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

https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/27/make-school-accreditation/

by hokustalkshow • 8 years ago

103 34 8 years ago

TACIXAT• 8 years ago

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.

jseliger• 8 years ago

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.

DesaiAshu3• 8 years ago

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.

Someone1234• 8 years ago

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 a graduate can gain additional work experience while others study? Yes.

But you went way too far (pre-tax dollars, no cost of living, assumptions about $100K income/year, and equivocating it to a full ride at a normal college). Arguments like that sound like the sales pitches at Phoenix and other sketchy degree programs, and you definitely don't want to be associated with that.

$70K/year is what many would pay for in-state including living on campus. It is definitely on the high end (although I don't know if it is more normal in California).

eksemplar• 8 years ago

It worried me a little that you compared yourself to Udemy. Because Udemy is at best a decent look into a little bit of a certain technology, and at worst an amateurish stride through a topic. Maybe it’ll allow you to google program, but it won’t teach you computer science.

So I looked over your courses at, https://www.makeschool.com/course-catalog and I have to ask, but do you really teach computer science? You seem to lack a lot of the fundamentals on how computers, compilers and programming languages actually work, and instead offer a range of introductory courses on specific technologies.

Don’t get me wrong. I like applied computer science, we have it in my country as well, as an alternative to the universities and real CS. Such a degree takes 2.5 years, and it makes people very hireable, but it’s not comparable to a real bachelors of computer science.

I think you should aim instead, and instead compare yourself to EDX and their free course of CS50x from Harvard. I’d feel a lot more comfortable hiring someone who had completed those courses than someone who had learned React on Udemy.

Good luck though, the CS field has room for, and needs more craftsmen, but maybe don’t call it a bachelor of science if you don’t actually teach the science.

0x70dd• 8 years ago

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?

azhenley• 8 years ago

As a CS professor, I hope to see more of this type of thing! Quality education needs to be more available to more people.

leroy_masochist2• 8 years ago

Do they take the GI Bill now?

jvrossb2• 8 years ago

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.

leroy_masochist2• 8 years ago

That's awesome! One suggestion -- if the VA slow-rolls anything, call up Pelosi's staff. Not only is she your local SF rep, she will be looking for quick wins as she takes back the gavel and improving transition opportunities for vets is hot right now in DC.

AcornTree• 8 years ago

I would really like to see more evidence about what effects income-share agreements have on higher education.

IdiocyInAction• 8 years ago

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'.

chrisseaton2• 8 years ago

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

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

aphextron2• 8 years ago

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.

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

A computer science AS degree at any decent California community college is about $1500 instate tuition,

That's about 32 semester units ($46/unit). An AS typically has a minimum of 60 semester units as a requirement.

Plus, an accredited BS is likely to be better regarded than an AS for many purposes.

aphextron2• 8 years ago

That's about 32 semester units ($46/unit). An AS typically has a minimum of 60 semester units as a requirement.

So about $2700. But it depends on your income, and most sudents end up paying almost no fees at all thanks to the Governor’s Grant. San Francisco City College is actually completely free for all residents of the city now.

chrisseaton2• 8 years ago

Nobody cares about accreditation in CS. Stanford is not accredited, for example.

paul7986• 8 years ago

Even cheaper learning yourself by building out random ideas, posting your code on GitHub and blogging about how much you like to code/create stuff.

drawnwren• 8 years ago

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."

thaumasiotes• 8 years ago

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?"....)

strikelaserclaw• 8 years ago

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

brian_herman• 8 years ago

Amazing, if I was going to college now I would definitely put this on my short list.

jammygit• 8 years ago

Sort of off topic, but I wish every company didn't put these in their privacy policies:

"user information related to the Service may be among the items sold or otherwise transferred"

"The Company may modify or update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect the changes in our business and practices, and so you should review this page periodically"

For 70-100k in tuition, one would hope for a less revocable promise of privacy than that, especially from a school.

It would also be nice if these policies had parts that clarify whether the 'anonymized' data they inevitably transfer can reasonably be re-identified later. I'm never sure how to read those, personally.

DesaiAshu3• 8 years ago

You're right that our privacy policy is generic / written for web services - that policy applies to our website rather than our student data. FERPA laws govern student data, so those are definitely better protected than the generic policy may indicate!

sureaboutthis• 8 years ago

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?

casper345• 8 years ago

"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.

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

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