It is for just profs, with peers like that you start at another level altogether.

Amit

1) I never wrote that lectures could be delivered as effectively online. Quite the contrary, I told people to stop lecturing. In your example, Christos is not lecturing, he is chatting with a group of students. Formal lectures are boring. Plus, most professors, including the famous ones, are terrible lecturers. If you really want lectures, pick the best out of a lot of pre-recorded lectures on a given topic, you will always do better than picking a random professor as your lecturer.

2) Physical presence is all about bandwidth. Please follow my links and read what I actually wrote. I did not say “physical presence does not matter”, I said “you need to offer the student a lot of interesting data quickly and interactively.” Up until recently, this was only possible offline. But as bandwidth and latency improve, that’s no longer true.

Once you will be able to hear and see the person as well as you would if the person was sitting next to you, what is left of the physical presence? Do you really want to smell the person too?

And yes, bandwidth and latency will get there. Faster than you may think.

3) You are assuming you would not have found someone as bright as Christos in a lesser school. Let me quote Paul Graham here: “The curve for faculty is a lot flatter than for students, especially in math and the hard sciences; you have to go pretty far down the list of colleges before you stop finding smart professors in the math department.” In fact, in a lesser department, you may have found the equivalent of Christos, but with slightly better availability.

The fact of the matter is that big schools are all about branding, not quality. It is like drinking Coke because Coke is obviously a better cola than the no-name colas out there, right? Big schools are very good at marketing, and they make sure that their professors shine. However, the brightest professor at your local state university can match, as far as his skills and knowledge go, any professor in your heavy-league school. And it is almost certain that you will have an easier time getting in his office.

BTW I am a graduate of the University of Toronto, arguably the “heaviest” Canadian school. Certainly among the list of top-3 schools in Canada. And you know what? The teaching was terrible. There were many famous people, but they were not very available nor very kind nor did they care much for the students (other than, maybe, their own graduate students). I saw no evidence that students got more for their money, except for the branding. I did get my first professorship because of my UofT degree… people thought it was a safe bet to go with a UofT graduate (the math. program at UofT is a killer). But I was not any better than I would have been had I attended another school.