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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

"Between January and June 2017, Flatiron claimed that 98.5% of its students received employment less than 180 days after graduation and that Flatiron graduates had an average salary of $74,447. However, Flatiron did not disclose clearly and conspicuously that the 98.5% employment rate included not only full time salaried employees but also apprentices, contract employees and self-employed freelance workers, some who were employed for less than twelve weeks. Similarly, Flatiron failed to clearly and conspicuously disclose that its $74,447 average salary claim included full time employed graduates only, which represent only 58% of classroom graduates and 39% of online graduates."

Good to crack down on this.

"In order to obtain a SED license, a non-degree granting career school must meet a number of criteria, including using an approved curriculum and employing a licensed director and teachers."

This is worrying. Part of why these bootcamps have been a valuable addition is that they've been able to use their own curricula and train their own teachers.

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Having done some work for a school that's jumped through these hoops, I believe that it's a different definition of "approved." It's not "choose one of these curricula we made up and do that," it's "show us your complete curriculum and defend how this makes a complete program."

The response times on approval can be pretty terrible and you get peppered with a lot of dumb requests by reviewers who don't actually understand the material.

(I grew up around my parents' vocational school, board of education interactions looked totally insane)

This. I work at a coding bootcamp and last week we decided to include CSS Grids in the syllabus for the advanced HTML/CSS week and this week we are practicing it. This would never be possible if we needed our syllabus accredited.

> This would never be possible if we needed our syllabus accredited.

Good thing you don't need your syllabus accredited to have an approved curriculum (and in fact not even sure there's such a thing?)

Also, accredited institutions make small changes to syllabi (such as the one you mentioned) all the time.

(e: Just noticed your comment down-thread, and now assume you're not in the USA. So edit, prepend "In the USA" to my comment. Relevant at least to the article I guess.)

I’ve never heard of them stopping you from teaching something extra. Does this mean you dropped something to make room for grids?

In my country you can't function like a normal school if your syllabus needs to be accredited and it's not easy to change it.

We didn't really drop anything, an extra day appeared because they were already better prepared before starting the course with basic materials.

When I went to a university, they got around this by making the syllabi as vague as humanly possible. They even would have a spare course code in each department which was just "whatever the professor feels like teaching, and if it's popular we'll turn it into a real course". Syllabi would avoid specifying the exact languages/frameworks/technologies taught in class.

We had something like that at UToronto Scarborough campus in philosophy. We had independent study course codes which were fourth year course codes where a student or small group of students could work with a prof to develop a custom course. Was amusing in that I think when I started studying there they only had I think four codes, but a friend of mine was there an extra two years and had taken everything upper level basically and they had to make new course codes for him.

My university (in the United States) had a course code like this, except that it was allowed to be repeated so you could take it a number of times under the same course code.

UPenn has that. I took CIS 399 ("Special Topics in Computer Science") once as "Unix/Linux Skills" and once as a Python course. From googling I see that it's also been offered as "The Art of Recursion", "Open Source Software Development", and other titles. It is a half-credit course, i.e. half of a normal course.

I don't see the problem.

A syllabus -- per dictionary.com, "an outline or other brief statement of the main points of a discourse, the subjects of a course of lectures, the contents of a curriculum, etc." -- is required by a governing authority that presumably has an interest in what citizen/subject (per your local regime) are being taught. This seems legitimate in the general case.

Your syllabus can be "unit-n: overview of current layout technologies for www browsers". Problem solved, no?

This kind of vaguness must certainly be tolerated for established universities and other parts of the traditional pantheon in any given jurisdiction. But, depending on jurisdiction, new schools and small schools might well be given no such wiggle room.

On timing — absolutely. It puts the old time-estimation adage of "take a developer's estimate and triple it" to shame.

What’s even more worse is people being defrauded of time and money by what amounts to at best an accidental scam. The stakes are high enough that there is arguably an appropriate level of rigor in certification

So what? That's how the world works. You don't get a free pass because you can code.

I've also done work for a for profit school. The issue with approval (as far as I can see) is that it focuses on easily checkable items like "do you have lesson plans" and less on important intangibles like "does your curriculum make any sense."

Still seems like that'd be better than nothing.

58% of classroom graduates making $74,447 average seems better than most universities out there. Too bad they had to lie about it.

A general practice of many coding bootcamps is making admissions selections in part based on the likelihood of career (as opposed to academic) success. There is a degree of "would I like to have a beer with this person" in the application process which is absent from traditional academic institutions like 'Old State U.'

One of the operating models of bootcamps is as a recruiter for tech companies. In addition to tuition from students, the bootcamp receives a fee from employers when graduates are hired. This provides incentives bootcamps to encourage students to take jobs as apprentices. And whether a student has the financial resources to take on an apprentice role can also factor into admission selection.

I have hired or at least interviewed directly from several bootcamps in NYC, including the Flatiron school, and was never asked to pay a referral or acquisition fee.

Fullstack Academy has a fee for hiring grads, but only if the company attended hiring day and the offer was a result of that attendance.

Their acceptance rate is much lower than all but the very top tier schools. Plus the students are a good bit older on average, they have more work experience, and most of them already have degrees.

Most universities teach something besides tech.

I assure you, a bootcamp for European medieval history will not produce average salaries of $73,000.

your logic makes no sense.

That's like saying coding bootcamps don't produce chefs. Different goals for different programs.

> 58% of classroom graduates making $74,447 average seems better than most universities out there.

The parent poster is comparing how successful universities are at getting their graduates well-paying jobs, compared to how successful coding bootcamps are at getting their graduates well-paying jobs.

I point out that this is an unreasonable comparison. University averages are dragged down by low-earning, low-employable majors.

(One may conclude that going to university for the sake of a low-wage, low-employable major is worthless. To which I will have to ask - how well do you think software engineers will be paid, if the 20 million current American college students were to switch their major to comp sci tomorrow?)

Is it better than a university CS degree?

"Better" is tough to say - coding bootcamps are focused on getting a coding job, but university CS degrees are not (CS graduates going into other fields [like finance], research/grad school, etc).

If the goal is to get a high-paying coding job as quickly as possible, bootcamps look good. Would be interesting to look at longer-term trends in a few years - career advancement, job type, management level, industry within tech, etc.

A bit of a rant since I worked in the industry:

> CS graduates going into other fields [like finance]

Finance is just like every other high-professional industry, they train you for what you need to know because they are invested in your success. I worked in that industry for 6 years. Most banks run a 2-3 month internal bootcamp for fresh college hires. I was a math/econ double major and sat next to an english lit major in my class. My brother was a poli-sci major and went straight from college -> bootcamp -> Goldman Sachs as a developer.

I think people greatly overestimate the value of their major (excluding those going into academics). My personal experience in finance and tech is that Finance and CS majors are the absolute worst about overvaluing their education. 2 years of work experience^ erases any "superiority" of an industry-specific major compared to an art history major (all else equal).

^ I've done a fair amount of mid-level hiring. I've told people in the past that mentioning your major in an interview after 2 years of work experience is a strong strike #1 to me. If your major is still relevant to your ability to do a job, I generally assume your recent work experience has been worthless.

Strange. I've found my education has been highly relevant over the last 20 years.

I’m going to mention it if you list it as a requirement and ask me about it.

I would hope you answer if asked about it, but I don't see it as something to bring up unless directly asked about it. Maybe my experience is unique, but on the interviewee side of the table it has only come up once after being in the workforce for 2 years. The only reason was because we went to the same school and were joking about professors.

I can't speak for Finance but if your CS degree isn't equivalent to ~4 years of work experience you went to a bad school.

Some numbers:

College:

    30 weeks
    40 hours per week
    4 years
    = 4800 hours

Work:

    49 weeks
    50 hours per week
    2 years
    = 4900 hours

And that's being generous at only a 50 hour work week, as well as being generous in giving a full 40 hours worth of college work. I think your comment perfectly demonstrates my point.

CS majors are also doing 2-4 internships which are by and large more formational experiences than a bootcamp. I don't know where you work that a developer working "only" 50h weeks is "generous" but I hope I never find myself applying there.

> CS majors are also doing 2-4 internships which are by and large more formational experiences than a bootcamp

This seems like a left turn from my comment. Nowhere did I say bootcamps are a replacement for formal education. I was comparing the value of time in the workforce vs. time spent in school. I was discussing finance majors who, shockingly, also do internships. I don't know anyone that took a bootcamp as a replacement to a college education, so I'm not sure where you pulled any of this from.

> I don't know where you work that a developer working "only" 50h weeks is "generous" but I hope I never find myself applying there.

Maybe my part of the world is unique, but I've never worked less than 50 hours per week in my 10 years and I honestly can't say I know anyone that does excluding people with "non-professional" jobs.

I've worked exactly one job that routinely took more than 40 hours/week and I make sure to not fall into that trap again. 50 hours a week standard is the same as a 20% per hour pay cut

Only if you're not paid by the hour.

True, but is that a significant amount of people who would be going to boot camps for engineering? The type of people who have the personality to get and succeed at consulting jobs seem to overlap heavily with the type of people who can learn on their own

You're saying people who actively sought out continuing education and were willing to do a career transition are people who aren't willing to learn on their own? That's just silly.

I think they are saying the opposite.

Some of the stats in the thread seem to indicate that a not insignificant minority do self employ or consult.

I was saying the opposite.

Sorry, I completely misinterpreted that as "taking coursework" is the opposite of "independent learning"

Nah I meant more that bootcamps aren't the "proper path" for lack of a better phrase, that everyone goes to by default. It takes a certain amount of motivation to go out of the norm, or at least a certain amount of comfort with that risk, and that same mindset applies to entreprenership.

I say this as someone who just went to college because that's what you do and only got into software because my degree led to a $10/hr job which could not pay rent and student loans. If I had gotten 25 or 30 an hour there's a good chance I never would have had the impetus to teach myself anything

> I was discussing finance majors

I wasn't, I explicitly said I can't speak for finance majors. My point I would not consider 2 years of work and a 4 year CS degree from a well-regarded school to be equivalent for technical hires.

My internship experience was what made CS click, rather than the curriculum itself. Agree that they're a critical ingredient. :)

Which plays directly into my comment about work vs school.

As a college student, I consistently put in 60-80+ hours a week into my studies. I know this is just one data point, but I think your estimate of what it takes to be a student is way off. However, I do take a lot of classes, and do research, so I may be on the upper end.

(This is at a state school in the US.)

That's absolutely insane. I overloaded half my semesters and had a double major-double minor and didn't work anywhere near those hours. Maybe college has changed in the last 10 years, but I went to a very good school and had a drastically different experience. It's insane to believe you should be working more in college than after, let alone double.

Seriously, that's insane. I've never heard of anything even resembling that.

For a lot of the classes I took, this is what the hours looked like for my classmates as well. I do not think it's that unusual, even.

This could be tricky to quantify. What percentage of these bootcamps jobs are based in the Bay Area? Salaries are obviously "higher" there (quotes because cost of living is as well).

In my experience (having worked with several people from boot camps and obviously several people with CS degrees), boot camps are much better at attracting/selecting people who are interested in programming and the long term learning needed to be a successful programmer. University CS degrees are much better at teaching CS, and even the skills necessary to be a good programmer. If you look at CS degrees with good co-op or intern programmes, then it's not even close.

My main complaint about boot camps is that they give students the impression that the 2-6 month intense boot camp is close to what they will need to be successful in their career. It's not. However, my experience has been that after boot camp it's pretty easy to reorient those people to understanding that they will need to work hard to improve for their whole career. Basically, a good boot camp graduate is very similar in skill level to a good 2nd year coop/intern student -- but then they need to study the rest of the stuff on their own.

My main complaint about university programmes is actually pretty similar. People leave the programme with the idea "I know CS", sort of like how Neo knows kung fu in the Matrix. My experience has been that it's much harder to explain to new graduates that they still have a lot to learn. People with master's degrees are even harder to convince. In addition, because coop/intern sessions are poorly monitored, quite a lot of graduates are actually completely hopeless at programming.

But either way, I think you can make a successful career. Sometimes you see boot camp graduates complaining, "How could I have known that" when the answer is, "Yeah, having 4 years to screw around with this stuff and do a variety of different projects really helps". Sometimes I see CS graduates say, "Wait, this complexity is completely ridiculous. Nobody can be productive in this mess" when the answer is, "Yeah, working on realistic projects has a huge benefit".

I personally don't like the current generation of boot camps, mainly because of the potential to exploit the students badly. However, I think there is a huge need for something like them and I'm looking forward to seeing how things evolve. Having said that, for people who know they want to be a programmer and are young/able I still recommend getting a CS degree at the moment.

After accounting for the difference in cost and time required, quite possibly.

From my experience, boot camps are more frequently a supplement rather than a replacement to college education.

They have a much lower acceptance rate than the vast majority of CS programs.

You'd need to compare them to Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley etc...

Being intellectually honest, I'd have to say that they aren't really comparable. The low acceptance rate is true, but the sheer amount of completely unacceptable applications that are filled out after seeing one of these "make 75k in 3 months" ads contributes heavily to the percentage.

I attended this school and while most of my classmates were highly-intelligent people of diverse backgrounds, I can absolutely say it is much easier to get into Flatiron school than any of the programs listed above.

I've heard that many people who don't know any coding at all often apply to bootcamps and simply just flunk the first coding assessment they get. They probably help account for much of the low admissions rate at any half decent bootcamp (that have coding assessments).

why do people think coding bootcamps are a replacement for a CS degree? 99% of successful bootcamp grads already have a previous Bachelor's degree and use the bootcamp as a career changer.

I think it's fair to demonstrate that you actually know how to teach adult humans, regardless of the subject matter. A license is a fair standard to measure. Maybe the license criteria need to be modernized?

It is incredibly annoying that access to education is held behind barriers of entry that discriminate based on socioconomics and race. Education has fallen behind industry demands and global standards. The industry has already failed this test of "demonstrating they actually know how to teach adult humans."

1. Education industry fails to meet industry demands and to offer fair, affordable education

So, 2: Innovators ask, "If it pleases the crown, we would like to be allowed to try to fill this gap and offer an education that people can voluntarily pay for if they desire."

3. Only if we say so. Prove to us you can teach adult humans, peon.

4. But you already failed to do this? And you had the advantage of taxpayer dollars funding you. Why do you have authority?

The school should be punished and pay compensation for lying. However, we should not hand over the right to offer education to a government that, given the opportunity to provide it, failed the competency test to "actually teach adult humans" already.

Any accredidation should be voluntary.

Anyone can teach. Just look at the Khan Academy -- Sal started by just posting YouTube videos of his voice over Microsoft Paint.

The thing that is held behind a barrier is issuing a credential. And it seems reasonable that someone generating diplomas (or claims they can teach you enough to get you a job) should itself be held to accreditation or a standards body.

But we (software developers in industry) could be making that standards body, rather than sitting on our butts and waiting for the government to do it.

I agree. I don't think government is useless, but private industry is much better at innovation and meeting consumer demand.

A story everyone speaking of education reform should be cognizant of is that of Jaime Escalante.

Another issue aside from innovating to meet demand: Personally, if I want to sit down tomorrow and earn a degree in a subject, I don't know why I can't just self study and take exams to do this. To me, anyone in the world being able to earn the equivalent of a Harvard degree appears to be the ultimate policy in dismantling inequality and advancing opportunity. Why should Harvard degrees be limited to a small number of people? They really shouldn't.

> To me, anyone in the world being able to earn the equivalent of a Harvard degree appears to be the ultimate policy in dismantling inequality and advancing opportunity.

What happens in the classroom is largely not what defines a Harvard degree/graduate -- quite the contrary, actually. While some classes are very well taught, many of them round to something like "hey, you're smart, I'm going to pretend to teach, give you some reading lists, and you can figure it out for yourself."

There are little learning hacks like office hours (maybe) or talking with TAs (maybe), but again these are not the defining features of a Harvard grad (high quality or otherwise).

> take exams to do this

and who manufactures these magical exams you speak of, and on what authority?

They're not magical. If I want to be a doctor, there are two primary sets of exams I need to take: 1-the MCAT, and 2-the USMLE.

Both sets are managed by non profits.

There should be no reason why a poor minority, boy or girl, struggling to make ends meet in a rough neighborhood cannot get online, self study, and one day go and take a seat for these exams. In fact, this should be subsidized by government more than university classes--it is far more efficient and more fair, just better overall.

So these are the primary tests, both in a literal and figurative sense, which establish ability and competency to practice medicine.

After this point, getting the residency requirements and practical lab skills is just a formality.

If what it comes down to is basically some exams, we should be able to give more people access to that. Especially in STEM fields.

> They're not magical.

> Both sets are managed by non profits.

without an explanation as to how these non-profits are founded, given authority to regulate a given credential, and populated with people, fail to see how 2 negates 1.

Wait... You think someone should be allowed to self-study, take a test, and be a medical doctor?

You can do this with some professions, but I'd like to think my medical doctor has had actual experience with living people and cadavers.

Read my post again. Someone should be able to circumvent the academic complex's monopoly on credentials, as long as they can demonstrate the same aptitude and proficiency.

At that point, as I said, the hospital training is just a formality with some exceptions. Surgeons obviously need to demonstrate dexterity and composure. Candidates need to show up to work on time, etc.

Residency is not just a formality. A pre-residency doctor is about as useful as a fresh CS grad who has never seen, or worked on a real codebase in their life.

Except that instead of checking in awful, unmaintainable spaghetti, they'll be making life or death decisions.

I wouldn't let an unsupervised zero-work-experience fresh grad be solely responsible for a product. Doctors make important decisions - without any supervision or 'code review' on a daily basis.

Fair enough, either way we both agree there should still be residency.

That's marginally better. I'm still not sure I want a self trained physician. A lawyer who didn't go to school and still passed the bar is more acceptable.

We standardized for a reason. Could those standards be changed? Absolutely. I still don't think some poor person should be allowed online study and then to pass an exam and be a medical doctor.

What's wrong with 'some poor person'studying and passing an exam to be a doctor?

Fwiw, I'm still saying we should have residencies.

The same things wrong with a wealthy person doing so. There is much more than is on exams. Exams are easy to pass, experience is hard to fake. Much, much more is covered than exams cover. That stuff is also important.

If that is the case, then it equally applies to university students.

In both cases you study the material and are tested on it. There is nothing magical about paying to study inside a university.

They have more tests that are administered and you glossed over them covering more than is on the tests you mentioned.

It sounds like you're on board with the testing idea, but just think the tests should be more/longer.

And more intermittent. They cover things in medical school that are important (and tested for in class) that don't make their way to the final examination. Those are things a medical doctor should know.

There are also labs that cover things that aren't going to be on the tests. There are practical examinations along the way. It's a whole big process and fairly standardized for a reason. It's not like many other disciplines. I got to witness my daughter go through it.

As much as love her and think she's the most brilliant person ever, she needed the full educational experience and would benefit from more. In fact, many medical doctors keep adding to their education.

I think a lot of us here are engineers who came from unrelated disciplines, or some even with no formal education at all beyond HS.

Other fields could be the same way, if they could get over the cultural and authoritarian bureaucracies. Architecture has less scientific foundations, but it's nearly impossible to do without the prestige of an academic institution.

Medicine is one of the most difficult fields, but I still think if you can demonstrate the same ability, you should be able to go to a residency program.

Academia has an unfair grip on modern credentials, and I think that is one of the great things about tech. For example, some of the very most brilliant modern innovators abandoned academia, Musk, Gates and Newell come to mind.

They can CLEP some classes and skip them. That sort of helps.

In med school or just in undergrad?

An objective test removes the power of picking winners and losers from the academics, they will never allow that to happen.

Not everyone can teach well. I've also found that folks who have never had a good teacher in a particular topic don't realize how much disparity there can be.

"The school should be punished and pay compensation for lying. However, we should not hand over the right to offer education to a government that, given the opportunity to provide it, failed the competency test to "actually teach adult humans" already."

"The government" can only do the job that elected politicians allow it to do: the dedication and professionalism of front-line staff can easily be wasted by poor strategy and questionable agendas from the people at the top. Source: 10 years experience working in education.

Innovators == scammers

Most law schools lie about their graduate employment prospects as well. If the risk of being caught times the penalty is smaller than the increased revenue, why not fudge the numbers?

> I think it's fair to demonstrate that you actually know how to teach adult humans, regardless of the subject matter.

This is way too generic. To grant a standardized degree (e.g., BS, MBA, PhD), sure. As a generic, "show me that you are qualified to teach adults before I let you" I could not disagree more. Adults can decide what they want to learn (karate or Python, basket weaving or machine learning) and where they want to go. The state's role, if there is one, should be to inform, not limit the options. My 2c.

The state's role, if there is one, should be to inform, not limit the options

No opinion about this. But taxpayer's money should not be used to enable schools that do not provide an adequate education. No one is better off with a diploma from ITT Technical Institute or Corinthian College, there is no good reason for places like ITT or Corinthian to exist and even less reason to support them with public money.

Why is that needed for this particular field though? I don't have to have a license to be hired as a software developer or manager. I'd go to a bootcamp because their graduates get good jobs and I've heard good things about the experience, not because they got a license from someone.

but did the students learn more?

You're assuming bootcamps have been valuable. They haven't. They're complete garbage.

I've worked with bootcamp grads who have been pretty good, and hadn't already learned how to code. I also have friends who started out as non-coders, went through bootcamps, and are now doing really well.

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