My state has a network of community and technical colleges. There is a program that allows one to get their Associates degree through community colleges, then transfer to a state school and continue paying community college tuition.
10 years ago, this allowed for earning an engineering degree for $2k a year, or $8-10k.
In my experience, community colleges were very much viewed as remedial. I’d guess that many of the classes were taken by students who had failed the equivalent class at university.
I took Physics at both the community college and university (I was afraid that the community college class would not prepare me for later classes). The differences were stark:
At university, lecture was 3x a week by the professor (who did not speak English), recitation by a TA (who did not speak English), and lab by another TA. There were 3 sections with 400 students per section. The professor had one hour of office hours for all 400 students in my section.
At community college, my professor lectured, ran the lab, ran recitation. He went to a top 5 school, was an American, and was a great teacher. The class had 2 sections of 30 students. He ran weekend reviews for tests, if needed, and had open office hours all day. His tests were very difficult and required mastery of the subject matter.
I dropped the university class after I realized it was of much lower quality than what I had already received, for 1/5th the price, no less.
I took a course for fun at a local community college: physics. There was nothing more fascinating learning physics from someone that did accident reconstructions for 30 years. It is a different feel than being lectured to by someone that hasn't finished their graduate program. Then for fun I tried again: Oracle. My teacher? A former executive at WellsFargo and Oracle. He was extremely wealthy, and taught for fun - he did not publish some book or beg for grants.
This hit a little too close to home. Interestingly enough, those professors at my alma mater who were abysmal at teaching and lecturing but pulling millions in grants listened to the course feedback cards. They took it to heart that we had been uninterested* in the way the course was presented, couldn't grasp the material from the lessons, etc. We could see how their teaching methods evolved as we had them for upper level courses and electives.
According to interns, those are some of the best professors that are currently on staff.
Irrelevant note: I originally used disinterested, but those words do not have the same meaning:
> An uninterested person is bored, unconcerned, or indifferent; a disinterested person is impartial, unbiased, or has no stake in the outcome.*[0]
I just finished my undergrad at a traditional four-year university in the United States and this is spot on. The language problem you mention is very real - I have taken classes with professors who are almost incomprehensible when speaking English. In some of my computer science lectures it was not uncommon for a student to ask the professor a question and for him to answer it in a language other than English, which doesn't seem fair.
Not surprising really. The big schools skim off the top student talent, brand them with a degree, place them in top jobs, and repeat the cycle. There's no particular pressure for them to be great educators.
I started at a community college and transferred to a state university, getting degrees at both, putting myself through the whole way while working.
I don't remember anything noteworthy (in terms of professional stature) from any of the state university teachers (few bad, some quite good, but no real experts). In the CC, an instructor I had multiple times had a Doctorate, the old-school Certificate in Data Processing, and decades of industry experience.
The best instructor I ever had in any discipline, whom I had for calculus, was at the CC. He authored several college math texts as well. Jack Minnick, you are greatly missed.
That was my experience. I went from the local community college to the top University in the state (currently a top 10 ranked public University) and found the the teachers at the community college were in most cases superior to the University professors.
I had 400 level EE classes with a couple guys who came up through community colleges. They weren't always prepared for the classes. It was ironic because it wasn't they didn't understand the previous material, but because they hadn't dealt with poor instructors and didn't have the relationships of the previous 3 years studying with the same people.
It was possible at the same university to walk into a lab and start working on joint projects with NASA, the NSA or local industry, where other local universities and community colleges don't offer as much in that regard. On the other hand those professors running the labs didn't really seem to care where the students came from, whether they were in high school or the community college up the road if they were willing to work.
Way back in the 1990's, between undergrad and graduate school, I took introductory statistics, linear algebra, and 3 advanced calculus classes at night at a local CC which had ~4 different campuses in the metro area. It was mostly college or grad level students taking the courses for credit. Most of the professors had a separate, professional day job. Two were heads of their respective departments at the school.
Based on my experience I would say that community colleges are great for learning the material, and universities are great for socializing and learning stuff outside of the classroom through self-directed interests (especially in graduate school).
I went to a liberal arts college and a lot of the virtues of community college mentioned in this thread remind me of my own experience (smaller class sizes, broader curricula, professors dedicated to teaching rather than research). Well, except price, anyway.
I went to UIUC for Computer Engineering (I think it was #3 at the time), but my differential equations class was taught by someone with such a thick german accent it was impossible to understand. At least 100 people in the class, and no TAs that I can remember. Failed that course.
Took it over the summer at the local community college for much cheaper, and it was so much easier, smaller class (about 15), and then transferred the credit back to UIUC and didn't have to take it again at UIUC with the same professor who I couldn't understand the first time.
> In my experience, community colleges were very much viewed as remedial.
"Community college is like a disco with books. Here's $10, let me go get my learn on!" --Chris Rock
Despite not being taken seriously as higher institutions, they're a godsend for focused, unconventional learning, and certainly an attractive alternative to for-profit bootcamps. State schools had many of the same advantages as CCs. I ended up graduating from state school; compared to the mid-tier private university I went to, the state school's profs were either clueless, or very interested in teaching.
I think university experiences are bi-modal. If you're going to an essentially unranked university with very poor professors/a non-existent graduate program, you'd probably be better off going to community college and saving an order of magnitude in tuition. On the other hand if you're going to a, say, top-25 school, the price tag is probably worth it and opens the door to graduate schools and research mentorship that you can't find anywhere else.
But if you do two years at a community college and then two years at one of your top-25 schools you get the same benefits. It's also generally easier to transfer into a university than it is to get accepted right out of high school.
I would be quite surprised if you found a top-25 school that would accept community college credits 1:1. I am familiar with one of the top liberal arts schools in the US and credit transfers are most often at the discretion of the department of your declared major - a professor at an "elite" liberal arts school is very unlikely to assign much value to community college credits.
Of course, the ability to transfer of credits will vary immensely depending on the university and the community college - some of which are highly regarded. If you are planning this route and know the educational institutions you want to attend, it would be prudent to verify at the outset.
The University of Michigan accepts community college credits. I transferred some math credits and had several friends do their first 2 years at a community college before transferring there.
man, reading these comments is REALLY validating my choice going to a small University. I was THE ONLY PERSON in my operating systems class, and most CS classes had less than 20 people.
Unsurprisingly the school shut the department down, but it was GREAT.
If we're talking "top 5" in the context of graduate programs for a given discipline it's likely not as rare as you'd think.
I can see the PhD glut and general awfulness of academia (do postdocs and adjunct until a tenure-track opens up) pushing people from even high ranking programs into teaching at a CC.
This is especially true if they're married or have an SO: It's hard to convince your partner to uproot their lives so you can work at some tenure track position at some no-name college in the middle of nowhere... or forgo tenure and get paid slightly less and have the option to actually live near family/friends/partner's career.
Warning N = 1, but I went to CC and there were plenty of Top 5 graduates working there. There are lots of reasons someone with a PhD from a top program might want to work at a community college. Passion for teaching, proximity to family, and much more flexible schedules are all reasons to choose to work at a CC over a 4 year.
I attended community college for a few years before transferring to a 4-year university. During that time I took a variety of technical and non-technical courses that I really enjoyed and felt I got a lot of value from due to the small class sizes and ability to connect with professors outside of class fairly easily. I would have stopped after getting my Associate’s degree as I felt like I had learned a lot and I had next to zero debt from my education, and it was around that time I really got into programming and software development which is what I now do for a living.
The only reason I went on to a bigger school was familial pressure and the idea that I’d be pretty much doomed without a Bachelor’s degree or better. I left with a large amount of debt (my family fell into the space of too much for grants and not enough to pay out of pocket) and honestly didn’t really like my 4-year experience nor do I feel like it added much to the value of my life, either in practical or intrinsic terms. I get that my experience is anecdotal but I wonder how many other people would have been in the same boat.
Community colleges really are underrated. In a world where increasingly a bachelor's degree does not guarantee a job, university education is super expensive, and especially in fields where a bachelor's degree is not necessary (I've never had an interview where they asked about my college education), vocational schools are the place to be.
Four-year universities put big emphasis on well-rounded educations, so you're taking humanities and physical education and biology and math classes in order to achieve a business degree. Community colleges cut away the "well rounded" part and often just tech the skills necessary to get a job at a local company. Oftentimes the instructors actually work at these local companies as their day job, so they know what to teach to.
If your goal is to get a job that leads into a career, go to a CC. If you need continuing education past that, many CCs have programs that let you transfer your credits into a local state university at extremely generous rates. My local CC has a 3+1 program where you can take 3 years at CC and one year at the state university and get a bachelor's degree from the university. The cost per credit hour at the CC is literally half the cost for the university, so you're paying $35k for your bachelor's compared to the $50k you'd be paying for four years at the state university. It's a no-brainer.
I’ve been involved in many interviews in my jobs, and we haven’t thrown an Software Engineer application out because they don’t have a bachelors.
Many of my friends and I don’t have a bachelors, and we haven’t noticed this issue. I have been asked if I have a degree, and I am honest about it and tell my story.
While not everyone agrees, I think it matters more what you’ve done on your own and on the job than what degree you’ve got.
I didn't have my bachelor's degree until very recently... three jobs and nearly 10 years into my career. When I got my degree, no one seemed to care. I didn't get a pay raise or anything.
I don't think you'll get a pay raise for it but not having it might prevent you from getting jobs.
I've definitely been asked why I didn't go to/finish my Bachelor's in many interviews. Who knows how many jobs I was skipped over because I didn't have it. Could be 0 for all I know but how would I know?
That being said, after a few years of working nobody cared about it anymore.
Like I said, some fields care. Some don't. YMMV. Getting an interview depends on a million and a half factors, it's hard to say one is more important than the other.
If you're a dev, my impression is that boot camps have changed this a lot. 10 years ago, someone without a bachelor's had a larger chance of fitting the 'lone hacker' stereotype than they do today. Of course, work experience trumps all.
> They don’t ask, but many places throw your resume without a bachelors into the trash at the first step in the hiring process. Ask me how I know.
I'm very understanding of this sentiment. I have suggested to people to get around this by simply lying about having a bachelors degree on their resume. If the employer verifies, you're out nothing. If they don't, you have a job you otherwise wouldn't have had. You have to be able to do the job though.
Don't do this. I have a client who did this, and he now wonders how many interviews he _missed out on_ over a 3-year period because the employer was interested but the college screening came up lie-positive.
Many, many employers public & private do verify. And some people will start rumors if you are in a small community, or if they know someone you know. And if the employer later finds out that you lied, the lie will cost you the job, not the lack of education.
IMO if you are low on experience like education, your best bets are things like formal networking events or informal events (parties, concerts with friends, etc.), or even informal walk-ins to companies where you want to work. For some, the biggest problem is that they won't talk about wanting a job around their friends, for fear of appearing incompetent.
There are services which verify education - for instance, the National Student Clearinghouse (US) provides degree verification through affiliated schools for $15 plus a varying school surcharge.
For non-US schools, there are services that will provide an evaluation of foreign academic credentials. I know someone who was reviewing a candidate from Poland for a position requiring specific credentials and used a service to find that the listed education did not meet US standards for the position credentials.
Best not to lie. When I hire, education is last on my list of criteria, but if I select a candidate and the HR background check turns up an outright lie, it is out of my hands.
What is your suggestion for OP where their resume is immediately discard because of no education? Networking and meetups won’t get you passed HR filters and corporate requirements.
As I mentioned, even if you don’t get the job or lose the job, you’re still ahead of not trying. And you now have experience to put towards your next employer (and your old employer will only verify employment dates, as they don’t want to be sued).
This is the unfortunate reality of an asymmetric labor market where employers can make demands with no cost to themselves. Fake it until you make it.
"Fake it until you make it" is completely different from "lie until you are caught." Speaking from experience, lying is not a good idea.
OP is competing against people who have put in work that he/she hasn't. That's just the reality. The best way in is to show the employer that they are a qualitatively superior employee. Networking and filters are _very often_ surpassed by leadership, sometimes even by creating new positions that are an exact fit for that person's experience. I have a few clients who were hired this way, and had better opportunities because of it. I even got a job that way myself long ago, when a CEO friend-of-a-friend hired me in a low level role but then re-read my resume and moved me to corporate offices to work more directly with leadership.
Lying about your past is not a good idea in this case, and it's far worse than just faking a role until you get better at it.
Here's another anecdote: I'll take four experiential-subjective anecdotes from a professional any day, as compared to macro-scale analytical-subjective theories from an analyzer-theorist.
Dodging around relational morals like "don't lie to others" or "be a good human being to others" is a typical blind spot of a game-analyzer-type logician. "I beat the game, don't I win the prize?" are famous last words in these cases; I suggest you choose your audience very carefully if you wish for your cognitive gifts to be celebrated in the context of such a strongly-recognized developmental target as being an honest person. Perhaps sporting or hostage negotiation or other "bluffing"-oriented domains are better suited for such advice, where some variant of "outright lying" is given a little bit more leeway.
> As I mentioned, even if you don’t get the job or lose the job, you’re still ahead of not trying.
I fail to see how poisoning your own reputation comes out as "still ahead"; that is absolutely guaranteed to get your résumé silently discarded. The tech community isn't that big, even in the tech hubs, and word does eventually get around both among engineers and recruiters.
True that. The community I work with all know each other, and one's reputation is paramount. If anyone found out I lied about my degree, I'd be finished. I wouldn't work with a cheat, either.
I’m not advocating lying, but there’s no way this comes up, at least not at startups. Do you think we sit at the bar and discuss potential hires university degrees? If someone told me “watch out man, Stu lied about his uni education” my response is likely to be, “why would you tell me that and why would you think I cared?”.
The gabber is going to look worse than the candidate by a long shot.
Startups involve a lot of trust between the members of the initial group. I wouldn't have anything to do with trusting my future to a professional liar.
It's like marrying someone who cheated on their spouse. They'll cheat on you, next.
Rumors are a quick way to get sued. Are you ready to pay a settlement as an employer because someone’s resume has an inaccuracy on it? Sometimes there are benefits of living in a litigious society when it works in your favor.
> I’ve seen lesser cases win. You’d be surprised. Your tight knit industry community isn’t the general public.
[citation needed]
Court cases are a matter of public record and, given your, ahem, open advocacy of falsehoods, it's unclear why we should believe your unsupported assertion.
>What is your suggestion for OP where their resume is immediately discard because of no education?
Eh, I don't have a degree. My own strategy? I just apply until I find a place where that isn't a hard requirement.
I personally don't mention my education at all. Let them assume what they like. I mean, if they ask, I'll tell them, (they ask like 20% of the time, and it has never been a problem at that phase, as far as I can tell. At least once, the interviewer acted super surprised and I got the job.)
Note, a lot of places claim to "require" degrees. Treat that requirement like any other "requirement" on the job description; in my experience, you need something like 3 out of 5 of the requirements to get a chance at an interview; the degree is just one more I've gotta make up for, no different than not knowing Java.
>Networking and meetups won’t get you passed HR filters and corporate requirements.
This hasn't been my experience. Someone on the inside with pull has a lot more influence than HR, in my experience. It's very rare that we technical people approve a person and HR blocks them; the only cases I know the details of in my own experience have to do with serious (and obvious) lies turned up by the background check.
I mean, certainly, there are jobs that will bin my resume right off... and I'm sure there are some jobs that will bin my resume even with a good internal recommendation, (I could tell stories there, but they all have to do with trying to get work outside of the USA.) but my experience is that most places? A good internal advocate is worth a thousand pieces of paper from the university.
The other thing to keep in mind is that a technician who misleads is about as useful as a salesperson who can't deceive without crossing that line in the way that good salespeople can. A lot of the startup advice is fine if you are management-track, but if you are looking for individual contributor work, being honest and straightforward in ways that don't really work when you are management/sales is the order of the day. I've seen a lot of technicians fired for lying about a screwup (or because management thought they lied about a screwup) - I haven't seen many technicians get fired for actually screwing up.
B.Sc. Computer Information Systems, Wahresleben University, 2014.
(Wahres Leben = “real life” in German)
If they actually check they won’t find the university but they can’t discount the fact it might exist. So HR is more likely to follow up with you then throw your resume out, and you can take that chance to explain you being more to the table than a university graduate.
Employers don't care to hire a liar. What you'd "bring to the table" is a lack of trust. What else have you lied about? Would you lie on expense reports? Would you betray confidential information? Would you lie about the quality of the work you'd do?
If one person in the hiring chain knows German, you're out of luck. And more than likely, if they can't find a university, you are probably lying. Universities are big, kinda hard to not be able to find one.
You should not lie on your resume, but if you're going to lie, just find a way to make it harder to verify. Presumably the for-profit schools that got shut down in the last few years would be hard to check with. Obviously they aren't accredited, but that's not your fault. It'd be, at least, a believable lie.
The point is if they knew German they’d get the joke... you’re not trying to lie. You’re trying to get past the crazy HR driven mandate that EVERYONE have a 4 year degree, even when it has zero relevance to the job.
> If they don't, you have a job you otherwise wouldn't have had.
No, you have a job for as long as you're able to keep your lie secret. Once the lie comes out, even if it's X years down the road, you're terminated for cause, and if a prospective new employer calls they will be told you are "ineligible to be rehired." There are possible legal consequences as well.
GP, do not lie. In the long run, the world works out to be pretty fair, and liars are revealed for what they are.
But if your goal is an undergrad business degree (looking for a marketing job at Dunder Mifflin), you've already set your educational goal well below unlocking the universe.
A few years ago I did the rounds of a bunch of schools in the Bay Area giving talks to CS departments. By far the most passionate students and the smartest questions came from a community college I spoke at in the East Bay. They had so many questions that the planned 1 hour talk ended up taking 2 hours, and nobody left even though it was the end of the day. They had also set up their own after hours meet-ups to teach themselves parallel programming. It helped that their teacher was highly inspiring and passionate too.
In contrast, the university students just felt a lot less interested, and in one case they had to be promised credits just to get them to show up.
My university had some 1 and 2 credit hour classes in physical education. It maybe required 3, I don't remember. But people took those classes for fun, to fill out a schedule, etc.
I'm like you except I skipped college and went straight into the working world. It's entirely possible to do without an education but you have to get creative with how you acquire that initial experience, in my case through volunteering to do basic IT work before landing the first job and then some minor open source contributions to move into the devops space. Sure I'm probably not making $300K/year at the Big 4 any time soon but I've done well enough to afford a nice apartment rental in the Bay Area without roommates or student loan debt and save so I consider that doing just fine all considering.
How old are you, if you don't mind breaking some OPSEC?
Making it quick, I'm a 20 year old native who's having a troubling time keeping optimistic and feeling 'locked out' from the job market around here. I've only been doing front-end engineering for a non profit for a few years now since High School, but everything still feels so far away and impossible to me, especially because I didn't go straight to college, so I've just been wondering if I'm just not trying hard enough or if I'm actually locked out until I build a decent resume...
You need a decent resume. I graduated with a math degree and couldn't get a software engineering job until going back and getting a CS degree. I'd already been programming for years. There was another guy from my class that had to do the same too.
26, I was about your age when starting out full time. If you're feeling locked out locally you might consider moving if you can, I sent my resume to companies across the country until it finally landed somewhere decent which also helped with the search. Resulted in a move to Texas from California for a bit and was worth it.
A few questions ... are you applying to places ? or just feeling locked out ?
Are you in the USA ? In a techie area ? sometimes moving might help
I'm assuming the front-end engineering is paid ? Think portfolio, not resume; why don't you have a nice portfolio ?
Lately, no, last I've actually tried was all last year, but I've been wanting to get back on it with everything I've learned this year.
"Are you in the USA ? In a techie area ?"
Yes, Oakland, quite near San Fransisco.
I've been thinking I might have to end up moving one day, I wouldn't hate it but even then I must imagine that other 'tech areas' around America have that same kind of competition where people are moving out for work. My work is indeed paid.
"Think portfolio, not resume; why don't you have a nice portfolio ?"
Good question, I'm not actually sure but you've managed to get me on it. I've been relying on Github for a portfolio because people've always told me that it's about having a Github accessible and a decent resume...
I did have a few professors among the normal “instructors” you typically find at community colleges. For example, one of my music professors had a Ph.D. and did transcription work that the college used.
Different countries and different schools define "professor" differently. The lowest rank in the US is often called "adjunct professor", which is a part-time position with no research requirements. Adjunct professors often only have masters degrees, as well.
I don't think there's one single definition of "professor" that is true around the world.
Adjunct is grafted onto the side of the regular academic ladder, which goes assistant —> associate -> full professor, and then perhaps a named chair or professsorship (e.g. Lucasian Professor of Mathematics)
The idea behind adjuncts was originally that you might hire someone on a temporary basis, either because of an unexpectedly large class or to offer a class on a special topic: a famous politician might offer a seminar about their time in office or an industrial researcher might offer something related to their work.
However, it’s become increasingly common to hire adjuncts to teach intro classes because they’re cheaper than professors (usually a flat fee per class and minimal benefits) and don’t involve much commitment (usually hired per semester), both of which have obvious short-term benefits to the administration.
It's worth noting that some departments at some universities have an alternative academic ladder for instructors. Even with something analogous to assistant -> associate ~> analogous-to-tenured -> full.
It's possible to treat teaching faculty well. And even necessary in some in-demand fields where the private sector options remove the option of treating non-traditional faculty like crap.
US community college instructor here. Students use the title professor as described here. I prefer either “Mr.” or my first name. I tell students, “Please don’t call me professor. Even my mom gave up on the idea of me ever getting a PhD.”
"Full Professor" is a just job title. Every institution has different standards.
In the US at least, there are thousands of (good) Bachelors, Masters, and sometimes even Ph.D.-granting colleges/universities that do not require an R1-level research agenda for the Full Professor rank.
And many students use "Professor" as a title for any instructor above the Highschool level, even for people who do not have the word "Professor" in their job title, such as ad juncts, full-time non-TT instructors, and sometimes even TAs.
No, it’s just a title. Directional State University will have professors because they have a status hierarchy and titles are a significant part of that, and the total compensation.
As I understand the US system for four year universities
TOP
Professor with an endowed chair
University or Full Professor
Associate Professor (They have tenure and time in position)
Assistant Professor (They don’t have tenure. This is their first job and they want tenure here.)
BOTTOM
Visiting Assistant Professor (They got denied tenure at a higher ranked university than they currently teach at and want tenure at that university or another one of similar rank.)
Adjunct Professor
Someone with a non-academic job, expertise or position who teaches a university course because they enjoy doing so. Also a deluded holder of a Ph.D. who thinks this is still a part of academia. It is not. That is why it is below the bottom. These people are highly qualified, poorly compensated casual labour, desperately clinging to hope of an academic career after this makes any sense.
Your characterization of adjuncts is unnecessarily harsh. Many simply enjoy teaching in a university environment and aren't "desperately clinging" to anything.
Adjunct lecturing has terrible working conditions and benefits. It is a hobby, not a job. No one should do it as a job. Anyone who treats it as a job should be dissuaded from doing so as forcefully as possible to prevent further suffering. If you have a spouse with a good job and insurance or a trust fund by all means do it as a hobby, even an especially engrossing one.
Anyone who describes themself as an adjunct professor as if it’s sonetbing other than a hobby should be encouraged to get a job that isn’t shit. Teaching high school is vastly less intellectually rewarding but the holidays are better and so is the insurance and the pension.
I looked into this in my state. Getting your foot in the door as a teacher in a public school would require someone with a PhD in say, mathematics, physics or computer science, to go back to grad school for a masters in education. Not sure that's an option, and is also ridiculous considering I just spent six years in grad school. You could do TFA as a backdoor, in many states, but that is probably an even worse deal for you physically and emotionally than being an adjunct.
I’m not saying it’s a good deal for anyone capable of getting a doctorate. It’s clearly superior to being an adjunct though. They’re low paid, insecure, highly qualified labour. Once you have a doctorate and you have two years on the job market without a tenure track job you’re done. You’re never getting a tenure track job and you’re better off getting the he’ll out. There are some exceptions but assuming you’ll beat the odds is a losing bet. Even those two years of adjuncting, doing teaching and research and hoping is a losing bet but it’s not an insane, fallacious waste. Sometimes people make it out. For all practical purposes no one makes it to tenured Professor, of whatever rank, after two years adjuncting.
Many states have backdoors that are regularly used to hire exceptional non-traditional candidates such as practicing Lawyers, experienced Engineers, and science/engineering PhDs (even PhDs in the humanities if the PhD is from a prestigious name).
But you need to get your resume in front of the right people -- namely, folks in the central office (or maybe principals) who view your area as a strategic/difficult hiring area. Easy peasy in CS these days...
My understanding is that private (k-12) schools pay dramatically less than (unionized) public schools. I've had family and friends who taught even at very expensive secular private schools, who then moved over to public school because the pay, pension and benefits were dramatically better.
I don't have hard numbers, but my impression from talking with family and friends is that you are much better off as an adjunct at a public college than as a k-12 teacher at even a prestigious private school or non-union charter school, though a union teaching job at a public k-12 school pays better and is much more stable than both.
In my experience, visiting assistant professors are often freshly-minted PhDs building up their portfolios before going on the job market “for real.” It’s like a postdoc but with much more emphasis on teaching.
Community college was one of the smartest moves of my life.
The IGETC program ensured that my education was equivalent to what I would have gotten at a UC as a freshmen and sophomore.
My teachers were mostly Stanford and Berkeley PHDs. They were dedicated to teaching. Not trying to balance research and teaching. 30 people per class, maximum. Arguably, I got a better education than UC students.
And obviously, cost. My mom raised me and my brother. On paper, we were rather poor. The financial grants for students from low-income families essentially paid for all costs. If I had been really savvy with my money, I actually could have saved a few grand each year.
I transferred to UC Berkeley after 2 years, right on time.
I have the same story. Except, I'm attending Harvard instead of Berkeley in the fall. Guess what, the credits still transfer. It's pretty jaw-dropping that the credits that cost me about $2k a semester will be used as a replacement for credits that cost $38k a semester.
Would you mind sharing some insight on what elite schools are looking for in transfer students? I'll be starting community college this fall and it's hard to picture what the criteria are for these schools with 1-2% transfer rates.
To be honest, I'm a vet and got lucky on that. The best way to think about transfer to an elite school is that you can only disqualify yourself with academic work. You should have a compelling essay about what you bring to their community, and apply to at least 4-5 schools. If you took time between high school and now, what did you do? If nothing, do you have a compelling reason to be back in school? If so, can you support this with evidence. Keep in mind that these schools see lots of essays about dreams. They prefer to see evidence of you having already moved the needle in that direction. I got denied from 4 schools, wait listed at 2, and into 2.
TLDR; Academic performance is necessary but not sufficient. Figure out why you're unique, what you can bring to their student body that they might not have, and kill the essay.
Currently going to a CC in the Bay Area and it's a huge relief seeing that my time in the junior college won't be a waste as some have made it out to be.
Just wanted to say I also went to CC in the Bay Area, and a few years out I am still very satisfied with the education I got. I’m now at my 2nd job as a Software Engineer... it’s not a waste of time!
Silicon Valley needs to get ahead of the curve: high school incubators!
Then some bright spark will come along and beat them to the punch: Jr High incubators!
We'll eventually have a system where you're born right into a desk, and a machine is hooked up to your head to suck all the originality, youth and zeal straight from the nape of your neck and provide it in pill form to people who have lost touch with reality, at the cost of your childhood, to those who can afford it.
Isn't that kind of what they do in sports? I know that they do a softer version of that, hooking very young kids to the coffee clubs' training schools and facilities, in order to change guarantee a constant supply of raw talent.
This is an interesting reaction to the "bootcamp" trend (and subsequent implosion).
I think it has a better chance of succeeding: you might not need four years of university education to become an entry-level developer, but a few weeks of intensive "bootcamp" training isn't enough.
It really depends on the prequisite knowledge that you have. If you're good in reading knitting patterns, it means you have a tack for algorithms. If you know propositional logic because you were a philosophy major, then if-statements are basically a syntactic difference and nothing else.
When I was a bootcamp instructor I noticed that my top students were able to pick up React Native or Electron without me teaching them. One student needed to learn the basics of Python, PHP and later on Java Spring Boot. He was capable of doing that.
For students that are in the lowest 33% I would agree, but for everyone above that there is a debate and for the top students it is not a question in my opinion. They are employable, even for different technologies. Of course, they still have a lot to learn, but they also have demonstrated they're capable of doing that making them an investment that's easily calculated whether he/she will be an asset or not.
As someone with experience teaching younger people (middle school students) programming, I have also seen this three-way split, though it may not be an even one.
1. Learners who will succeed, regardless of the amount and nature of instruction.
2. Learners who will not be able to grasp the material, due to lack of engagement, interest, self-efficacy, or some other related factors that cannot easily be fixed in a one-to-many classroom setting.
3. Learners who will succeed with the right kind of instruction, but will flounder without it.
Effective instructors try to gauge who falls into the third category, and then concentrating their efforts on these individuals.
As an enterprise boot camp instructor who taught the same fullstack web dev curriculum to career desktop application engineers at a big company, I saw this three-way split as well.
I think the other advantage is that at most community colleges you are required to branch out from technical topics and take at least a few humanities and liberal arts courses. You end up coming out slightly more well-rounded which can be hugely beneficial both career and life wise.
Is there actually good evidence on the value of a "well-rounded education"?
But in any case, I don't think shoe-horning general education into what is basically jobs training is the right approach. We put kids through 12 years of "general education", if we haven't succeeded at that point, why would a few more college credits help?
I’m not sure that knowing about Æthelred the Unready is particularly useful for most jobs, but if you think of these classes as (covertly) teaching critical thinking and writing skills, then perhaps they make some sense even if you don’t value knowing about the world beyond your particular specialization.
But are they actually teaching critical thinking successfully? And why would you need to wait until college for those effects to show up? The humanities classes are taught throughout regular schooling.
The community college where I teach has English 001C: Critical Thinking/Composition -- “This course presents the elements of critical reasoning and logic. Students will learn to identify the basic structures of arguments and the ways people use language to fortify or to falsify arguments. Students will analyze and demonstrate these techniques by writing and critiquing essays and using research strategies.”
So, does this course actually work at instilling critical thinking in students, outside the narrow classroom setting? Does this effect persist over the long term? Is it better or worse to teach this in the context of composition, or something more domain-specific, e.g. economics/government policy?
I feel like people making claims that education that students don't ask for is useful have the burden of showing that it is does what they say it will, empirically, and not get to hand wave about "critical thinking" or "well-roundedness".
Helps you pass the "Airport Test" If you have spent your uni years rote learning you not going to do very well.
If say you had been in the foot lights (Cambridge) got a blue or been on university challenge.
Our in a very interesting case when I worked at BT, been a under 21 international and had his foot blown off in the Balkan wars and been medevac'd to the UK
It varies, but students are typically required to do anything from half a year to one year of breadth courses outside their major, which would mean arts and humanities courses for those headed into technical disciplines. But many students take what are called AP courses in high school which count as college credits, and quite a few students are able to satisfy breadth requirements that way. And some narrow programs, such as engineering degrees, require next to no work outside the main field of study.
On the other hand, at some institutions one can satisfy the major minimally without a whole lot of courses, leaving plenty of time for non-technical courses.
So to summarize, there is a lot of variability. A US graduate in a technical discipline may have taken anywhere from zero to two years of arts and humanities courses.
Outside the USA and its cultural appendages, Canada, South Korea and the like, it is assumed that anyone who goes to university has studied the liberal arts at secondary/high school. Given the low quality of secondary education in the US in the formative period of its third level system this could not be assumed so what would in Europe be considered (grammar school) high school classes and subjects are taught at university.
The big differences in Universities between the US and Europe developed over a century ago and were the result of philosophical disagreements about what qualifies as a liberal education. It had nothing to do with poor quality secondary education.
Parts of the US have world class secondary education and parts don't--just like Europe. Even taken as a whole the US education system ranks higher than many countries in Europe.
>South Korea
The South Korean education system is nothing like the US education system. It's hard to think of a large country more different from the US in this regard.
The US doesn't have "low standards", it has broader access to liberal arts education than Europe. It ends universal secondary education at grade 12, so the grade 13 (at college) completes the "liberal arts" foundation. European countries simply do grades 12 and 13 in a separate school between secondary school and university, for students that weren't forced out after grade 11.
Perhaps this is a bit unrelated, but when I was in High School I participated in a program called A+ which provided HS graduates with free tuition for any community college in the state. The program was very easy to complete - I believe it was about 50 hours worth of tutoring sessions with kids at your school. When I graduated in 2003, I ended up getting 3 years of free Community College as long as my GPA was above 3.5. This was a fantastic way for me to save money. I even milked the 3rd year just to take up courses I found interesting, but had nothing to do with computer science. As far as I know this program is still offered in several states.
I took a circuitous route to a Yale PhD as a high school dropout entering a community college as a ‘mature student’ (Canadian term). In general the teaching at CC was much better with smaller classes. Many of the instructors really enjoyed teaching and were not burdened by research. Of course university has it’s own magical appeal, but for me it was the perfect on ramp.
Was inspired to take up programming by a community college teacher. I attended his lectures 8 years back. He kept insisting we learn how to program our TI calculators and said programming was a vital skill. I was scared of breaking my laptop if I downloaded software. Downloaded R as a result of the confidence I felt from the success with the TI. Went on to do a second masters focusing on data. From a math class for kicks to a career change! All thanks to the inspiration from a community college teacher.
One of my biggest regrets in life is how dismissive I was of community college back when I was applying to schools as a teenager. If the school didn't have "university" as part of the title, then I wasn't interested.
I went to a university, paid a ton of money, dropped out, and then found work as an engineer. If I had done community college, I would have probably gotten the same quality of education, but not have to spend the first year and a half of my post-dropout years paying back loans.
I find it very unfortunate that university is so expensive in the US. I grew up in a country where university education is mostly free and even students from low-income families get to go to best universities. I don't get how US cannot get university education cheaper.
I think community colleges are great, but they also are used to reframe the issues away from the real problems and solutions:
First, employers are only interested in what you can do for them, immediately. They are not interested in you or the rest of your life either 'horizontally' (the very many other aspects of your life, from individual to parent to citizen to homeowner to intellectual to whatever) or vertically (the rest of your life after you work for them, after you retire, if you get sick, have kids, go to grad school, etc.). For example, many employers will repeat the trendy mantra that all you need is community college skills, but they won't hire you for management without an MBA.
Second, the distribution of education is not based on capability and need, but on the wealth of parents. Wealthy kids without academic talent or effort get 4 year degrees or more; poor kids who are smart and work hard get community college or less. It's just as good, the wealthy people say, but somehow not good enough for their kids or to hire or pay well.
Finally, the demand for 4 year college is overwhelming, which we can see based on the ability to raise tuition without impacting attendance. The demand in the labor market is overwhelming, based on salary differences. Let's meet the demand and stop finding second rate substitutions.
I don't understand your argument. You can get an MBA after community college. MBA programs are for people who already have work experience.
College tuition increases astronomically due to bad govt subsidies and poorly--financially-educated teenagers making purchasing decisions.
Community colleges aren't "second-rate" compared to the plethora of for-profit and low-quality private universities.
2-year Community colleges are a stepping stone to 4-year degrees.
Do poor kids deserve better K-12 education so they can succeed in the same 4-year programs that rich kids do? Sure, but colleges can't fix that. It's crazy to also deny college education to kids just because they already got screwed over in K-12.
I wonder if you can get an MBA that's worth anything. I doubt any top tier program accepts many CC students.
> College tuition increases astronomically due to bad govt subsidies and poorly--financially-educated teenagers making purchasing decisions.
They are due to making tuition more market-priced, and according to research I've read, due to a reduction in public funding. It's also due to colleges raising tuition rather than focusing on their mission of educating people; nobody is forcing them.
> It's crazy to also deny college education to kids just because they already got screwed over in K-12.
Nobody suggested that. I said quality college education availability should be expanded.
Behind the curve; not up to date on the latest tech advancements. This is common criticism of the "lower-tier" schools generating "business process automation" coders for old industries like healthcare and manufacturing.
My first CC programming course (early 80's) was in Fortran (probably because of that mainframe they had chilling in the server room,) but I had several others on micros (TRS-80!) I have found being exposed to multiple environments helpful in the time since then.
I don't think so. Having a degree from CC marks you as from the lower class. Upper level and prestigious positions tend to be filled with people just like those already there. There was a good study on this http://www.asanet.org/journals/ASR/Dec12ASRFeature.pdf
I don’t agree with this speaking from experience in the tech industry, which is the focus of article. I went to CC. I work right along side folks with all kinds of prestigious backgrounds, and we’ve earned eachother’s respect based on performance on the job. My education label hasn’t hurt my ability to get the jobs (or salaries) I’ve wanted, either.
The trend I’ve noticed is that the more senior of a role we interview for the less and less we even look at their education. Much more comes from their work history.
While the study is possibly applicable to the jobs they studied (lawyer / business roles), I’m not sure it holds up in all sectors.
If the last 50 years have taught us anything it's that the middle class will be pushed lower, the lower class will be pushed lower still and the upper class will take all the winnings.
The economy has been a zero sum game for the majority for a very long time, so zero sum game strategies is what they employ.
That was my first thought - companies are just looking for people who consider themselves (or can be embarrassed into thinking of themselves) as “lesser” and are willing to accept lower paychecks in return.
"Elite Professional Service Firms" is not he tech industry. In the tech industry, people can get ahead by doing good engineering work, mostly regardless of background. In "Elite Professional Services", no productive work is being done, just PR and marketing and CYA-management for clients.
I'm having a similar though tangential reaction: is this trend saying something about the four year degree against changing demands for talent? I don't know but if I've long argued that if the Associates degree in the US was valued as something more than just "doorway to a BA/BS", the talent "shortage" (sarcastic quotes intentional) would probably disappear overnight.
As someone who's attended a community college both in my undergraduate career and again in preparation for grad school, this is something I think about quite a bit. Overall I'm pretty happy with my experiences studying at community college, and I'm of the mind that for most subjects, you can get a good education there. While I think it might be possible to get a decent education in preparation for a software development career at _some_ community colleges (like the technically-focused ones mentioned in the article), I suspect that's not the case generally. I think that has to do with two things:
One, part of the problem is that I've found "computer science" and "software development" get shoved under the umbrella of the "computer technology" departments of community colleges, rather than the math or engineering departments. Consequently there's a sense that software development is an extension of IT rather than an engineering practice. That might be true in a lot of settings (e.g. making VB widgets), but I'm not sure it's great for producing generalist developers. Frankly, I think it also lends to unqualified people leading departments, hiring instructors, and designing a curriculum. Anecdotally, one semester I took a discrete math class (through the math department) and a data structures class (through the CIS department); I ended up learning a lot more about data structures in the math class, and the programming project I did for the math class was much more instructive than any of the projects in the CIS class.
Two, across all institutions (boot camps, community colleges, universities) there doesn't seem to be a coherent curriculum on how to teach this stuff [1]. With math, english, economics, etc. the lower division classes are basically the same everywhere. Even if you think the way we teach subjects is kind of weird (as I do with math), everyone knows what "Calc II" means, or what's taught in an intro to microeconomics course. With software, there's no consensus on where to begin. Is it an infusion of theory and practice ala the SICP-based courses (MIT and Berkeley)? Intro to programming (Stanford)? A class where you learn how to use an office suite (a lot of community colleges)? Git and HTML/CSS (bootcamps)? [2] As a result, it's not surprising that individual classes don't line up. Maybe this is fine for the case where students will only ever study at one school, but for a lot of students indenting on transferring to a university (or anyone trying to evaluate a curriculum) it's quite cumbersome.
Not being an educator (and being mostly self-taught for software development), I'm not sure what the best approach is. Personally, I think a combination of theory/assignment based classes supplemented with longer-term project courses is probably the way to go. The former helps in presenting a general area or class or problems, and how to solve them, and the latter might help with exposure to the diversity of practical software development.
[1] I say "stuff" intentionally. Even the scope of "software development" is huge and hazy
[2] I could be wrong with the specifics on schools here :)
Your second point deserves a caveat: CS does mean something at colleges/universities. they almost all follow the ACM model curriculum:
- CS I -> CS II -> Data Structures
- Discrete Math and Calculus I
- A smattering of available electives from a few fairly uniform buckets (SE,DB,OOP; OS,PL; ML/AI; theory,algorithms).
Contents of courses change (true in Math also! Biz Calc vs. Eng Calc vs. Honors/Advanced Calc). But overall shape stays the same. Can't guarantee outcomes, but can guarantee intent.
Unlike colleges/universities, at the national level, CCs have a serious cruft issue in CS/IT. It's totally impossible to tell what someone might know from the name of the degree program alone. Not even overall shape of curriculum is obvious.
IMO there's a simple solution: CCs nation-wide should pare down everything into a few specific named degrees:
1. Associates in CS Foundations: basically ACM without electives. Designed for transfer to a BA/BS.
2. Associates in Software Development: the non-math portion of ACM + some pragmatic courses (e.g., databases and web dev). Can have various version of this marketed as "AS in SD with Emphasis in ___" where ___ is chosen according to local/regional labor market. E.g., most bootcamps are somewhat like "AS in SD with an Emphasis in Web Development using <stack here>".
3. Associates in Information Technologies: catch-all for the stuff that doesn't even fulfill the non-math, non-elective portion of the ACM model. So "VBA scripting", "Networking aka CISCO certs", "Database Administrator aka Oracle&MS certs", "Applications aka MS Office+Web publishing", etc. degrees currently offered by CCs. Again, various versions can be marketed as "AS in Information Technologies with Emphasis in ___"
These issues might not be recognizable to folks in states like California with amazing CC systems, but in most of America, just figuring out which of the half dozen similar-sounding "IT/CS" associates degrees you want is a serious problem. And very often the answer is "none" because all gazillion of them fit into bucket #3 and you're really looking for bucket 1 or 2.
You don't really need an associates in CS foundations, since all the "CS" part of CS is upper level (except for the most advanced students who start elite Bachelors universities with 1-2 years of university coursework from high school). Just take some basic liberal arts math and intro programming during your AA, then you are ready to apply for CS Backelors program.
> Just take some basic liberal arts math and intro programming during your AA, then you are ready to apply for CS Bachelors program. You don't really need an associates in CS foundations
Well, you can say the same for pretty much every curriculum ever: "we don't need a named degree, just have students figure out what courses they need to take".
Concretely, here's what happens in practice. A student does not know what to take and tells their counselor they are interested in transferring into a four-year CS degree.
So student then ends up in:
- standard college prep courses (Algebra, Calc, and liberal artsy stuff), and
- some totally random stuff for the CS part. Might be programming. Might be VBA (won't transfer) or Java (might transfer). Might be a CISCO prep course. Who knows! And unless the student knows and fights, they end up wasting time.
Making a separate track that's explicitly "pre-college CS" avoids this confusion. And after all, part of the value add of a formal education is that someone who knows what you need to know organizes the curriculum for you.
So what you say is true, but there are still strong advantages for both the student and the institution to having a separate, explicit pre-college track.
If you just want to reduce the bill for college, you can test out of a bunch of requirements for graduation for nominal fees. Even cheaper than community college. https://clep.collegeboard.org/
Also some people get married to get better financial aid...
Sounds like regular college students are too expensive for the tech companies because they have a hard floor below which they will not work. Having a cursory look that is due to student loans being easier to service if you're unemployed than employed at a low -relative to the cost of living- wage.
So now they are looking for a pool of labor that will take even lower salaries.
Expect the vulture capitalist friends to pump up community college prices in the next decade.
The big issue I have had when I went from Community College to a four year college is that some of your credits don't transfer which means more time spent in College.
That's generally because (some of) the course work is too low-level /remedial. If you aren't ready for university at high school graduation, then you need to take the extra time. If you are ready, you need to challenge yourself at the rate that university students do if you want to keep up (which may need some good advising that is hard to find, point granted).
10 years ago, this allowed for earning an engineering degree for $2k a year, or $8-10k.
In my experience, community colleges were very much viewed as remedial. I’d guess that many of the classes were taken by students who had failed the equivalent class at university.
I took Physics at both the community college and university (I was afraid that the community college class would not prepare me for later classes). The differences were stark: At university, lecture was 3x a week by the professor (who did not speak English), recitation by a TA (who did not speak English), and lab by another TA. There were 3 sections with 400 students per section. The professor had one hour of office hours for all 400 students in my section. At community college, my professor lectured, ran the lab, ran recitation. He went to a top 5 school, was an American, and was a great teacher. The class had 2 sections of 30 students. He ran weekend reviews for tests, if needed, and had open office hours all day. His tests were very difficult and required mastery of the subject matter.
I dropped the university class after I realized it was of much lower quality than what I had already received, for 1/5th the price, no less.