This isn't even close to an apples-to-apples comparison and looks like mostly an advertisement. You're looking at broad academic institutions preparing students for a huge range of careers vs. an institution that takes advantage of quickly ramping up a student for a specific career that currently has very good average salaries.
Besides that, I don't get this:
"Part of it is that the cost of delivering that education are very reasonable."
He then preaches about how higher ed's cost structures are terrible. But when you look at the cost per week of education, Flatiron is over 3x higher than a 4-year college. That doesn't suggest to me that higher ed's costs structures are all that ridiculous compared to Flatiron.
Overall, I get the impression that Flatiron is providing a valuable educational program to its students. However, if you really want to impress me or inspire others, show me how this model can be successfully applied to careers outside of software engineering.
It would seem a better argument would be made for time spent rather than dollars spent.
> However, if you really want to impress me or inspire others, show me how this model can be successfully applied to careers outside of software engineering.
My opinion is that most jobs don't require any of the skills taught in college (sure you probably need to write well, but you can learn that in high school or just by reading a lot... I'm sure almost no one needs any math aside from how to work a calculator).
The two primary benefits of college are: First as a signal to employers to say, "hey, I did something moderately difficult so I'm a relatively safe bet." And second, as a place to develop social skills and the ability to interact with people different from yourself.
The US government has proposed a draft framework on ranking higher ed institutions based on Outcome. This gets closer to the ROI model for evaluating any program/college.
Access
-Percentage of students receiving Pell grants
- Expected Family Contribution Gap.
- Family Income Quintiles: number of students from low and moderate income families.
- Percentage of First-Generation Students
Affordability
- Net Price: what a student actually pays (cost of attendance minus financial aid).
- Net Price by Income Quintile: what a student actually pay by income class.
Performance
- Completion Rates.
- Transfer Rates
- Labor Market Success: The most controversial metric by far on the list.
- Graduate School Attendance of Former Students
- Loan Performance Outcomes: A metric to be determined that will examine whether or not students are able to repay their loans after graduation.
Also, I'd like to see statistics about how much of Flatiron-like schools and traditional schools graduates manage to get above-avarage salaries in their field. Comparing with other fields makes little sense.
Part of a VC's job is advertisement (for their portfolio companies) ;-) However, in this case I couldn't find a past association between Flatiron school & Fred Wilson and/or Union Square ventures, so this article seems to be expressing genuine appreciation for the model. Maybe he likes them so much that he will invest in them in the next round :D
To understand the cost of education argument, notice the catch lies here: "teaching students skills that are directly related to job requirements." How much time of a traditional 4 year college is spent on skills that a grad would actually need or use? A lot of it is just archaic legacy. If you take those out, then the cost of education might actually compare favorably for bootcamps.
An additional (or alternate perspective) is that bootcamps are a supplement to, rather than a replacement for traditional education. Bootcamps teach hard job skills, whereas college teaches soft & social skills. Either way, they are a welcome addition!
Why are you comparing cost per week? You can't spend an equivalent time in college to flatiron and gain anything meaningful. The value is in the unit of a degree or the completion of the program. You can't partially invest in college and expect to get proportionate consideration or results. Likewise, you can't really do anything with 1/3rd completion of flatiron.
Or you could look at the traditional universities teaching a "whole range of careers" for people who may or may not need most of them as being hugely inefficient.
Maybe a better model is to spend $15,000 on a crash-course for a new career, do that for a while and if you're unhappy with the career choice, pay another $15,000 for another crash-course, and so on.
One issue with this proposal is that I still find $15,000 way too expensive. It may be "much cheaper" than paying $200,000 for a bundle of courses, but it seems no cheaper on a per-course basis. Surely we can have education in the future that's much cheaper than that? We should look for disruption in that as well.
A huge problem with this comparison is that the field of software engineering is really, really, really hot right now. So you can get away with studying up for 16 weeks, and get a $70k job. We've been here before -- http://www.defmacro.org/2013/12/09/learn-to-code.html. When the field encounters a short-term cool-off (as it inevitably will), these hires will be the first to go because 16 weeks is absolutely not enough to get a strong base of fundamentals. You could (barely) learn Rails and JavaScript in that time, but you really aren't getting a strong enough engineering skillset to build a resilient career.
The bigger problem is that high school seniors don't understand basic economics of supply and demand. The job market is becoming polarized -- top people in their fields are doing better than ever, and the market doesn't really need anything else (with software engineering currently being an anomaly). So I'd say it isn't worth going to college (from an ROI perspective) if you aren't positioned to be in the top 10% of your field. This used to not be the case, but the world is very rapidly going in this direction and I'm not sure if there is a solution to this problem, any more than there was a solution to manual labor jobs disappearing post industrial revolution.
> EDIT: When you always add and never subtract, you get cost structures that are not sustainable.
I started college at the start of the dot com bubble. I remember network engineering was the hot field of the time and there were places offering fast turnaround and relatively cheap Cisco certification training.
These days, I wonder how many companies are hiring CCNA's with no other higher education.
Exploiting a short-term market condition is revolutionary, even if it looks different than the status-quo while the market condition exists.
This blog post is extremely misleading: the three featured alumni [0] on the Flatiron School's web site all have 4 years of college at good schools (one even has an MFA)
Saron Yitbarek - University of Maryland College Park
B.A. English, B.S. Psychology
2007 – 2011 [1]
Justin Belmont - Tufts University
BA, English
1999 – 2003
Columbia University in the City of New York
MFA, Nonfiction Writing
2005 – 2008 [2]
Danny Olinsky
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Kenan-Flagler Business School
BSBA, Business Administration; Entrepreneurship [3]
This, of course, is the irony of the higher education debate. Those having the debate very likely did not go through the voc-ed tracks (which is effectively the "revolutionary" model the Flatiron School is providing).
That doesn't mean there's no value in providing education that leads directly to career opportunities or salary improvement. As an American I know our culture loves to yell "But!" and provide an example of a VC or entrepreneur who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule.
It's not an apples to apples comparison. As a Flatiron grad myself I can tell you that most my classmates already had college degrees. They do have a program that serves as a substitute for college, but it's not clear that the main program has been filtered from the data.
That said, I thought Flatiron was an exceptional investment, much higher ROI on my salary than college, but also served a fundamentally different purpose and role in my education than college.
You can't discount your traditional education from your ROI on Flatiron. They aren't exclusive investments. In cases like yours, Flatiron is complementary to other education.
If Flatiron wants to make their ROI case stronger, they should look at people who have Flatiron as their exclusive post-secondary education.
Despite the obvious flaws of comparing a coding "bootcamp" school to a 4 year higher ed institution, I think there is a very valid argument in thinking about ROI when picking degree choices. While not everyone can be coders, (if everyone could, then the salary/demand would drop and this solution would be invalid) everyone should seriously think about ROI. Counselors almost never discuss ROI when advising 17-18 year olds on college choices. Questions like, can you pay off a 6 figure debt to pursue a comparative literature degree?
If you pick a program that has high salary/demand, you will have better ROI. Even if you spend lots of money on it, you will be able to pay it back. That is ROI. (Not just cost by itself)
Here is a list of top ranking salary schools. They are almost all dominated by Ivies, tech/engineering (and interestingly, Military) schools.
> While not everyone can be coders, (if everyone could, then the salary/demand would drop and this solution would be invalid)
I think we really can't know how much the supply of programmers would rise if we gave everyone access to decent education. The state of programming education is abysmal.
Today almost every good programmer is also an autodidact. That's pretty weird when compared with other professions, and I predict that things won't stay this way forever.
Education doesn't guarantee a higher salary - instead it opens up opportunities and raises each person's potential ceiling. This makes using averages and ROIs very difficult.
I could have gone to med school (historically a very high ROI degree) but I'm terrible at memorization/studying and probably wouldn't have thrived i.e. wouldn't have reached anywhere near its ceiling. Obviously, it would have been a poor degree for me.
Or, I could have gotten an MBA (another very high ROI degree), but my salary probably wouldn't have immediately been higher than what I have as a software engineer/data scientist. But an MBA would enable me to enter an executive track that is mostly closed off to me now. Is it worth it? Honestly I don't know - its an extremely complicated calculation.
Instead of ROI, I think it's worth thinking about how much each degree will cost you (both time and money), what it will enable you to do, whether you are capable of doing that, whether you want to do that, and what the payoff will be. If I were a counselor, I would go through this exercise with my students.
"The Flatiron School started two years ago and teaches students, both high school grads and college grads, how to become software engineers in a twelve week course that costs $15,000."
Wow. It's a good thing that whole "software engineering" thing isn't a profession or anything. I wish this had been available 25 years ago, before I wasted 4 years and roughly 9000 hours (4 years, 2 semesters per year, 15 weeks per semester, 15 class hours per week = 1800 class hours; by their class+lab+deployment numbers, a 5/1 ratio) getting a bachelors.
Plus, even if I had decided to stick to the BA, on their schedule I could have packed all that into a little over 2 years, instead of 4.
Like the old saying goes, if you want to burn down a house, you don't burn it down from the outside, you light the fire inside. An individual who has just invested thousands of dollars in their own self-education and (most likely) heard the negativity and 'you're crazy' from their family and peer group has a lot to prove. Their house is on fire. Your ability to learn has nothing to do with your age - it has more to do with your mindset and your ability to proactively deal with frustration and failure. And let go of your ego (code reviews).
I know programmers with 15+ years of experience who are doing the same thing year after year. After a while, the years of experience for that type of programmer are meaningless. Also, either the company or their peer group restricts their ability to learn new things. Many of them with families and (now) college tuition bills to pay don't mind this restriction on learning. There are many more 9-5 programmers than the people who live and breathe on the bleeding edge.
The reality is that while there are only a couple superb programmers at the level of Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy, Thomas Knoll in the world's history - there are many orders of magnitude more programmers who might not change the world but help keep the increasingly technological world running. There is room for many more programmers and we don't need to restrict the industry to the narrow intake funnel of 4 year CS degree.
It’s been an interesting comparison. However, there are programming Bootcamps that are free of charge, like http://pilot.co/bootcamp (disclaimer: I work for Pilot). The ROI comparison is quite interesting in that case… :)
I thought the comparison of graduation rates between the Flatiron school and universities was very misleading. Most stste systems have open enrollment in community colleges and some four year colleges with low, low standards. The truth is that there are tons of private and public universities that will let anyone in who can fill out a student loan application.
I don't know anything about the Flatiron school but I discussed App Academy with a graduate of the first New York class. They made it sound like the excellent results were all selection effect rather than treatment. A lead mentor who was never there and two assistants who had finished the previous San Francisco cycle. Some of the people doing the course had more programming experience than these teachers. It is very likely that the graduation rate reflects selectivity as much as good teaching and curriculum.
[+] [-] ssharp|11 years ago|reply
Besides that, I don't get this:
"Part of it is that the cost of delivering that education are very reasonable."
He then preaches about how higher ed's cost structures are terrible. But when you look at the cost per week of education, Flatiron is over 3x higher than a 4-year college. That doesn't suggest to me that higher ed's costs structures are all that ridiculous compared to Flatiron.
Overall, I get the impression that Flatiron is providing a valuable educational program to its students. However, if you really want to impress me or inspire others, show me how this model can be successfully applied to careers outside of software engineering.
It would seem a better argument would be made for time spent rather than dollars spent.
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|11 years ago|reply
My opinion is that most jobs don't require any of the skills taught in college (sure you probably need to write well, but you can learn that in high school or just by reading a lot... I'm sure almost no one needs any math aside from how to work a calculator).
The two primary benefits of college are: First as a signal to employers to say, "hey, I did something moderately difficult so I'm a relatively safe bet." And second, as a place to develop social skills and the ability to interact with people different from yourself.
[+] [-] wooyi|11 years ago|reply
http://www2.ed.gov/documents/college-affordability/framework...
TDLR on Metrics:
Access -Percentage of students receiving Pell grants - Expected Family Contribution Gap. - Family Income Quintiles: number of students from low and moderate income families. - Percentage of First-Generation Students
Affordability - Net Price: what a student actually pays (cost of attendance minus financial aid). - Net Price by Income Quintile: what a student actually pay by income class.
Performance - Completion Rates. - Transfer Rates - Labor Market Success: The most controversial metric by far on the list. - Graduate School Attendance of Former Students - Loan Performance Outcomes: A metric to be determined that will examine whether or not students are able to repay their loans after graduation.
[+] [-] alcuadrado|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parul|11 years ago|reply
To understand the cost of education argument, notice the catch lies here: "teaching students skills that are directly related to job requirements." How much time of a traditional 4 year college is spent on skills that a grad would actually need or use? A lot of it is just archaic legacy. If you take those out, then the cost of education might actually compare favorably for bootcamps.
An additional (or alternate perspective) is that bootcamps are a supplement to, rather than a replacement for traditional education. Bootcamps teach hard job skills, whereas college teaches soft & social skills. Either way, they are a welcome addition!
[+] [-] FLUX-YOU|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] higherpurpose|11 years ago|reply
Maybe a better model is to spend $15,000 on a crash-course for a new career, do that for a while and if you're unhappy with the career choice, pay another $15,000 for another crash-course, and so on.
One issue with this proposal is that I still find $15,000 way too expensive. It may be "much cheaper" than paying $200,000 for a bundle of courses, but it seems no cheaper on a per-course basis. Surely we can have education in the future that's much cheaper than that? We should look for disruption in that as well.
[+] [-] coffeemug|11 years ago|reply
The bigger problem is that high school seniors don't understand basic economics of supply and demand. The job market is becoming polarized -- top people in their fields are doing better than ever, and the market doesn't really need anything else (with software engineering currently being an anomaly). So I'd say it isn't worth going to college (from an ROI perspective) if you aren't positioned to be in the top 10% of your field. This used to not be the case, but the world is very rapidly going in this direction and I'm not sure if there is a solution to this problem, any more than there was a solution to manual labor jobs disappearing post industrial revolution.
> EDIT: When you always add and never subtract, you get cost structures that are not sustainable.
That's brilliant.
[+] [-] ssharp|11 years ago|reply
These days, I wonder how many companies are hiring CCNA's with no other higher education.
Exploiting a short-term market condition is revolutionary, even if it looks different than the status-quo while the market condition exists.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gkop|11 years ago|reply
Saron Yitbarek - University of Maryland College Park B.A. English, B.S. Psychology 2007 – 2011 [1]
Justin Belmont - Tufts University BA, English 1999 – 2003 Columbia University in the City of New York MFA, Nonfiction Writing 2005 – 2008 [2]
Danny Olinsky University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Kenan-Flagler Business School BSBA, Business Administration; Entrepreneurship [3]
[0] http://flatironschool.com/web#block7 [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/saronyitbarek [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinbelmont [3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyolinsky
[+] [-] secstate|11 years ago|reply
That doesn't mean there's no value in providing education that leads directly to career opportunities or salary improvement. As an American I know our culture loves to yell "But!" and provide an example of a VC or entrepreneur who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule.
[+] [-] lexap|11 years ago|reply
That said, I thought Flatiron was an exceptional investment, much higher ROI on my salary than college, but also served a fundamentally different purpose and role in my education than college.
[+] [-] ssharp|11 years ago|reply
If Flatiron wants to make their ROI case stronger, they should look at people who have Flatiron as their exclusive post-secondary education.
[+] [-] wooyi|11 years ago|reply
If you pick a program that has high salary/demand, you will have better ROI. Even if you spend lots of money on it, you will be able to pay it back. That is ROI. (Not just cost by itself)
Here is a list of top ranking salary schools. They are almost all dominated by Ivies, tech/engineering (and interestingly, Military) schools.
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/full-list...
[+] [-] ef4|11 years ago|reply
I think we really can't know how much the supply of programmers would rise if we gave everyone access to decent education. The state of programming education is abysmal.
Today almost every good programmer is also an autodidact. That's pretty weird when compared with other professions, and I predict that things won't stay this way forever.
[+] [-] rm999|11 years ago|reply
I could have gone to med school (historically a very high ROI degree) but I'm terrible at memorization/studying and probably wouldn't have thrived i.e. wouldn't have reached anywhere near its ceiling. Obviously, it would have been a poor degree for me.
Or, I could have gotten an MBA (another very high ROI degree), but my salary probably wouldn't have immediately been higher than what I have as a software engineer/data scientist. But an MBA would enable me to enter an executive track that is mostly closed off to me now. Is it worth it? Honestly I don't know - its an extremely complicated calculation.
Instead of ROI, I think it's worth thinking about how much each degree will cost you (both time and money), what it will enable you to do, whether you are capable of doing that, whether you want to do that, and what the payoff will be. If I were a counselor, I would go through this exercise with my students.
[+] [-] IndianAstronaut|11 years ago|reply
This may have to do with the fact that there is a bias towards veterans in hiring for the federal government.
[+] [-] mcguire|11 years ago|reply
Wow. It's a good thing that whole "software engineering" thing isn't a profession or anything. I wish this had been available 25 years ago, before I wasted 4 years and roughly 9000 hours (4 years, 2 semesters per year, 15 weeks per semester, 15 class hours per week = 1800 class hours; by their class+lab+deployment numbers, a 5/1 ratio) getting a bachelors.
Plus, even if I had decided to stick to the BA, on their schedule I could have packed all that into a little over 2 years, instead of 4.
[+] [-] wallflower|11 years ago|reply
I know programmers with 15+ years of experience who are doing the same thing year after year. After a while, the years of experience for that type of programmer are meaningless. Also, either the company or their peer group restricts their ability to learn new things. Many of them with families and (now) college tuition bills to pay don't mind this restriction on learning. There are many more 9-5 programmers than the people who live and breathe on the bleeding edge.
The reality is that while there are only a couple superb programmers at the level of Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy, Thomas Knoll in the world's history - there are many orders of magnitude more programmers who might not change the world but help keep the increasingly technological world running. There is room for many more programmers and we don't need to restrict the industry to the narrow intake funnel of 4 year CS degree.
[+] [-] jdudek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thirdstation|11 years ago|reply
That might be a good test of demand for junior Ruby/Rails/Javascript developers, in addition to how good Flatiron is at preparing them.
[+] [-] barry-cotter|11 years ago|reply
I don't know anything about the Flatiron school but I discussed App Academy with a graduate of the first New York class. They made it sound like the excellent results were all selection effect rather than treatment. A lead mentor who was never there and two assistants who had finished the previous San Francisco cycle. Some of the people doing the course had more programming experience than these teachers. It is very likely that the graduation rate reflects selectivity as much as good teaching and curriculum.