An Inexpensive Virtual Statewide UC Campus
Now that we know that virtual college educations can work, we can face up to the serious financial problems poorer and even middle income families have sending their college students to expensive UC locations.
While coastal campuses are an attraction to students and for recruiting faculty, they are now among the most expensive places to live. UC San Diego, UC Irvine (close enough), UCLA (close enough), UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley (Silicon Valley Digital heaven). Even new faculty cannot afford to buy into the area and campus housing is being built. The dorms are often only available to first year, or first and second year students.
The growth of the campuses to over 30,000 to 40,000 students saturates local apartments, and leaves students to combine to make their own housing groups, and sign leases.
The campuses, facullty research, and availability of graduates to hire stimulates growth of industry and of housing needs, further raising housing costs.
While the UC Blue and Gold Program funds the $14,000 tuition and fees for families making less than $80,000 the housing costs for an average apartment costs about $2,200 a month, leading to $26,400 a year. Split two ways, that is $13,200 each for two bedrooms. Then their is transportation to campus. Buses may work, but students may need a car, with upkeep and high insurance costs, and then parking costs.
Yet, except for lab work, which is often very rote, boring, and simplistic, students can attend lectures from home, and have mixer sessions before and after classes on the web. In fact labs are a waste of a lot of student’s time, leading students to skip such majors. There are also virtual lab exercises on the web.
I will also reveal a well kept University secret. Except for exams and sessions before exams, where instructors are supposed to reveal what is on the exams, the giant lecture halls are often far from filled. Lectures are taped, and students could already watch the videos for the last few decades.
With all of the attention paid to preparing minorities for college, recruiting them, and mentoring and retaining them, the main focus has to be on allowing them to afford the UCs in the first place, and to be among a cohort where they are comfortable. The scattered admission policies sends students all over the state, to place that they could never afford.
Clearly, one of the great advantages of the UCs is the ongoing research, and being taught and guided by active research faculty. This can also be done remotely, and even by faculty across the university system, irrespective of what campuses the faculty and students are at.
Well, labs are not present, but I would really like to know what fraction of UC research nowadays is actually accomplished by students staring at a computer screen. With emphasis on data sets, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and neural networks, it is a lot. A part of research data is actually gathered in experiments or surveys or labs across the state, which actually could be accomplished by groups whose members are in fact located across the state, or across the country, or across the world even.
In regard to the rise of applications to the UC system, this Virtual University can be set up rapidly and at much less cost than a new campus. It could also allow us to collect the financial support from out of state or foreign students, without filling a lot of the space for Californians.
There are many strong arguments for establishing and creatively forming a statewide virtual UC campus.
