Town Hall highlights (aka response by Penn staff regarding recent student concerns)

Some talking points from today's meeting (side note: 175+ people showed up wooow)

  1. About graduation: For this year there are no plans to change anything (like location or date) but they may rename it to something like "Master's Ceremony 2". The reasoning is that some students may have bought plane tickets already and it would be too disruptive. (this may be true, but unfortunate for students walking this year.) Future graduation ceremonies will have student input considered. Professor Boon also mentioned that the number of online students (for all Penn Online programs, not just MCIT Online) is greater than the total number of on campus students (undergrad + grad). Interesting to see how other online programs at Penn are dealing with scaling issues.
  2. No change to the policy that MCIT Online students can't attend on-campus career fairs.
  3. Claim they will edit? some webpages / branding that mention "Online". Someone post here when they do so we can compare it. (side note: To the nice blonde lady, please realize literally no student will ever be excited as you about getting a box of swag with online plastered on it).
  4. Tuition will continue to increase (big surprise). I encourage the university to consider decreasing it instead.
  5. Claim all the money goes back into the program (uh huh, but we get you guys want to hustle too)
  6. Claimed they were worried about students graduating. This point I wanted to bring up because in general, people don't worry about students from Ivy schools graduating. But isn't it funny how many big names in tech actually dropped out of school? Maybe Penn should be actively trying to lower their graduation rate instead. For marketing purposes.
  7. No concrete info given about acceptance rates or application standards.
  8. holy balls, a couple of you in the chat seriously need to chill. (you know who you are). ruuuuude.
  9. leaks for upcoming AI and CIS (or CS?) (online) degrees. I will sign up for the AI one if CCB teaches all the classes in it.

Overall I am pleasantly surprised by how quickly the uni staff moved to address student concerns.