Show HN: Make School – College replacement for founders and developers
makeschool.com
makeschool.com
There is no deep in two months. There's broad, there's skim, there's sophomoric. But there's no deep. Particularly for people not already seasoned and experienced in ingesting vast quantities of difficult data and drawing out inferences.
Edit: Some more notes. There are 6 headliners in https://www.makeschool.com/education. Of those, one (CS) was covered adequately in my college career, one was given lip service (Communication, something I struggle with today), one I learned on my own (Open source), app dev & web dev were largely irrelevant to my education (principles over practice), and networking (people, not wires) was totally neglected.
Communication and networking are both subjects that deserve to be a higher priority in collegiate CS environments.
My perspective is that this is essentially a trade school, which is a good thing. It's not a replacement for a four year degree, it's a two year degree, which is something basically lacking in the software world. Now, if this general package could be rolled up into a traditional two-year trade school, I'd be all for it.
Trade schools are great things, but I'm not sure I could feel comfortable advising a student to turn down MIT for a trade school, even one with really great connections.
Current statistics on average salaries for those schools in EECS disciplines compared to industry average seems to suggest that the expense is plenty justified. Will this offering be able to compete at all in the value delivered dimension? It seems like comparing apples and oranges.
do you have a source for that?
also keep in mind that those schools are starting with more capable students going in
CMU Software Engineers - $95,512 http://www.payscale.com/research/US/School=Carnegie_Mellon_U...
MIT - $95,392 http://www.payscale.com/research/US/School=Massachusetts_Ins...
Stanford - $111,324 http://www.payscale.com/research/US/School=Stanford_Universi...
+$20K a year for ~$30K in loans is a no brainer.
I only have experience with what CMU will quote a family with modestly upper middle class means, about 10 years ago, but I was unimpressed
the difference back then between them and state school was multiples more than 30K over 4 years
2 things about that 20K difference
1) how much of the can be attributed to better students starting off at those schools
2) I'm not convinced that the 20K a year difference persists over time, the state school engineer who becomes professionally accomplished will get raises, the elite school engineer who rests on their laurels won't
what matters is the individual, not the school
The average net price of an MIT education (4 years) in 2012-2013 was $40K: http://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html
You can't make these numbers not add up to demonstrating the value of a high quality education unless you speculate that education has nearly 0 value and simply attracts inherently brilliant and valuable people. You then have to further hypothesize that there is negligible benefit to being surrounded by such people.
Constructing such a hypothesis without evidence is clearly grasping at air.
As far as evidence, how would one prove that the value of the brand is more important than the education itself? From what I understand, many employers give nearly as much weight to attending either of those schools (and others) as they do actual graduation from them. At best it's difficult to say whether it's the education, the actual understanding and knowledge gained from these institutions, or merely being associated with them that indicates future economic value.
"We find that the return to college selectivity is sizeable for both cohorts in regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers, such as student high school GPA and SAT scores. However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. There were notable exceptions for certain subgroups. For black and Hispanic students and for students who come from less-educated families (in terms of their parents' education), the estimates of the return to college selectivity remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics. "
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http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2004/10/education...
"The researchers Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale began investigating this question, and in 1999 produced a study that dropped a bomb on the notion of elite-college attendance as essential to success later in life. Krueger, a Princeton economist, and Dale, affiliated with the Andrew Mellon Foundation, began by comparing students who entered Ivy League and similar schools in 1976 with students who entered less prestigious colleges the same year. They found, for instance, that by 1995 Yale graduates were earning 30 percent more than Tulane graduates, which seemed to support the assumption that attending an elite college smoothes one's path in life.
But maybe the kids who got into Yale were simply more talented or hardworking than those who got into Tulane. To adjust for this, Krueger and Dale studied what happened to students who were accepted at an Ivy or a similar institution, but chose instead to attend a less sexy, "moderately selective" school. It turned out that such students had, on average, the same income twenty years later as graduates of the elite colleges. Krueger and Dale found that for students bright enough to win admission to a top school, later income "varied little, no matter which type of college they attended." In other words, the student, not the school, was responsible for the success.
Research does find an unmistakable advantage to getting a bachelor's degree. In 2002, according to Census Bureau figures, the mean income of college graduates was almost double that of those holding only high school diplomas. Trends in the knowledge-based economy suggest that college gets more valuable every year. For those graduating from high school today and in the near future, failure to attend at least some college may mean a McJobs existence for all but the most talented or unconventional.
But, as Krueger has written, "that you go to college is more important than where you go." The advantages conferred by the most selective schools may be overstated."
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in
"But let’s look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn’t seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don’t.”
Krueger says that there is one exception to this. Students from the very lowest economic strata do seem to benefit from going to an Ivy. For most students, though, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person you’ll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school. You’ll make good contacts at Penn. But Penn State is big enough and diverse enough that you can make good contacts there, too. Having Penn on your résumé opens doors. But if you were good enough to get into Penn you’re good enough that those doors will open for you anyway. “I can see why families are really concerned about this,” Krueger went on. “The average graduate from a top school is making nearly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year, the average graduate from a moderately selective school is making ninety thousand dollars. That’s an enormous difference, and I can see why parents would fight to get their kids into the better school. But I think they are just assigning to the school a lot of what the student is bringing with him to the school.”
- ability to prove worth outside an education credential
- access to educational materials outside a couple elite schools
- ability to find the relevent people to network with
suggests that a software engineer today has it easier, not harder to overcome non elite credential than the people measured in the qouted study
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that said, the MIT average numbers qouted above seem fine, if someone where to tell me they could attend MIT for less than 50K for the whole 4 years, I would say that sounds like a pretty good deal
its encouraging to me that the top couple universities seem compelled to compete on value, even if that happens in what appears to me to be a fairly price discriminatory manner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination )
hopefully the trend spreads and many many more college compete on value as well
what happens to non-dischargable debt if they don't do well?
1. I struggle to believe that a well-rounded CS and engineering education can be squeezed into two years. Describing this as "the future of computer science education" (their words)—when it appears to be a trade school which teaches CS basics followed by Rails, Python and iOS development—is doing CS a massive dis-service.
There's nothing wrong with this kind of trade school, but it is emphatically not "The future of computer science education".
2. It's rather expensive. What'a a starting salary for a developer in SV - maybe $70k? AT 25% over two years, that's $35k – which is comparable to college debt. It's great that this prevents the broken US higher education funding system, I suppose, but it's not cheap.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I've seen too many graduates of similar trade school programs who have a couple of years of experience on paper, but are woefully under qualified for the development and deployment of computer systems in the real world. Given the sort of attendees this program will see, I don't imagine it'll be the case here, however.
Cross academic pollination probably is one of the best aspects of college, and honestly with the amount of resources at their disposal, they could facilitate programs for the current state of "Startups" as a minor or even major, ideally paired with an unrelated field.
This on paper looks more like a trade school, I imagine a program like this could be designed to churn out competent programmers but beyond that, I'm not so sure.
* There is so much more to life than a job. You will be a citizen; how do you decide on war and peace, economic issues, social policy, etc. without understanding history, politics, economics, social issues, other cultures, languages, etc.? Without being able to grasp and think critically about sophisticated propaganda, and how to challenge ideas? You will be a social animal: A member of the community, a friend, and maybe a parent. You will be a person, a being with an identity and life outside of your cubical; if all you know are technical skills for a job, what are you? What will you get out of life? Where will you learn about the things that make our lives rich, such as the arts -- you know, much of the content that is the purpose of the wires and systems you hope to build.
* There is so much more to a career than one job. If you focus your education on the skills needed for one job at one time, you'll find that soon both you and the world have moved on. The demand for skills change and, more importantly, you will change, and the skills will be obsolete.
* There is so much more to a job than technical skills. As simple examples, you need to understand other people, to undertand other cultures in the U.S. and around the world if you will sell to or help (or work with!) people outside of SV. As was discussed yesterday, some in SV still don't even undertand those people called "females" enough to realize they may not enjoy playing male characters. You need ideas, and most great ideas are outside tech and outside SV and older than 20 years; there are thousands of years of them.
What a sad, myopic, even egocentric view of the world and of education. I feel bad for the people who will encounter so little of the world of knowledge.
EDIT: Minor rewording
Taking a history class, a philosophy class, and a sociology class along with some economics and science helps you solve problems with people as well as the world around you.
When I was in my 20s and taking those classes I found it a waste of time. Now that I'm older I'm thankful for them.
Can you get well-rounded on your own? Depends. If you only read what people in your bubble tell you to, maybe not so much. Having someone else curate things for you to read, reflect on, discuss, and do has great value in my opinion.
I disagree. I've never hired someone based on their undergraduate major; I rarely know what they are. The skills imparted by an undergraduate educational institution are very valuable, but not directly applicable to professional work, and that even applies to graduate schools such as law, for example -- no law firm cares what classes you took or believes those skills qualify you to do that kind of work; they care you learned to write, think, and work like an attorney well enough to apprentice you to a real one. Professional learning, in every field I can think of, starts with your first job as an apprentice. Most fields consider a graduate degree to be the minimum serious credential.
And after a few years in the professional world, nobody even considers your undergraduate major. Name your co-workers' or any tech leaders'. Does anyone mention it in their HN profile? Could you imagine being asked about it in an interview?
> Can you get well-rounded on your own? Depends. If you only read what people in your bubble tell you to, maybe not so much. Having someone else curate things for you to read, reflect on, discuss, and do has great value in my opinion.
I'd take it much further. I think people underestimate the value of a college environment. You get a cirriculum designed by an expert in the field, and then their personal tutoring. You are surrounded by resources unmatched elsewhere, from research libraries, to a room full of peers, to labs (if applicable), to a department full of experts available to talk to you. Want to learn about a subject? Try going to the office hours of a professor who spent their life studying it, and see if they have time for you. How do you even know which books to read? Which are respected in their field? What are their strengths and weaknesses and who will contextualize them for you?
The undergraduate major I ended up with has definitely opened some doors; if I had finished the other half of my degree I wouldn't need to spend nearly as much time proving my literacy in other languages on the job. Most of my clients do business in English, so it's not a major disadvantage, but for someone who wasn't lucky enough to pick up a midwestern American accent at home, both the liberal arts side and the major can be vital for proving that you can do what you need to while you're not a "senior" or "highly experienced" candidate.
> As someone who's much better off as a person having a B.A. in Computer Science in five years than their intended B.S./B.F.A. in four
In fairness, you don't know what would have happened if you took the other path. (Not that I have any idea myself.)
I think my mental health was greatly improved, though of course I can't know the alternative :)
I don't believe that to be the case.
College education currently involves exposing students to sophisticated (progressive) propaganda, which they lack the skills to challenge.
Nonetheless, I think the good outweighs the bad when it comes to a the broad liberal arts education. But it could be a lot better. A good start would be
1) Adding more mainstream economics (and confronting Marxists economists who have left the economics departments but continue to preach Marxism from other departments).
2) Removing censorship of non-progressive opinions. This means people should be allowed to say that different races have different IQs, that it's not ok to be gay, and that gender differences stem from biologically hardwired tendencies. People censor all of these things, then wonder why there are no moderate right wingers. The fact is moderate right wingers get fired. All that remains of the right after it's intellectuals have been eliminated or forced to pretend to be more moderate than they are, is the populist right.
Some of my professors have been very free market(the economists oddly enough), although the majority are indeed left wing.
I don't really think that it's sophisticated propaganda, but rather a very ivory tower/academic view of the world that makes college a left-leaning place. I'm fine with being taught by biased professors, I just take some of their statements with a grain of salt.
Why should people be allowed to loudly assert unsupported claims in an institution devoted to learning?
If a person can make the unsupported claim that gender differences do not stem from biologically hardwired tendencies, then a person should be able the unsupported claim that gender differences do stem from biologically hardwired tendencies.
Also, not being able to make "unsupported" claims is a vicious cycle. If you can't say X, then any academic study is going to phrase their conclusions very careful regarding X (or possible selectively publish - I've seen this). And then X is going to be "unsupported".
The word "replacement", to me, makes it sounds like they think they are strictly better than college when in fact they are not, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Also it comes off as somewhat arrogant.
They abandoned Make games with us and have been spamming my inbox with at least 3 different business models since then, this being their latest one.
The online gaming course had buggy code and horrible stumbling lessons. I heard about them on here and was conned out of $100. Stay away from these scammers.
Also, my experience is not unique. During the course many students voiced their frustration. Your site crashed the first day, content was posted late and the example code had bugs in it.
That was the time to offer refunds, privately, to every one of your customers. Not here, publicly, to one person exposing your company.
Anyways, everyone deserves second chances. Just because my first code draft had bugs in it, doesn't mean I should stop coding. (though I really should remove those bugs before shipping)
Sorry that the online gaming course wasn't good - hopefully they've improved. I don't know any students, but I know one of their first interns who spoke highly of the company, back when it was in a garage. I've met the founders at hackathons and they seem to be very nice and onto something big with a strong pro-social element.
Bummer to hear about your experience, but scammers sounds unnecessarily harsh, especially with a startup so young that is still figuring itself out.
The opposite is true.
The average person has 27k, which means it's a pretty exceptional person who leaves college with 40k in debt (that's 25% of 80k over 2 years). The real cost disparity is probably even larger than 10k due to taxes.
As others have pointed out, undergrad debt numbers include R&R but the 25% for 2 years doesn't. What's 2 years of rent in SF for two years.
>Your education will be focused on building apps and websites that improve the lives of those around you.
Getting a wide-ranging liberal education was never really that important, huh?
Maybe I'm just an angsty young adult, but I am really unhappy with the higher education model in the modern world.
One great option that isn't presented often enough is to transfer to a different institution. Don't think that just because the school you're at sucks for you that all of them will. In some cases you can actually get into a better school than you got into out of high school as a transfer student (although some schools are weird about accepting transfers, Google can help).
Also, note that I said "for you", very few, if any, colleges or universities in the US suck in general. Some are stronger or weaker in certain areas, some emphasize certain aspects of education over others, and some will better prepare you for various jobs than others, but it is an individual evaluation.
Another thing to keep in mind is whether what you're hoping to get out of school is really what colleges and universities offer. Maybe college isn't right for you. Colleges and universities do not prepare you for a job (with a few notable exceptions like professional programs such as law and medical school, and certain business programs). Instead, they prepare you to prepare yourself for a job.
A lot of people like to trash the emphasis on theory in academic CS programs, but if you pay attention, and work hard (which it sounds like you are, with your side projects) the theory becomes pretty damn useful later when you get a job and you're shown a couple hundred (or thousand if you're really "lucky") lines of spaghetti code and asked to figure out why it is "slow", etc. A lot of people don't take the time to digest the theory they learn and therefore they aren't able to apply it to real problems when they go out into the world. Don't make that mistake.
However, does everyone need those exact skills? Nope, we need tons of people who can pump out relatively simple, relatively repetitive (though not enough to automate) code for relatively standard applications. We also need people who can maintain that (and other) code, write tests, automate processes, and a hundred other things each requiring a slightly different mixture of skills, not all of which are (or should be) taught in college. Additionally, and this is important for startups, we need people who have strong social and organizational skills, who don't necessarily spend all day writing code (not to mention the hardware people, everyone always forgets about them :)
So instead of plowing $30k/year into an education you aren't sure you want, you might want to think about a different path. Do some research. If other schools are stronger in what you want to learn, maybe you should transfer. It could also be that college just isn't what you should be doing right now, perhaps a program as described in TFA, or one of the other "code schools" would be more your style and better fits your interests. You can usually go back to college and pick up where you left off if you change your mind (although depending on the school your tuition might go up in that case).
As for the spaghetti code example, there's definitely more going on there than I implied, but my point was that having an extremely solid grounding in algorithms and theory can be a huge asset, assuming the student has actually taken the lessons to heart. For example, I have spotted bugs and inefficient algorithms before just by looking at code or even hearing a description of what it is supposed to do that colleagues with less "theory" knowledge have missed.
Of course YMMV, there is no silver bullet. My point was just that a broad knowledge of theory isn't useless, but it also isn't necessary for everyone to have. We end up in the best place when every person gets the education that best suits what s/he wants to do, and having enough information up-front to make that happen is critical.
It's important, but it's also expensive. Unbelievably so. What I see happening is ambitious kids going here to gain marketable skills, and figure out what they like doing, and then using those skills to pay their way through college with a much better idea of what they want to do. That way you don't have to be saddled with a crapload of debt.
edit for downvotes: here's the math: Average college debt is 27ish k. Bump it up to 30k for interest.
80000 * .25 * 2 = 40k.
60000 * .25 * 2 = 30k.
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You could argue that there's a two year opportunity cost here. I'm not so sure:
1) If your only goal is to become a web dev and you don't want any other background knowledge (that is, knowledge otuside of computer science), then you can do that in two years at most universities. What I mean by this is that the CS major portion of a degree is a little more than half your courseload most places.
2) But IMHO it's silly to major in CS without picking up a secondary major/minor in an interesting application area. So I it's at least debatable that there's a real opportunity cost benefit here.
Finally, to be fair, they seem well-connected. The YC etc. connections might help offset the comparatively high price.
it'd be interesting to know the tax implications of that 25% (is it pre tax/post tax)
it appears to be risk free, as in, what happens if you flake out and move to India, or develop a debillitation illness, or simply decide that programming isn't for you
which is substantially different than the non-dischargeable debt that you might take on to attend college
But I fear at scale (and even now) it's paid for by higher prices. See my comment below -- at standard SV salaries, they're burdening students with much more "debt" in two years than typical four year institutions.
And it's not like the unemployment rates for CS majors are atmospheric... most CS majors with the social skills to make it through the non-technical portion of an interview will find a job somewhere.
what's the going rate for a developer boot camp these days?
10K or so?
if their placement rates are as good as they advertise (I don't really have a way of know if they are or not), this seems hardpressed to compete with those, especially if you combine a bootcamp education with the available MOOC options
I think this is more aimed at the college-dropout techie / entrepreneur type than your typical CS student.
I haven't heard of many people who have gotten that where I live. So maybe it isn't.
Consider my interest piqued.
edit: This isn't judgemental. Nothing wrong with trade school But that's what this is.
You might recall it was quite a luxury to have a mobile phone not too long ago.
Demand for this kind of education might persuade others to implement a similar model, and I don't see any major roadblocks for other areas.
Employers will finally get graduates with work experience, as well as access to cheap intern labor.
Looks worth exploring if nothing else.
High schools, colleges, universities often have boring teaching programs that force everybody to learn at the same speed, programs that look like a progress bar (The Matrix training program?) In real life we can't ask Tank to load the Networking course from a floppy disk and yet that's what metaphorically most Universities are trying to do.
Because of that kind of system we are maybe 10-20% as productive as we could be. We are bored with exercises and we don't really want to do leaving them till the last moment before the deadline. Now, take a moment go back to your ol' university years and think. When did you learn the most? In labs and lectures? Or when you thought "It would be cool to do a 2048 clone that negotiates every move with the server side that you cannot cheat"? You got excited, spent a week coding, learning new things, redoing, rebuilding, learning even more. I remember doing project of that kind in my 1st year of the University. Over the Christmas holiday I learnt more than in the past 3 months at uni...
Yeah I could totally see the Make School work. At least I hope it will ;)
At my local university doing 3x semesters of just CS classes leaves you 1 course short of the required CS courses for a degree. Mind you I'm not including the math requirements. But on the other hand this is probably more intensive and with a better student/teacher ratio arguably you will be learning stuff quicker. Not to say they are equivalent... but I'm not sure its fair to write it off as being "code monkey" school.
Not a fan of the location choice though. I get that SF has a lot of really good networking opportunities but for a two year program it is crazy expensive. The difference in rent compared to where I live makes this more expensive than attending university. If I was to get an apartment with equivalent square footage to what I have now the cost of this would actually be pretty close to doing a 4 year degree. That's before factoring in the 25% rake. Mind you I'm in a relatively inexpensive Canadian city.
[1] With some companies paying interns to $10k+ monthly, a student could pay out around up to 60k earned (a 6 month internship period is referenced on the site), then get a $120 job afterwards and have to pay another 60k over two years, totaling 120k.
[2] Meanwhile, a student who gets a 30k internship + 100k job only pays back 80k for attending the same school.
That being said if they position themselves as "for startup minded people" they should focus a lot more on the "get out of the building" aspect. In fact I think there'd be huge value in a program where you essentially learn this. Talk to a lot of potential customers simulate it find creative ways of going about it. I think this is what a lot of us need more than (not meant as an insult) "yet another bootcampish thingy".
I think they need to clearly pick one focus and go allin on it. Either "you'll be excellent founder material" or "you'll be a great hire". I think they try to spotlight the former but the latter creeps in. I think the biggest potential is taking the "university like we wished it was" line and the "no debt" line and mix it with "hands on/projects/good hire" and focus less on the startup angle.
If you want to focus on the startup angle...way more non-technical hands on talk to people things. I think there's a nice gap there. It's easier for a sufficiently curious person to teach themselves technical things than to have access to potential customers and interview them (imo)
Either way, good luck :)
I'm not convinced of this. The value of having mentors and teachers is tremendous, even if you know you can learn to code on your own. Having someone to ask "What's the best way to structure this program?" or "Does this idea make sense to you?" is very valuable - someone to answer questions that text books, google, and stackoverflow can't.
As one who is often in charge of interviews I could tell you that if I saw a CV with this school and no other redeeming qualities it would go straight to the bin.
I will now go and salute D. Knuth and get drunk.
You'll need a mac laptop purchased in the last 2 years running the latest version of OS X and an iPhone or iPod touch running the latest version of iOS. We provide need-based hardware assistance for students who can't afford a mac or iPod.
for who?
seems like a good portion of their target market might have something like that in mind
also (opportunity cost of two years and having to live in one of the more expensive real estate markets in the US isn't exactly risk free for the student either)