How to start a school with your friends
prigoose.substack.com
prigoose.substack.com
Wonder how to reconcile the description of almost-negligible admin overhead with this description of a similar effort that warns, "We wanted to keep costs extremely low, so we had parent volunteers do all admin for the school. It's going really well, but it's an insane amount of work."
From my experience both teaching kids and organizing things, that seems like a much more likely outcome.
My kids attended a small co-op school when they were young--5 employees (4 teachers + "director" who was mostly a floating assistant/substitute), everything else handled by parent volunteers. There's really an enormous amount of administrative overhead.
FractalU doesn't have any of that because it's not actually a school.
What kind of work does this administrative overhead in particular consist of?
your definition of "actually a school" seems to arbitrarily include a lot of reporting and paperwork and commerce that have nothing to do with the bit where you teach people stuff
Some skepticism for me creeps in the more I peruse the fractal sites. Course links for the summer semester are broken, and a lot of the working content seems to be somewhat self-indulgent, reading more like a normal unremarkable friend group.
The MLM/cult vibes I’m getting are that the main purpose and monetary incentive seems to be in the mere existence of the “community” itself, and selling that aspiration as a $600 course. The website for the course (fractalcampus.com) is a bog-standard tech startup marketing landing page including “as seen on…”, testimonials, and other calls to action to buy this $600 course.
Notable with that course, we are talking about a paid course being sold where the only person with a true success story is the person selling the course. The Boston iteration seems to only consist of a weekly dinner so far.
Doesn’t that sound familiar, like every other influencer selling a self-help course we’ve ever seen?
I think if the paid course and stated analogy to YCombinator wasn’t a part of it I would be more enthusiastic, like, “yeah this thing is awesome, a real community that goes deeper than small talk, you’re all getting together and learning from each other and truly engaging.” But then the more I think about what they’re actually doing as actions rather than words, the more I feel like this whole thing isn’t 100% honest.
The founders’ biographies support the idea that they are a tech couple who exited with lucrative equity and are now landlords as their main job and that this is a glorified real estate course. “Co-living” is just a drop-in word for “landlord.”
“FractalU isn't a business or a nonprofit. In fact, it's not a formal organization at all.”
I’d put five bucks down that there’s an LLC or trust involved somewhere.
Idk, maybe I’m reading too deep into this, but there are a lot of scams in this world and I think this might be one of them.
> So instructors must deal with collecting money and managing taxes on their own.
But when I think about applying, I worry that it’s just tapping into my addiction to external validation and credential-seeking rather than just learning something on my own.
Or… that’s what I tell myself because I’m not nearly as bright as the recursers I’ve met
The existing university model in the US seems like it's ripe for disruption so I'm surprised no one has tried to create their own.
That way we get professionals who aren't a pack of hyenas looking to put the squeeze on everything an everyone. Those will rip you appart like a sheep with no effort at all.
I'd say it's currently the worst for SecOps people, senior data-engineers working closely with infrastructure, cloud engineers who specifically prefer to not focus on one platform, etc. Three main clouds each offering many cert levels, plus the major vendors in your adjacent spaces, it can add up pretty quick.
And just to be clear.. keeping up with changes is something I do consider table-stakes for working with tech. But I really do not like the hassle/expense of yet another bullshit administrative burden forever when life is full of such things as it is.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067939
- the “dupe” post with a title that specifically refers BloomTech aka Lambda School CEO Austen Allred being banned from all consumer-lending activities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40071694
*edit to add “dupe” link.
Quality of instruction was poor, instructors were often students from bootcamps with no work experience. They misrepresented the nature of the debt agreement that students were entering into:
> The contracts stated,[45] "this extension of credit is a qualified educational loan and is subject to the limitations on dischargeability in bankruptcy contained in Section 523(a)(8) of the United States Bankruptcy Code." This was false, and lead students to believe that it was impossible to discharge their debt.
It turned out that they sold the ISA contracts -- the "X% for next two years income" contracts -- to third parties before the students had finished their education. This means their claim about alignment of incentives with the student was bogus.
They ended up getting fined for deceptive practices by the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also sued by former students for misrepresenting job placement rates (claiming 86% to prospective students but in internal memos claimed around 50%).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Institute_of_Technology#...
Much of the point of an established university is credentials, a new one cannot give the same recognition.
This means that to attract new students, and build a reputation, you have to have some other draw; either some world renowned experts, or cheap (even free or scholarships) tuition. Probably both.
And if you want your graduates to be outstanding, then you need to offer the best incoming candidates a reason to choose your school, because the truth is the school has less impact than the individual.
Two good colleges who’ve overcome the challenges recently are Olin (engineering school in Boston) and Minerva (globally distributed college).
As for a draw, the US jniversity system is so flawed at this point that it wouldn't be hard to come up with something better.
It turned out more than a few professional teachers were more than a little bit tired of how things work in the usual institutions. You can't even call it new ideas I think, they knew exactly what was wrong. The funny part was that that automatically became the main selling point.
Also, are employers really looking into if a prospect's school was accredited or not?
Councils formed by the currently accredited schools decide.
> what right
The government started relying on these accrediting bodies with the GI Bill in 1952. They did not want the GIs to spend the money on bad educations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_accreditation...
> are employers really looking into
Didn’t yours? If they’re not body shops, companies will rely on the reputation of the school or pick out people from their own school. Unaccredited schools typically have poor reputations and usually churn out “graduates” who can’t attract the money to start businesses and hire people from those schools.
I'm not trying to be flippant, this is an actual question.
Sure, getting a higher degree at another institution will have that requirement, as would a professional certification (medicine, law, professional engineering), but those are relatively narrow scopes.
Isn't it true that in most cases nobody is going to care or even know enough to check accreditation?
You don’t want someone designing a bridge, performing open heart surgery, or flying a plane with 300 people on it who were trained by unverified schools.
The risk tolerance varies a lot between people.
It’s the same concept as “regulations are written in blood.”
Getting a pilot's license requires a certain number of hours of flight experience, which one gets as a student.
No state issues a medical license without completing an accredited residency program.
It is completely absurd we have not built an alternative, online liberal arts 4 year degree that basically cost nothing.
There is absolutely no reason this could not be done for less than $1k a year right now.
I suspect a large reason is because the people who benefit from the cartel, basically every professional educator, like things as is. The massive education inflation cost is a feature for the cartel, not a bug.
They get created if there is specific market pressures I.e visa fraud. Then suddenly every ceramic and pottery class becomes a university.
You should ask why we don't close them instead.
Would the world be a better or worse place if all university business programs were shut down tomorrow? Follow the thought regarding advertising, marketing and psychology.
It would be interesting to look at the impact, success, and failure.
Not that that's a bad thing for FractalU. They seem like they know what they want it to be, and they're happy with it in its current state. I certainly think it's a great idea, though admittedly it does only really cater to a specific niche of people. In a better culture that values education I could see this almost being a universally enjoyed activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
And then sort by year.
They weren't all started in the 1800s, they were all started in the past and you're squishing 300 years of history into a single chunk of time, ignoring that there were decades-long gaps between foundings.
In my state there were four waves of foundings: colonial pre-USA land grant institutions, rich guy vanity projects a century later, post-WWII expansions 80 years after that, and biotech/health care market growth in the 2000s.
If you think undergrad education should move in a certain direction, it’s probably easier to find a university on the way there and give them a donation to do more of what you like.
As someone that has given a number of classes and seminars, it gets fairly discouraging, how few folks want to learn.
I think that establishing a learning-focused community (like this) would probably really get a lot of people engaged.
Geeks like learning. Many others don't. It's always fairly demoralizing, when I encounter it.
FTFY.
Note - a lot of the classic social containers have been systematically disappearing since the 1970s in anything but rural areas for a variety of reasons. I'm not qualified to hypothesize the causes, but I do see the effects.
I mean they're not wrong, but also they could have made friends with their neighbours like the Stoop Coffee[2] author, or moved to be nearer to a friend group also. It's nice to see them really embracing their main character bias though (in this case, in a way that seemed to have successfully built a geographically aligned community)
[1]: https://prigoose.substack.com/p/how-to-live-near-your-friend...
I have no idea how you’d maintain relationships with that many people that would be strong enough to justify “I’ll uproot my living situation to be by this person”. Maybe they actually just have 22 acquaintances that like their roommate matchmaking and apartment hunting skills?