that's a first-year course that's designed to prepare you for the rest of the CS curriculum, not .. what we teach you in the other 7.5 semesters.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2023/cs-academy-credit-by-exam
(In case it's not obvious, I'm a CS professor at CMU. I've taught the course I'm discussing above, 15-112, together with David Kosbie, one of the creators of CS academy.)
This is the part that I bet a lot of prospective students will like!
Do you think the program will eventually get extended to cover some of those remaining 7.5 semesters or remain focused on the initial half semester?
Alternatively, the big name universities could open up their exams. People will be able to say they passed the actual MIT CS exam, they just didn't go there. Of course I'm aware this might not fly with these institutions...
I think it would help a lot of people who don't have the means to move somewhere and not work a job for 4 years.
High school exams are already more or less like this, everyone takes the same test. Why not uni?
In the public's mind one goes to an elite institution for access to elite education, but, with everything being free and ungated, there should be little meat left to support that argument. I realize it's not a fresh hot take, but until recent it was still plausible to justify the high prices with the excuse of learning. Don't think that will fly for much longer.
I wonder if they could get rid of the antiquated teaching portion of universities altogether and just keep the "gated access exclusive club for people of your social or cognitive tier" portion of it. It's somewhat of a YC model too. There's some pedagogy during the batch, even though nowadays so much of their great content is on YouTube, but the value is mostly in everything else you get.