[ssharp]

This isn't even close to an apples-to-apples comparison and looks like mostly an advertisement. You're looking at broad academic institutions preparing students for a huge range of careers vs. an institution that takes advantage of quickly ramping up a student for a specific career that currently has very good average salaries.

Besides that, I don't get this:

"Part of it is that the cost of delivering that education are very reasonable."

He then preaches about how higher ed's cost structures are terrible. But when you look at the cost per week of education, Flatiron is over 3x higher than a 4-year college. That doesn't suggest to me that higher ed's costs structures are all that ridiculous compared to Flatiron.

Overall, I get the impression that Flatiron is providing a valuable educational program to its students. However, if you really want to impress me or inspire others, show me how this model can be successfully applied to careers outside of software engineering.

It would seem a better argument would be made for time spent rather than dollars spent.

[jeffreyrogers]

> However, if you really want to impress me or inspire others, show me how this model can be successfully applied to careers outside of software engineering.

My opinion is that most jobs don't require any of the skills taught in college (sure you probably need to write well, but you can learn that in high school or just by reading a lot... I'm sure almost no one needs any math aside from how to work a calculator).

The two primary benefits of college are: First as a signal to employers to say, "hey, I did something moderately difficult so I'm a relatively safe bet." And second, as a place to develop social skills and the ability to interact with people different from yourself.

[bunderbunder]

I once read an interesting article comparing a college education to high heeled shoes.

High heeled shoes were once a utilitarian device: They made it easier to keep a solid grip on the stirrups when riding a horse. As footwear, the feature embodies a tradeoff that's only practical for a particular class of people: Riding a horse is easier, at the expense of making walking a bit less practical. But since this class of people happened to be wealthy, and it's common for folks to want to mimic the habits of those wealthier than themselves, eventually a fashion for high-heeled shoes developed among non-equestrian classes. That development also divorced the shoes from their practical roots, which allowed fashion to take over and push the shoes to even more impractical extremes, which is where we get modern incarnations such as women's pumps. To some extent, the only real purpose served by such shoes is to signal to others that your day-to-day life doesn't involve doing anything that would render them too impractical, and therefore you're of a higher social status than anyone who doesn't wear them.

Higher education seems to be starting down a similar path. It used to be that it was a thing for the upper classes, who were expected for various reasons to have a well-rounded liberal arts education. Because of this it became desirable in part because wealthy people do it. Nowadays that seems to be a major driving force. How else can you explain why a time-consuming and expensive BA is still considered more desirable than one of the trades, many of which offer comparable or even better income prospects?

[wallflower]

> How else can you explain why a time-consuming and expensive BA is still considered more desirable than one of the trades, many of which offer comparable or even better income prospects?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

[rayiner]

I disagree. If you look at non-technical white collar jobs, they all involve mainly analytical and persuasive writing. It doesn't really matter if you're writing essays picking apart Foucalt, or writing a memorandum explaining why the company should buy this kind of server versus this other kind of server. It's the same skills.

[nitwit005]

But then you'd be able to reduce things down to a relatively short writing curriculum. Many university courses involve writing, but they are not primarily designed to improve students writing.

Some universities force students who are behind in writing to take courses to catch up before they can even enroll in the normal liberal arts classes. You have to be decent at writing before they'll even let you read Foucalt.

[wooyi]

The US government has proposed a draft framework on ranking higher ed institutions based on Outcome. This gets closer to the ROI model for evaluating any program/college.

http://www2.ed.gov/documents/college-affordability/framework...

TDLR on Metrics:

Access -Percentage of students receiving Pell grants - Expected Family Contribution Gap. - Family Income Quintiles: number of students from low and moderate income families. - Percentage of First-Generation Students

Affordability - Net Price: what a student actually pays (cost of attendance minus financial aid). - Net Price by Income Quintile: what a student actually pay by income class.

Performance - Completion Rates. - Transfer Rates - Labor Market Success: The most controversial metric by far on the list. - Graduate School Attendance of Former Students - Loan Performance Outcomes: A metric to be determined that will examine whether or not students are able to repay their loans after graduation.

[alcuadrado]

Also, I'd like to see statistics about how much of Flatiron-like schools and traditional schools graduates manage to get above-avarage salaries in their field. Comparing with other fields makes little sense.

[parul]

Part of a VC's job is advertisement (for their portfolio companies) ;-) However, in this case I couldn't find a past association between Flatiron school & Fred Wilson and/or Union Square ventures, so this article seems to be expressing genuine appreciation for the model. Maybe he likes them so much that he will invest in them in the next round :D

To understand the cost of education argument, notice the catch lies here: "teaching students skills that are directly related to job requirements." How much time of a traditional 4 year college is spent on skills that a grad would actually need or use? A lot of it is just archaic legacy. If you take those out, then the cost of education might actually compare favorably for bootcamps.

An additional (or alternate perspective) is that bootcamps are a supplement to, rather than a replacement for traditional education. Bootcamps teach hard job skills, whereas college teaches soft & social skills. Either way, they are a welcome addition!

[tbrownaw]

How much time of a traditional 4 year college is spent on skills that a grad would actually need or use? A lot of it is just archaic legacy.

I thought it was moe that universities are meant to promote general enlightenment as much as (or, primarily rather than) useful trade skills. With a fair bit of confusion coming in where some skills (engineering, S/W development) depend heavily on (parts of) said enlightenment (math, how people think).

[mcguire]

That was always a big argument when I was in and around a university computer science department: how much time you spend on "general enlightenment" topics like linear algebra and how much to spend on specific, valuable skills, like x86 assembly.

[minthd]

If there would be 1000x flatirons pumping out graduates, startups would have greater access to lower cost developers, which i'm sure would make VC's job more profitable,and easier.

[FLUX-YOU]

Why are you comparing cost per week? You can't spend an equivalent time in college to flatiron and gain anything meaningful. The value is in the unit of a degree or the completion of the program. You can't partially invest in college and expect to get proportionate consideration or results. Likewise, you can't really do anything with 1/3rd completion of flatiron.

[bunderbunder]

That's the value you get at the largest scale. There are several smaller scales at which education delivers value. There's the individual course, and there are the individual skills you learn.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that the flatiron school is not teaching much in the way of linear algebra or discrete mathematics, for example. That may not be a hindrance in many software jobs, probably most, but both are absolutely essential to the things I do day-to-day. I have met precious few developers who majored in something other than CS and can really grok a lot of the stuff I work on, simply because they don't have the education.

The exception is people who've taken the time to flesh out their knowledge with online classes from sources like Coursera. This gave them nothing comparable to a degree or completion of an educational program. They just took one class, and it wasn't even 12 weeks long. But that one class still provided enormous value.

The other exception is people who did attend a college-level CS program, but didn't complete it for whatever reason - dropped out, switched majors, whatever. They didn't get that BS in CS, but they still got a lot of value and were able to do something with it.

[ssharp]

Because the article was trying to say that Flatiron's costs were lower, yet they're charging more.

Granted, my calculations were dumb. I took the 4.3 years the article used as time to finish a 4-year degree and multiplied it by 52. Obviously, the number of actual weeks in-class is different, but I'd imagine most universities costs during the various breaks and lighter summer sessions aren't substantially less than in the middle of a fall or spring semester.

[ctide]

Because what people charge is based on what their costs are. If you have to provide staff, location, etc. for a longer period of time it drives up your costs which in turn drives up your prices.

[higherpurpose]

Or you could look at the traditional universities teaching a "whole range of careers" for people who may or may not need most of them as being hugely inefficient.

Maybe a better model is to spend $15,000 on a crash-course for a new career, do that for a while and if you're unhappy with the career choice, pay another $15,000 for another crash-course, and so on.

One issue with this proposal is that I still find $15,000 way too expensive. It may be "much cheaper" than paying $200,000 for a bundle of courses, but it seems no cheaper on a per-course basis. Surely we can have education in the future that's much cheaper than that? We should look for disruption in that as well.