My reading is that this class just has a huge number of students, each bringing in a bit of funding. This allows for relatively large investments in the quality of the teaching materials, but teacher/student ratios will probably not be great. Hiring capable teachers is hard, especially at scale.

I must be missing something. Harvard has 7,153 undergrads says Wikipedia. At most that's 1,790 students per year taking the class each year. But surely not everyone is taking the course? So why does it need to scale?

Harvard tuition is $54,269, says https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees .

Assuming it's a 3 hour class with a 120 credit hours to graduate, that's 30 hours per year, so each student pays about $5,000 for what seems to be a horrible staff/student ratio.

FWIW, I found https://cse.engin.umich.edu/stories/popular-intro-cs-course-... as a comparison, the EECS 183 course at the University of Michigan.

Three professors (Dr. Dorf, Dr. Bill Arthur, and Dr. Héctor García-Ramírez), and 24 student instructors for the 870 students who finished the course. (It doesn't say how many started the course.)

Full-time tuition at UMich is $8,780/in-state and $27,663/out-of-state.

Without class size numbers for Harvard, I can't directly compare the two.

I can understand that the distance learning version of the course does need to scale. But chefandy was talking about the in-person version of the course. (Unless "in a giant hall waiting" means some sort of VR-based course. :)

My coworker’s kid just graduated from Harvard. He said it cost about $315,000k. Does your number include all the fees and such most colleges tack on to tuition?

You probably mean $315k.

If they lived in off-campus housing in Cambridge then $315m would be on the low side.

I linked to https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees which shows I quoted only tuition. That's the amount which most directly goes toward paying for educational staff salaries.

The total tuition+fees for Academic Year 2023-24 from the same page, is $79,450/year, giving $317,800 for 4 years, and matching your number.

I think they're pointing out that $315k is different from $315,000k as both include the k (for thousand) but one includes the thousands as 0's and the other does not.

I think wil421 made a typo. I don't think anyone believes Harvard costs $315 million for a degree.

Instead, I think wil421 was asking about the difference between "tuition" and "tuition and fees".

Typo!!

> At most that's 1,790 students per year taking the class each year

Anyone in the world can take CS50 for credit via Harvard Extension [1], and if you happen to be in the Boston area you are welcome to come to campus and attend lectures, sections, office hours, etc (but they also have everything you need fully online).

Like other large classes at Harvard (Stat 110, etc), these operate just like the weed-out courses at the big state schools. Unlike the state schools the deadline to drop a course without it showing up on your transcript or affecting your GPA is really, really late in the semester. So it's not uncommon for 50+% of the kids to be gone by the final exam/project.

[1] https://cs50.harvard.edu/extension/2023/fall/

The pricing doesn't make sense. Harvard Extension charges $2,040/4 credit course[1]. I estimated this course cost Harvard students $5,000, for low-quality access to educational staff.

Does that mean Harvard Extension students get even worse access?

Surely paying twice as much in tuition should mean something more than getting to say "I graduated from Harvard."

[1] https://extension.harvard.edu/paying-for-school/

No, they get the same access to the courses they are enrolled in.

An extension student doesn’t have access to the full course catalog, and doesn’t live in one of the undergrad houses, doesn’t develop the same network of friends etc.

But they do attend the same morning graduation exercises in Harvard Yard and get the same lifetime benefits (if they carry through to graduation, that is).

> access to the full course catalog

That would (to me) only make sense if the extra $3,000 for the CS course subsidizes the other courses.

> and doesn’t live in one of the undergrad houses

Which is why I only compared tuition, and did not include the housing fee.

Not all of the classes are the same quality— though many are. Harvard College summer classes are all done through the extension school. I think extension students can actually enroll in the full undergrad catalog once they get to a certain point in their degree program if they're preforming well. Not positive though.

However, your degree options are very limited, you don't get access to the same interaction with the big famous names (though you can usually work some magic through side channels for genuine collab interests,) you don't really interact with the Harvard College undergrads, you don't get the same internship opportunities, you can't join the sports teams or go to most undergrad-specific events, you don't live in the Harvard buildings or eat in the Harvard dining halls, your email address is extension-school specific... etc etc etc. Even if there are undergrad specific things you technically can take part in, nobody is going to make sure you know about them. You DO get the same access to the online resources, all of the clubs, and all SEVENTY TWO libraries (some are like office-sized.)

Harvard knows how much cachet a Harvard degree has, and with the extension school, they must walk the razor-thin line between marketing that to extension students, and making the Harvard College students feel like ubermensch. You actually get a different degree from the extension school— a "Bachelor of Liberal Arts (ALB) in Extension Studies concentrating in XYZ" rather than the "BA/SB concentrating in XYZ" to differentiate it even more. Lots of extension school students try to push it on their resumes because most employers don't know the difference, and lots of Harvard undergrads get mad about it and feel like that cheapens their degree. In reality, the connections, outlook, exposure, and experiences uniquely available to them in Harvard College are the real secret sauces.

> Harvard knows how much cachet a Harvard degree has

Reading about how crappy their intro CS course it makes me downgrade their cachet.

I can't help but wonder if the richer students simply pay for a tutor, rather than depend on the school-provided services.

Harvard isn't known for their CS program. I did CS undergrad at a school ranked quite a bit higher than Harvard (for CS). I think that CS50 would have been quite an improvement on the intro class at my school. But you have to understand, these classes are supposed to be hard. CS requires a huge amount of self-study and a huge amount of independent work. The kids that aren't willing to do that gain nothing by advancing to the second year curriculum.

The system isn't perfect - it never will be. But seeing lots of kids at sections and office hours is a good thing. It shows that they are willing to ask for help when they need it, and are willing to put in the hard work to succeed. I'm sure that some of the richest kids pay for private help. But one thing you need to understand about the wealthy is that they are more likely to make use of the services that are available to them. It is very striking to see how many poorer people suffer in silence when help is available, because they don't want to be a burden or are embarrassed to be in need of help. I assure you that no rich person ever feels embarrassed by asking for help.

As for Harvard Extension, a lot of people will tell you that it is around 100 years old. But in reality, it is a lot closer to 200 years old. Harvard alum John Lowell Jr left half of his estate to provide educational opportunities to greater Boston. They paid the most accomplished academics they could find to present lectures for free or cheap at night so that people who worked jobs during the day could attend. It wasn't limited to Harvard professors, of course, and it continuously evolved to serve the needs of the day. The trustees at MIT were the first to organize lectures into a real curriculum rather than a set of ad-hoc topics. By the early 1900s it had transformed into an organized group of all of the colleges and universities in the Boston area. Depending on the subject matter you studied, you "graduated" from the school that specialized in that subject even if you took courses at a different school. All those schools dropped out, one by one, until Harvard was the only one left - which shows their commitment to the concept (no entrance exam, inexpensive, targeted at non-traditional students).

Not that many students on campus. From Wikipedia "The on-campus version is Harvard's largest class with 800 students, 102 staff..." they probably have that many or more online students but they aren't the ones in annenberg, the freshmen dining hall, waiting for TAs. (That hall is a dead ringer for the great hall at hogwarts.)

At the events, there were Facebook and Microsoft logos everywhere. I'm pretty sure corporate sponsorship took care of a lot of it.

Feom what I understand of these universities with endowments they use money to hire administrative staff and to "last forever". Teaching staff is secondary to those.

Yes. They lay off scores of staff in nearly every economic downturn. There's a whole lot of 'blah blah blah' about why they can't use the endowment to avoid screwing people who've given decades of their professional life to Harvard, but I think it mostly comes down to their wanting a big shiny endowment balance long after everyone on earth right now has died.

Harvard is bizzaro land. I don't know what CS50s setup looks like internally, but after taking the course, and working there for a couple of decades— one full time— I think I'm pretty close.

I learned that they always have money for stuff but rarely for staff. The class seemed to have significant corporate support from Facebook and Microsoft, and probably others— both Zuck and Ballmer have given guest lectures— but I'll bet that Harvard's governance rules didn't let them hire academic staff with outside funding or something like that. They def could use it on regular staff positions— I spent years in a full-time, permanent staff position that was funded through a project partner.

The support academics in CS50 are all done by student TAs at the lowest level, or teaching fellows— grad students maybe— for lecturing or more advanced help. The staff are for things like video production, technical infrastructure, etc. There's only so many qualified students willing to do that work and no way you're getting existing faculty to do it. I'll also bet that they have rules about hiring staff to do anything resembling instructional work.

Like I said, though, I don't know what the situation is exactly but I'm pretty familiar with Harvard.

> grad students

Why buy the cow, amirite?

Yeah though they're unionized now I think. I wonder if anything changed with cs50?

> I learned that they always have money for stuff but rarely for staff.

(By "they," I mean Harvard, generally. I have no reason to believe CS50 is exempt from this, but I have no special insight, here.)

Yeah, not exactly helping with my prior of "college is a massive, societal level scam"

College is great and very useful, it's just heavily abused by our society. I think that a lot of well-meaning people in the 80s and 90s saw that people with college degrees were better off, and confusing correlation with causation, insisted everyone needed to go to college so they could also be better off. Well, now we have way more people with college degrees than we need.

They've taken on debt that their (government-employed) guidance counselors insisted would pay for itself. Decent paying white collar positions for non-degree holders, like administrative assistant, now require them because of lazy recruiting. And income inequality is worse because you can't resolve structural economic issues with credentials.

So you have someone with an expensive English degree from BU answering phones in a CS pool for 35k, and the 'dumb' kids who went to trade school and became electricians have to turn away work at hundreds of dollars per hour because they're in such high demand.

Harvard isn't about learning. It's about paying the TA. Connections and money.