

Finding ROI in Higher Education - davi
http://avc.com/2014/12/finding-roi-in-higher-education/

======
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.

~~~
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.

------
coffeemug
A huge problem with this comparison is that the field of software engineering
is really, really, really hot right now. So you can get away with studying up
for 16 weeks, and get a $70k job. We've been here before --
[http://www.defmacro.org/2013/12/09/learn-to-
code.html](http://www.defmacro.org/2013/12/09/learn-to-code.html). When the
field encounters a short-term cool-off (as it inevitably will), these hires
will be the first to go because 16 weeks is absolutely not enough to get a
strong base of fundamentals. You could (barely) learn Rails and JavaScript in
that time, but you really aren't getting a strong enough engineering skillset
to build a resilient career.

The bigger problem is that high school seniors don't understand basic
economics of supply and demand. The job market is becoming polarized -- top
people in their fields are doing better than ever, and the market doesn't
really need anything else (with software engineering currently being an
anomaly). So I'd say it isn't worth going to college (from an ROI perspective)
if you aren't positioned to be in the top 10% of your field. This used to not
be the case, but the world is very rapidly going in this direction and I'm not
sure if there is a solution to this problem, any more than there was a
solution to manual labor jobs disappearing post industrial revolution.

> EDIT: _When you always add and never subtract, you get cost structures that
> are not sustainable._

That's brilliant.

~~~
ssharp
I started college at the start of the dot com bubble. I remember network
engineering was the hot field of the time and there were places offering fast
turnaround and relatively cheap Cisco certification training.

These days, I wonder how many companies are hiring CCNA's with no other higher
education.

Exploiting a short-term market condition is revolutionary, even if it looks
different than the status-quo while the market condition exists.

------
gkop
This blog post is _extremely_ misleading: the three featured alumni [0] on the
Flatiron School's web site _all_ have 4 years of college at good schools (one
even has an MFA)

Saron Yitbarek - University of Maryland College Park B.A. English, B.S.
Psychology 2007 – 2011 [1]

Justin Belmont - Tufts University BA, English 1999 – 2003 Columbia University
in the City of New York MFA, Nonfiction Writing 2005 – 2008 [2]

Danny Olinsky University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Kenan-Flagler
Business School BSBA, Business Administration; Entrepreneurship [3]

[0]
[http://flatironschool.com/web#block7](http://flatironschool.com/web#block7)
[1]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/saronyitbarek](https://www.linkedin.com/in/saronyitbarek)
[2]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinbelmont](https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinbelmont)
[3]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyolinsky](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyolinsky)

~~~
secstate
This, of course, is the irony of the higher education debate. Those having the
debate very likely did not go through the voc-ed tracks (which is effectively
the "revolutionary" model the Flatiron School is providing).

That doesn't mean there's no value in providing education that leads directly
to career opportunities or salary improvement. As an American I know our
culture loves to yell "But!" and provide an example of a VC or entrepreneur
who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but these are the exceptions
rather than the rule.

------
lexap
It's not an apples to apples comparison. As a Flatiron grad myself I can tell
you that most my classmates already had college degrees. They do have a
program that serves as a substitute for college, but it's not clear that the
main program has been filtered from the data.

That said, I thought Flatiron was an exceptional investment, much higher ROI
on my salary than college, but also served a fundamentally different purpose
and role in my education than college.

~~~
ssharp
You can't discount your traditional education from your ROI on Flatiron. They
aren't exclusive investments. In cases like yours, Flatiron is complementary
to other education.

If Flatiron wants to make their ROI case stronger, they should look at people
who have Flatiron as their exclusive post-secondary education.

------
wooyi
Despite the obvious flaws of comparing a coding "bootcamp" school to a 4 year
higher ed institution, I think there is a very valid argument in thinking
about ROI when picking degree choices. While not everyone can be coders, (if
everyone could, then the salary/demand would drop and this solution would be
invalid) everyone should seriously think about ROI. Counselors almost never
discuss ROI when advising 17-18 year olds on college choices. Questions like,
can you pay off a 6 figure debt to pursue a comparative literature degree?

If you pick a program that has high salary/demand, you will have better ROI.
Even if you spend lots of money on it, you will be able to pay it back. That
is ROI. (Not just cost by itself)

Here is a list of top ranking salary schools. They are almost all dominated by
Ivies, tech/engineering (and interestingly, Military) schools.

[http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/full-
list...](http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/full-list-of-
schools)

~~~
rm999
Education doesn't guarantee a higher salary - instead it opens up
opportunities and raises each person's potential ceiling. This makes using
averages and ROIs very difficult.

I could have gone to med school (historically a very high ROI degree) but I'm
terrible at memorization/studying and probably wouldn't have thrived i.e.
wouldn't have reached anywhere near its ceiling. Obviously, it would have been
a poor degree for me.

Or, I could have gotten an MBA (another very high ROI degree), but my salary
probably wouldn't have immediately been higher than what I have as a software
engineer/data scientist. But an MBA would enable me to enter an executive
track that is mostly closed off to me now. Is it worth it? Honestly I don't
know - its an extremely complicated calculation.

Instead of ROI, I think it's worth thinking about how much each degree will
cost you (both time and money), what it will enable you to do, whether you are
capable of doing that, whether you want to do that, and what the payoff will
be. If I were a counselor, I would go through this exercise with my students.

~~~
jerf
"Instead of ROI, I think it's worth thinking about how much each degree will
cost you (both time and money), what it will enable you to do, whether you are
capable of doing that, whether you want to do that, and what the payoff will
be."

Um, are you quite clear on what "ROI" is? You just described it there, while
making it sound like you disagree. As with any future-looking thing, it's all
probabilities in the end. There aren't any guarantees in life.

~~~
rm999
> As with any future-looking thing, it's all probabilities in the end.

Actually, this was the exact opposite of my point and my own personal
experience. On average, a medical degree would have paid out more than the
option I went with, but I ignored this simple ROI calculation. Instead, I did
a deeper analysis, mixed with some intuition about myself, and went with what
was at the time a fairly low ROI option (masters in AI/CS - at a time when the
average MS in CS was paying 5k more than a bachelors). I did this because I
knew it would open certain doors for me, not for any monetary gain. I'm
confident it's served me better than the "just go to med school" advice I was
repeatedly given when I was 20 - advice that was strongly backed by every
monetary statistic you could find.

So, maybe that's still an ROI estimate, but it's a complex one that explicitly
rejects averages. It's not what people typically mean when they refer to
"ROI".

~~~
jerf
"So, maybe that's still an ROI estimate, but it's a complex one that
explicitly rejects averages. It's not what people typically mean when they
refer to "ROI"."

I still say you've got a seriously impoverished view of "ROI". You pretty much
never just get to look it up on a table, you _certainly_ never get a
guarantee, and you are absolutely supposed to consider _everything_ in a ROI
calculation... if you value personal satisfaction than be sure to factor that
in.

One of the baseline facts of modern economics is the highly variable nature of
individual preferences. Microeconomics 101 is literally an exploration of this
fact, and all economics cease to function if you assume all agents in the
system have the same preferences. The idea that it's all about money is a
slanderous strawman, not how it actually works. And so with ROI... if you are
not considering your personal happiness with a ROI investment in your degree,
that's your fault for failing to do a proper ROI investment, not basic
economic's fault for not taking your personal preferences into account.

If this sounds wrong to you, I'd suggest digging in and learning some
microecon 101, because it sounds like you've got a strawman understanding
right now. If you're a programmer it's easy enough to pick up by just reading
about it.

~~~
rm999
I'm referring fairly specifically of the context of the parent comment. These
are the parts that I was replying to:

>can you pay off a 6 figure debt to pursue a comparative literature degree?

>If you pick a program that has high salary/demand, you will have better ROI.
Even if you spend lots of money on it, you will be able to pay it back. That
is ROI. (Not just cost by itself)

>Here is a list of top ranking salary schools. They are almost all dominated
by Ivies, tech/engineering (and interestingly, Military) schools.

I disagree with the approach of the first two quoted parts, and what the third
comment is alluding to.

> One of the baseline facts of modern economics is the highly variable nature
> of individual preferences. Microeconomics 101 is literally an exploration of
> this fact

Erm, I studied econ in college (concentrating in micro econ and game theory),
this certainly is not what micro econ 101 is about. One of the key assumptions
of classic micro economics is simplifying people into homogenous
representative agents (usually, perfectly rational agents who seek to maximize
gains and minimize costs). The field of properly modeling individual
preferences in micro economics is a relatively recent development. Economics
101 is where the simplistic definition of ROI arises, e.g.
[http://econwiki.wikidot.com/roi](http://econwiki.wikidot.com/roi). And yes, a
lot (probably most) people still mean this when they refer to ROI.

------
mcguire
" _The Flatiron School started two years ago and teaches students, both high
school grads and college grads, how to become software engineers in a twelve
week course that costs $15,000._ "

Wow. It's a good thing that whole "software engineering" thing isn't a
profession or anything. I wish this had been available 25 years ago, before I
wasted 4 years and roughly 9000 hours (4 years, 2 semesters per year, 15 weeks
per semester, 15 class hours per week = 1800 class hours; by their
class+lab+deployment numbers, a 5/1 ratio) getting a bachelors.

Plus, even if I had decided to stick to the BA, on their schedule I could have
packed all that into a little over 2 years, instead of 4.

------
wallflower
Like the old saying goes, if you want to burn down a house, you don't burn it
down from the outside, you light the fire inside. An individual who has just
invested thousands of dollars in their own self-education and (most likely)
heard the negativity and 'you're crazy' from their family and peer group has a
lot to prove. Their house is on fire. Your ability to learn has nothing to do
with your age - it has more to do with your mindset and your ability to
proactively deal with frustration and failure. And let go of your ego (code
reviews).

I know programmers with 15+ years of experience who are doing the same thing
year after year. After a while, the years of experience for that type of
programmer are meaningless. Also, either the company or their peer group
restricts their ability to learn new things. Many of them with families and
(now) college tuition bills to pay don't mind this restriction on learning.
There are many more 9-5 programmers than the people who live and breathe on
the bleeding edge.

The reality is that while there are only a couple superb programmers at the
level of Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy, Thomas Knoll in the world's history - there
are many orders of magnitude more programmers who might not change the world
but help keep the increasingly technological world running. There is room for
many more programmers and we don't need to restrict the industry to the narrow
intake funnel of 4 year CS degree.

------
jdudek
It’s been an interesting comparison. However, there are programming Bootcamps
that are free of charge, like
[http://pilot.co/bootcamp](http://pilot.co/bootcamp) (disclaimer: I work for
Pilot). The ROI comparison is quite interesting in that case… :)

------
thirdstation
Instead of charging tuition, I wonder if employers would be willing to pay
Flatiron $15K per hire as a finder/training fee.

That might be a good test of demand for junior Ruby/Rails/Javascript
developers, in addition to how good Flatiron is at preparing them.

------
barry-cotter
I thought the comparison of graduation rates between the Flatiron school and
universities was very misleading. Most stste systems have open enrollment in
community colleges and some four year colleges with low, low standards. The
truth is that there are tons of private and public universities that will let
anyone in who can fill out a student loan application.

I don't know anything about the Flatiron school but I discussed App Academy
with a graduate of the first New York class. They made it sound like the
excellent results were all selection effect rather than treatment. A lead
mentor who was never there and two assistants who had finished the previous
San Francisco cycle. Some of the people doing the course had more programming
experience than these teachers. It is very likely that the graduation rate
reflects selectivity as much as good teaching and curriculum.

