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Comment by charlesju | Hacker News Reader

$20k seems pretty steep for 6 months of education, or am I completely out of the loop?

Consider that this course probably bumps its students' earning potential by ~$30k/year, and that there aren't many cheaper substitutes. (Imho, learning on your own isn't a substitute for this program -- your odds of getting a dev job 6 months in are pretty low, and the odds of your getting distracted/frustrated and never achieving your goal are pretty high.)

Disclaimer -- I'm a cofounder at a similar program.

Disclaimer: I work for Jumpstart Lab.

To give you some perspective, I am in $70,000 in debt from my undergrad CS degree, and that took four years. If this program would have existed when I was a freshman, I would have done the math, dropped out, and done this in a heartbeat.

avg U.S. college semester is ~ 14-16 weeks, including testing. We'll call it 16 for some easy math.

16/4 = 4 months * 2 semesters/yr = 8 months.

We are naively assuming that semesters don't include test-weeks or other vacations and that all 16 weeks are education-filled.

Pricing for a college education [1] in-state public college avg ~22k private college avg ~44k

44k/8 months = $5500/mo

22k/8 months = ~$2750/mo

20k/6 months = ~$3333/mo

Pricing seems about right for a low end year of college.

[1] http://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmp...

[edit: formatting]

It depends on what your starting salary would be, I suppose.

It's guaranteed to be at least $60K, but lots of people will likely end up at around $80K. Plus, you can defer a big chunk of the $20K into $199/mo payments.

I suppose that really depends on the screening process to determine how well and prepared, ready for learning, a person is entering the program. There's no guarantee a person will learn how to program as a language, where they may not be able to become fluent in it. This is where the risk is. And sometimes people take longer to learn than others. A program like this would be best IMHO to split into a condensed version and a longer variation.

And what they mean by "60 hours a week".

It's 6 months of intensive training, where students work 60 hours a week during the training. Total immersion, basically.

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