
Ask HN: I want to make school more afforadable - bobblywobbles
Hello,<p>I&#x27;m looking to leverage my software developer background in order to make school (higher education) more affordable. Are there any groups&#x2F;projects already going on to help this cause?<p>I&#x27;m not looking to be paid, but am looking for volunteer work.
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Foober223
There may be a cost reducing technique (technology) in the way education is
conducted. But it's optimizing something that's not the bottleneck.

My take. I think the main reason for increasing costs is loans. Loans that
cannot be escaped through bankruptcy. Colleges can raise tuition at rates much
faster than inflation because everyone has access to unlimited student loan
money. They name a price, all students can access money to pay it.

One way to bring prices down is to allow prices to grow so high that people
balk. Even when provided access to unlimited loan money to pay it. Waiting for
this to happen doesn't require any special activism or groups though. But it
might just be the actual way it plays out. A natural bubble pop.

If you don't want to sit on the sidelines and wait for things to pop
naturally, you could raise awareness about loans. Try to make people balk at
the prices sooner? Or try to promote a change in the law allowing bankruptcy
to be an escape from loans. Once bankruptcy is introduced you will see access
to money plummet sharply and college tuition prices along with it.

The longer this goes on, the more people unwittingly commit themselves into
life long indentured servitude.

TOO LONG DIDN'T READ: I don't think you will successfully leverage your skills
as a programmer to reduce college tuition costs. Even if you optimize a piece
of the puzzle (online MOOC reducing the need for staff/land/buildings)

~~~
muzani
One option might be to help Americans get into or find good foreign colleges,
like NUS, University of Melbourne, or the IITs. Break the monopoly. Many
foreign countries hold that education is a human right and try not to charge
too much.

The other one might be disrupting colleges. Find a better way to educate
people. Online courses and bootcamps are doing a good job, but don't quite
have the "college experience". But with the pandemic going on, and today's
bandwidth, this might be a good time.

~~~
Symbiote
Melbourne is AU$44k/year for science, about US$30k.

Is America so expensive that this is reasonable? Many countries that are cheap
(or even free) for local students charge significant fees for international
students.

~~~
trcollinson
The current annual cost for Harvard is US$50,420. So the other poster who said
many are more than double is, well, off by a bit. So the "best" University (by
their own marketing) is about 60% higher. The University of Utah where I live
is about US$10,000 a year. The UC school system in California is at about
US$14,000 a year. A good online school system like Western Governors
University is about US$6000.

The problem is quite like the post above you said. It's loans. Students, with
very little information or guidance are handed tens of thousands of US dollars
a year to "pay for school". They can do any program, pay for any housing, pay
for any food (my son in his first semester racked up a $7000 food bill,
because cafe's took student food cards). Schools take advantage of the
monstrous amount of debt students can get into.

There is no reason why a student needs to be tied down if they make smart
decisions. The problem is the same today as when I was 18. 18 year old college
students aren't always making smart decisions.

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Melting_Harps
There are several people working in ED-Tech, most of it K-12, on HN; the issue
with University level is not access, for example I'm currently enrolled in
Master level Supply Chain certification courses at Rutgers and CU Boulder via
Coursera, it's accreditation.

That's has been the reason why, even someone like myself, we've had to relent
to the gatekeepers. What's fascinated me is how quick the race to the bottom
has happened since COVID sent most programs into an Online only format, a BSc
in Comp Sci from the College of London can be had for 10k GBP, and a MSc from
CU Boulder in Electrical Engineering can be had for 20k, a Bsc and MSc for a
total of ~35k USD, which is nearly half of what I paid for my BSc in Biology
in 2009 in what is supposed to be the most affordable University system in the
US (CSU/UC) as a local CA resident/student. And it's entirely online, which if
we had UBI, would be to totally doable for just about any family and would
allow for PT work and community volunteering/tutoring as well.

It's a noble thing to be able to dedicate your time and labour towards this
end, so here are some software roles listed on their Coursera's website [1].

If you want to chat about end-user feedback, and some possible improvements,
I'd be open to set that up as I think this is the new model we should usher in
to disrupt the monoliths in Academia.

1:
[https://about.coursera.org/careers/opportunities](https://about.coursera.org/careers/opportunities)

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HALtheWise
Higher education is complicated to analyze partially because it fills so many
roles simultaneously, the big three probably being network-building,
credentialing, and teaching. Others in this thread have pointed out that there
are increasingly many low-cost options to replace the teaching component, but
to my knowledge, nothing has really stepped up to provide near-free networking
or credentialing.

I suspect that if there were a demonstrably more reliable way to quickly judge
employee quality from a resume than looking at alma mater, employers would
eventually switch to using that, but it's not clear to me what that would be.

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jldugger
If you want to make higher education, its worth looking running some
regressions on what drives cost differences between educational institutions.
The community college I worked for a decade ago now charges 223 per credit
hour, while the flagship state university I attended now charges 841 per
credit hour, using out of state rates as a proxy for the cost to provide
service. I don't think anyone can explain what makes the flagship's Chem 1
offering 4x better than the community college. Yes, the instructor is more
involved in research, but often that's more of a distraction to the core
instructional job students pay for (or, conversely, the matter of
undergraduate instruction distracts world class researchers from their pursuit
of science). In fact, a great many students of nearby flagship unis took
classes at my CC employer, and transferred the credits to save money.

The key is to figure out how to provide the thing people _are_ paying 4x for
at a cheaper cost. IMO, what is paid for is prestige, in the form of admission
selectivity, and the privilege of making connections with people who also
passed the screening filter. That prestige is what you put on your resume,
even after the GPA becomes irrelevant. It's why students transfer credits from
CCs and don't list any affiliation.

From that POV, the most useful thing you could do is convince employers that
community college grads are worth hiring, and convince students that the
associate's degree isnt' a black mark on a resume.

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nichos
Become a politician and remove government backed student loans. Since the
government has backed the loans, prices have gone up tremendously.

~~~
matt_s
To flip the idea, petition the government to absolve loans for certain degrees
- low paid but highly educated job requirements like Teachers, Social Workers,
etc.

A way for the government to invest for the future is to fund large projects
for those jobs like sustainable energy, and then make the education required
for those jobs to be very low cost or no cost.

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bsldld
I am working on a non-profit and open source idea[0]. It is at a very early
stage. Let me know what you think. Happy to chat. My email id is in my
profile.

Just last week the project was invited to participate in Mozilla Builders Open
Lab. Let me know if you want to join me in making education completely free
and at the same time increase income of education institutions and its staff.
This is not very easy to achieve, it will take a very along time and lots of
efforts. But with technology it can be achieved. The stakeholders in this
project are government(education policymakers, politicans), education
institutions, students and businesses.

[0] [https://bsldld.neocities.org](https://bsldld.neocities.org)

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zb1plus
I'm in the OMSCS program. It sounds like you might want to be involved in an
Educational Technology project. David Joyner [1] is a professor in the OMSCS
program and does a lot of research into MOOCs. You might want to look at some
of the research groups / projects his lab is involved with as a starting
point.

[1] [https://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/david-
joyner](https://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/david-joyner)

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Pabblo001
I'm thinking about it too. I would also work on this idea. In general online
higher education is something not explore fully yet and the margins are out of
space..

You don't need to pay monthly fixed salary - you can have everybody on hourly
rate. There are many educators which would like to have additional money by
doing 2hrs open online office and up to 4 exams onsite.

IMO the for any education level online school (higher edu is easier to do
online) it's a neat idea!

Sign me up

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imranq
I'm going to take a different take, and say there are a lot of opportunities
to apply CS to education and have a meaningful outcome.

I think we can break higher "education" down into three roles:

1\. Getting someone from skill state A to skill state B in a time efficient
way

2\. Verification and credentialing for skill state B

3\. Providing a safe environment to meet like-minded, intellectual folks and
have fun

The hardest part to automate is #3, but there are plenty of challenges in #1
and #2. One idea is to create a system that can break down a syllabus of
information into bite sized chunks that are automatically ordered
appropriately for the user based on some profile or assessment data. This will
likely involve some NLP.

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erikbye
It's not a technology problem; higher education is free in my country.

~~~
tcbasche
Yes arguably it's a problem with what your society and government values. The
US seems to value profit over people and that's how you end up with insane
university costs / debts / loans etc.

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rajlego
I would look into the effective altruism community and see what things people
have already tried there. You might also find the work of the
[https://www.povertyactionlab.org/](https://www.povertyactionlab.org/) useful
because they use RCTs (randomized controlled trials) to see what interventions
work. These aren't direct answers to your questions but I think they're useful
to consider as what the best, most effective application of your time is.

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toomuchtodo
Online material is already affordable. Convince employers a degree isn’t
required for employment, and the cost of education will decline.

~~~
closeparen
Very few people have the drive and discipline to systematically learn a
bachelor's degree worth of content from that online material while sitting in
their childhood bedrooms. Schools are, in part, a social technology for
getting students to actually do the work and stick with it. Conceivably the
community and social pressure could also be replicated on the internet.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Very few people need a bachelor’s degree worth of content to be successful in
their jobs.

------
rhc2104
Could you reach out to the Georgia Tech OMSCS program? They have 9,000
concurrent students, and a $7,000 Master's in CS Degree.

------
szhu
Don't have groups/projects I know about, but if you'd like, I would love to
have a further conversation about education. I'd rather converse rather than
post because most of my thoughts are still half-baked (and because I have
quite a lot of thoughts about education). Feel free to contact me through the
link in my bio.

~~~
bsldld
I would like to hear your thoughts as well. I just sent you an email.

I am working on a non-profit and open source idea at the moment[0]. I have
directly replied to OP with the details. Let me know what you think.

[0] [https://bsldld.neocities.org](https://bsldld.neocities.org)

------
BossingAround
More affordable? Maybe join UoPeople [1], and try to engage into making them
regionally accredited. UoP is doing lots of good stuff, but is not regionally
accredited and so the degree won't have a lot of value in the US.

[1] [https://www.uopeople.edu/](https://www.uopeople.edu/)

------
lawrenceyan
Wasn't the MOOC supposed to address higher education as a problem? No traction
on that front?

~~~
jkell
I believe MOOCs address an issue of access to higher education, not replace
it.

~~~
lawrenceyan
With the current pandemic, online classes seem par for the course. Perhaps
there's an opportunity somewhere for a resurgence here? I definitely don't see
people viewing the $60k/year price tag of private universities as reasonable
the way it is right now.

------
enjoyyourlife
Make a site for searching online classes and degree programs

Higher education is already affordable. The problem is that people aren't
looking in the right places for it

~~~
bobblywobbles
What about accreditation? Aren't online classes not accredited and therefore
companies aren't impressed you have an online degree or course completed?

~~~
enjoyyourlife
I am not suggesting to another search engine for MOOCs, instead I am
suggesting a search for online programs from accredited colleges that one can
receive a degree from

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yesenadam
> more affordable

Great question. Public education should be free everywhere, and so should
public transport.

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rsj_hn
If you want to make university education affordable, it might be a good idea
to look at places where university education already _is_ affordable, and see
what they are doing differently.

    
    
       I. Staffing
    

Let's take a look at Heidelberg University.

2,608 Academic staff

1775 non-academic staff

28,500 students

annual spending of $100,000 per staff or $14,000 per student.

(All numbers are excluding medical school/medical students).

Now let's look at a US university: Penn State.

5946 FTE academic staff

24422 FTE non-academic staff

76,219 FTE students

spending $32,406 per student or about $100,000 per staff.

So both Penn State and Heidelberg spend the same per employee (roughly), but
Penn State costs twice as much because they have so many more non-academic
staff per student.

What do these 24,000 non-academic staff _do_?

Well you have 48 executives, (the president earns over a million per year in
salary) all the way down to armies of bureaucrats.

If you want to know what those bureaucrats do, look at their jobs page
([https://psu.jobs/jobs](https://psu.jobs/jobs)).

I found some gems: (All full time jobs)

    
    
      * Military Marketing Manager
      * Workforce Education Outreach Coordinator
      * Student Advocacy Specialist
      * Proposal and Award Generalist
      * Coordinator for Academic Success
    

Then take a gander at the Heidelberg jobs page: [https://adb.zuv.uni-
heidelberg.de/info/INFO_LS$.Startup](https://adb.zuv.uni-
heidelberg.de/info/INFO_LS$.Startup)

Night and day difference.

    
    
       II. Years to completion
    
    

Once you limit your staff, you can also limit the amount of education you
provide. Do you need your students to spend 6 years studying majors or can you
have a slimmed down curriculum?

In Germany you finish in 3 years. That cuts costs in half over a 6 year time
horizon. There are fewer electives outside of your main area of study, fewer
optional courses, etc.

    
    
       III Stricter Entrance Requirements
    
    

Having an aggressive schedule requires restricting yourself to good students.
It also eliminates wasted resources on studies where students drop out or
don't finish. Heidelberg is very selective. Penn State is also selective in
some sense, but not nearly as _academically_ selective.

So these three tips is why in Germany you can provide an undergrad education
for about 30-40K total, and it takes 3 years, whereas in the US it costs
30-40K per year and can take 4-6 years.

So those are some things you can do to cut costs.

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manu3000
get into politics

