Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

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Community colleges have been doing this for many years (read: my CC in 1999 had this). However, they have a twofold problem which makes them relatively poorly suited to this.

Community college students are not very smart on average, so it's very difficult to teach proper computer science. And community college professors are generally older and not very fad driven so it's unlikely they will effectively teach the Rails-Mongo-Heroku stack (complete with unsanitized inputs).

The way the various code schools get around this problem is to hire young hipster coders (as opposed to a former academic with a Ph.D.) to teach for a year or two. But that's not really a model which one can reasonably expect community colleges to adopt.

Additionally, the post-code academy hiring model isn't well suited for CC's. The hipster who taught GA/hackerschool/etc for a year or two becomes part of the alumni network and is likely to hire some grads. That doesn't happen at community college - even the temporary faculty just go to become temporary faculty elsewhere.

> Community college students are not very smart on average, so it's very difficult to teach proper computer science.

Economic standing and intelligence have jack shit to do with each other. Now education is impacted by wealth, but not raw intelligence or capability. I'd wager the majority of CC students are there because they don't have the funds to go to a 4-year school.

Now I'm generally against the government intervention like this, but if they are going to do something, I'd much rather they do it like this rather than dish out money with zero oversight. It's got a fixed cost (facilities + teacher's salaries), can be tailored to the local community, and within months of a student completing a class you'll get feedback on whether it's working.

> And community college professors are generally older and not very fad driven so it's unlikely they will effectively teach the Rails-Mongo-Heroku stack (complete with unsanitized inputs).

I've taught in the past and genuinely enjoy it. If there was a local forum for me to do so I'd be game to do it part time. Throw in a decent amount of $$$ and I'm sure you'll find others as well.

I attended a community college before I went to university. The computer science program was kind of a joke. They did remote classes from partnered state universities where the CC students would watch a live stream of professors at the state unis. I mostly took just Calc, Physics, and some other general requirement classes before transferring, but I did take one CS class. There was myself and two other students doing Intro to Programming (Java).

The same kids who were in Physics, were in Calc, etc. There were only about 20-30 of us. The majority of the student body was there to study Nursing and Law Enforcement.

I found I enjoyed the professors at CC more than most of my state uni professors. At CC, instead of having Physics in a 300 person lecture hall, it was a 20 person classroom. Same with Calc. All of the STEM-related professors at CC had their doctorates, where at state uni I had a bunch of grad students teaching - not that everyone wasn't knowledgeable enough.

That simply isn't true. Intelligence tests - e.g. the older SAT - are strongly correlated with wealth. That's why, in order to make things "fair" (both on the basis of income and "too many Asians"), the college board has tried to make it more education/prep based and less g-loaded.

As for your willingness to teach as a part time gig for fun, that's a model that many code schools are happy with (and probably favor). CC tends to have mostly academic faculty. If you want to teach computer science at CC, nothing is stopping g you from applying.

Fundamentally, if CCs have not already done this, and code schools are filling the gap, it's because CCs squandered their 20 year lead.

> That simply isn't true. Intelligence tests - e.g. the older SAT - are strongly correlated with wealth.

That's education, not intelligence. The former is a function of the latter and your surrounding resources.

I don't care how intelligent you are, your not going to know the meaning of some seldom used SAT vocab word unless you've studied the language and that study takes education (both classroom and self directed).

The same pattern exists for sat math, ravens matrices, etc. In order to reduce this effect the college board switched from 50/50 math/verbal to 33/66.

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