Live data from Hacker News

Make School (YC W12) gains accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree

techcrunch.com

1–10 of 38 posts

Re: Make School (YC W12) gains accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree

#2
The situation is confused. I think everyone will have different opinion on this issue. I wrote a post on my blog where I described in details all my thoughts on this subject. If anyone is interesting feel free to join our discuss at http://essayssharks.net/

Re: Make School (YC W12) gains accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree

#3
This is great. I love that people are taking on the higher education space. During my masters I would take the uni's online courses that were of absolute garbage quality. I've gotten better content from Udemy for 45$. The only reason they could get $3500 per class from me is because they were one of a limited few accredited universities in my area. Competition in this space is much needed. I hope that Make School will one day be competing on price.

I also really like the idea of a focused 2 year degree in applied CS. CS concepts are useful but at the end of the day we're building applications and solving problems. A minority of CS graduates stay in a pure CS role. It also takes out a lot of the fluff of general ed. I would absolutely have traded my undergrad for a program like this, but I doubt I would have had that foresight back when I was transferring from community college.

Re: Make School (YC W12) gains accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree

#6

Do they take the GI Bill now?

Make School co-founder here - now that we have accreditor approval, we're going through the necessary steps to ensure the program is GI Bill eligible. It's looking like we'll be able to confirm early next year.

Re: Make School (YC W12) gains accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree

#8
post #3

This is great. I love that people are taking on the higher education space. During my masters I would take the uni's online courses that were of absolute garbage quality. I've gotten better content from Udemy for 45$. The only reason they could get $3500 per class from me is because they were one of a limited few accredited universities in my area. Competition in this space is much needed. I hope that Make School wil…

I've taught quite a bit as an adjunct: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc... and also like the idea of taking on higher ed; one school had a sticker price of $25K/year for tuition and paid adjuncts $3.4K/class. Even accounting for discounts against the sticker price, the situation just doesn't add up.

Accreditation is an underrated, little-understood barrier to entry in the higher ed industry.

Re: Make School (YC W12) gains accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree

#9
post #3

This is great. I love that people are taking on the higher education space. During my masters I would take the uni's online courses that were of absolute garbage quality. I've gotten better content from Udemy for 45$. The only reason they could get $3500 per class from me is because they were one of a limited few accredited universities in my area. Competition in this space is much needed. I hope that Make School wil…

Thanks for the positive feedback :)

We're not as cheap as online Udemy courses due to high touch instruction at a physical campus. Though we are substantially undercutting traditional bachelor's degrees on cost.

Students will on average pay ~$100k for their degree, but because they enter the workforce 2 years sooner they also have $200k more earnings than their peers (pre-tax/tuition). From a net-worth standpoint, this ends up being comparable to getting a full ride at a 4 year institution.

Re: Make School (YC W12) gains accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree

#10
I kind of like the idea of not doing summer breaks. When I studied CS in Europe, we had extremely stressful months due to people cramming in massive courseloads because of holiday seasons. Even really good students had to put in insane time if they wanted to finish their degree on time.

Also, the applied curriculum is probably not a bad idea either, though, don't almost all CS programmes have rather large semester-long projects? We had to design a multi-threaded OS with networking, a basic 3D rasterizerers/raytracer, distributed chat app and a simple compiler and a whole lot of other things. I guess those aren't directly useable in industry though.

But yeah, the idea is solid, as there is certainly a mismatch between academia and industry; I don't really use my advanced skills all that often and I often fear that my degree was a waste of time, even if I enjoyed it. I kind of regret not choosing a field like EE, where education is valued and there are no 'bootcamps'.

Post reply on HN