Students paid thousands for a Caltech boot camp that Caltech didn't teach | Hacker News Reader

Students paid thousands for a Caltech boot camp that Caltech didn't teach

nytimes.com

84 pointsgoldfishgold128 comments

> The university, he learned, had largely outsourced the program to a company called Simplilearn.

> A spokesperson for Caltech, Shayna Chabner, said that the university viewed its online programs as “a way that we can bring value”

Sounds more like Caltech views its online programs as a way to exchange credibility for short-term profits

The same can be said of Stanford which charges ridiculous amounts for "certification" courses.

Basically cashing in on the institutions reputation and student's hunger to get the institution's stamp on their resumes.

Glad to see the pushback. eventually stupid money runs out.

> eventually stupid money runs out.

It appears to be a renewable resource.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...

he, I got the popup to donate to wikipedia. The irony.

> student's hunger to get the institution's stamp on their resumes.

but this is exactly what the students were after isnt it? The certification is a resume checkbox rather than an actual education.

I think there is a fundamental difference if the content is created by and taught by Stanford staff.

https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/

Most of these classes would fall under the heading of "light entertainment for people with the money to afford it."

Take a look at this one:

https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/detail/20241_...

It doesn't claim that Anja Lee has anything to do with Stanford, except for teaching this class.

https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/detail/20241_...

You probably do learn something about photography from Mr. Feria for your $480.

>It doesn't claim that Anja Lee has anything to do with Stanford, except for teaching this class.

I'm not sure what more people would expect, being hired to teach a class or classes is how a decent percentage of the people that how have anything to do with Stanford have to do with Stanford.

I don't even know what this means. Does the janitor have "something to do with Stanford" ?

fair, but is there are too many such courses, the exclusivity of the brand dilutes.

I fail to see how. If the content quality and instructional quality is the same then there is no damage to the perception of quality. So then if they charge a lot for the targeted certification, then they don't diminish the value of the degree programs.

The difference then is scope of instruction. I think high quality certification programs are quite valuable to the market and properly run ones but trusted institutions are a benefit for the institution and the marketplace.

"Someone might be misled!"

Classic cry of the people who want to regulate and control everything.

Maybe if the certificate is worthless, the students will figure it out? Maybe by doing a little research before they invest their money and time.

I know that for a course to be eligible for government reimbursement under any program (job training, GI Bill, etc.) the government has to investigate it. So presumably the bad ones are either already ineligible, or someone's not doing their job.

premium brands like coach, rolex thrive on exclusivity. same with the premier institutions. they want to keep their brand allure so someone can boast that they are from stanford, or that they own a rolex.

If every tom dick and harry has a stanford cert in their resume, the value of the brand diminishes. so, you are from stanford, big deal, i got a certification too.

Coach makes bags in the (at the top end) 500$ USD range. Rolex makes watches in the (bottom end) 10,000$ USD range. You can find bags in a coach outlet for basically the same price as any other bag.

You were thinking of Hermes/Chanel instead of Coach. Even LV and Gucci aren't in the same league as these.

Also, all of these are part of what I call the "Franko-Italian Fashion Cartel".

> a way to exchange credibility for short-term profits

Immediately on reading this I thought "ah yes, Hewlett-Packard's business model for the last few decades".

The part of HP I most respected became Agilent in 1999 (then later Keysight).

In the spinoff, the part that became Agilent should have stayed "Hewlett-Packard." Because you're right, Agilent and its spinoffs are the true inheritors of what Dave and Bill built.

The part that stayed HP should have been renamed "HP Computing" or some BS corporate acronym ("HPC"??)

that is how every elite school that offers these views it

I had the University of Minnesota's "Coding Bootcamp" reach out to me a couple years ago about possibly teaching a course. I was genuinely excited at the prospect, it's always been something of a dream of mine to teach, so I scheduled a call. I never talk to recruiters but I wanted this.

The call very quickly went down hill and they became visibly angry when they found out I was not a NodeJS expert.

You reached out to me. I never represented myself as such. You likely saw on my credentials on LinkedIn which shows I have been writing JavaScript since the late 90s.

I hadn't entirely given up hope yet and said something a long the lines of "I am sure I could pick it up very quickly, I just haven't had the need so far" and the already visibly annoyed interviewer basically shouts "NO, we need someone who is an expert from day one!"

I apologized for wasting their time. They say that they will contact me if anything changes. I, a grown adult of near 40, went in to the call giddy and left tearing up a little. Good riddance.

You didn't waste their time. They wasted your time.

They're the ones who contacted you and didn't check your abilities before scheduling a call.

That's probably the same bootcamp that my friend took. I was really excited for them, but unfortunately the bootcamp was of poor quality. No enforced gates, no meaningful feedback on code quality, too little explicit mentoring on tech skills and soft skills, no support finding work at "graduation". That was in 2019, before the markets churned. Those courses were branded as UMN but we're reskinned Trilogy bootcamp materials, and there was ultimately no UMN staff involved except maybe an admin somewhere.

Good riddance indeed.

Did you point out to this person that they contacted you, that you never claimed to be a Node expert, etc.? If so, did they have any sort of coherent response to that observation?

Yep, I sure did. I never got anything about why they reached out to me specifically or any such explanation. Just that they needed a "node expert". The call lasted maybe 5 minutes when they'd scheduled half an hour.

Sounds like you dodged a bullet, even if you were a Node expert.

I find it very surprising that prestigious colleges are willing to outsource their online courses at the expense of diluting their own brand.

I guess I should not be that surprised, college admins are some of the worst business people on the planet.

If you think of these entities as plain ol businesses instead of “prestigious colleges”. Then nothing will surprise you.

College used to be very affordable. Before the massive injection of funds from the “student loan bubble”, you could take on a minimum wage summer job and pay for a semester of college and living expenses.

Now, college tuition has far outpaced the cost of living. And subsequent entities (ie, book publishers) are increase the cost of the books part of the courses. A parasite on top of a parasite. I remember older editions of introductory course textbooks cost 10X than the latest edition.

What changed between the latest and oldest? The publisher moved the chapters around. The worst part of it is that the author doesn’t even get paid.

It was at that point, I began pirating every textbook I was forced to buy and shared it with all the classmates at the start of every semester.

Also, college today is less of an institution for learning and more of a 4-yr “experience”. Colleges (private and public) have amenities such as “lazy rivers”, “luxury” dorms, zoos to attract victims to their ~~~scam~~~ institution.

I feel society has oversold the idea of college and looked down upon trades colleges. We honestly need more trades people rather than STEM, doctors, and (especially) lawyers.

If I had to start over, I would probably be an electrician. Maybe plumber. Maybe architect with an emphasis on green/sustainable housing and building practices.

When I was teaching university I made it a point to put all class materials on two-hour reserve at the library, and promised my classes that if those were oversubscribed that I would deposit more copies. (I also made oblique references to alternate methods of acquisition: "ask your nerdiest friend what that means".) That may have contravened the college's contract with Barnes and Noble (I mean, the parenthetical bit definitely did), but fuck them. I served my students' best interests, never anyone else's.

But they are already delegating teaching (of undergrad level at least) to people who generally aren't interested in teaching...

Yup; this is common at research universities, where professors’ tenure evaluations are largely based on research accomplishments and fundraising. I’ve had many friends tell me that they had better experiences with community college professors compared to university professors, since the community college professors are there to teach.

(Disclaimer: I am a new community college instructor of computer science who worked as a researcher in industry for nine years before wanting a career change.)

What's "tenure evaluation"?

Typically when a person is hired for a tenure-track professorship at a university, that person doesn’t immediately start out with tenure, which is a status that means the professor cannot be fired without cause. Rather, most professors start out as assistant professors who have six years to prove to the university and their peers that they can meet the university’s bar regarding research productivity, teaching, and service (to the university, the community, the discipline the professor researches, and society). During the sixth year of employment the university evaluates the professor’s contributions and then decides whether to grant that professor tenure. If the professor is granted tenure, then the professor is usually promoted to associate professor and doesn’t need to worry about getting fired except in cases of misconduct (e.g., a professor taking an unapproved vacation in the middle of the semester; a professor having an inappropriate relationship with a student, postdoc, or advisee; a professor caught plagiarizing, etc.), though layoffs could still happen. However, if a professor is denied tenure, while there is usually an appeals process, the professor isn’t allowed to stay at that university beyond the end of the sixth year, and so the professor must move on, either to another university or often to another career.

Everything linguae says is correct. The additional bit of the system to understand is that the actual teaching (of undergraduate courses) is done by "Adjuncts", who are holders of advanced degrees, but on contract (ie, not salaried employees of the institution) for each class.

Adjuncts generally earn poverty wages, and exist in a state of profound financial and existential insecurity. Universities won't hire any individual adjunct for more than a certain number of classes per term (lest they become a full-time employee, to whom they owe health insurance and other benefits), so adjuncts usually need find employment with more than one institution, or else a secondary job to make ends meet (I met folks, teaching at universities you've heard of, working in restaurants and fast-food on the side).

Even worse, universities (by and large; maybe there are honorable exceptions I've not heard of) will not consider their adjuncts for promotion to tenure-track positions. Even worser, other universities likely won't consider you for tenure-track if you've adjuncted elsewhere - so, even if you've managed to publish some interesting papers on top of your teaching grind (I'm coming from a Humanities background, where that's more possible than in STEM), the people who know you won't hire you, and you aren't able to claim your association with [Prestigious Institution] because the stench of "Adjunct" hangs about it.

(The additional point about community colleges is correct. You will often find better undergraduate instruction - from imminently qualified professors - there than you will at brand-name universities. However, some community college systems are also starting to adjunct their classes, as a cost-saving measure.)

There's a concept of "Elite Overproduction", that I think explains the phenomenon:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

This is how empires fall.

Academia is mostly about multi-level marketing. Teaching and research are side effects. There are a lot of similarities to nightclub promotion.

University of Oregon did a lot of this around 2015. Imagine the passion a post-grad math scholar has for teaching calculus to undergrads. Zero.

It’s not clear that their brand actually gets diluted. Lots of top-tier universities run extension schools and certification programs. I suspect that it really is free money from the school’s perspective, even accounting for the occasional expose.

Given the recent events, I would say even top-tier universities are quickly destroying their own brands, and outsourcing their online education is one way they're doing it.

Parodies of the atrocious Wharton offerings during the pandemic referred to the overall effort as "Whoreton." Some would say it's destruction not dilution.

This is the problem with “branding” and ranking in the American university system. People believe Caltech is a good school, so they automatically assume it is worth the high price.

Maybe a solution is to be clear if a class or program is taught by an FTE instructor, or if the program is outsourced? There’s nothing wrong with trying new things to make more money (student enrollments are declining), but be clear about who is teaching the course and how they are affiliated with your brand.

There's a pretty clear delineation between courses that lead to a degree, and "extension" courses that don't.

> automatically assume it is worth the high price

Data needed: what do "regular" bootcamps cost and is Caltech's cost any higher?

Is there really a difference? Most of these universities outsource the actual teaching to grad students.

Grad students who are technically under the employ of the University...that is not outsourcing.

To me the difference is just a technicality. My point is you’re not getting taught by who you’re paying for.

> who you’re paying for

Only ignorant people think that all beginning courses are taught by real professors. That hasn't been true for generations.

Right but what you’re paying for is still not a random grad student of unknown reputation for whom teaching the class is a way to build favor with the professor

Aside from the fact that you've got your negatives confused:

Grad students' assistantships often require them to teach classes. It's not "a way to build favor with the professor," it's required for them to stay in grad school.

As for whether they're "random" or not: how would you know how they assign classes? I doubt it's by lottery.

at least at harvard you can get a degree in “extension studies”

What we're seeing is how the profit motive is anathema to higher education. Colleges view their reputation as their brand that can simply cash in on for even more profits. Some colleges are basically hedge funds masquerading as colleges at this point.

What we need is a high-quality, no or low cost state university system (like California and other places used to have) as a balancing force to keep skyrocketing tuition costs in check.

I'd even go so far as to say that state college systems should not an athletics department at all [1]. Or let that aspect be completely privately funded.

Now there's a lot to criticize with the military but the one aspect I'd like to emulate is the idea that you qualify to do a job, you choose to do that job, you get trained to do that job and then you do the job.

We don't need to turn higher education into job factories to do that.

As for these courses, almost all of them in every area is a scam. Any course teaching you to make money (eg in stocks or crypto) is a scam because if someone was capable of making money, they'd do that. They wouldn't tell you how. The course is their income.

This is a little different but still, Caltech is selling their name to profit off of third-party courses.

[1]: https://www.collegevine.com/faq/112712/do-most-college-athle...

I'm a big fan of what Georgia Tech, UT Austin, UIUC, and CU Boulder did with their online masters programs - the courses are the same as on campus (and I've verified this with alums and/or having taking courses at these universities as an undergrad), and they give the hard skills needed to truly become a decent SWE.

> What we need is a high-quality, no or low cost state university system (like California and other places used to have) as a balancing force to keep skyrocketing tuition costs in check.

Doesn’t California show exactly why this doesn’t work? California has, today, a large system of well-supported state universities where tuition is under $10,000 per year. But the best students don’t want to attend them. Since most people understand high-quality to mean things like “will I be surrounded by some of the smartest people in the country” or “will employers looking for the smartest people seek me out”, they often don’t get perceived as high-quality no matter how good their instruction may be.

> But the best students don’t want to attend them

Admissions at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD is near Stanford level for in-demand programs like EECS and Business, and plenty of us Ivy and Ivy-adjacents didn't get into a UC or didn't get Regents (thus potentially making an Ivy Adjacent cheaper).

My sibling is much younger, and in their time (late 2010s/early 2020s), admission stats to CS or Business even in "middling" (imo criminally underrated) UCs like UCR or UCSC became comparable to UCB barely a decade ago.

I'd reemphasize my point. When the discussion turns to public colleges in California, people often think exclusively of the UCs, which are genuinely prestigious and (non-coincidentally) expensive. The CSU system is larger, much cheaper, and thus entirely invisible to most who identify as Ivy-adjacent.

> The CSU system is larger, much cheaper, and thus entirely invisible to most who identify as Ivy-adjacent.

For top Californian students targeting Eng/CS these programs are very visible.

The good CSU programs (Eng/Business @ SJSU, SDSU, and CalPoly SLO) tend to overprotect their yield rate.

Personally, I and a significant proportion of my HS friend group would have preferred attending CalPoly SLO (it's a fun campus, great hiking, great beach, great academics, great job placements), but we all got rejected because our scores (SAT/GPA) were way higher than the median, yet we ended up at Ivy Tier programs (EECS@MIT/Berkeley/Stanford/etc). Same thing happened to my sibling as well.

This has been an issue for almost 2 decades now because high demand programs in Californian public universities (STEM, Business) haven't increased the amount of faculty or seats per department yet the number of students trying to apply to these programs has skyrocketed

Prop 13 (Property tax revolt) wreaked havoc on the UC, Cal State, and Community College systems. Tuition started to creep up at Berkeley shortly after I started a couple of years after the vote but it was absolutely nothing like it is today. Also, the competition to get in to UC schools is crazy. No way in hell I could get in were I to apply today with my high school grades, test scores, and extracurriculars.

Prop 13 wasn't the issue for us younger applicants (graduated HS in the last 20 years) - it's the austerity measures that were in place across California from 2009-2013.

That prevented UCs and CSUs from being able to dynamically expand STEM and Business faculty headcount.

That said, even Ivy League programs have fallen into the same trap - CS@Harvard is bursting at the seams and imo, the course quality is middling compared to UCs, UT, UIUC, UW, MIT, CMU, GT, etc, and recruiting isn't that different between a top public CS program and Ivies (the only difference is VC Analyst recruiting, but that's a horrible career that expires in 2-3 years. Only MBAs or experienced EMs/PMs/Founders or a handful of IB Analysts break into partner track [associate and above] roles).

I think that was another of many blows to the head and gonads that the California public Universities have suffered.

Prop 13 forced the state schools to adopt a private school model. Way back when, there was a tacit agreement that the public schools wouldn't tap private sources and in return, the private schools would be generally supportive of the state schools with respect to Sacramento.

That all went by the boards and everyone is now selling off chunks of schools to private entities. In the early 1990s, the UC schools had to offer buyouts/retirements and a lot of very senior faculty left. Many were still in their prime and went to other Universities. Nasty brain drain.

I'll defer to your assessment of CS programs. I studied a science but not computer science. In my experience, an Ivy league name is worth a huge amount in prestige.

Edit: Also, the contacts one makes at an Ivy or a Stanford are leagues ahead of what's available at a public school.

> I'll defer to your assessment of CS programs. I studied a science but not computer science. In my experience, an Ivy league name is worth a huge amount in prestige.

Fair enough! I can't speak for the sciences - only Engineering/CS.

CS/Eng is much more driven by defense and private sector funding, which is biased towards National Labs, which are overwhelmingly managed by public universities.

At the federal level, the DoD and DoE has held this bias for decades due to a mix of pork barrel politicking as well as the fact that public university graduates tend to be overrepresented in career civil service roles.

I personally know a couple SES types who purposely redirected CHIPS and IRA funding to flagship universites due to a bit of a grudge against the Private School IVorY tower (though lack of STEM research capacity also played a role)

> Also, the contacts one makes at an Ivy or a Stanford are leagues ahead of what's available at a public school.

As someone who attended an Ivy/Ivy Adjacent, I highly disagree, at least in Eng (and Eng adjacent roles like PM/EM/Sales/Entrepreneaurship and even VC to a certain extent)

Middle management turned upper management in most tech companies tended to attend flagship publics in the West Coast/TX/Midwest plus some elite privates like Stanford/Claremont Colleges/USC/CMU, which impacts recruiting as well.

Ime, other than Penn and Cornell, Harvard and other Ivies are not as well represented compared to a program like EECS@Cal, CS@UT, CS@UW, etc.

Most upper level Ivy grads I end up meeting tend to have done grad school at an Ivy (MBA@Wharton/HBS/CBS/Johnson) but undergrad at a public university either domestically (state flagships) or abroad (IIT D/K/B/M to Wharton pipeline)

Stanford and MIT are a different story, but they also have much more rigorious admissions and student body.

In addition, a lot of my professional (not age - precocious little scamp ain't I [0]) peers in Eng/Sales/VC leadership are at the "sending kids to college" stage, and most of them are sending their kids to flagship public and private engineering programs - not Ivies.

This has a downstream impact on the network, as parents will help their kids and their kids friends get jobs and referrals. I personally know a Tech Billionare who sent their kids to a top public CS program despite having the option to send them to MIT or Harvard due to the larger network of mid-level managers turned founders/VCs from that school.

And as you can probably tell from this conversation, I'm probably not in favor of giving a leg up to hiring or funding Ivy/Ivy Adjacent graduates, and I am in a position to make that choice. There are plenty of others like me.

Tl;Dr - the tech industry has made upward mobility easier by overemphasizing work experience over Ivy/Private pedigree to a certain extent.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uofjc65LEJM

Very interesting perspective, thank you.

>> Also, the contacts one makes at an Ivy or a Stanford are leagues ahead of what's available at a public school.

> As someone who attended an Ivy/Ivy Adjacent, I highly disagree, at least in Eng (and Eng adjacent roles like PM/EM/Sales/Entrepreneaurship and even VC to a certain extent)

In my long but undistinguished career, I don't see that my Berkeley undergrad classmates and I have set the world on fire and we're not powerbrokers by a very long shot. We were all (at that time) from the same chunks of middle-class Northern and Southern California with almost no out-of-staters. Many of us including myself commuted and there was almost none of the stereotypical college social life due to courseload and research (a very big emphasis).

Now, I am sure things have changed in the nearly 40 years since I graduated. Perhaps the increasing cost and explosion of Silicon Valley/CS has changed who came after, where they come from, and their family backgrounds.

> CS/Eng is much more driven by defense and private sector funding, which is biased towards National Labs, which are overwhelmingly managed by public universities.

That used to be true when UC ran LBL, Livermore, and Los Alamos but these days they are run (poorly) by "public/private" consortia. Stanford runs SLAC, Chicago for the moment runs Fermilab - both are private schools. I don't think wealthy families send their kids to any of these private schools with a view to jobs at LocMart, Boeing, or Argonne.

> Middle management turned upper management in most tech companies tended to attend flagship publics in the West Coast/TX/Midwest plus some elite privates like Stanford/Claremont Colleges/USC/CMU, which impacts recruiting as well.

The real surprise here is USC which was a scorned backwater when I was in college. "University of Second Choice" took great strides in the 1990s under Steven Sample. IMO it is far from an elite[0] place like Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, etc. but the USC network is a Very Big Deal at least in So Cal. At my company, their alumni association virtually guarantees that an applicant will get a face-to-face with a decisionmaking alum while others are getting screened out by the AI or HR.

Edit:

[0] I mean elite in terms of academic quality vs. job/networking opportunities.

> I don't see that my Berkeley undergrad classmates and I have set the world on fire and we're not powerbrokers by a very long shot

> I am sure things have changed in the nearly 40 years since I graduated

40 years ago maybe, but since the mid-2000s, UCB (and LA and SD) have become much more prestigious (or became more prestigious again - I think Stanford/USC were "inferior" until the 70s-80s due to political strife).

Now that tech (software and hardware) has been the 1st and 3rd highest margin industries for almost 25 years now, there is a lot more money sloshing around.

A plurality of Investment Bankers, PEs, and VCs you'll meet nowadays in the SFBA will have studied at UC Berkeley for either undergrad (usually Eng+Haas or Eng+Econ double major) or via the PT MBA at Haas. Wharton is up there largely thanks to the EMBA program they strategically placed on Embarcadero, and Stanford has never changed prestige wise.

Tech still has a regional bias (Dallas and westward), and most of the West is still public school dominated.

> I don't think wealthy families send their kids to any of these private schools with a view to jobs at LocMart, Boeing, or Argonne.

You're underestimating rich people (or maybe the rich people I know have a tech bias, given that we all work in the tech industry). The "Asian" parent and "Soviet/Israeli Jewish" parent archetype is strong in NorCal - and transplants from other parts of the US act the same way - and most of us 2nd gen members of these communities filtered into the tech industry because our parents worked in them.

Also, new grad salaries in tech outpace salaries in IB, PE, and Consulting when factoring hours worked as well as career longevity, because most IB/PE/Consulting/VC Analysts burn out or get managed out with 3 years, and have to do an MBA in order to pivot into tech. The downside with partner heavy systems is that they limit carry to a handful of mid-to-upper level types who are partner/MD or partner/MD track, and unlike NYC, there just isn't enough deal flow in the West excluding VC to make it easy to job hop in these sectors, and partner-track VC roles at the truly successful VC funds (BVP, Accel, A16Z types) are biased in favor of thematic experience.

On the other hand, if you consistently upskill and show a strong track record of execution, you can remain relevant in the tech industry for decades earning very comfortable salaries.

> The real surprise here is USC which was a scorned backwater when I was in college

Henry Samueli (Broadcom), Andrew Viterbi (Qualcomm), and Aerospace (Northrop, Grumman, BAE) helped massively, as they tended to hire from UCLA, CalTech, and USC due to proximity.

SCU [or USC back in the day ;)] remained an insular parochial Italian Catholic college, though their IP Law program is decent because of the part time JD and some well placed alumni at Fenwick&West, Cooley, Wilson Sonsini, and Google's in-house counsel.

> I mean elite in terms of academic quality vs. job/networking opportunities

40 years ago maybe but not anymore in engineering/CS.

Excluding MIT/CMU/Stanford, most breakthroughs in the last 30-40 years were done by professors at the top CS/EE public universities.

Heck, at Harvard it's fairly common for Eng and CS students to take courses at MIT due to a lack of course offerings at Harvard SEAS.

And anyhow, both MIT and Harvard can't compete with SJSU's MSEE which has actual GMs and Product Leaders at Micron, Intel, Samsung, AMD, Applied Materials, Nvidia, etc teaching part-time

If you don't get a scholarship (which most Californians end up becoming ineligible for due to household income restrictions - a 2 income household where both parents are earning $75k/yr is ineligible for no-strings attached aid at a notable Ivy), the math starts making sense to go to a decent public.

>> I don't think wealthy families send their kids to any of these private schools with a view to jobs at LocMart, Boeing, or Argonne.

> You're underestimating rich people (or maybe the rich people I know have a tech bias, given that we all work in the tech industry).

I didn't think the HN community considers big aerospace (and I work in one of them!) to be tech in the sense of startups on the one side and FAANG on the other. Some have even said as much. Yes, my shop hires from UCLA and USC, slightly less from Caltech in recent years but the promotions go predominantly to USC people. Can't be because of technical or managerial quality, either.

I must have been at Berkeley and then Stanford (grad school) during downturns. I finished up the latter in 1990 before the dotcom boom changed everything and apparently the former has grown in reputation although along different axes as well.

When I was an undergrad, Berkeley's powerhouse rep. in the physical sciences and elsewhere were good for instruction and research opportunities. Lots of Type A profs didn't like to be bad at anything so they taught well or at least tried hard at it. Research opportunities speak for themselves since the labs were well equipped with hardware and people and LBL was nearby. Helped me get into grad schools and with a nice external fellowship to pay for it but from the late 1990s on, that background has never helped in job searches or advancement.

Edit: I should also note that Berkeley may be placing people in the SF Bay Area (your post) but that the Ivies/MIT/Stanford have name recognition and influence far beyond their regions.

> I didn't think the HN community considers big aerospace (and I work in one of them!) to be tech in the sense of startups on the one side and FAANG on the other

Depends person to person, but I strongly believe Aerospace is tech as well, and the overlap between Aerospace, EE, CE, and CS is massive. Most of my peers would agree as well, and one of HN's most prolific poster JumpCrisscross is a significant investor in Aerospace.

> the promotions go predominantly to USC people. Can't be because of technical or managerial quality, either

Yea, the Trojan network is very strong. The only other similar cliques I can think of are UT Austin, the Claremont Colleges, and the BIG10.

> I finished up the latter in 1990 before the dotcom boom changed everything and apparently the former has grown in reputation although along different axes as well

I'm curious how much of an impact the Nixon and Reagan era culture wars at UC Berkeley had in that perception back then. I wasn't around so I'd love to hear your thoughts.

> Berkeley may be placing people in the SF Bay Area (your post) but that the Ivies/MIT/Stanford have name recognition and influence far beyond their regions

In the West Coast (Dallas westward imo), I haven't noticed a significant leg up as an Ivy compared to other similar programs. If I attended USC or Stanford I think I'd have a much stronger network in the West.

Prop 13 is such a sad story of the narrow self-interest people vote and act with. Like it's the reason Disney's tax rate for their park in Anaheim was set in the 1960s and basically hasn't moved. Does that sound like a good idea? But no, all people see is "my property taxes won't go up (as much)"

It just keeps getting worse too because you can inherit a property on a stepped-up basis (meaning the cost gets reset to market value for capital gains tax purposes should you then sell it) but you can inherit your parents' advantageous property tax rate.

This problem is so bad that a minimal claw back of Prop 13 benefits (Prop 19), which would limit you to only inheriting ONE beneficial tax rate, barely passed.

Are half of CA voters really inheriting multiple properties with tax rates set in the 70s? Of course not. But people vote agains this kind of thing anyway.

The other argument for Prop 13 is kicking seniors out of their houses when they're on a fixed income. I mean, do you really still need that 5 bedroom house in Los Altos whhen you're a retired couple? Of course not, but you'll happily pass it onto your children with no taxes and the low property tax rate if you can.

If you're really concerned about seniors, you can carve out an exception just for them without giving an exception to everyone (including Disney). This is actually something that Texas handles better. You can stay in your house and defer your property taxes until you die. So there's an incentive to downsize and you're not priced out of your house if you really want to stay.

And for the longest time (only up until the last 5-10 years), Texas managed to have relatively good control on house prices. It's why it was so popular to move to Texas. But national trends finally caught up with Texas too.

Imagine what could've been funded if Prop 13 never passed. Infrastructure, education, health care, whatever.

I'm now sensitized to the senior citizen housing issue now that I'm approaching that age. I can't downsize - no place to go to. Lots of people are nominally leaving California to be just outside of it in Nevada (Reno, Tahoe, LV) but I don't want to do that. I don't know what it would have been like had Prop 13 not passed of course.

I tried to go on Caltech's site to see if there was any indication that this bootcamp was taught by Caltech. After reading the bootcamp page for a few seconds, a chat window popped up on the side asking if I needed any help. So I asked: "is this bootcamp actually taught by caltech?"

The response was: "Hello and welcome to Simplilearn! My name is Priyanshu and Your current Country would be?"

https://archive.ph/BgZZu

Are any of these bootcamps actually good? Every time I looked into them it seemed like a ridiculously shallow syllabus that would leave you far from being able to do the job they claim. Maybe you could pass HR interview by knowing some keywords and last a month or two before getting fired.

Some are good, some aren't. The problem is, a Bootcamp student can't tell the difference and there's nothing like an accreditation system for them so it's full on market for lemons[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

This exactly. It reminds me of the "ESL certifications" you can get online - there's no presiding international body for guaranteeing some minimal level of quality / competency.

Well at least for those CEFR and TOEFL exist.

I should have been more clear. Those are for students who are learning, ESL is for people who intend to teach English. There are only two real recognized certificates for it - Trinity which is Oxford, and CELTA which is Cambridge.

I used General Assembly to learn frontend web development about 5 years ago. It was a positive experience, the two types of people I saw succeed were

1. people with some kind of tech background already and

2. people who were really smart but not technically oriented (we had 4 former professional artists and musicians in my cohort, one of whom was a Princeton undergrad).

The people who failed were people who had no curiosity to genuinely grow their knowledge and were just there because they wanted to check a box before getting a better paying job.

I've found that my curiosity drops commensurate with my savings (and therefore the chance I'm going to get kicked out of my home, my belongings repossessed, and find food unaffordable). If people are so insecure that this opportunity to retrain an entire workforce was squandered - the money was there, the desire was there, the expertise was there - it comes off to me as more of a, "If you owe the bank $1 billion...", sort of problem, for society.

No they are not. They are mostly one additional way to take money from people who are desperate and bury them under loans making them believe a sticker on their resume will make it more appealing.

On the other hand, they were a way to get large numbers of people into the field and staff unfilled positions. The market was very hot a couple of years ago.

Sure and a lot of those are being kicked out in the current layoff cycle. So it helped, maybe, companies with their engineering seats beeing filled, but didn't necessarily help at all with getting things done.

Easy come, easy go. Now everyone is looking for machine learning engineers instead of front end for the "current thing".

About 2018 I was helping with Operation Code (tech for vets) and doing their podcast. There was one guy who said he knew people in his bootcamp who got job offers before they were even finished. A number of my interviews got jobs that lasted.

The job market is different now, from what I hear.

At that time people making bootcamps was a way to show that they were willing to learn, a big positive factor when hiring somebody. Today it doesn't mean much, a lot do the bootcamp and believe that they now know everything and that there is no need to do any additional learning effort. And it is difficult to filter those people out to get to the genuinely interesting ones.

> a lot do the bootcamp and believe that they now know everything and that the effort is not necessary to pursue anymore.

I don't understand this. What does "the effort is not necessary to pursue anymore" mean?

That they don't need to study anymore. That they think they've studied enough in bootcamp that they don't need to learn anything else to get a job and be a functional engineer.

fixed it

"This is an ugly word, this 'scam.' This is business. And if you wanna be in business, this is what you do." --- Marlon Brando, 'The Freshman' (1990)

Caltech offers certs in Program Management, System Engineering, and a lot of other frobozz not in line with their deservedly Tier A+++ reputation. I work with people who've gone through these courses and 'unimpressed' would be an understatement. Of course, nearby UCLA and USC do this as do schools up and down the coast and eastward. These are Extensions and they bring in cash.

https://ctme.caltech.edu/

These aren't even Extension courses, but a "bootcamp" cash grab. Extension courses are usually courses offered to students, but often taught at a lower level so that the general public can attend.

They have other offerings besides the explicitly titled "Bootcamps." Extension as I've seen it used are for people outside University enrollment (undergrad/grad/postdoc) who want some enrichment or additional training whether for curiosity or, in these cases, advancement.

Higher education has become too powerful and influential due to unlimited government loan guarantees. They used that to charge insane amounts and hired bloated administrations.

Get the government out of the student loan business and take a lesson from the Germans: promote vocational and technical schooling. Not everyone needs to go to university or get a university education.

> Get the government out of the student loan business and take a lesson from the Germans: promote vocational and technical schooling. Not everyone needs to go to university or get a university education.

And while taking that lesson top with another: remove the profit motive from education, since you want to remove the government from providing loans you will need a backstop so the have-nots don't stay forever bound in the have-not enough money for education.

How exactly can you "remove" the profit motive without outright taking control of private educational institutions?

If you want public education to become more affordable, then standards must be raised and it must become more scarce.

I suppose a root cause of sorts is that for the first time in millennia there is a surplus of ambitious people with the means to pay for education, but a shortage of adequate warm bodies to teach. This in turn means top universities can provide a low quality course taught by outsourced teachers and know it will sell regardless.

I'm not sure how you fix it. There's only so many people who are smart and want to teach. It doesn't help that teaching doesn't pay well, but paying more only sort of helps: there would be a greater supply of teachers, but surely paying more can't make it cheaper.

People who feel comfortable and safe exploring topics govern their own learning, especially when there's a small but healthy amount of peer and supervisory pressure. So, don't pay a small army of adjuncts. Pay students to show up to a classroom and to complete standardized measures of progression.

Not sure about this. Generally there’s a line out the door of highly qualified people to teach at places like Caltech for little or nothing. A few years ago, UCLA tried to hire someone to teach a chemistry course as a volunteer position. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/03/21/ucla-criticiz...

Sure, but somehow these people aren't teaching, one way or the other. Maybe it's not a shortage of able people (in fact you're right, it definitely isn't) but they aren't teaching at top universities. Or there isn't enough of these teachers.

> The federal government helped kick off the gold rush in 2011. The Education Department, under the Obama administration, loosened its guidance on revenue-sharing relationships between colleges and for-profit companies.

Thanks Obama!

Blame Harvard and MIT - they founded EdX and used it to print a buttload of money with extremely high margins.

Everyone else is just copying that model.

In the cases of Harvard and MIT, actual, regular Harvard and MIT faculty taught the courses. That's a huge difference.

This feels like it might have had something to do with the likely demise of a bunch of for-profit "educators" (ITT, AI, and the like). That was still a few years away, but the writing was on the wall for investors who wanted to get off the sinking ships but still continue the grift. I suppose the view on the government side was that for-profit education wasn't an inherently corrupt venture, but that the independent nature of the companies involved made the profit motive take precedent, and that tying them to institutions with their reputation on the line would help to maintain instruction quality. So much for that.

https://archive.ph/2024.09.29-101523/https://www.nytimes.com...

What is the point of having almost $5bn in endowments[0] if the school still has to chase after revenue like this, at the cost of its credibility and reputation?

[0] https://investments.caltech.edu/

If you discount their JPL lab operations, it seems their revenue/expenses are ~$1Bn [0]. The investments would be able to probably cover half of that.

[0] https://finance.caltech.edu/documents/23713/FS_21_22.pdf

Mixed feelings on this. I've taken Extension courses from UCSC and from Stanford, and was never under any illusion that the teachers were affiliated with the schools (although one was). For all of them, they tell you in the course description who the teacher is. There's always a course evaluation at the end.

If Caltech isn't monitoring the content of their courses and the student evals, then they're being negligent, for sure. But I don't see this as a systemic problem, other than maybe lack of disclosure.

> I've taken Extension courses from UCSC and from Stanford, and was never under any illusion that the teachers were affiliated with the schools

What does this mean? Someone from those schools hired a teacher to teach a class sold under their schools brand. That's an affiliation. If the teacher dropped out and you didn't get a refund, you would sue those schools.

What this seems like are schools outsourcing their hiring to private companies. It's a problem precisely because the random teachers get affiliated with the school.

Extension or no, university courses (especially undergraduate courses) are often taught by underpaid lecturers, adjuncts, and grad students, sometimes hired on a term-by-term basis.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing for students. At research universities, there is little reason to expect that a tenured faculty member would actually be a better teacher than some random lecturer; faculty are incentivized for fundraising and research rather than teaching. Moreover, experienced faculty may have little recollection of what it was like to actually learn the course material before it became second nature to them.

Courses typically cover the same material, and the syllabus is usually about the same, irrespective of instructor.

> That's an affiliation.

Wrong. The teachers aren't professors of any type, or student assistants, or even employees. Their classes don't give credit towards a degree.

They're contractors.

> It's a problem precisely because the random teachers get affiliated with the school.

Wrong again. I haven't taught a class at UC Berkeley Extension, but if I had, I would not be entitled to say I was "affiliated with Berkeley."

> Wrong. The teachers aren't professors of any type, or student assistants, or even employees. Their classes don't give credit towards a degree. They're contractors.

From Miriam Webster:

affiliated, adjective, af· fil· i· at· ed ə-ˈfi-lē-ˌā-təd: closely associated with another typically in a dependent or subordinate position

What you are saying is like saying "I've taken car rides from Uber and from Lyft, and was never under any illusion that the drivers were affiliated with the companies"

If your organization sells services that are fulfilled by contractors who are vetted by your organization and branded with your organization's logos, then those contractors are affiliates of your organization.

It's nice you can use a dictionary.

In the real world of universities, though, there's a clear distinction between professors, grad students, and Extension teachers. No matter what your dictionary says.

Classic game that universities love to play where they hire someone but that person isn’t “really” part of the university. Happens with extension but happens in degree granting programs too with adjuncts.

As I remembered them, many of the "extension" courses at universities are taught by people with at least a minimal affiliation to the university. I took one at Harvard that was taught by a graduate student, and another that was taught by an assistant professor.

I'm personally glad, as a Caltech alum, that Caltech got called out on this bullshit, because these bootcamps really are not related to the university, and just cribbed the branding.

> many of the "extension" courses at universities are taught by people with at least a minimal affiliation to the university

This is true, but it's not necessarily an academic affiliation. That isn't inherently a bad thing though, especially for more practical-minded courses. In the mid-aughts, when I was employed by Harvard FAS as a web developer, on the side I also TA'ed for the Intro to Web Development class at the Extension School for a few terms. The instructor and most of the TAs worked for various parts of Harvard IT.

The course material was very current and high-quality as a result of being based on our hands-on day-to-day experience working in web dev, and we generally received very positive scores on student-submitted course evaluations.

Granted, at my day job I also wrote a majority of the online course evaluation system used by FAS + Extension School, but I swear that didn't impact our high marks :) The underlying Oracle DBs were appropriately locked down anyway, as we took privacy laws like FERPA quite seriously.

> many of the "extension" courses at universities are taught by people with at least a minimal affiliation to the university.

That might be true at Harvard, but it's not at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, or Stanford. Probably others, but those are the ones I see catalogs for.

(Also an alum) If you look on Reddit people were calling them out two years ago.

That was also good, but the university president doesn't read or pay attention to reddit. He does read the New York Times.

I met him right before the pandemic and I remember he did respond to my email around the time it was kicking off so I know that he does communicate to alums but this honestly might’ve been below his radar

I was the student body president in my last year of school, so I met the current president of the university several times (he came in during my time as a student), and he and I discussed some articles from the New York Times a few times since we were both subscribers.

Also, he and the rest of the administration were very sensitive to press in the traditional media outlets. Social media was mostly immaterial to them. There was a story in the LA times about Math 1a being too hard (for the audience, Math 1a is a "calculus" course that is mostly about real analysis and not that much about calculus), and that caused a big stir that I ended up getting involved with at one point, since I was part of the student government's "course concerns" group.

The current NYT article has already inspired a letter from the president.

Agree on the sensitivity wrt traditional (East Coast) media. Imagine what it takes for the president (and provost, and general counsel, and chief communications officer, and ...) of Caltech to send out an email at 8:30pm on a Sunday night. This article (finally) rattled something at the Institute. However, they are still defending this program, in court, and in the press, as a wonderful thing Caltech is proud to put its name on. 4.6 out of 5 stars! (How many NSF and NIH grants get funded if they are rated 4.6/5 by reviewers? Hint: zero)

You've got faculty calling it a major embarrassment[0] and alumni aligned 100% against this grift. One has to ask, if faculty and alumni (and I presume current students) don't want this program, then who is advocating for it? One can only assume the worst.

[0] https://x.com/CFCamerer/status/1840545142006288667

My belief is that this is one of Tirrell's (the provost) programs given the timeline of when it happened. Bhattacharya may have also had a hand in this - I think he's the current vice provost covering teaching, which tends to also include some outreach-related stuff.

When I was a student, that outreach was mostly citizen science (a very caltech-appropriate form of outreach).

Interesting - I have a contact in the CTLO (the real teaching-oriented group) and they have said they have no contact with the CTME and are discouraged from interacting with them.

While the provost may have approved it, this whole thing is another example of administrators running roughshod over faculty (who are, admittedly, disinterested in this sort of thing). I do (hazily) recall that back when I was a frosh, there was some sort of professional program that focused on engineering management and was a joint effort with places like Hughes and The Aerospace Corporation. Given Caltech's long history with the Southern California aerospace industry, this is at least plausible. This was done through the Industrial Relations Center (page 21 here: https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/121/1/1992-1993.pdf)

I agree wrt outreach. It should be Watson lectures and setting up telescopes, etc. This isn't outreach, is an obvious money grab.

I remember IRC bring mentioned in older Techs from the 60s, it had been around a while.

Yeah, the CTLO is not involved with the CTME, but the vice provost of teaching has much more than just the CTLO in their purview - that is a relatively small group. They are also not involved with a lot of other forms of outreach, like the Watson lectures and much of the other science communication Caltech does, as well as a lot of the citizen science done by the institute departments (at the time).

People at Caltech don't realize how much influence JPL has on how the school runs, but it is 3/4 of the annual budget of the organization.

When I had to deal with Tirrell as a undergrad academic rep for curriculum he was sort of an asshole so it tracks.

Yes, I saw it too.

Here in Chicago I saw some bootcamps sponsored by University of Chicago and Northwestern University but when you dig deeper they're not actually teaching it. Some third party company.

Students care more about the university's name on the certificate than who is teaching the course.

That depends on a view of students as a monolithic group of mouth breathing individuals who only care about the name on the certificate, and not being comprised of individuals who are nerds, which students who go to CalTech, a top private university, might possibly be. I'm sure some students were excited to be taught by astrophysicist and Nobel prize winner Kip Thorn, to the point that the fact that the fact that he was a teacher there landed him a spot on the TV show The Big Bang Theory about him being a teacher there.

Same applies to companies also. They also give more attention to people who studied in ivy leagues etc..

Is MIT class also taught by outsourced instructor instead of MIT instructor?

Is it an MIT course?

Or MIT xPro?

I was cold called by one of these programs a while ago that was offered through Columbia University. They wanted around $13,000 for a 4-something week bootcamp. It's honestly disgusting that schools with billion dollar endowments feel the need to prey on people like this.

Always look at the faculty.

I needed some extra money in 2018 after purchasing a new house. I was recruited to be a part time adjunct instructor “on behalf of” Case Western Reserve University. It was entirely operated by Trilogy Education Services. In exchange for allowing Trilogy to slap the university’s name on it, incorporate into the university’s official website and marketing materials, and borrow a room for a couple hours in the evening, they share some of the profit. It’s not clear to me what if any influence, decision making, or oversight the university had over the program, but I suspect little to none. I only talked to Trinity staff, most of which were good people but just cogs in the machine like me.

Students received zero support from the university despite being advertised as an accreditation directly from it. It had been advertised as an intense 6 month alternative to a degree, which is a very wild stretch. In reality, it was a long and kinda brutal (if you were completely new to programming) guided tour of JavaScript-focused “full stack development”. The syllabus was predetermined by Trilogy and was very superficial, rigid, out of date, and focused on quantity of topics rather than quality. Students were largely frustrated how little time we had to ask questions or dig into a concept until being whisked off to another. It also required that the individual had to do most of then learning on their own time without support from myself or the TAs, although I did try to be available via email during the week and had office hours. Trilogy insisted they vetted applicants to make sure only qualified candidates were in classes to ensure a fair and high quality experience for everyone. The reality is the only vetting Trilogy did was that the payments cleared. I spent an inordinate amount of time doing tech support and teaching people how to use computers, which was frustrating for me, other students, and the poor person who was swindled into paying $8k for something over their head. “Graduating” just meant you had to pay, show up and submit something for assignments, the bar being so low that some students received their certificate but had learned virtually nothing. The post graduation professional services, which I was not involved in whatsoever, were the part that students were particularly angry with. Bare minimum, hand wavy, and the job placement was a joke. Graduation day was supposed to showcase the student’s skills and be a meet and greet with employers. The reality is only a couple of actual employers showed up, didn’t hire anyone AFAIK, and most of the “employers” there were grifters, scumbags, or clueless people. There was a lot of “I don’t have a business or any money yet but I have this revolutionary idea for a blockchain app and I’d like you to build it”.

In the beginning, I was pretty into the bootcamp. I enjoyed teaching and there were some really great students and TAs. By the end, I felt really embarrassed and ashamed to be part of something so terribly misrepresented and overpriced.

(As an aside, I was introduced to two professors at a party where someone mentioned I was teaching a CWRU… I carefully corrected them that I was only doing this bootcamp and only part time, not working for the university. The two professors were not happy with me. I learned that I was basically a scab, and which really just capped the whole experience for me)

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