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

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

#31

Post by chrisseaton » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 7:24 AM UTC

IdiocyInAction wrote: post #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-lo…

> I guess those aren't directly useable in industry though.

People do build operating systems, renderers, chat apps, and compilers in industry, you know.

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

#32

Post by 0x70dd » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 8:19 AM UTC

DesaiAshu wrote: post #9

TACIXAT wrote: 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, th…

Sadly, this model won't work for Europe where tuition fees are very low already. I can give you an example with UK, where I did my bachelor at a top 10 university for roughly 10k GBP (i.e. 3k per year). My masters degree at a top 3 university was 6k and it lasted a single year.

Would you say that Europe is a target market for you? Have you thought about how you would tackle it?

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

#33

Post by frobozz » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

0x70dd wrote: post #32

DesaiAshu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

Sadly, this model won't work for Europe where tuition fees are very low already. I can give you an example with UK, where I did my bachelor at a top 10 university for roughly 10k GBP (i.e. 3k per year). My masters degree at a top 3 university was 6k and it lasted a single year. Would you say that Europe is a target market for you? Have you thought about how you would tackle it?

Those numbers are massively out of date. Even Warwick (cheapest top-10 university in England and Wales, Scotland is a different story) is at least £6750K per year for UK undergrads.

Many universities charge the full £9250 allowed.

Granted, that's still considerably less than $100K

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

#34

Post by sureaboutthis » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 11:54 AM UTC

> College students spend years learning arcana and quaint academic theories

When I read things like this the writer often means he doesn't think degree candidates need to learn the fundamentals and foundation of computer science but be thrown into writing code in PHP just so the student can be thrown into a company and get a product out the door as fast as possible and not as smart as possible.

But this is not the purpose of a degree in computer science. No one knows what position a student may obtain and some, at least, will go into research and some will need to know those arcana and quaint academic theories or will work for a company which will create unique products and services which we call innovation.

I don't know anything about this Make school but is this the case there?

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

#35

Post by king_magic » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 12:25 PM UTC

DesaiAshu wrote: post #18

Someone1234 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Perhaps avoid going into specifics next time. Is it true to say that earlier graduation makes it cheaper? Yes. Is it true to say that…

I hear your point. To avoid getting into trouble I'll keep the framing as better than a full tuition scholarship (rather than full ride). It's already a good deal so no need to take risks with marketing :) If you're curious, here's the math I'm using (assuming that our average salary will stay around $95k and long term salary trajectory will map to traditional stats). Since our tuition is a percent of earnings, the m…

> It's already a good deal so no need to take risks with marketing :)

No, it’s an insanely bad deal. Stop acting like this is an amazing deal - it’s not, it’s verging on predatory.

My 4 year CS BS through a state school left me with $45k in loans that I’m still paying off - and that is extremely reasonably compared to this insanity.

A 4 year degree should never cost anywhere near 100k. It’s criminal for a 2 year degree to approach that cost.

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

#36

Post by casper345 » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 3:31 PM UTC

"Id like to welcome you to this course on Computer Science. Actually thats a terrible way to start. Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, its not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art. Well actually see that computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic. We will see that in this course. So its not a science. Its also not really very much about computers. And its not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators. And biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes. And its not about computers in the same sense that geometry is not really about using a surveying instruments."

In my opinion this soultion may be beneficial in the short term but detrimental in the long run. As we do not have 2-year applied medical school or engineering schools (or they are frowned upon), computer science is much more than just writing code for applications, there needs to be rigorous and lengthy studying of algorithms, data structures and their relationships with algos, architecture, advanced math concepts. Imo this is a programming degree not cs.

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

#37

Post by strikelaserclaw » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #12

Sorry but 100k is just absurd. A computer science AS degree at any decent California community college is about $1500 instate tuition, and would be vastly more respectable and useful.

I was going to comment on how awesome this was until i saw the 100k price tag.

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

#38

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 29, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #22

drawnwren wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good thought, but low tuition costs mean CS professors at California community colleges are making close to nothing. Warning, anecdotal evidence, but I took CS at CCSF and when asked how to tell if a number was prime in Java, the professor responded "I don't know, google it. There's probably a function that does that."

To be fair, that's the correct answer if you're trying to do a primality test for some non-didactic reason. They're complicated. There are very simple ways to test for primality, but they're... slow. (And at that level, the "in Java" part of the question doesn't make any sense. "What cryptography libraries do you use in Java?" is a perfectly sensible question. "How do you divide numbers in Java?"....)

[deleted]