25% of your salary for 2 years is not a crapload of debt?
In fact, if your starting salary is 80k, this is ten thousand dollars MORE THAN the average college debt ! And no opportunities to branch out of software engineering. Your starting salary would have to be around 55-60k for you to take on less debt than a typical four year degree, even accounting for subsidized interest rates. edit for downvotes: here's the math: Average college debt is 27ish k. Bump it up to 30k for…
I think there is an assumption that this enables such a job that otherwise would be unattainable. As an individual, of course you want the $80k job, despite the $60k job "requiring less debt", plus you then get to keep the $80k job after the 2 years.
It sounds more like a graduate program than a college education, a sort of Masters in IT entrepreneurship? As a college education, it shortchanges the students: * 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…
This tired liberal arts approach of mandatory enlightenment is exactly why we have students graduating with tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with no marketable skills. Students can become a well-rounded person on their own time, through the many life experiences they can afford when they are not paying off debt. I am so happy to see the world of academia get disrupted, and I cannot wait for the coming…
Personally, its not just liberal arts courses that add to a value education, but other technical courses as well. Just because i want to be a developer doesn't mean I don't want to study Calculus or linear algebra or differential equations or Accounting principles in college. (these were all courses in my CS degree). Even if we stick to CS, I don't think one can truly cover everything in 2 years. I haven't checked the curriculum of this program yet, but I'd like CS colleges to delve into subjects like data structures, automata, compiler construction, OS, Database internals (not just queries), Concurrent programming, etc. Yes, I may not need all of this to write a Web app, but these are things that I believe make a more well-rounded developer
Founder of Make School here. I'm really sorry you had a bad experience with our online game development course :(. We're continuing to improve both the curriculum and user experience. Please drop me a line - ashu@makeschool.com - and I'll be sure to give you a refund.
I'm not interested in a refund. I posted my experience so others can learn from my mistake. When make games with us was on HN I believed in your company and by the end I felt duped. Maybe things have changed but I would never give you guys a second chance. 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 examp…
I totally understand your frustration, but frankly I think you're being a bit harsh on them. I have recently started providing CS courses independently and trust me, it's not as easy as it seems. Shit happens. As a first timer, I know I have made mistakes and I have learned from them. I know my current course wasn't all that but I know my next would be better. Obviously I am going to email people telling them about my newest venture, though I would try not to make seem like spam.
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)
where are you getting 30K from? 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 20…
It's median salary for all grads, not median entry level. So it's 20K every year over likely 10 years, which blows nearly any fixed education cost out of the water. 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…
Attaching the global brand of MIT or Stanford to your name clearly has value. The education itself? Highly debatable. Being around successful people also has value, but it's also debatable. It's easy to spend time around amazing people without becoming one yourself.
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.
First of all I applaud all attempts to find alternative ways of CS education (or I guess applied CS/software engineering). I'm still convinced that programming is essentially a selflearning and experimentation kind of discipline that benefits from a hands on approach (and collaboration with others that are on a similar path).
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)
As someone who took their online gaming course I wouldn't have anything to do with these guys. 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.
You say "abandoned" when it seems like they've really expanded the scope of their mission. Spamming sucks, but it's the reality of signing up for almost any e-mail lists - if you're no longer interested, it becomes spam and you should remove yourself from the list.
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.
I'm confused. College is amazing. Why would you want a college replacement? >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?
It's important to some people. But others don't really care, and would prefer a cheaper and better way to do what they want to do (in this case, become a founder or developer).
I think this is more aimed at the college-dropout techie / entrepreneur type than your typical CS student.
This is kind of gimmicky. Most people are probably better off going to a 4-year university and studying CS/engineering/math/physics or something, and the few who want to learn in a nontraditional way and don't intend to get a corporate or hardcore engineering job would probably be smart enough choose to use books, a startup internship or some freelance gigs, and, say, the Internet (???) over something like Make Schoo…
>the few who want to learn in a nontraditional way and don't intend to get a corporate or hardcore engineering job would probably be smart enough choose to use books, a startup internship or some freelance gigs, and, say, the Internet (???) over something like Make School
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.
If this is computer science I will eat my hat. checks site No it's just computer programming. so surprised
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.
It sounds more like a graduate program than a college education, a sort of Masters in IT entrepreneurship? As a college education, it shortchanges the students: * 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…
> Without being able to grasp and think critically about sophisticated propaganda, and how to challenge ideas 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 mai…
> 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.
Why should people be allowed to loudly assert unsupported claims in an institution devoted to learning?