
Google Has a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree - simonebrunozzi
https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/google-plan-disrupt-college-degree-university-higher-education-certificate-project-management-data-analyst.html
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codingdave
I think short-term vocational training is great. The days of getting a degree
in order to get a job should be over. And if programs like this succeed,
hopefully the pricing on degrees will correct.

But that doesn't mean degrees are getting disrupted - it means people are
recognizing that their purpose is orthogonal to getting a job. Anyone who
still wants a T-shaped higher education still will get value from a degree.

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jfengel
There's a lot they won't get from a six-month program, like writing and other
soft skills. (Not that a lot of four-year degrees really end up doing a good
job of teaching those, either.)

I'm very interested in Signum University's program to focus specifically on
these[1], at a cost higher than a MOOC since it involves a lot of interaction
with a human being, but still much lower than a four year degree. Between the
two it might just be possible to actually get T-shaped education without the
distressingly high cost of a traditional diploma.

Then we just need to get people to actually hire them, instead of taking the
easy path of requiring a four-year degree as a proxy for education.

[1]
[https://path.signumuniversity.org/badges/](https://path.signumuniversity.org/badges/)

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jfengel
I'm a big fan of ending the requirement for four-year degrees to get entry-
level jobs, though I'm a bit surprised at the ones they've chosen: project
manager, data analyst, and UX designer. IT support makes a lot of sense, since
it's a fairly well-defined set of tasks, but the others strike me as wider in
scope and thus harder to teach in six months.

If they're really making good on their goal of hiring these people, at decent
salaries, with the idea of starting in apprentice-style positions and learning
on the job, then that would be fantastic. The experience needed to do those
jobs isn't really well served by more years of book-learning anyway.

