The Education I wish I Had

I find this syllabus overly specific. I appreciate the pillar of "Application" but it is too applied. Any one of a hundred things can invalidate this curriculum.

The industry could switch from Rails to some non-MVC model. Facebook and Twitter could turn out to be fads and Internet marketing moves onto another platform. Lean Startup could be replaced with some other methodology and all the Mixergy wisdom is rendered useless.

An education should teach you something more fundamental than the flavor of the month in the fields that you care about.

I would remark that a lot of business books are badly written. There are excellent ones, I'm sure. But a lot of the ones that make noise in the press do not age well.

You are correct to insist that the student write frequently about what he or she has learned. That it is on a blog seems irrelevant to me. You do well to mention reading one unrelated book per month. A lot of college students, and for that matter a lot of persons in middle age who think of themselves as literate and up with matters, do not read that much. I'd want to see some guidance on the reading. Also, I think that language study should be all four years. One year of a language doesn't get you very far. (Unless perhaps you're a native Spanish speaker learning Portuguese or German speaker learning Dutch, or etc.)

And I am not much impressed with talk of "personal branding" for anyone, let alone college students. Are you acquainted with the definition of "Rhodes Scholar" as "a man with a great future behind him"?

You do realize learning is a discovery process? I think the part that set off red flags for me was the "Business book a week" policy. It's important to follow one's interests; they have a habit of leading to subjects and careers that will make you happy. Your article outlined an acceptable 4 year plan to become a very specific type of person. It's important to adapt and grow into your education, rather than set out a series of things to do beforehand. Education is a discovery process and steps this specific constitute tunnel vision.

Ok, I'll admit that I have quite a few problems with what is here, both for the business end and the engineering end, but I'll just name my two biggest here.

1.

While nothing on this outline strikes me as outrageous in terms of time, looking closely will uncover a huge amount of resources and time that is required on behalf of the student.

Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves here. Learning programming for the first time in any language isn't something you can write off as easy or quick. I have attended courses that wanted to teach a language from start to competent, and they ran three months with 24 hours per week devoted for learning the syntax and application. This didn't include any data structures, algorithms, math, or other CS fundamentals [1]. Even then classmates struggled. I led several study sessions to help people with thorny concepts. All of this just to learn the basics of one language for the first time.

In addition to all this learning, you need something to apply it (More on this below). This requires blocks of markedly non-trivial amount of time. You will be stretching your brain to try to fit what you learned to the problem you are having at any given moment, as well as the bigger task you want to accomplish. This is where you start to grok what you learned.

Granted this isn't impossible, but with everything else people have to do in life it seems very strenuous.

People need downtime to let their brain relax. Since there is a mentor involved, I am assuming that there is some sort of rubric they are applying, thus none of what is mentioned here can be considered as a pleasurable activity. This is work, no matter how much fun you have doing it.

There's also the issue of part time work. Those business books and Treehouse accounts don't pay for themselves. You still need a place to live, to eat, and some spending money outside of the necessities. None of this stuff is free. There might be somebody who is paying for all that for you, but many do not have that luxury. Part time minimum wage work of 20 hours is seriously stretched for room and board expenses, much less course textbooks and pocket change. [2]

Let's look at the time breakdown of one week. We have:

25 hours to learning programming. Includes coursework and project time.

12 hours for business books and blogging. 2 hours a day (5 days) reading and taking notes, and 1 hour per blog post.

2 hours for the other book.

1 hour with the mentor.

4 hours volunteering.

3 hours of exercise.

2 hours meeting somebody.

Subtotal: 49 hours per week.

20 optional (maybe...) hours for work.

Total: 69 hours per week.

That's just the requirements for the first year. I haven't looked into what it would take for the door-to-door sales in year 2, the white paper in year 3, or learning a language and travel in year 4.

2.

I am going to assume four months (16 weeks) of vacation per year for things such as Christmas and Summer break. That might be generous, so hear me out. That leaves 38 weeks of learning under these courses.

That translates to about 38 business books and 8 outside books per year. Thus you will have read 114 business books and 32 outside books over the course of the four years with a grand total of 146 books. A student would chew through your list [3] before finishing his first year. I'm not counting any technical books they will go through [4].

How much of that can you realistically expect to remember?

What is preventing this student from learning the material, especially the business books, enough to write about it in their blog post and then forgetting it? How much of any education is remembered beyond the test? What I see here is a lot (and I really mean a lot) of information absorption without any focus on how to cultivate retention.

To force the long term storage of information would mean free-form projects where the student must apply the information they learned. While the technical end might accomplish this some through posting code to Github, simply doing tutorials won't force your head to remember what you learned. Even the project, scratching that itch, will not be enough. CompSci has several unsexy topics that a student would need to learn [5]. This is even worse for the business book section, where application is very hard to do in a traditional MBA learning environment.

Some people are very good at retaining arbitrary information for long periods of time and others are not. What will be remembered is a four year long blur of reading, writing, and some code, but the student will be hard pressed to do any effective recall of what they learned.

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[1]: Don't underestimate CS fundumentals. Algorithms and their analysis and data structures are very important to understand. You might never write one yourself, but I guarantee you will use them. Honestly, where is the math in all of this study?

[2]: I'm assuming this is geared for the typical college demographic, thus the 18-22 bracket. Unless you are extremely talented/gifted, you will be working minimum wage. That's around $8/hour for 20 hours, so you will pocket $640 a month.

[3]: I don't see Peopleware on that list. Now I'm very suspicious...

[4]: Unless they are taking the MIT/Stanford/etc courses, I haven't seen a good comprehensive CS course online. Most focus exclusively on a particular tech, like Rails or Javascript, and eschew the general CS coursework. I would love to be proved wrong though.

[5]: Granted you can skip some fundamentals, there are others should not. Security and Cryptography come to mind as something most CS students do not want to dive into, but are VERY necessary for any web service.

This post ballooned into something much larger than what I envisioned...

Oh, jeez.

This sounds miserable and antithetical to the very concept of education. If you're the kind of self-learner who'd honestly eschew a traditional education (liberal arts educations are incredibly valuable, even if liberal arts degrees aren't), then you're better off not wasting your time with dozens of 'business books'.

College isn't about developing your 'personal brand.' College is about doing the things that excite and challenge you, often with wanton disregard for your 'personal brand.'

This looks more or less (maybe not all the business books) like 50% of what I would expect a strong, motivated undergraduate to do in their free time, on top of normal coursework.

I'm assuming that this in addition to regular classes? If not - I feel that this approach is missing quite a lot.

You wish you had read 208 business books?

Google Ed: online degrees accredited by Google without the $100k+ burden when you're done. Yes?

why is this still a 4 year education? people don't (shouldn't?) stop educating themselves after they turn 22

College is extremely expensive and probably not right for everyone, but it's a different experience. Should 18-year-olds be learning what it takes to program in the real world? Absolutely. I think that computer programming education shouldn't start in college, but much earlier. That doesn't mean that being active on Github is a substitute for the liberal arts experience.

All that said, liberal arts education isn't about getting a job. It's about learning, by studying history and philosophy and literature, the critical thinking skills that you'll need if you want to lead and to make complex decisions that effect other people. (It's also a lifelong process; you need to keep learning and maintain an interest in that stuff or it doesn't count. If you never crack a book after graduating from college, you probably shouldn't have gone in the first place.) And yes, I firmly believe that you're not qualified to be in any higher leadership position if you don't have some education (possibly pursued on one's own-- it doesn't need to be a 4-year degree-- but autodidacts are rare) in the liberal arts.

College is also about learning how to learn. Well, actually, people shouldn't need schooling to learn that, so it's more accurate to say that it's a time to dedicate oneself fully to improving one's ability to learn. The actual learning has to be a lifelong process. If your curiosity stops at college, you missed the point.

The problem with the college degree is that when you give people a leadership education and then there aren't appropriate jobs, they get really pissed and clamor about how they were fucked over. And they're kinda right, too. That's what we have now: a society where people spend half a house on a leadership education and then struggle even to get regular entry-level jobs.