Who pays?

Cakeguts

phillw wrote: »

I guess I'm unique in only being able to inhabit one building at a time.

Universities are outnumbered by employers, so it would make more sense to encourage working from home before targeting universities.

Or do you just have something against universities?

Well where I live there are 11 dud universities that could close and not be missed by anyone. We could use the land to build more houses.



The point about universities is that the Open university has been offering study by distant learning for years so it would be very easy to just make all degrees that don't need lab work distant learning.



With employees it would need more imput to make it work plus different companies would need different strategies.



The distant learning degrees could be in place in couple of years because all of the course work is already available from the Open University. If you just made those courses available for all degrees you wouldn't need many of the physical buildings that are in operation now, not to mention the extra buildings to house students. They could all study at home. All degrees would then be the same standard so you wouldn't get degrees from one university that were not of a high enough standard to get you a place to start a degree at another. The benefit also in terms of jobs for the students would mean that employers would know exactly what a degree was worth because they would all be standardised. Not only that but because there wouldn't be the competition for students to fill the buildings classes of degrees could be returned to historical levels so that only about 1% of students were awarded a first class.


Distant learning would also mean that those students choosing universities on the night life in the local town or for "the experience" probably wouldn't bother to study for a degree so reducing the number of loans needed.



Doing this you could reduce the carbon output by a really large amount in a very short period of time. In any case even if you get employees to work from home you can't then justify large numbers of people going to university to study if distance learning is available which it already is. It would then be easier for people to transfer to working at home because they would have already got used to the not going to somewhere else to study or to work.

Malthusian

phillw wrote: »

I guess I'm unique in only being able to inhabit one building at a time.

Universities are outnumbered by employers, so it would make more sense to encourage working from home before targeting universities.

It makes no sense at all. Houses are occupied extremely inefficiently, often two or three people to one big building, whereas workplaces have dozens or thousands of people in one building.

Which means what we should do is seize and bulldoze residential properties, and make everyone sleep at their workplace in dormitories.