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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> $70K/year is what many would pay for in-state including living on campus.
A quick check of UCs shows total all-inclusive annual cost estimate for in-state students tend to be $25-35K depending on living situation. (Which includes things like housing and food that getting a degree sooner doesn't actually save that much, if anything, on.)
I think they might have meant for all four years of state school on campus, which rings true with me. I went to a state school and lived on campus for four years and it cost me roughly 80k.
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 math is relatively straightforward:
Make School:
- Tuition = 20% of 5 years salary = ~1.1x starting salary = $1.1S (assumes 5% annual salary increase)
- Living expenses = 4 * annual cost of living = $4L
To plug in some numbers, our students' cost of living tends to be ~$1500/mo, while our average starting salary is approximately $95k.
- Make School case net worth after 4 years: -$49k
- Full tuition case net worth: $-72k
- Full ride case net worth: $0
However, this doesn't factor in compounding gains of starting off at a higher salary (http://eagle.gmu.edu/newsroom/843/). The top CS programs in the country (Stanford, MIT) are currently at ~$95k average starting salary, while the overall average is ~$60k. At the point their peers are graduating college, our alums will have a $10k+ higher salary. This difference should compensate for the -$49k difference over a long career.
Since tuition and tax rates are both proportional to income, the numbers won't change substantially if salary is lower.
> 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.
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
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.
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?"....)
>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.
> most sudents end up paying almost no fees at all thanks to the Governor’s Grant.
That's because California Community colleges right now draw a huge share of students from the low income (sub-150% of federal povertly line) families that are eligible for the Promise Grant (formerly Board of Governor's Fee Waiver.) But that's not the segment of the potential market that is most likely to be weighing Community College against a $100K 2-year accelerated BS program, most likely.
> San Francisco City College is actually completely free for all residents of the city now.
And that is awesome, but again not relevant to most of the potential market at issue here, I think.
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'.
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.
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!
"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 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.
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.
> 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?
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.