
Make School (YC W12) gains accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree - hokustalkshow
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/27/make-school-accreditation/
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TACIXAT
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.

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DesaiAshu
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.

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Someone1234
> 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).

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dragonwriter
> $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.)

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plants
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.

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aphextron
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.

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dragonwriter
> 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.

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aphextron
>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.

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dragonwriter
> 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.

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IdiocyInAction
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'.

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

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

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sureaboutthis
> 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?

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jammygit
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.

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DesaiAshu
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!

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

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casper345
"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.

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

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

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leroy_masochist
Do they take the GI Bill now?

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jvrossb
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.

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leroy_masochist
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.

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jvrossb
Very helpful advice, thank you!

