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Comment by eaenki | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, feels like an airline trying to differentiate itself. It feels just like any other random university, maybe worse because the name sounds like a bootcamp. and it kinda feels like it is anyway. I would take the founder's former university (MIT) any day over "Make School" lol.

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Based on reputation it's tough for us to compete for students who are considering MIT, Stanford, or Ivy's. We have a few students who transfer from those schools because they want a more hands on education, but it's not the norm.

Our outcomes set us apart from the next tier of universities. Average starting salary is north of $100k (on par or higher than any other CS degree) with strong placements at name brand companies. Unlike top universities with comparable outcomes, we draw from a much more diverse socio-economic range.

We have struggled with the name a bit. On one hand we like that it sounds much more humble than trying to pick a "prestigious" sounding university name (and we don't like the ego involved with naming it after a person), but on the other many people don't grok that it's a proper college on first glance. Sticking with it for now...

I feel like MIT wouldn’t be MIT if it was named Maker School

Just like Stripe and dev/payments

Also, idk AFAIK the prestige is built upon exclusion + top notch research + beautiful place

When you don’t have that, it’s hard to sell someone on “a more hands on experience and same salary prospects” imo

But it’s probably me, I’m such a school snob

IIRC the degrees are awarded by the Dominican University of California, not by Make School.

Your comment about 'any other random university' just highlights the time and effort required to build up name recognition and a reputation.

Any new institution, regardless of merit, would face the same challenge, unless it had a famous name attached (e.g. Gates, Musk, Grove).

"Any new institution, regardless of merit, would face the same challenge"

This! It's proving to be a LOT harder to build reputation in this world than it is for most startups. Higher Ed brands are societally entrenched in a way that some people define their entire social hierarchy around it (which we don't feel is particularly progressive of a worldview). This is partly why there's been limited pressure to innovate in higher ed, in order to build a new school you first need a lot of capital, then work to get accredited, then build a strong reputation. Some of the strongest barriers to entry of any industry.

I think if you ask: “How much money does it take to go from zero to high repute in 5 years?”. There is one data point: Olin College of Engineering, half a billion dollars.

I’d be interested in hearing if you looked at the Olin model and what you learned from that.

We definitely look to them as inspiration! We've read a decent amount of how they were started. It's more or less the only new prestigious institution founded in the last 50 years. A lot of their classroom pedagogy also aligns with the direction we've been going, more project based and applied. And they've done a great job of sharing learnings back out to other institutions.

They sit more squarely in the research university category, whereas we're closer to a teaching college (where faculty are dedicated to students rather than publishing research). And it's been a capital intensive way to build a college, since they build out a big campus, research facilities, etc.

We've been meaning to build a closer relationship with them to share learnings on the education side, good reminder to reconnect with the folks we know there :)

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