Kat Timpf: Harvard's fall courses online-only -- why would you pay $50K for that?

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Harvard University announces all classes will be online for the 2020-2021 school year

Reaction from Harvard Global Health Institute director Dr. Ashish Jha.

I may not have attended Harvard, but even I am wise enough to know that spending a whopping $50K for a year of online classes is not the smartest thing to do.

And yet? That seems to be exactly what the best-and-brightest, cream-of-the-crop students at that very school will be doing in the fall.

In case you haven’t heard, Harvard University has announced that it’s going to be doing things differently next semester because of the coronavirus pandemic. Although 40 percent of the student body (including all first-year students) will be living on campus, “[a]ll course instruction (undergraduate and graduate) for the 2020-21 academic year will be delivered online.”

GUTFELD ON HARVARD GOING ONLINE

It’s a huge change for sure, but there is one thing that will remain the same: The tuition cost will remain the usual $49,653 for anyone living off-campus, and the full cost will remain the $72,356 for those living there, even though they will be learning online

In other words? Harvard is offering a completely different product from what it’s offered in the past -- a model of education, by the way, that they have next to no experience in facilitating -- and still charging the same price. This is a crazy offer, and what’s even crazier is that some people are actually going to go for it.

Now, I don’t call it “crazy” just because I think that anything costing 50 grand should at the very least be something that gets you off of your couch. I do think that, yes, but I also believe that the price tag to attend these “prestigious” Ivy League institutions was already stupidly high, even under the operating procedures of The Before Times when that “classroom experience” was included.

By the way, this view isn’t just some kind of abstract talking point for me either. Rather, it’s the path that I myself chose when weighing my own options for my own life. As I’ve written about in the past, I was accepted into a Columbia University graduate program when I was 21-years-old. As a product of a culture that tells you it is always worth it to further your education, and that there is so much prestige associated with attending an elite university, I even went so far as to enroll. Just weeks before I was supposed to move across the country, though, I decided that whatever I’d learn there could never be worth saddling myself with debt to afford its price tag.

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Although many people called me crazy at the time, this was absolutely the right move, and I still consider it to be one of the best decisions that I’ve ever made in my life. The small amount of debt I took on for my undergraduate degree is already paid off, and my career is going far better than I could have ever even imagined it would be going right now. Had I attended Columbia, however, this would not have been the case. Not only is it true that I learned far more by schlepping it as an unpaid-intern-slash-restaurant-employee, but I’d also never have been able to afford to accept the kinds of entry-level positions that gave me my start if I’d had to worry about paying down that huge loan. I have achieved some of the exact things I used to dream about not in spite of having taken a creative, alternative route, but actually because I did it that way.

To be clear, I understand that things have changed because of this pandemic. I understand that we can’t just snap our fingers and do things the way that we used to be able to do them. When it comes to the way we view higher education in this country, though, I think that it might be more of an opportunity than a burden. We have needed to reevaluate the way our culture treats higher education for quite some time now, and this situation could be just what we need to kick that discussion into high gear.

When I was making my own decision, I figured that forking over all of that cash I didn’t have to Columbia meant I’d be essentially paying for two things: to have a diploma with my name below that of a prestigious institution and to have the chance to rub elbows with the sort of people you’d encounter at an Ivy League school. I personally didn’t consider that calculation worth it then -- and, now that elbow-rubbing of any kind is off the table indefinitely, who could ever consider that it would be worth it now?

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Even if you disagree, and you’re one of those people who believe that there is another thing that makes the high price of Harvard worth it -- that it really, truly has offered the best education money can buy -- then you’d still have to acknowledge that this may not be the case under current conditions. After all, even if Harvard always had been the best, the “Harvard” you’d be attending now is simply not the same school. Harvard, after all, has only just very recently started using this sort of online model. It’s a brand-new way of doing things. In other words? It’s an experiment, and paying $50,000 minimum to be a guinea pig seems senseless.

The way we publicly discuss this topic is, quite frankly, stupid. Actually, even worse than that -- it’s disingenuous. After all, I can hardly say that every person I’ve ever met who has attended a school like Harvard is among the smartest I’ve encountered, nor can I say that every person I’ve ever met who didn’t attend any college at all is among the dumbest, and I’m betting that almost anyone would agree with me on that. We all already understand that there are many different kinds of education and that attending some fancy undergraduate or graduate school is just one of them. For some people (especially those who don’t have to worry about the money) it’s an excellent option, sure -- but it’s far from the only option, or even the best option, for every single person, and there really hasn’t been a better time than now to embrace just how true that is.

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