I'm a prof at a community college and I encountered this last semester. I was teaching an online class of 30 and 3-4 were definitely "fake" students. A college had about half her students turn out to be "fake."
Students had to do discussion board posts and these students responses all had html formatting as if they were indented replies from an email chain. The clincher was one of them posted in the introduction message board, "Hello, I am a student in [insert city] and I'm studying..."
We had been warned that these "students" were coming because we are part of a system of schools and the schools earlier in the alphabet had encountered it in the semesters before us. So the school had contracted with some id verification system and those students got kicked out pretty quickly.
Community college isn't free but it is much less than 4 year colleges. You can take out loans that will cover things like books and other expenses. I'm not in financial aid so I don't know exactly how it works. I assume they aren't really "bots" but are people in another country who have faked an identity. Anyone could do it but if they used their real name the government will find them eventually. As faculty I could look at the "student's" schedule and see they were taking multiple online classes from different campuses in our system. I called the number on their accounts and two of them were no answer and the third I called was someone else who didn't know that name.
I assume that one person is running accounts for multiple "students" and from the boiler plate that one person submitted I wouldn't be surprised if it was an organized business like many internet/phone scams.
Giving student aid beyond just free classes enables students who would otherwise need to spend time working to support themselves to instead attend school to get a better life. Generally that's considered a good thing, not worthy of the disdain you're displaying.
This is the first-order, emotional reaction, yes, but policy should be made based on its full effects, not just its sales pitch's popularity with first-order-emoting voters.
Europe as a whole manages to hand over money for nothing to would-be students in need without any anti-education backlash. An anti-education stance is the cause of protesting education subsidies, not their consequence.
As someone else pointed out, yeah - anti education movements are a third order effect of how succesful education is at not making people vote for religious causes and non scientific positions.
The threat of its efficacy, is why, since 1960 onwards, a large chunk of the western world has been figuring out how to bend psychology, rhetoric, and media forces to undermine "Ivory tower" intellectuals.
Yes, a succesful movement has been undermined because it posed a threat to people with the money to spend to fight their battles.
This. People didn't agree on immigration levels yet they thought people fleeing horror should have shelter from the horror and be given asylum. The Democrats seemed to let the asylum process be abused as a general immigration process and now the US is having a huge pullback/backlash on asylum seekers.
> The third order effect of handing out money for nothing, is the chicks coming home to roost as anti-education movements
Anti-education movements may be a third order effect for this, but it's a first order effect for other groups who are deliberately pushing anti-education efforts.
No. It's a Sybil attack on subsidy to help ppl of different means equally make room for education in their lives. No one is "making money" unless they are committing fraud. They are being put on an equal playing field -- the subsidies are seemingly directed at the individual, but are terraforming [of the field] in nature, not for enrichment of the individual.
I was able to get educated with full focus on that task, because my family prioritised saving for my education. I want others, without such privilege, to have access to such opportunity.
If you choose to frame it also that "your parents paid you to consume free education", then so be it. But let's not pretend the state is doing something strange or against its core mission here
One can virtue signal on either political spectrum, obviously. Phatic, performative language and gestures to indicate allegiance and supplication are possible for any given philosophy. Bumper stickers are literally virtue signalling.
"Virtue Signaling" is often a term of derision placed from the right onto the left. But is often done just as much on the other side. It's part of the 'right's vocabulary of labels for the left.
I just like to point out all the times when the 'right' take part in "virtue signaling".
Right wing , political or religious, often take part in "virtue signaling". Yet, seem unconscious of it, un-ware of their own biases, because to them they are not 'signaling' they are just speaking 'truth'.
But of course, they are not. "God is real, hence I'm not just 'signaling' when I say it to my fellow believers".
The fact you think the "libs" are the only ones who can virtue signal says a lot about you. The far-right have an entire playbook of dog whistles just for virtue signaling.
Please avoid labels. It’s not unique to the ‘far’ right to want to manage accountability to limited resources like quality education. it’s generally accepted that requiring some level of skin in the game from those that benefit does a decent job of doing this.
> it’s generally accepted that requiring some level of skin in the game from those that benefit does a decent job of doing this
"Generally accepted" by who? Based on what?
Sometimes the reactions on this site are silly. We're talking about community college here. The people going to community college are trying to transition their life from minimum wage retail job to useful careers as things like dental hygienists, nurses, IT workers and daycare workers.
Their own increased future earnings will offset the subsidies through higher taxes and reduced burden on social services, and everyone in society benefits by having people in the types of jobs that community colleges prepare students for.
Community colleges are just a massive benefit to society at large, regardless of whether you're leftwing, rightwing, rich, poor, young or old. Literally everyone is benefiting here.
Off the top of my head, so may not align exactly with formal definitions, but economics is the study of allocation of resources and how incentives play a large role in how human behavior is influenced by those incentives. I prefer Sowell for a primer but if he’s not to your liking try google, keywords economic incentives and resource allocation.
i have plenty of personal experience with community colleges and those close to me have gone from penniless immigrant to making more than the average tech bro because they attended one while working full time, and paying full tuition without aid. what kept them going was a reasonable roi . the i was their investment of hard earned dollars that they used to pay for their tuition and gave them the incentive to stay in. they had skin in the game so they endured. getting something for free doesn’t instill any obligation, and that’s a common lived experience.
But using student debt, as an incentive to study hard, as justification that debt is good, is bit of a stretch.
There are plenty of students that do well without pressure.
Programs that are trying to pull in people on the fence will inevitably have some that don't make it, the goal is for a net positive. If local employers have 1 extra qualified employee at the cost of 2 or 3 that don't make it, it still balances out. The state is out the money for a few tuitions for students that didn't make it, but the lifetime earnings of the one that made it is greater.
Well, the problem is obvious in hindsight, and perhaps even in foresight. Giving out free money attracts these scammers, who crowd real students out of not only the aid money, but also the actual class. So the net effect is to make it harder to access community college, not easier.
Perhaps I'm naive, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to avoid the scammers if they limited first time students to in-person classes.
It's not about whether money frees up time-that's obvious. That argument could be used to justify handing out money to literally anyone. The issue is this aid is easily gamed, as the article shows, and strong incentives to pursue education already exist, like better job prospects. Not to mention that it's hard to justify asking less-educated workers to subsidize the upward mobility of those who may soon out-earn them.
>> If attending these classes was even just free, this wouldn't be a problem. Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous.
> Giving student aid beyond just free classes enables students who would otherwise need to spend time working to support themselves to instead attend school to get a better life. Generally that's considered a good thing, not worthy of the disdain you're displaying.
I think the idea would be if someone's getting paid to go to school so they don't have to work, then they should go to in-person classes. Online classes probably shouldn't be an option.
If there's profit available and no personal cost (in either time or money), scammers will exploit the program as described ("fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds").
You present hypothetical scenario of up against the reality they getting paid to “attend” online class is a total farce, diluting the value of a diploma or degree from that community college system well also stealing away resources.
This is your opinion and it is not a hypothetical scenario. Many people including myself received grant aid to attend classes both in person and virtual. If it wasn't for that flexibility I likely wouldn't have be able to go.
I’m glad it worked for you, however this is not an opinion, it’s a worldview, and it is unethical and unscrupulous to use government funding to pay people to remotely attend a community college course. This is several steps beyond the intent of a community college, which is simply to provide free education for working people in the community.
Yes if my taxes can be used to "unethically" and "unscrupulously" build roads I didn't ask for then I'm fine with taxes being used to pay for education.
I'm mixed. If we lived in a utopian world where money isn't real, I'd agree. Reality is California has major budget issues. Offering the classes for free is already enough in the current climate.
Working while going to school is not uncommon or isolated to California. Full time work while going to school is excessive - but that is also a California COL issue that the state needs to actually tackle. But it gets worse the more they don't address their deficits. Debt begets debt and it always drives up COL.
If you completely ignore the section of the population that needs aid, then yes, there's no need for aid. Might as well stop building wheelchair ramps, because for a healthy person with no locomotory issues the stairs are just fine.
I mean, I worked 20ish hours a week while doing engineering and I did well relative to my peers, but I can still recognize it was a lot. Full time in that world for 4-5 years would have been miserable.
Just because I can do something doesn't mean it's something I would want or would suggest for the rest of the population.
OTOH, life in America is very unfairly miserable for tens of millions of people who are not going to school. And trying to tell all the taxpayers that they have to provide nice quality-of-life upgrades, for people who are already enjoying taxpayer-supported free classes? NO - in our non-utopian world, where money is real, that is a very bad idea.
Yeah, I agree in our real world that it's a tall ask. I'd like to see us not burden all tax payers with such requests, though. Rather, I'd focus on the very top to be contributing substantially more into the systems that they've pillaged for their present wealth.
> Taking just one or two classes per term is an old tradition at community colleges.
Not for people fresh out of high school. You are usually trying to graduate with a Bachelor's in 4 years so you do full-time at community college for 2 years to get your AA-T and then transfer to a university for your last 2 years. California in particular has a program that lets you transfer get a guaranteed transfer to any state university or participating private university once you get your AA-T.
Not really. I worked various jobs in community college to support myself. Community college is designed around that fact with early morning and late night classes, but these are ONLINE classes. You can’t say that they have to work at that time because there is no time slot
My wife got her Masters from Harvard recently through online classes, and every class had...I want to say about 4 hours a week of actual scheduled, synchronous class sessions over Zoom, in addition to the coursework required.
I’ve done years of online coursework and I’ve never had that nor heard of that at a community college. Harvard must be doing their own thing. I guess if you pay tens of thousands for a degree you’re stuck with onerous practices.
Community college is explicitly to help local students who are generally working jobs, so these onerous scheduled sessions are not reasonable
This is the hard part of society. We want nice things but propose anything that can be gamed/scammed for free money and it's instantly shot-down before it even gets off the ground. That, or if by a miracle it launches, is constantly attacked and smeared by politicians using it to get votes from selfish assholes who dont want to share (I learned about sharing in preschool and kindergarten).
Until you solve the primitive animalistic problems of selfishness, greed, and energy conserving laziness, were not going to have nice things. Someone asshole is going to be mad they have to share. Some asshole is going to lie and scam to get as much free shit as they can.
But the numbers mentioned there seem tiny for a federal programme like the Pell Grant. A lot of times it's a matter of scale: a bit of fraud isn't ideal, but entirely manageable, so whatever.
Since then the scale expanded greatly. This is often a problem when you move things online: you're instantly connected with everyone on the world, which also means you're instantly connected with every asshole in the world. And with AI a single asshole can now pretend to be 200 assholes.
The solution is to do less things online and more in person. There are some advantages for some people in doing things online, but it also negatively affects everyone, and in general it just doesn't seem worth it to do everything online. It's not binary: you can do many things online while still requiring some bits in-person (e.g. registration, exams, occasional events).
> which also means you're instantly connected with every asshole in the world. And with AI a single asshole can now pretend to be 200 assholes.
Technology always seems to be the solution until the tables are turned.
> The solution is to do less things online and more in person.
And then we go right back to these programs being attacked for being inaccessible by e.g. poor people and the disabled. Obviously the solution is to hire people to go out and bring these services to those who need it but once you see how much effort is required to do that it rapidly requires a lot of funding and looks inefficient.
A cultural shift is required to fix all this and I am not sure how that will happen. Even given that the major religion in the west is Christianity which preaches that being selfish is not cool has been appropriated by selfish assholes who vote selfishly. I dunno what to say anymore. I am 100% for these programs which will be massively beneficial for humanity and all these fucks can think of is "muh tax munney."
It is important to not deny people what they need in order to prevent fraudsters from profiting. This fraud is roughly 0.3% of total student aide in California.
On one hand, students need to pay for food and rent, so it makes sense. I used loans, grants, scholarships, and financial aid to pay for these expenses myself when I was in school.
On the other hand, maybe the barrier to entry is just waaayyy too low for online community college classes for this to make any sense. Students should have some skin in the game. Maybe students should be required to take a couple in person classes before financial aid can be used for online classes?
I don't think the article was dancing around it though.
No such thing as free education. Just subsidized education. Costs would be pushed entirely to tax payers, many of whom have never attended college themselves. Demand, costs, taxes and state deficits would increase. The incentive for fraud would be pushed up one level to the administration.
We all understand the context of words here. Believe it or not, many people think that the government providing things for its citizens via taxation is a good thing.
If you want to refute any of my points, please do so. Sarcasm isn’t helpful. Managing scarce resources like education is a hard problem. Giving it away for free isn’t a solution.
How about we start with knowing that it's not "free" as in "costs nothing to anybody", as UncleMeat has already acknowledged that it's being provided by the government through taxation, and actually address why you thin that it's bad, rather than just repeating "it's not free! it's not freeeeee!!!!" over and over again, as if we're idiots who don't understand how taxes and public funding work?
Since you're the one trying to prove that free education is bad, why don't you address those, and then if we think you're wrong, we can rebut? Rather than demanding that your interlocutor prove your own points for you.
This is an example of what I've been thinking about/warning about for several years now: we are entering a post-truth era, where there is increasingly no way to know what is real and what is not.
When I've thought about it, this scenario never occurred to me, but it's a perfect example: we're going to be increasingly unable to know what is "true" in a million different ways, and people are going to exploit that in every way possible.
We're headed for bad times, and I don't know what the answer is, if there is one.
Underlying this is a belief that scamming people is the only way to achieve financial stability, that you need to always be hustling. Teenagers went from idolising actors and musicians (who had agents dealing with the money behind closed doors) to idolising social media creators and influencers who are quite transparent about how the algorithm determines their income. On IndieHackers and MicroConf, it's standard advice that you need to sell your SaaS to businesses because ordinary consumers have no money.
I'm not saying this specific problem isn't solvable, just that it is an example of the problem I'm thinking of.
That said, there are tremendous advantages to supporting remote learning. Simply requiring in person has far greater costs than are being described in the source article.
We've been in a post-truth era for all of human history, since the first hunter-gatherer told a lie to take advantage of someone else.
Which is why we evolved to have exquisite bullshit detectors. They're not perfect, but they're pretty decent.
The answer around what is real and not is the same as it ever was -- does information come from a respected, generally trustworthy source or not? Does it come from a source that might have an agenda, or not? Is it written in a way that seems to gather a lot of evidence in all directions and then explain its conclusion in a plausible way, or is it clearly one-sided?
Bullshit detection, fraud detection, scam detection -- these have always been necessary skills in the world. Sure the scale of misinformation grows, but so do the tools we have to combat it. Email spam was a huge problem, then Gmail filtered it out.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Stop offering online classes and expect students to show up in person. Online education sucks, everyone knows this. Everyone knows that they are making some kind of compromise when teaching or taking an online course. And if people are too poor to drive themselves to college or have to work too much or whatever else, then the state should provide opportunities for them so that they can continue their education. Stop accepting less than this.
I grew up in a very conservative and controlling environment. My ability to study remotely is one of the things that helped lift me out of that environment. I am far from alone in this experience.
I’d have much preferred an in-person education. But I don’t think we should look at the situation as “A is better than B so let’s get rid of B”. B still serves an important purpose and eliminating it will leave people behind.
> then the state should provide opportunities for them so that they can continue their education
I get what you mean, but saying that something _should_ be the case in response to not liking it doesn’t really make sense since that’s the reason it’s popular in the first place. States don’t do this, so that’s part of why online schooling is valuable.
I agree that online school isn’t as quality as in person (in my experience), but it gives a ton of flexibility to those who can’t commute (due to time or cost) and allows those people to possibly get an education when they otherwise couldn’t.
I wonder if there’s a formal term for this kind of argument (would love to know because I see it a lot).
The formal term is irony, because what they are presenting is actually a "Reductio ad absurdum", but they don't understand why their argument is absurd.
If you want a case and point of this, imagine a comedian proposing this idea dripping with sarcasm and clever little jokes, sort of what John Oliver does. The overall absurdity would be obvious, and everyone would understand the suggestion is a bad idea, with a little bit of honey to go with the vinegar.
The people often presenting this sort of unintentionally ironic argument don't seem to recognize the idiocy or exclusivity of the thing they're suggesting. Lacking understanding of the absurdity of the situation is the definition of their ignorance, because the burden of understanding and proof are on the person presenting the argument, not the audience. (Everyone is ignorant in some way, and nobody is even close to knowing everything. You're being dramatic if you really think that way, even for a second.)
I currently have a full time job in government as a computer scientist. I'm also taking an online master's at georgia tech and it's fairly good so far - no other way I could study supercomputing. Why would I leave an AI job where I'm learning practical AI skills to study CS? Async with evening exams was my only option.
If you don't have a broad perspective on all life circumstances and types of education, don't just dismiss what you don't know.
I had to go to community college while having a job and paying for everything and doing it around my schedule. This was before most places had online options and those that did were like, university of phoenix where it seemed like it would limit you because it wasn't considered the same as a non-profit university. I don't really buy this argument that people need some kind of online experience or otherwise they would be cut out (excluding people with some kind of disability that prevents them from going places). Plenty of people were able to complete college educations by showing up to night classes prior to online classes being a thing.
After that, I worked at GaTech where one of my responsibilities was helping to build the physics portion of the masters program that you are currently in (i don't think the physics portion ever turned into a master program like OSMCS, i left around the time OSMCS started offering degrees). When building these courses we tried to implement the best information from cognitive science and education, we tried to build the best exercises, we had super active involvement in course forums, etc. We did everything right, and we still felt that something was missing from the experience from the teaching side and we did not find that students in the online side participated in the same ways, or learned the same information, as those on-campus. I still believe that most people would benefit more from in person educational experiences. I think your experience in the gatech program is a valuable one and I have heard many positive things about this program since I left to go and do other stuff. However, I still believe that there is something valuable from most educational programs being offered in person only.
1) full-time in-person education, quitting my CS job
2) full-time online education, quitting my CS job
3) full-time CS job and doing a part-time master's online
Option #3 is the best for my CS education and growth. Period. Don't pretend the only choices are #1 and #2 because you're arguing in favour of #1.
Plus, it's not like I can (or want to) move to the USA just for studies. I have family in Montreal. Montreal has great universities for CS and AI but they have almost nothing for supercomputing or quantum computing.
I was a teacher for 4 years. I get it. There's magic to in-person education. But millions of people think online is the better choice for them and they're not all wrong.
However I believe they do require you to show up for _exams_. Online proctoring is a miserable disaster, especially in the AI era, so I think for credentials it's unfortunately necessary to have in-person exams. (edit: checked and they switched to online during COVID, unsuprisingly, but are considering switching back)
The ease of financial fraud is a separate issue. In the US I suspect that's linked to widespread identity fraud.
When I went to university, the first week we received the syllabus, and date for final examination. Lectures were some old professors pretty much just doing book recitals in a large auditorium - little to no interaction with the students. If you had questions, that's what the TAs were for.
Any actual learning, you had to do in the library or study halls - and hopefully join a reading/study group. But the vast majority of students just showed up to lectures (if that even), and studied the course material on their own.
Pretty much what every large college / university looks like. And to be completely honest, I don't see why that can't be done online. Some of the core classes today have thousands of students at the largest schools.
When I took my MBA at a much smaller (in terms of student mass) school, it was completely different. But that was due to the much smaller number of students, and more professors, who had a much closer connection to the students. For that type of education - and with that type of infrastructure, I do agree that getting people physically to the school can help. But that's more by design.
Very few students watch lectures online. There is massive amounts of cheating in online courses. Almost no online course requires proctored exams. Online education is overall worse, in terms of actual learning, than face-to-face courses.
The whole discussion revolves around credentialing and certification that you actually learned the stuff you claim to have learned, that you jumped through the hoops required by a given college system whose reputation you want to lever into a career.
If you just wanna learn stuff online, dive in and watch YouTube or any of the variety of online educstional services, but in reality you want a certification that says you did the work, and maybe the actual transfer of knowledge is secondary. We shouldn’t pretend that credentials should be handed out for watching YouTube videos and filling out tests with Google searches, group chats sharing answers, or now, AI.
The goal of any credentialing system shouldn’t be to lower the bar as low as possible; you just devalue the whole system. There are several major institutions, formerly reputable, that many will not hire job prospects from.
In other words… Community college should be a bit of a grind, one that produces students who are far more knowledgeable than when they started the program.
The goal of the system as a whole should be to help people live better lives. That includes providing the knowledge for people to do the jobs that help society function. And whatever is needed to help them convince employers to hire them (ie, credentials). And (hopefully) other knowledge that helps them in a more general way (ie, the various generic classes that teach non-domain knowledge).
The fact that public colleges are a credentialing system is (supposed) to be in pursuit of the above; not the end goal. If we can find ways to help them achieve the above that doesn't actually need credentialing, that should be fine, too. I don't know if that's possible (or even a goal); but it's important to be able to distinguish between the actual goal and what we're trying to do (atm) to achieve them.
Yes but they have to be willing to do things that sacrifice other things in order to get ahead. And those sacrifices should be minimized in places outside of their control. Like a child of poor parents should not be penalized and be unable to afford school or take massive debt to do it. It is unacceptable to live this way. It is not fair. People should be given the option to pursue skills and knowledges without a financial burden. And because that is true, people need access to the best possible educational environment and I guarantee you that is not watching video lectures and it’s not plugging in answers into some dumb course management software. That is not a good use of anyone’s time. This is why students should be expected to show up and be present in class because so much of learning is done together. Online environments create a barrier between each other in this case.
I am sure there will be someone who will say, but I liked studying alone. Yes, I agree with you. Pursuit of knowledge by yourself is an important skill to have and a time that is meant to be enjoyed. And what I say to you is this, creating knowledge with others is also a time to be enjoyed and if you miss out on that you are missing out on some of the understanding your books cannot provide. And I would welcome you to work on teams which give you the opportunity to work in this fashion and see if you enjoy it. Because I found that I really do and I want to share that with others.
This might shock your worldview but cheating is absolutely rampant in STEM programs in person too. I still remember the corrupt graduate students who would circulate exam answers and/or take money to get copies of exams. Tutoring services range from valid to straight up homework cheating. Students share answers all the time, sometimes innocently, because humans want to help each other. Students are much, much smarter than faculty when it comes to stopping cheating. Good luck stopping it in a lecture hall of 100 people!
Every accredited online course program requires proctoring. To think in person stops cheating is naive. We need to rethink how education works if people feel the need to cheat so much. I’ll give you a hint: when people pay 5,000 dollars a class they’re going to cheat because they’re financially incentivized to do so. Administrative bloat in university needs to be done away with immediately and costs of education fixed by the government to some number that is reasonable for most people. Education should not be for-profit. Right now it is, even at public universities.
I have 30 years of experience teaching mathematics in higher education. Around 50% of higher education occurs in community colleges. Another large percentage occurs in regional state universities and small liberal arts colleges. Many of these don’t have graduate students and don’t have large lecture hall courses. Your experience is not normative.
Every accredited online course program requires proctoring.
You are wrong.
Your logic is quite bad too. The response to the statement that there is massive amounts of cheating in online courses shouldn’t be: “there is cheating in face-to-face courses too”. Obviously what matters are the relative rates of cheating and you’ve not provided any evidence or reasoning as to why the rates are comparable.
To think in person stops cheating is naive.
Obviously. And I never stated or implied that there is no cheating in face-to-face courses.
* entirely self driven, which is hard for a lot of necessary but often dry courses
* taught mostly via online videos; impossible to ask questions on the spot or explore concepts
* interaction with peers and professors is almost entirely forced or inorganic and often terrible
* limited networking options; no real community; hard to build bridges and get references when your professor is an automated test system (i.e. Canvas, et al)
* often limited screening; U Phoenix or WGU takes anyone, and now I have 100+ semi-literate applicants who somehow pulled a 3.3 via online schools blowing up my applications
* difficult to assess value proposition; you generally need to register to take part, while I can just drive to VA Tech or Dartmouth or even the Naval Academy and walk around and see (mostly) what it's like
Like anything it depends on the situation. It works well for some people and subjects but not for others.
Last semester I had a student in my online class that was every tech illiterate. There was an assignment where they were supposed to download a file, fill in the blanks and submit it. This is something that should take no more than 5 minutes. The student couldn't figure out how. I told the student, "you can just print it out then take a picture." Come to find out the student doesn't have a laptop or desktop computer and was trying to do it on a phone. I look at their schedule and they are taking all online courses. That person should not be taking online classes.
This kind of fraud existed even before online college became so popular.
Around 2014-2015 we had to start reporting the “last day of attendance” or participation for any student who failed a course. Kind of a pain when you prefer to treat your university students as adults and not take attendance.
Yeah, they once told my wife this "expect students to show up in person", when she was pregnant and not all the time well. The result? Thrown out of the self paid language course at university with no refund.
But in the US, colleges have offices for accommodations. The faculty isn't required to do anything unless the university, acting through that office, tells them to.
Source: my career spent working with this kind of institution and this kind of office.
Remote and correspondence (the same thing really) have existed forever. There is zero basis for your statement it’s worse, and there is zero basis for your statement that there is compromise. Remote schooling allows people who wouldn’t have the means to educate themselves formally such as working people, parents, adult learners, etc to do so in a manner practical to them.
I have a degree I got in person and now one I am working on remote. Do you know what the difference is? NOTHING! When I went in person I was making up for the shortcomings of professors too. I was still having to teach myself a lot. The only true difference was I wasn’t able to do more than terrible part time work and I drove 45 minutes one way.
Malware vendors like honorlock have made remote schooling much more difficult. Not in terms of learning but in terms of overall stress level. Remote schooling itself is an incredible way to break from the aristocratic ideal still pedaled by universities today.
I’m envious of students whose parents prepared appropriately for their kids to go to school and focus full time. I was not one of them. My situation made worse by my parents making just enough to disqualify me from any aid despite their contribution of 0. The existence of remote schooling has allowed me to pursue my educational dreams.
When I read that title, I was expecting the following story: "Academic ghostwriters", thanks to AI, are now completing online degrees by the hundreds per actual human headcount, selling the opportunity to put one's name on the "work" to fraudulently obtain a degree.
How do you handle students that are not capable of showing up on the first day in-person?
- Live far away
- Have a job they can't just not show up for
- Having children to take care of
- Health issues
There's tons of reasons for people not to be able to attend in person, and not all of them are "because I didn't want to". And, for a _lot_ of those people, improving their education can have a huge impact on their quality of life.
Can’t show up for one day? That is such an incredibly low bar to also ask them to sit through a long series of courses and test. These college colleges are state funded, so if the person is overseas or on the opposite side of the US… then what are we really funding? That’s not the intent of a “community college”.
A single mother than works at Walmart and another job delivering food, trying to support her kid(s), and will get let go if she misses a day at work; who is desperately trying to better herself so she can provide a better future for her family?
Look, I get that it's a balance between stopping the cheaters and not putting undue burden on the good ones. But it's not a simple problem, and there's a lot of people out there that are under constraints that a lot of us wouldn't even consider when trying to work out the solution.
Funny you should choose Walmart as your hardship example, as they have a very generous educational benefit program for their employees. Many corporations do. All are contingent upon showing up for work! It’s ok to have obligations in exchange for benefits.
I would say, not have to show up for Day 1 but how about have to show up at the collage with a state issued ID in order to have funds released to their account?
It looks like the main issue is that the people committing the fraud are able to create student profiles and request student aid with these profiles. I am unsure of California's requirements but this generally requires a SSN. California is issuing Real ID so verification should be relatively easy.
Presumably we would handle that in the same way we did up until ~5 years ago or so.
Right now people can't enrol in "full" classes either, except the classes are "full" of bots.
And a single day of attendance is really not a very high bar to meet. For special cases where it's really a problem accommodations can be made on request.
This only adds a small amount of friction. Some more effective options off the top of my head:
1. free classes but no aid
2. pay covered costs directly
3. tie aid to participation (not performance)
You could argue someone could still scam the system by attending the class and submiting AI-generated content or just copying others, but this is much more involved. Some of the blame has to land on the distance programs of the institutions. They've become overly relient on charging full tuition for much cheaper online delivery, and don't care too much about the "community" part of college anymore.
That might not always work. There is a huge issue of Lyft and Uber drivers showing up the first day, passing all the background checks, etc. then selling their account to someone else to take their place. Maybe better is to show up first day, and to do random ID checks throughout the semester. It feels.. unfriendly and accusatory to do that but I'm not sure of the alternative...
.. but if we wanted to be a little Orwellian.. put cameras and facial recognition in the classrooms to take automatic attendance and to identify students who should not be there, or who may be missing for prolonged absences. That'll go over really well....
I'm surprised to see ID verification isn't required apparently (or that's being faked as well), that's usually required for any kind of program that involves financial aid.
At my community college we are increasingly teaching high school kids. I have taught students who were not of voting age and didn't have a drivers license.
That being said, we have contracted with an id verification service to randomly ask some students to verify especially if we think they are "fake" students in online classes.
I wonder if there are perverse incentives preventing this from being fixed. The financial aid program looks like a success issuing more funds, the schools see increased enrollment, and the fraudsters go without saying. Seems like a win-win-win.
Sort of. As a professor who has encountered this, on one hand if I have fewer papers to grade then I'm happy but on the other hand the "students" do submit work for at least the first couple weeks that I still had to grade. (After that we caught on and got them out of the class). Additionally, I would rather just grade good papers than try to figure out why their work seemed weird. Is it AI generated? A non-native english speaker? Good old fashioned plagiarism? or just bad work?
Last semester was the first time I encountered it and I was suspicious and then I talked to a colleague who noticed identical irregularities.
So is the journalist (and/or faculty) misusing the term "bot" to refer to real humans doing fraud? I find it annoying that words get redefined this way. Especially as it feels like it's the opposite meaning.
Seems like the fake students are automation scripts written to mimic human interaction in online class, pretty much the common definition of "bot"? For now, all bot is still in someway human-operated anyway.
If you get a Pell grant or other “non-traditional” financial aid packages, there’s a bit for associated costs. It’s not huge money, but if you do this scheme across many schools…
Financial aid is sent directly to the college. However, if you have a positive balance in your account (financial aid, grants, scholarships, or loans more than tuition and fees) you can request the bursar deposit that balance into your bank account. This is how I paid for living expenses in the years I lived off campus.
It does afaik so I'm confused what the monetary scam is. Community College in California is cheap or free for most students so I feel like something is being left out of the explanation.
If someone is able to first scam state and financial aid for a non existent student that seems more first issue to fix than at the point there's a bot/scammer in CC classes submitting AI homework.
I'm a prof at a community college and I encountered this last semester. I was teaching an online class of 30 and 3-4 were definitely "fake" students. A college had about half her students turn out to be "fake."
Students had to do discussion board posts and these students responses all had html formatting as if they were indented replies from an email chain. The clincher was one of them posted in the introduction message board, "Hello, I am a student in [insert city] and I'm studying..."
We had been warned that these "students" were coming because we are part of a system of schools and the schools earlier in the alphabet had encountered it in the semesters before us. So the school had contracted with some id verification system and those students got kicked out pretty quickly.
What’s the point of sending a fake student to a community college? What’s the end goal of the people running these bots?
Financial aid fraud.
How are they able to profit off that? Doesnt the school cost money which the aid would just reimburse?
The community college tuition is free but the state will give you some money to help cover living expenses while you study.
So then anyone could do this even if they arent a bot?
Community college isn't free but it is much less than 4 year colleges. You can take out loans that will cover things like books and other expenses. I'm not in financial aid so I don't know exactly how it works. I assume they aren't really "bots" but are people in another country who have faked an identity. Anyone could do it but if they used their real name the government will find them eventually. As faculty I could look at the "student's" schedule and see they were taking multiple online classes from different campuses in our system. I called the number on their accounts and two of them were no answer and the third I called was someone else who didn't know that name.
I assume that one person is running accounts for multiple "students" and from the boiler plate that one person submitted I wouldn't be surprised if it was an organized business like many internet/phone scams.
They should give you interest free loans with generous payment schedules starting one year after graduation.
Tuition aid mediated through a school's financial office is not the only form of aid.
They don't pay the school.
literally in the first few paragraphs of the linked article?
financial aid fraud
They steal any loan and aid money that in excess of the tuition.
Training data?
The author tried really hard to dance around the real problem here: California is apparently paying students to attend online community college.
If attending these classes was even just free, this wouldn't be a problem. Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous.
Giving student aid beyond just free classes enables students who would otherwise need to spend time working to support themselves to instead attend school to get a better life. Generally that's considered a good thing, not worthy of the disdain you're displaying.
This is the first-order, emotional reaction, yes, but policy should be made based on its full effects, not just its sales pitch's popularity with first-order-emoting voters.
The second order effects of cheap education are immense, ranging from longer life span, better health, stronger economies, amongst just a few.
The matter at hand, specifically, is one about how our ability to verify is overwhelmed by our ability to generate content.
This is playing out with recruitment, bug reports, complaint forms - and going all the way up to sophisticated fraud.
The third order effect of handing out money for nothing, is the chicks coming home to roost as anti-education movements tear down the nation.
Europe as a whole manages to hand over money for nothing to would-be students in need without any anti-education backlash. An anti-education stance is the cause of protesting education subsidies, not their consequence.
Yeah right. Now go visit East Germany, no shortage of anti-education anti-intellectual attitudes.
As someone else pointed out, yeah - anti education movements are a third order effect of how succesful education is at not making people vote for religious causes and non scientific positions.
The threat of its efficacy, is why, since 1960 onwards, a large chunk of the western world has been figuring out how to bend psychology, rhetoric, and media forces to undermine "Ivory tower" intellectuals.
Yes, a succesful movement has been undermined because it posed a threat to people with the money to spend to fight their battles.
This is old news.
This. People didn't agree on immigration levels yet they thought people fleeing horror should have shelter from the horror and be given asylum. The Democrats seemed to let the asylum process be abused as a general immigration process and now the US is having a huge pullback/backlash on asylum seekers.
> The third order effect of handing out money for nothing, is the chicks coming home to roost as anti-education movements
Anti-education movements may be a third order effect for this, but it's a first order effect for other groups who are deliberately pushing anti-education efforts.
No one's "anti education", except universities bloated with administration and professors who publish false data for the gov bux.
It's not cheap education. What is the point in deliberately changing the topic? It's about paying people to consume free education.
No. It's a Sybil attack on subsidy to help ppl of different means equally make room for education in their lives. No one is "making money" unless they are committing fraud. They are being put on an equal playing field -- the subsidies are seemingly directed at the individual, but are terraforming [of the field] in nature, not for enrichment of the individual.
I was able to get educated with full focus on that task, because my family prioritised saving for my education. I want others, without such privilege, to have access to such opportunity.
If you choose to frame it also that "your parents paid you to consume free education", then so be it. But let's not pretend the state is doing something strange or against its core mission here
Read the article. The students complained about aren't after the opportunity.
"Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous."
This is also a sales pitch, playing to the far-right. (virtue signaling)
You think virtue signalling is playing to the far right? Care to define... any of your terms?
The concept of virtue signaling does not imply a particular group that the signal is intended for, and absolutely can be for the far right.
hell, the concept comes out of signaling Christian Virtue and taking steps to look holier than thou
One can virtue signal on either political spectrum, obviously. Phatic, performative language and gestures to indicate allegiance and supplication are possible for any given philosophy. Bumper stickers are literally virtue signalling.
As others pointed out.
"Virtue Signaling" is often a term of derision placed from the right onto the left. But is often done just as much on the other side. It's part of the 'right's vocabulary of labels for the left.
I just like to point out all the times when the 'right' take part in "virtue signaling".
Right wing , political or religious, often take part in "virtue signaling". Yet, seem unconscious of it, un-ware of their own biases, because to them they are not 'signaling' they are just speaking 'truth'.
But of course, they are not. "God is real, hence I'm not just 'signaling' when I say it to my fellow believers".
The fact you think the "libs" are the only ones who can virtue signal says a lot about you. The far-right have an entire playbook of dog whistles just for virtue signaling.
Please avoid labels. It’s not unique to the ‘far’ right to want to manage accountability to limited resources like quality education. it’s generally accepted that requiring some level of skin in the game from those that benefit does a decent job of doing this.
> it’s generally accepted that requiring some level of skin in the game from those that benefit does a decent job of doing this
"Generally accepted" by who? Based on what?
Sometimes the reactions on this site are silly. We're talking about community college here. The people going to community college are trying to transition their life from minimum wage retail job to useful careers as things like dental hygienists, nurses, IT workers and daycare workers.
Their own increased future earnings will offset the subsidies through higher taxes and reduced burden on social services, and everyone in society benefits by having people in the types of jobs that community colleges prepare students for.
Community colleges are just a massive benefit to society at large, regardless of whether you're leftwing, rightwing, rich, poor, young or old. Literally everyone is benefiting here.
>>>"Generally accepted" by who? Based on what?
Off the top of my head, so may not align exactly with formal definitions, but economics is the study of allocation of resources and how incentives play a large role in how human behavior is influenced by those incentives. I prefer Sowell for a primer but if he’s not to your liking try google, keywords economic incentives and resource allocation.
i have plenty of personal experience with community colleges and those close to me have gone from penniless immigrant to making more than the average tech bro because they attended one while working full time, and paying full tuition without aid. what kept them going was a reasonable roi . the i was their investment of hard earned dollars that they used to pay for their tuition and gave them the incentive to stay in. they had skin in the game so they endured. getting something for free doesn’t instill any obligation, and that’s a common lived experience.
I do see where you are going here.
But using student debt, as an incentive to study hard, as justification that debt is good, is bit of a stretch.
There are plenty of students that do well without pressure.
Programs that are trying to pull in people on the fence will inevitably have some that don't make it, the goal is for a net positive. If local employers have 1 extra qualified employee at the cost of 2 or 3 that don't make it, it still balances out. The state is out the money for a few tuitions for students that didn't make it, but the lifetime earnings of the one that made it is greater.
Well, the problem is obvious in hindsight, and perhaps even in foresight. Giving out free money attracts these scammers, who crowd real students out of not only the aid money, but also the actual class. So the net effect is to make it harder to access community college, not easier.
Perhaps I'm naive, but it seems like it would be a lot easier to avoid the scammers if they limited first time students to in-person classes.
It's not about whether money frees up time-that's obvious. That argument could be used to justify handing out money to literally anyone. The issue is this aid is easily gamed, as the article shows, and strong incentives to pursue education already exist, like better job prospects. Not to mention that it's hard to justify asking less-educated workers to subsidize the upward mobility of those who may soon out-earn them.
>> If attending these classes was even just free, this wouldn't be a problem. Giving out student aid for online classes is just ridiculous.
> Giving student aid beyond just free classes enables students who would otherwise need to spend time working to support themselves to instead attend school to get a better life. Generally that's considered a good thing, not worthy of the disdain you're displaying.
I think the idea would be if someone's getting paid to go to school so they don't have to work, then they should go to in-person classes. Online classes probably shouldn't be an option.
If there's profit available and no personal cost (in either time or money), scammers will exploit the program as described ("fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds").
You present hypothetical scenario of up against the reality they getting paid to “attend” online class is a total farce, diluting the value of a diploma or degree from that community college system well also stealing away resources.
This is your opinion and it is not a hypothetical scenario. Many people including myself received grant aid to attend classes both in person and virtual. If it wasn't for that flexibility I likely wouldn't have be able to go.
I’m glad it worked for you, however this is not an opinion, it’s a worldview, and it is unethical and unscrupulous to use government funding to pay people to remotely attend a community college course. This is several steps beyond the intent of a community college, which is simply to provide free education for working people in the community.
It is an opinion and one I disagree with.
And your position is a demand for someone else to pay you to attend class?
Yes if my taxes can be used to "unethically" and "unscrupulously" build roads I didn't ask for then I'm fine with taxes being used to pay for education.
I'm mixed. If we lived in a utopian world where money isn't real, I'd agree. Reality is California has major budget issues. Offering the classes for free is already enough in the current climate.
Working while going to school is not uncommon or isolated to California. Full time work while going to school is excessive - but that is also a California COL issue that the state needs to actually tackle. But it gets worse the more they don't address their deficits. Debt begets debt and it always drives up COL.
> Full time work while going to school is excessive ...
For a healthy, driven person, without other major responsibilities (or a time-sucking internet addiction)? No, it really is not excessive.
And that's assuming that "going to school" is also full time. Taking just one or two classes per term is an old tradition at community colleges.
If you completely ignore the section of the population that needs aid, then yes, there's no need for aid. Might as well stop building wheelchair ramps, because for a healthy person with no locomotory issues the stairs are just fine.
I mean, I worked 20ish hours a week while doing engineering and I did well relative to my peers, but I can still recognize it was a lot. Full time in that world for 4-5 years would have been miserable.
Just because I can do something doesn't mean it's something I would want or would suggest for the rest of the population.
Yes, it is fairly miserable to do both full-time.
OTOH, life in America is very unfairly miserable for tens of millions of people who are not going to school. And trying to tell all the taxpayers that they have to provide nice quality-of-life upgrades, for people who are already enjoying taxpayer-supported free classes? NO - in our non-utopian world, where money is real, that is a very bad idea.
Yeah, I agree in our real world that it's a tall ask. I'd like to see us not burden all tax payers with such requests, though. Rather, I'd focus on the very top to be contributing substantially more into the systems that they've pillaged for their present wealth.
> Taking just one or two classes per term is an old tradition at community colleges.
Not for people fresh out of high school. You are usually trying to graduate with a Bachelor's in 4 years so you do full-time at community college for 2 years to get your AA-T and then transfer to a university for your last 2 years. California in particular has a program that lets you transfer get a guaranteed transfer to any state university or participating private university once you get your AA-T.
Not really. I worked various jobs in community college to support myself. Community college is designed around that fact with early morning and late night classes, but these are ONLINE classes. You can’t say that they have to work at that time because there is no time slot
"Online" doesn't mean "on-demand."
My wife got her Masters from Harvard recently through online classes, and every class had...I want to say about 4 hours a week of actual scheduled, synchronous class sessions over Zoom, in addition to the coursework required.
I’ve done years of online coursework and I’ve never had that nor heard of that at a community college. Harvard must be doing their own thing. I guess if you pay tens of thousands for a degree you’re stuck with onerous practices.
Community college is explicitly to help local students who are generally working jobs, so these onerous scheduled sessions are not reasonable
This is the hard part of society. We want nice things but propose anything that can be gamed/scammed for free money and it's instantly shot-down before it even gets off the ground. That, or if by a miracle it launches, is constantly attacked and smeared by politicians using it to get votes from selfish assholes who dont want to share (I learned about sharing in preschool and kindergarten).
Until you solve the primitive animalistic problems of selfishness, greed, and energy conserving laziness, were not going to have nice things. Someone asshole is going to be mad they have to share. Some asshole is going to lie and scam to get as much free shit as they can.
Solving this is a very hard problem.
This type of fraud is not entirely a new thing, e.g. from 2014: https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/pell-grant-fr...
But the numbers mentioned there seem tiny for a federal programme like the Pell Grant. A lot of times it's a matter of scale: a bit of fraud isn't ideal, but entirely manageable, so whatever.
Since then the scale expanded greatly. This is often a problem when you move things online: you're instantly connected with everyone on the world, which also means you're instantly connected with every asshole in the world. And with AI a single asshole can now pretend to be 200 assholes.
The solution is to do less things online and more in person. There are some advantages for some people in doing things online, but it also negatively affects everyone, and in general it just doesn't seem worth it to do everything online. It's not binary: you can do many things online while still requiring some bits in-person (e.g. registration, exams, occasional events).
> which also means you're instantly connected with every asshole in the world. And with AI a single asshole can now pretend to be 200 assholes.
Technology always seems to be the solution until the tables are turned.
> The solution is to do less things online and more in person.
And then we go right back to these programs being attacked for being inaccessible by e.g. poor people and the disabled. Obviously the solution is to hire people to go out and bring these services to those who need it but once you see how much effort is required to do that it rapidly requires a lot of funding and looks inefficient.
A cultural shift is required to fix all this and I am not sure how that will happen. Even given that the major religion in the west is Christianity which preaches that being selfish is not cool has been appropriated by selfish assholes who vote selfishly. I dunno what to say anymore. I am 100% for these programs which will be massively beneficial for humanity and all these fucks can think of is "muh tax munney."
Right below the title "fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds". Where's the dancing?
It is important to not deny people what they need in order to prevent fraudsters from profiting. This fraud is roughly 0.3% of total student aide in California.
On one hand, students need to pay for food and rent, so it makes sense. I used loans, grants, scholarships, and financial aid to pay for these expenses myself when I was in school.
On the other hand, maybe the barrier to entry is just waaayyy too low for online community college classes for this to make any sense. Students should have some skin in the game. Maybe students should be required to take a couple in person classes before financial aid can be used for online classes?
I don't think the article was dancing around it though.
Just as ridiculous as paying people for remote work.
It's just not reasonable when they're not even traveling to the office.
No such thing as free education. Just subsidized education. Costs would be pushed entirely to tax payers, many of whom have never attended college themselves. Demand, costs, taxes and state deficits would increase. The incentive for fraud would be pushed up one level to the administration.
Yeah thats why free K-12 education is bad! /s
We all understand the context of words here. Believe it or not, many people think that the government providing things for its citizens via taxation is a good thing.
If you want to refute any of my points, please do so. Sarcasm isn’t helpful. Managing scarce resources like education is a hard problem. Giving it away for free isn’t a solution.
I think it is a solution.
What points? You just insist that this is bad and that's the end of it.
hm. let’s start with how free isn’t free. you can then move on to incentives for fraud.
How about we start with knowing that it's not "free" as in "costs nothing to anybody", as UncleMeat has already acknowledged that it's being provided by the government through taxation, and actually address why you thin that it's bad, rather than just repeating "it's not free! it's not freeeeee!!!!" over and over again, as if we're idiots who don't understand how taxes and public funding work?
Please address incentives of free education and how they impact fraud.
Since you're the one trying to prove that free education is bad, why don't you address those, and then if we think you're wrong, we can rebut? Rather than demanding that your interlocutor prove your own points for you.
This is an example of what I've been thinking about/warning about for several years now: we are entering a post-truth era, where there is increasingly no way to know what is real and what is not.
When I've thought about it, this scenario never occurred to me, but it's a perfect example: we're going to be increasingly unable to know what is "true" in a million different ways, and people are going to exploit that in every way possible.
We're headed for bad times, and I don't know what the answer is, if there is one.
Underlying this is a belief that scamming people is the only way to achieve financial stability, that you need to always be hustling. Teenagers went from idolising actors and musicians (who had agents dealing with the money behind closed doors) to idolising social media creators and influencers who are quite transparent about how the algorithm determines their income. On IndieHackers and MicroConf, it's standard advice that you need to sell your SaaS to businesses because ordinary consumers have no money.
>no way to know
Wouldn't having class in person be a sure way to know?
I'm not saying this specific problem isn't solvable, just that it is an example of the problem I'm thinking of.
That said, there are tremendous advantages to supporting remote learning. Simply requiring in person has far greater costs than are being described in the source article.
I'd say we are already in those bad times you predict.
We've been in a post-truth era for all of human history, since the first hunter-gatherer told a lie to take advantage of someone else.
Which is why we evolved to have exquisite bullshit detectors. They're not perfect, but they're pretty decent.
The answer around what is real and not is the same as it ever was -- does information come from a respected, generally trustworthy source or not? Does it come from a source that might have an agenda, or not? Is it written in a way that seems to gather a lot of evidence in all directions and then explain its conclusion in a plausible way, or is it clearly one-sided?
Bullshit detection, fraud detection, scam detection -- these have always been necessary skills in the world. Sure the scale of misinformation grows, but so do the tools we have to combat it. Email spam was a huge problem, then Gmail filtered it out.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I Am A ~~Strange Loop~~ Exquisite Bullshit Detector
(not a joke)
> Which is why we evolved to have exquisite bullshit detectors.
The number of MAGA voters really strains the credibility of this one.
Stop offering online classes and expect students to show up in person. Online education sucks, everyone knows this. Everyone knows that they are making some kind of compromise when teaching or taking an online course. And if people are too poor to drive themselves to college or have to work too much or whatever else, then the state should provide opportunities for them so that they can continue their education. Stop accepting less than this.
I grew up in a very conservative and controlling environment. My ability to study remotely is one of the things that helped lift me out of that environment. I am far from alone in this experience.
I’d have much preferred an in-person education. But I don’t think we should look at the situation as “A is better than B so let’s get rid of B”. B still serves an important purpose and eliminating it will leave people behind.
> then the state should provide opportunities for them so that they can continue their education
I get what you mean, but saying that something _should_ be the case in response to not liking it doesn’t really make sense since that’s the reason it’s popular in the first place. States don’t do this, so that’s part of why online schooling is valuable.
I agree that online school isn’t as quality as in person (in my experience), but it gives a ton of flexibility to those who can’t commute (due to time or cost) and allows those people to possibly get an education when they otherwise couldn’t.
I wonder if there’s a formal term for this kind of argument (would love to know because I see it a lot).
It’s known as the ricky bobby theory.
The formal term is irony, because what they are presenting is actually a "Reductio ad absurdum", but they don't understand why their argument is absurd.
If you want a case and point of this, imagine a comedian proposing this idea dripping with sarcasm and clever little jokes, sort of what John Oliver does. The overall absurdity would be obvious, and everyone would understand the suggestion is a bad idea, with a little bit of honey to go with the vinegar.
The people often presenting this sort of unintentionally ironic argument don't seem to recognize the idiocy or exclusivity of the thing they're suggesting. Lacking understanding of the absurdity of the situation is the definition of their ignorance, because the burden of understanding and proof are on the person presenting the argument, not the audience. (Everyone is ignorant in some way, and nobody is even close to knowing everything. You're being dramatic if you really think that way, even for a second.)
I currently have a full time job in government as a computer scientist. I'm also taking an online master's at georgia tech and it's fairly good so far - no other way I could study supercomputing. Why would I leave an AI job where I'm learning practical AI skills to study CS? Async with evening exams was my only option.
If you don't have a broad perspective on all life circumstances and types of education, don't just dismiss what you don't know.
I had to go to community college while having a job and paying for everything and doing it around my schedule. This was before most places had online options and those that did were like, university of phoenix where it seemed like it would limit you because it wasn't considered the same as a non-profit university. I don't really buy this argument that people need some kind of online experience or otherwise they would be cut out (excluding people with some kind of disability that prevents them from going places). Plenty of people were able to complete college educations by showing up to night classes prior to online classes being a thing.
After that, I worked at GaTech where one of my responsibilities was helping to build the physics portion of the masters program that you are currently in (i don't think the physics portion ever turned into a master program like OSMCS, i left around the time OSMCS started offering degrees). When building these courses we tried to implement the best information from cognitive science and education, we tried to build the best exercises, we had super active involvement in course forums, etc. We did everything right, and we still felt that something was missing from the experience from the teaching side and we did not find that students in the online side participated in the same ways, or learned the same information, as those on-campus. I still believe that most people would benefit more from in person educational experiences. I think your experience in the gatech program is a valuable one and I have heard many positive things about this program since I left to go and do other stuff. However, I still believe that there is something valuable from most educational programs being offered in person only.
I have three choices:
1) full-time in-person education, quitting my CS job
2) full-time online education, quitting my CS job
3) full-time CS job and doing a part-time master's online
Option #3 is the best for my CS education and growth. Period. Don't pretend the only choices are #1 and #2 because you're arguing in favour of #1.
Plus, it's not like I can (or want to) move to the USA just for studies. I have family in Montreal. Montreal has great universities for CS and AI but they have almost nothing for supercomputing or quantum computing.
I was a teacher for 4 years. I get it. There's magic to in-person education. But millions of people think online is the better choice for them and they're not all wrong.
Remote education has a long and storied history from before the Internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University
However I believe they do require you to show up for _exams_. Online proctoring is a miserable disaster, especially in the AI era, so I think for credentials it's unfortunately necessary to have in-person exams. (edit: checked and they switched to online during COVID, unsuprisingly, but are considering switching back)
The ease of financial fraud is a separate issue. In the US I suspect that's linked to widespread identity fraud.
Why does online education suck?
When I went to university, the first week we received the syllabus, and date for final examination. Lectures were some old professors pretty much just doing book recitals in a large auditorium - little to no interaction with the students. If you had questions, that's what the TAs were for.
Any actual learning, you had to do in the library or study halls - and hopefully join a reading/study group. But the vast majority of students just showed up to lectures (if that even), and studied the course material on their own.
Pretty much what every large college / university looks like. And to be completely honest, I don't see why that can't be done online. Some of the core classes today have thousands of students at the largest schools.
When I took my MBA at a much smaller (in terms of student mass) school, it was completely different. But that was due to the much smaller number of students, and more professors, who had a much closer connection to the students. For that type of education - and with that type of infrastructure, I do agree that getting people physically to the school can help. But that's more by design.
Very few students watch lectures online. There is massive amounts of cheating in online courses. Almost no online course requires proctored exams. Online education is overall worse, in terms of actual learning, than face-to-face courses.
But it's still better than no course option available to people that can't attend in person. So the question becomes how do we improve it.
The whole discussion revolves around credentialing and certification that you actually learned the stuff you claim to have learned, that you jumped through the hoops required by a given college system whose reputation you want to lever into a career.
If you just wanna learn stuff online, dive in and watch YouTube or any of the variety of online educstional services, but in reality you want a certification that says you did the work, and maybe the actual transfer of knowledge is secondary. We shouldn’t pretend that credentials should be handed out for watching YouTube videos and filling out tests with Google searches, group chats sharing answers, or now, AI.
The goal of any credentialing system shouldn’t be to lower the bar as low as possible; you just devalue the whole system. There are several major institutions, formerly reputable, that many will not hire job prospects from.
In other words… Community college should be a bit of a grind, one that produces students who are far more knowledgeable than when they started the program.
The goal of the system as a whole should be to help people live better lives. That includes providing the knowledge for people to do the jobs that help society function. And whatever is needed to help them convince employers to hire them (ie, credentials). And (hopefully) other knowledge that helps them in a more general way (ie, the various generic classes that teach non-domain knowledge).
The fact that public colleges are a credentialing system is (supposed) to be in pursuit of the above; not the end goal. If we can find ways to help them achieve the above that doesn't actually need credentialing, that should be fine, too. I don't know if that's possible (or even a goal); but it's important to be able to distinguish between the actual goal and what we're trying to do (atm) to achieve them.
Yes but they have to be willing to do things that sacrifice other things in order to get ahead. And those sacrifices should be minimized in places outside of their control. Like a child of poor parents should not be penalized and be unable to afford school or take massive debt to do it. It is unacceptable to live this way. It is not fair. People should be given the option to pursue skills and knowledges without a financial burden. And because that is true, people need access to the best possible educational environment and I guarantee you that is not watching video lectures and it’s not plugging in answers into some dumb course management software. That is not a good use of anyone’s time. This is why students should be expected to show up and be present in class because so much of learning is done together. Online environments create a barrier between each other in this case.
I am sure there will be someone who will say, but I liked studying alone. Yes, I agree with you. Pursuit of knowledge by yourself is an important skill to have and a time that is meant to be enjoyed. And what I say to you is this, creating knowledge with others is also a time to be enjoyed and if you miss out on that you are missing out on some of the understanding your books cannot provide. And I would welcome you to work on teams which give you the opportunity to work in this fashion and see if you enjoy it. Because I found that I really do and I want to share that with others.
This might shock your worldview but cheating is absolutely rampant in STEM programs in person too. I still remember the corrupt graduate students who would circulate exam answers and/or take money to get copies of exams. Tutoring services range from valid to straight up homework cheating. Students share answers all the time, sometimes innocently, because humans want to help each other. Students are much, much smarter than faculty when it comes to stopping cheating. Good luck stopping it in a lecture hall of 100 people!
Every accredited online course program requires proctoring. To think in person stops cheating is naive. We need to rethink how education works if people feel the need to cheat so much. I’ll give you a hint: when people pay 5,000 dollars a class they’re going to cheat because they’re financially incentivized to do so. Administrative bloat in university needs to be done away with immediately and costs of education fixed by the government to some number that is reasonable for most people. Education should not be for-profit. Right now it is, even at public universities.
I have 30 years of experience teaching mathematics in higher education. Around 50% of higher education occurs in community colleges. Another large percentage occurs in regional state universities and small liberal arts colleges. Many of these don’t have graduate students and don’t have large lecture hall courses. Your experience is not normative.
Every accredited online course program requires proctoring.
You are wrong.
Your logic is quite bad too. The response to the statement that there is massive amounts of cheating in online courses shouldn’t be: “there is cheating in face-to-face courses too”. Obviously what matters are the relative rates of cheating and you’ve not provided any evidence or reasoning as to why the rates are comparable.
To think in person stops cheating is naive.
Obviously. And I never stated or implied that there is no cheating in face-to-face courses.
* entirely self driven, which is hard for a lot of necessary but often dry courses
* taught mostly via online videos; impossible to ask questions on the spot or explore concepts
* interaction with peers and professors is almost entirely forced or inorganic and often terrible
* limited networking options; no real community; hard to build bridges and get references when your professor is an automated test system (i.e. Canvas, et al)
* often limited screening; U Phoenix or WGU takes anyone, and now I have 100+ semi-literate applicants who somehow pulled a 3.3 via online schools blowing up my applications
* difficult to assess value proposition; you generally need to register to take part, while I can just drive to VA Tech or Dartmouth or even the Naval Academy and walk around and see (mostly) what it's like
I had a much better experience than this at my local community college. Full engagement from all professors.
Like anything it depends on the situation. It works well for some people and subjects but not for others.
Last semester I had a student in my online class that was every tech illiterate. There was an assignment where they were supposed to download a file, fill in the blanks and submit it. This is something that should take no more than 5 minutes. The student couldn't figure out how. I told the student, "you can just print it out then take a picture." Come to find out the student doesn't have a laptop or desktop computer and was trying to do it on a phone. I look at their schedule and they are taking all online courses. That person should not be taking online classes.
This kind of fraud existed even before online college became so popular.
Around 2014-2015 we had to start reporting the “last day of attendance” or participation for any student who failed a course. Kind of a pain when you prefer to treat your university students as adults and not take attendance.
Yeah, they once told my wife this "expect students to show up in person", when she was pregnant and not all the time well. The result? Thrown out of the self paid language course at university with no refund.
Your wife should have received accommodations through the office of accommodation services or disability services or access or whatever they call it.
The school should have had information about that in the syllabus.
Either way, with appropriate accommodations, in person classes can be flexible as well.
I probably should have said, this was in germany. (So probably even more surprising)
And yes, we likely could have sued, but we kind of were quite busy with everything else required to start a family.
Should be able to sue. Basic human rights.
Should have filed with the office of disability services (or access services or whatever they call it) for accommodations.
Without that there's no lawsuit.
Pregnancy is a protected class.
Edit: not sure about Germany
Not sure about Germany either.
But in the US, colleges have offices for accommodations. The faculty isn't required to do anything unless the university, acting through that office, tells them to.
Source: my career spent working with this kind of institution and this kind of office.
Huh. I did an entire second degree remotely. It definitely did not suck.
Remote and correspondence (the same thing really) have existed forever. There is zero basis for your statement it’s worse, and there is zero basis for your statement that there is compromise. Remote schooling allows people who wouldn’t have the means to educate themselves formally such as working people, parents, adult learners, etc to do so in a manner practical to them.
I have a degree I got in person and now one I am working on remote. Do you know what the difference is? NOTHING! When I went in person I was making up for the shortcomings of professors too. I was still having to teach myself a lot. The only true difference was I wasn’t able to do more than terrible part time work and I drove 45 minutes one way.
Malware vendors like honorlock have made remote schooling much more difficult. Not in terms of learning but in terms of overall stress level. Remote schooling itself is an incredible way to break from the aristocratic ideal still pedaled by universities today.
I’m envious of students whose parents prepared appropriately for their kids to go to school and focus full time. I was not one of them. My situation made worse by my parents making just enough to disqualify me from any aid despite their contribution of 0. The existence of remote schooling has allowed me to pursue my educational dreams.
When I read that title, I was expecting the following story: "Academic ghostwriters", thanks to AI, are now completing online degrees by the hundreds per actual human headcount, selling the opportunity to put one's name on the "work" to fraudulently obtain a degree.
Isn't the solution really easy? Make the students show up on the first day in-person, compare.with ID and take a photo.
How do you handle students that are not capable of showing up on the first day in-person?
- Live far away
- Have a job they can't just not show up for
- Having children to take care of
- Health issues
There's tons of reasons for people not to be able to attend in person, and not all of them are "because I didn't want to". And, for a _lot_ of those people, improving their education can have a huge impact on their quality of life.
Can’t show up for one day? That is such an incredibly low bar to also ask them to sit through a long series of courses and test. These college colleges are state funded, so if the person is overseas or on the opposite side of the US… then what are we really funding? That’s not the intent of a “community college”.
> then what are we really funding
A single mother than works at Walmart and another job delivering food, trying to support her kid(s), and will get let go if she misses a day at work; who is desperately trying to better herself so she can provide a better future for her family?
Look, I get that it's a balance between stopping the cheaters and not putting undue burden on the good ones. But it's not a simple problem, and there's a lot of people out there that are under constraints that a lot of us wouldn't even consider when trying to work out the solution.
Funny you should choose Walmart as your hardship example, as they have a very generous educational benefit program for their employees. Many corporations do. All are contingent upon showing up for work! It’s ok to have obligations in exchange for benefits.
One way to lower the bar would be to show up any day before you could collect financial aid.
I would say, not have to show up for Day 1 but how about have to show up at the collage with a state issued ID in order to have funds released to their account?
It looks like the main issue is that the people committing the fraud are able to create student profiles and request student aid with these profiles. I am unsure of California's requirements but this generally requires a SSN. California is issuing Real ID so verification should be relatively easy.
Presumably we would handle that in the same way we did up until ~5 years ago or so.
Right now people can't enrol in "full" classes either, except the classes are "full" of bots.
And a single day of attendance is really not a very high bar to meet. For special cases where it's really a problem accommodations can be made on request.
For special cases, the committee can come to you!
This only adds a small amount of friction. Some more effective options off the top of my head:
1. free classes but no aid 2. pay covered costs directly 3. tie aid to participation (not performance)
You could argue someone could still scam the system by attending the class and submiting AI-generated content or just copying others, but this is much more involved. Some of the blame has to land on the distance programs of the institutions. They've become overly relient on charging full tuition for much cheaper online delivery, and don't care too much about the "community" part of college anymore.
That might not always work. There is a huge issue of Lyft and Uber drivers showing up the first day, passing all the background checks, etc. then selling their account to someone else to take their place. Maybe better is to show up first day, and to do random ID checks throughout the semester. It feels.. unfriendly and accusatory to do that but I'm not sure of the alternative...
.. but if we wanted to be a little Orwellian.. put cameras and facial recognition in the classrooms to take automatic attendance and to identify students who should not be there, or who may be missing for prolonged absences. That'll go over really well....
Yeah, the discussion has devolved into "why are we paying kids to go to school, let them eat dirt like I did growing up".
When really the discussion should be around how bots have become good enough to pass as students. And what can we do about verification.
I'm surprised to see ID verification isn't required apparently (or that's being faked as well), that's usually required for any kind of program that involves financial aid.
At my community college we are increasingly teaching high school kids. I have taught students who were not of voting age and didn't have a drivers license.
That being said, we have contracted with an id verification service to randomly ask some students to verify especially if we think they are "fake" students in online classes.
[dead]
A similar thing has been happening in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy87zjn97epo
I wonder if there are perverse incentives preventing this from being fixed. The financial aid program looks like a success issuing more funds, the schools see increased enrollment, and the fraudsters go without saying. Seems like a win-win-win.
Sort of. As a professor who has encountered this, on one hand if I have fewer papers to grade then I'm happy but on the other hand the "students" do submit work for at least the first couple weeks that I still had to grade. (After that we caught on and got them out of the class). Additionally, I would rather just grade good papers than try to figure out why their work seemed weird. Is it AI generated? A non-native english speaker? Good old fashioned plagiarism? or just bad work?
Last semester was the first time I encountered it and I was suspicious and then I talked to a colleague who noticed identical irregularities.
So is the journalist (and/or faculty) misusing the term "bot" to refer to real humans doing fraud? I find it annoying that words get redefined this way. Especially as it feels like it's the opposite meaning.
Seems like the fake students are automation scripts written to mimic human interaction in online class, pretty much the common definition of "bot"? For now, all bot is still in someway human-operated anyway.
This is so strange. When I was enrolled in college my financial aid was sent directly to the college, I couldn't steal it even if I wanted to.
If you get a Pell grant or other “non-traditional” financial aid packages, there’s a bit for associated costs. It’s not huge money, but if you do this scheme across many schools…
The scammers enroll and even submit AI generated homework for 3 weeks until the excess aid funds are distributed to they're fake checking accounts.
I'm sure they apply for the maximum amount which are supposed to be used on school related expenses, etc.
How do we have fake bank accounts with KYC?
It should be easy to follow the money.
Financial aid is sent directly to the college. However, if you have a positive balance in your account (financial aid, grants, scholarships, or loans more than tuition and fees) you can request the bursar deposit that balance into your bank account. This is how I paid for living expenses in the years I lived off campus.
It does afaik so I'm confused what the monetary scam is. Community College in California is cheap or free for most students so I feel like something is being left out of the explanation.
Student loans are usually for more than tuition and books. Part of the loan money is for living expenses.
If someone is able to first scam state and financial aid for a non existent student that seems more first issue to fix than at the point there's a bot/scammer in CC classes submitting AI homework.
You asked what the monetary scam was. I answered that. Don’t understand your response above.
I'm commenting on the gist of the article, not disagreeing with you.
The solution is simple and obvious: mandatory in-person student orientation before classes begin.
Require in-person attendance at least once the first week for those using financial aid.