This is great. I love that people are taking on the higher education space. During my masters I would take the uni's online courses that were of absolute garbage quality. I've gotten better content from Udemy for 45$. The only reason they could get $3500 per class from me is because they were one of a limited few accredited universities in my area. Competition in this space is much needed. I hope that Make School will one day be competing on price.
I also really like the idea of a focused 2 year degree in applied CS. CS concepts are useful but at the end of the day we're building applications and solving problems. A minority of CS graduates stay in a pure CS role. It also takes out a lot of the fluff of general ed. I would absolutely have traded my undergrad for a program like this, but I doubt I would have had that foresight back when I was transferring from community college.
I've taught quite a bit as an adjunct: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc... and also like the idea of taking on higher ed; one school had a sticker price of $25K/year for tuition and paid adjuncts $3.4K/class. Even accounting for discounts against the sticker price, the situation just doesn't add up.
Accreditation is an underrated, little-understood barrier to entry in the higher ed industry.
We're not as cheap as online Udemy courses due to high touch instruction at a physical campus. Though we are substantially undercutting traditional bachelor's degrees on cost.
Students will on average pay ~$100k for their degree, but because they enter the workforce 2 years sooner they also have $200k more earnings than their peers (pre-tax/tuition). From a net-worth standpoint, this ends up being comparable to getting a full ride at a 4 year institution.
Sorry but 100k is just absurd. A computer science AS degree at any decent California community college is about $1500 instate tuition, and would be vastly more respectable and useful.
That's a good thought, but low tuition costs mean CS professors at California community colleges are making close to nothing.
Warning, anecdotal evidence, but I took CS at CCSF and when asked how to tell if a number was prime in Java, the professor responded "I don't know, google it. There's probably a function that does that."
I kind of like the idea of not doing summer breaks. When I studied CS in Europe, we had extremely stressful months due to people cramming in massive courseloads because of holiday seasons. Even really good students had to put in insane time if they wanted to finish their degree on time.
Also, the applied curriculum is probably not a bad idea either, though, don't almost all CS programmes have rather large semester-long projects? We had to design a multi-threaded OS with networking, a basic 3D rasterizerers/raytracer, distributed chat app and a simple compiler and a whole lot of other things. I guess those aren't directly useable in industry though.
But yeah, the idea is solid, as there is certainly a mismatch between academia and industry; I don't really use my advanced skills all that often and I often fear that my degree was a waste of time, even if I enjoyed it. I kind of regret not choosing a field like EE, where education is valued and there are no 'bootcamps'.
Sort of off topic, but I wish every company didn't put these in their privacy policies:
"user information related to the Service may be among the items sold or otherwise transferred"
"The Company may modify or update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect the changes in our business and practices, and so you should review this page periodically"
For 70-100k in tuition, one would hope for a less revocable promise of privacy than that, especially from a school.
It would also be nice if these policies had parts that clarify whether the 'anonymized' data they inevitably transfer can reasonably be re-identified later. I'm never sure how to read those, personally.
You're right that our privacy policy is generic / written for web services - that policy applies to our website rather than our student data. FERPA laws govern student data, so those are definitely better protected than the generic policy may indicate!
"Id like to welcome you to this course on Computer Science. Actually thats a terrible way to start. Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, its not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art. Well actually see that computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic. We will see that in this course. So its not a science. Its also not really very much about computers. And its not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators. And biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes. And its not about computers in the same sense that geometry is not really about using a surveying instruments."
In my opinion this soultion may be beneficial in the short term but detrimental in the long run. As we do not have 2-year applied medical school or engineering schools (or they are frowned upon), computer science is much more than just writing code for applications, there needs to be rigorous and lengthy studying of algorithms, data structures and their relationships with algos, architecture, advanced math concepts. Imo this is a programming degree not cs.
Make School co-founder here - now that we have accreditor approval, we're going through the necessary steps to ensure the program is GI Bill eligible. It's looking like we'll be able to confirm early next year.
> College students spend years learning arcana and quaint academic theories
When I read things like this the writer often means he doesn't think degree candidates need to learn the fundamentals and foundation of computer science but be thrown into writing code in PHP just so the student can be thrown into a company and get a product out the door as fast as possible and not as smart as possible.
But this is not the purpose of a degree in computer science. No one knows what position a student may obtain and some, at least, will go into research and some will need to know those arcana and quaint academic theories or will work for a company which will create unique products and services which we call innovation.
I don't know anything about this Make school but is this the case there?
[+] [-] TACIXAT|7 years ago|reply
I also really like the idea of a focused 2 year degree in applied CS. CS concepts are useful but at the end of the day we're building applications and solving problems. A minority of CS graduates stay in a pure CS role. It also takes out a lot of the fluff of general ed. I would absolutely have traded my undergrad for a program like this, but I doubt I would have had that foresight back when I was transferring from community college.
[+] [-] jseliger|7 years ago|reply
Accreditation is an underrated, little-understood barrier to entry in the higher ed industry.
[+] [-] DesaiAshu|7 years ago|reply
We're not as cheap as online Udemy courses due to high touch instruction at a physical campus. Though we are substantially undercutting traditional bachelor's degrees on cost.
Students will on average pay ~$100k for their degree, but because they enter the workforce 2 years sooner they also have $200k more earnings than their peers (pre-tax/tuition). From a net-worth standpoint, this ends up being comparable to getting a full ride at a 4 year institution.
[+] [-] aphextron|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul7986|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawnwren|7 years ago|reply
Warning, anecdotal evidence, but I took CS at CCSF and when asked how to tell if a number was prime in Java, the professor responded "I don't know, google it. There's probably a function that does that."
[+] [-] dragonwriter|7 years ago|reply
That's about 32 semester units ($46/unit). An AS typically has a minimum of 60 semester units as a requirement.
Plus, an accredited BS is likely to be better regarded than an AS for many purposes.
[+] [-] strikelaserclaw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IdiocyInAction|7 years ago|reply
Also, the applied curriculum is probably not a bad idea either, though, don't almost all CS programmes have rather large semester-long projects? We had to design a multi-threaded OS with networking, a basic 3D rasterizerers/raytracer, distributed chat app and a simple compiler and a whole lot of other things. I guess those aren't directly useable in industry though.
But yeah, the idea is solid, as there is certainly a mismatch between academia and industry; I don't really use my advanced skills all that often and I often fear that my degree was a waste of time, even if I enjoyed it. I kind of regret not choosing a field like EE, where education is valued and there are no 'bootcamps'.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|7 years ago|reply
People do build operating systems, renderers, chat apps, and compilers in industry, you know.
[+] [-] azhenley|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jammygit|7 years ago|reply
"user information related to the Service may be among the items sold or otherwise transferred"
"The Company may modify or update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect the changes in our business and practices, and so you should review this page periodically"
For 70-100k in tuition, one would hope for a less revocable promise of privacy than that, especially from a school.
It would also be nice if these policies had parts that clarify whether the 'anonymized' data they inevitably transfer can reasonably be re-identified later. I'm never sure how to read those, personally.
[+] [-] DesaiAshu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] casper345|7 years ago|reply
In my opinion this soultion may be beneficial in the short term but detrimental in the long run. As we do not have 2-year applied medical school or engineering schools (or they are frowned upon), computer science is much more than just writing code for applications, there needs to be rigorous and lengthy studying of algorithms, data structures and their relationships with algos, architecture, advanced math concepts. Imo this is a programming degree not cs.
[+] [-] AcornTree|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brian_herman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leroy_masochist|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvrossb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sureaboutthis|7 years ago|reply
When I read things like this the writer often means he doesn't think degree candidates need to learn the fundamentals and foundation of computer science but be thrown into writing code in PHP just so the student can be thrown into a company and get a product out the door as fast as possible and not as smart as possible.
But this is not the purpose of a degree in computer science. No one knows what position a student may obtain and some, at least, will go into research and some will need to know those arcana and quaint academic theories or will work for a company which will create unique products and services which we call innovation.
I don't know anything about this Make school but is this the case there?
[+] [-] LenaAbbot|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]