More on Colleges

Schools for Cheapskates?

Much of what schools are spend money on has at most a tenuous connection to the quality of education. That left me wondering whether there are any schools for smart cheapskates, schools that provide a good education in the company of smart people at the lowest practical cost — which I would expect to be less half the cost of the elite schools I looked at when my children were choosing where to apply.

I went online to look.

In the case of law schools, there is at least one: Brigham Young University, #28 on the US News and World Report ranking. Tuition is $15,528 for an LDS member, $31,056 for a non-member, which makes it a very good deal if you happen to be a Mormon.¹ It is a better deal than most of its competitors even at the higher price — but not better than all competitors for all applicants. The University of Georgia, #22, charges in-state students only $19,460 so is a better deal than BYU for a non-Morman who lives in Georgia.

For an undergraduate education, UCLA and UC Berkeley, both top schools, seem to be a pretty good deal for in-state students at $14,208 and $16,832. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ranks only a little below the two California schools and, at in-state tuition of $9,003, is even cheaper. Several state universities in other states are almost as highly rated and, for in-state tuition, only a little more expensive;

What determines residence — can one simply move to the state, apply, and get in-state tuition? The answer, at least for California, is no; the requirement to qualify as a resident is over a year of residency. It must be satisfied by the student if he is over 24 or has been financially independent for at least two years, otherwise by his parents.

There are, however, ways of getting a college education for substantially less than in-state tuition from a good state university. One is to attend a community college; the average cost is about $3000 and many are tuition free. That does not give you the advantages, social and intellectual, of associating with a population of bright and academically interested students; the solution to that problem, for a student sufficiently enterprising and socially adept, would be to take classes in a community college near a top university and hang out with its students. He might even be able, depending on the school, to quietly audit university classes.

A community college gives only an associates degree but it is possible to transfer to a four year college, having gotten the first two years on the cheap. If you do not require a degree, only an education, you could do it for free, time cost aside, by living near a good school that made no serious attempt to monitor attendance, socializing with its students, getting educated by some combination of books, online material and auditing.

Asked whether he requires his auditors to have some connection to the University, Philosophy professor Sean D. Kelly said, “No, but often people will volunteer that, and sometimes we have people visiting from other colleges.” (“Auditors Make Use of Informal System,” Harvard Crimson)

Kelly’s criteria for auditing are of his own making.

“My personal view is that I’m happy to have people who want to learn things in the class,” Kelly explained, “as long as it doesn’t affect the experience of the students who are enrolled.”²

I agree.³

Living Virtually Off Campus

When I graduated from high school (in 1961), going to college meant an almost complete break with one’s previous life. There might be a few people from your high school going to the same college, one or two of whom might be friends or at least acquaintances. But for the most part you were being dropped into an entirely new world.

It was an opportunity to abandon the nickname you had been given in second grade. It was an opportunity, with luck, to change your image, the picture of who and what you were held by those around you. But it was also a world where nobody knew you, where you would have to rebuild in months the social networks that you built, or had built around you, over the past many years.

That was before the Internet. For college freshmen as for the rest of us, the online world makes friendships portable. I can fly to Paris or London, connect to my hotel’s Wi-fi, and continue a conversation started a day or two earlier from San Jose. A new student arrives at college complete with a network of online friends.

Here too there are advantages and disadvantages. The first day is less frightening if you know that, back at your dorm room, lots of friends are waiting for you via email, facebook, Skype or your evening WoW raid. As one colleague I discussed the matter with suggested, the situation of a student in the world of the Internet is rather like that of a student in the old days who lived off campus. His classroom life was shared with fellow students; his social life might not be.

College is, among other things, a place to find a spouse. It is possible to fall in love with someone over the internet, easier in realspace. To the extent that college students have shifted their social life online they are less likely to graduate with that one of their most important problems solved.

Doing VR Wrong

A good many years ago I attended a presentation on what universities are doing with Second Life, a freeform virtual reality environment. A lot of it seemed to involve requiring a class of students to spend an hour or so learning to get around in the virtual world in order to then hold a class there instead of in an ordinary classroom. Since a class in a virtual world has lower fidelity video, lower fidelity audio and less bandwidth in the form of facial expressions and the like than a class in realspace, it seemed a bit pointless.

It reminded me of my experiences many years earlier with educational software. I had written a price theory text and some computer programs to go with it, gave demonstrations of the programs at economics meetings where my publisher was trying to sell the book. One of the standard questions I got was “how many chapters of the book are on the disk?” My response was that the chapters were in the book where they belonged. What was on the disk were not chapters of the book but programs designed to teach ideas in ways that could be done by a program better than with text and pictures.

My conclusion at the time was that most educational software was bogus, doing things on the computer that could be done about as well on paper. Computers back then were supposed to be exciting, sexy, exotic, so the theory was that a student who would be bored reading an explanation of supply and demand in a book would be riveted to the same explanation on a computer screen. The approach to VR I observed looks like the same thing.

One of the presenters mentioned setting up physics experiments in the virtual world. It struck me as a terrible idea. What is exciting about doing a physics experiment is discovering that physical reality obeys the equations physicists use to describe it. Doing the experiment in virtual reality, where the physics professor has programmed the pendulum, billiard balls, or whatever, only demonstrates that the equations obey the equations.

Thoughts on Substance Free Dorms

A number of the colleges I visited with my daughter when she was looking for a school had substance free dorms. I am not an expert on Aristotelian philosophy but, as I understand it, the form of something defines its shape, the substance is what it is made of. That left me puzzled about how one could have a dorm with no substance at all.

I think I have now solved the puzzle. Obviously substance free dorms exist in virtual reality — possibly World of Warcraft, more plausibly Second Life. Only in VR can you have a building that is all form and no substance.

When I raised the question on my blog, one commenter blog offered an alternative explanation:

I’ve known some students who had no substance. I think a school concentrating them in one easily-avoidable dorm is a good thing.

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1. I did not check tuition figures immediately before posting this; some may have changed since I looked them up.

In an earlier post I estimated the cost of a bare-bones law school, more bare bones than the ABA would accredit, at $13,000 a year. BYU comes close to that price for Mormon students and is accredited, but it does it with a substantial subsidy from its church.

2. Kelly is a Harvard philosophy professor. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/12/9/despite-inconsistencies-auditors-come-back/. I suspect there are a fair number of other schools which have, de facto if not de jure, the same policy. As a graduate student in physics at the University of Chicago I audited a couple of classes on poetry — one on 18^th century poetry taught by Edward Rosenheim and one on modern poetry by Elder Olson, who had the rare talent of making sense of poems by Dylan Thomas.

3. My high school age daughter audited several of my law school courses. The rule was that she was not permitted to talk in class, for fear that would divert my time from the students who were paying for it, was permitted to take notes and discuss things with me after class.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I teach multiple classes at Pennsic for free, in part because teaching students all of whom want to learn what I want to teach is more fun than teaching, and grading, students some of whom are present for other reasons.