11 ms·

That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor

That's really no different than any university. A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The signaling factor is as important as the education, often times. Bootcamps are this weird space where, because they're so short and so expensive, even the most legitimate are considered mediocre by most employers because you can only teach so much in three months. So you can make it a year long, but then do you charge $40-80k up-front? No one has that kind of money.

bovitclan 9y ago
> A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The difference between the people who go to Harvard and those that don't has much more to do with money. Hire people with this assumption at your own peril.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Born Stanford and Harvard provide very generous financial aid packages to those that "get in" but aren't rich. The problem is getting in requires a lot of prep and achievement long before the college application is submitted, and that's where the rich get their leg up. And at the end of the day, that is still worth something to employers.
  - bovitclan 9y ago
    The claim is not that colleges provide no value, but that going to college is not a reliable indicator of anything but privilege. Using it as an indicator of intelligence or work ethic, especially as being more intelligent and hard working than someone who got their degree from University of Phoenix, doesn't work. It's just buying into the narrative that rich people must be rich because they're smart.
    - twobuy 9y ago
      I think the parent comment was referring to Harvard/Stanford's need-blind admissions & full financial aid packages.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  I'm glad someone said it. Merit= very short bootstraps. This is a much denied truth here in the US, where everyone is so desperate to believe in our national mythology of anyone who works hard can do anything and be anything they want to. This myth can't even carry an aroma of truth these days. No one who has "achieved" anything ever wants to get real and admit how they really got it--- they'd rather tell you and themselves a great American tall tale. Becase if it isn't earned, if it isn't "merit" in any real sense, then what? Then does everyone have a right to opportunity? Yeikes. We don't have enough opportunity for that. Instead, we avoid facing these issues by focusing on "diversity" now... but only a certain very narrow definition of diversity, and only when we want to raise ourselves above others of merit for being so meritorious as to think of diversity. Then, we wonder if "diversity" has made us less competitive. The only answer here is money. Money. That's it.
  - chronic6a5 9y ago
    > The only answer here is money. Money. That's it. Exactly. I'm rich. I didn't even work that hard; it was mostly inherited. I "bought" my way through Stanford/Harvard and learned far more than my peers, solely because I had money to pursue side projects and could hire experienced PhD tutors. I feel bad for those without enough money. With that said, I will do everything in my power to keep this status quo, whether that means donating to lobbyists or tricking others into suboptimal life decisions. Any poor person would do the same (in fact they already do with their other non-monetary resources such as time). This is absolutely not fair but that is the reality. I'm not going to shoot myself in the foot by making the playing field more fair.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    I absolutely agree with what you are saying, but I also believe most hugely successful people who work, work (or worked early in their careers) just as hard as anyone else, they just happen to be working at the right thing with the right people. Of course once you are successful, you can hire people to do most of the work for you while you just monitor. Finding the right thing with the right people is where the socioeconomic status comes in, particularly having a well connected family. On my graduation year, my university created a slogan, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Having just spend 5 years getting a degree from said university, I thought that wasn't a very good slogan for such an institution. It was absolutely correct though.
- smm2000 9y ago
  Works well for most companies that hire exclusively from top tier universities. They definitely miss out on some talent but unless they need thousands of engineers, they can find all talent they need from just a few top universities. Probably overpay 10k-40k/year for that privilege compared to equally skilled/smart people from other unis but it's chump change in overall employee cost. Also makes interviewing easier - rejecting 90-95% of applicants from lower tier state schools who could not fizzbuzz is not fun.
- morgante 9y ago
  Not really. Money helps to get in, but elite universities provide the most generous financial aid of any schools in the country. If you come from a anything below the middle class and get in, you likely won't pay a cent.
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    yes, money helps in so many ways. it sure does help you get in. It starts helping you when you are an infant. It helps the whole way. I know this because I worked in the tutoring idustry that helps people get in in exchange for money.
    - morgante 9y ago
      It helps, but it's certainly not the dominant effect. I don't know anyone who went to an elite university without significant baseline intelligence. I've seen so many students who still didn't do that well even after extensive, expensive tutoring. For example, SAT coaching only increases scores by around 50 points. [0] [0] https://www.jefftk.com/p/sat-coaching-what-effect-size https://www.jefftk.com/p/sat-coaching-what-effect-size
      - xiaoma 9y ago
        >" I don't know anyone who went to an elite university without significant baseline intelligence" Oh, I sure do. The strongest positive correlations I've noticed with elite schooling are conscientiousness, acquiescence to authority and then wealth, in that order. Intelligence is a relatively distant 4th place, thought it still correlates positively, IMO. PG actually wrote a whole essay on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html "...what we've found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it's negligible by comparison. We can learn more about someone in the first minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went to school."
        morgante 9y ago
GauntletWizard 9y ago
Gee, $40k per year? But with huge return on investment in education? Why don't we give people loans, and tie them to their future income? I smell a business opportunity.
- austenallred 9y ago
  Haha. Yeah I'm the founder of https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science - a computer science academy that's free up-front and takes a percentage of salary for two years after you get a job. The side benefit of this model instead of a loan is that if, by chance, you don't get a job in software engineering, you never pay anything. It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be. Also we're online, so you don't need to move anywhere (but still live instruction and world-class instructors).
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    but then one has to be affluent enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to do a mountain of pre-work and then get educated or re-educated, or for many in the USA, re-re-educated, and then one has to then afford to remain unemployed (bootcamps tend to go light on this part when recruiting) while looking for a place that wants to hire a bootcamp graduate.(hint: tough for diversity candidates here) These places are hard to find for many, even many who previously attended and paid for! an ivy school in a dying field. If this were such a wonderful model, and if we actually had a skills gap that needed filling, why aren't these hundreds of desperate and honorable tech employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves? If there were such a clamour for those with basic tech skills, why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months and months? Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students?
    - austenallred 9y ago
      We're not a bootcamp, but your points are well-founded. > But then one has to be $$ enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to get educated or re-educated You're right: Not everyone can afford to not work for six+ months. We don't have a perfect solution for everyone yet. But it's much easier for most Americans to find a way to stay alive for 6 months than it is for them to find $10,000 lying around. Basic subsistence, especially with a tiny bit of help from a safety net of some sort is generally close to within reach, and if it's not we don't have a way to help yet. For example, we had a student last week that has been living with a friend, and we learned she was so poor she couldn't afford a computer to code with, and had been using an old Android tablet and a cloud editor. We shipped her one, but for many "enough to stay alive" is much, much easier to find than some amount of cash. > If we actually had a skills gap that needed filling why aren't these employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves? Well, some do. Others have ridiculous recruiters' fees that are enough to pay for student tuitions. This is true not just of alternatives to higher ed, but of colleges. Why doesn't Google also become Stanford? Probably because that's a lot of work and what we have is close enough. To be clear, with regard to SWE, I don't think there's that big of a skills gap. It's not like there's a desperate shortage for junior rails semi-devs out there. But employers definitely hire folks and they definitely pay big recruiting fees and there's definitely demand. > Why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months? Other than the requisite time to get your first job (which is generally 3-6 months regardless), I haven't seen that any from tier one bootcamps struggling to find work for months. Probably three months on average, but that's pretty normal. Maybe we have a different understanding of "tier 1." > Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students? Because crappy bootcamps want to lie and make money. I mean look, there's ITT Tech, which is a complete rip-off for the vast majority of people, but that doesn't mean college in general is a bad thing for everyone. Somehow, though, that's how non-university programming academies get lumped together - one bad bootcamp? This entire idea must be horrible! As with everything, there are shades of grey.
KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
I don't know if this is accurate, but reading between the tea leaves it seems the commitment to diversity compromised their ability to signal their student quality. Their values are certainly laudable, but perhaps unprofitable. Maybe they would have been better off as a non-profit? It seems like rich and famous people would love to throw money to this initiative as a non-profit.
- austenallred 9y ago
  How diverse was charging $10k/head in New York City in the first place? Are we just talking about racial diversity? Seems like an awfully strange hill to die on.
  - Melchizedek 9y ago
    Diversity usually means diversity of race, sometimes gender and sexual orientation, hardly ever age or wealth, and never diversity of opinion.
  - fav_collector 9y ago
    I'm guessing not very diverse at all since most people had to float 6 months+ without income.
marcoperaza 9y ago
Another part of the value of a university is that they factor in SAT scores heavily into admissions. SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ. Hiring based on IQ tests is illegal, but hiring mostly from certain universities is not.
- learc83 9y ago
  It's not illegal, it's just considered defacto discrimination and you have to prove it's actually beneficial. There's no reason that you couldn't be sued the same way if you're only hiring from a certain university and that leads to excluding people from a protected class.
  - marcoperaza 9y ago
    You can use "disparate impact" doctrine to argue that just about anything is illegal. It's pretty hard to full proof yourself against that. But there's a big difference between something that existing legal precedent has ruled as strongly likely to be illegal for hiring (IQ testing), and a currently widespread hiring practice that may at some future date suffer the same fate (hiring from particular schools). The legal risk of the former is extremely high, while you would have to be extraordinarily unlucky to suffer damages from the latter. Even if the courts do so rule in the future, you'd have to win (lose?) the lottery and be the one or two companies that get taken to court in that test case.
  - drpgq 9y ago
    Interestingly the NFL uses the Wonderlic test.
- philipps 9y ago
  For those (like me) who immediately wondered if SATs correlate with socio economic status rather than IQ, this Slate article covers some of the debate about standardized tests and points to meta studies. SATs do track IQ and predict college success, but social emotional skills, grit, and other factors also count. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/04/what_do_sat_and_iq_tests_measure_general_intelligence_predicts_school_and.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

bovitclan 9y ago

> A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country. The difference between the people who go to Harvard and those that don't has much more to do with money. Hire people with this assumption at your own peril.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Born Stanford and Harvard provide very generous financial aid packages to those that "get in" but aren't rich. The problem is getting in requires a lot of prep and achievement long before the college application is submitted, and that's where the rich get their leg up. And at the end of the day, that is still worth something to employers.
- bovitclan 9y ago
  The claim is not that colleges provide no value, but that going to college is not a reliable indicator of anything but privilege. Using it as an indicator of intelligence or work ethic, especially as being more intelligent and hard working than someone who got their degree from University of Phoenix, doesn't work. It's just buying into the narrative that rich people must be rich because they're smart.
  - twobuy 9y ago
    I think the parent comment was referring to Harvard/Stanford's need-blind admissions & full financial aid packages.
brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
I'm glad someone said it. Merit= very short bootstraps. This is a much denied truth here in the US, where everyone is so desperate to believe in our national mythology of anyone who works hard can do anything and be anything they want to. This myth can't even carry an aroma of truth these days. No one who has "achieved" anything ever wants to get real and admit how they really got it--- they'd rather tell you and themselves a great American tall tale. Becase if it isn't earned, if it isn't "merit" in any real sense, then what? Then does everyone have a right to opportunity? Yeikes. We don't have enough opportunity for that. Instead, we avoid facing these issues by focusing on "diversity" now... but only a certain very narrow definition of diversity, and only when we want to raise ourselves above others of merit for being so meritorious as to think of diversity. Then, we wonder if "diversity" has made us less competitive. The only answer here is money. Money. That's it.
- chronic6a5 9y ago
  > The only answer here is money. Money. That's it. Exactly. I'm rich. I didn't even work that hard; it was mostly inherited. I "bought" my way through Stanford/Harvard and learned far more than my peers, solely because I had money to pursue side projects and could hire experienced PhD tutors. I feel bad for those without enough money. With that said, I will do everything in my power to keep this status quo, whether that means donating to lobbyists or tricking others into suboptimal life decisions. Any poor person would do the same (in fact they already do with their other non-monetary resources such as time). This is absolutely not fair but that is the reality. I'm not going to shoot myself in the foot by making the playing field more fair.
- Clubber 9y ago
  I absolutely agree with what you are saying, but I also believe most hugely successful people who work, work (or worked early in their careers) just as hard as anyone else, they just happen to be working at the right thing with the right people. Of course once you are successful, you can hire people to do most of the work for you while you just monitor. Finding the right thing with the right people is where the socioeconomic status comes in, particularly having a well connected family. On my graduation year, my university created a slogan, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Having just spend 5 years getting a degree from said university, I thought that wasn't a very good slogan for such an institution. It was absolutely correct though.
smm2000 9y ago
Works well for most companies that hire exclusively from top tier universities. They definitely miss out on some talent but unless they need thousands of engineers, they can find all talent they need from just a few top universities. Probably overpay 10k-40k/year for that privilege compared to equally skilled/smart people from other unis but it's chump change in overall employee cost. Also makes interviewing easier - rejecting 90-95% of applicants from lower tier state schools who could not fizzbuzz is not fun.
morgante 9y ago
Not really. Money helps to get in, but elite universities provide the most generous financial aid of any schools in the country. If you come from a anything below the middle class and get in, you likely won't pay a cent.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  yes, money helps in so many ways. it sure does help you get in. It starts helping you when you are an infant. It helps the whole way. I know this because I worked in the tutoring idustry that helps people get in in exchange for money.
  - morgante 9y ago
    It helps, but it's certainly not the dominant effect. I don't know anyone who went to an elite university without significant baseline intelligence. I've seen so many students who still didn't do that well even after extensive, expensive tutoring. For example, SAT coaching only increases scores by around 50 points. [0] [0] https://www.jefftk.com/p/sat-coaching-what-effect-size https://www.jefftk.com/p/sat-coaching-what-effect-size
    - xiaoma 9y ago
      >" I don't know anyone who went to an elite university without significant baseline intelligence" Oh, I sure do. The strongest positive correlations I've noticed with elite schooling are conscientiousness, acquiescence to authority and then wealth, in that order. Intelligence is a relatively distant 4th place, thought it still correlates positively, IMO. PG actually wrote a whole essay on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html "...what we've found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it's negligible by comparison. We can learn more about someone in the first minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went to school."
      - morgante 9y ago

GauntletWizard 9y ago

Gee, $40k per year? But with huge return on investment in education? Why don't we give people loans, and tie them to their future income? I smell a business opportunity.

austenallred 9y ago
Haha. Yeah I'm the founder of https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science - a computer science academy that's free up-front and takes a percentage of salary for two years after you get a job. The side benefit of this model instead of a loan is that if, by chance, you don't get a job in software engineering, you never pay anything. It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be. Also we're online, so you don't need to move anywhere (but still live instruction and world-class instructors).
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  but then one has to be affluent enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to do a mountain of pre-work and then get educated or re-educated, or for many in the USA, re-re-educated, and then one has to then afford to remain unemployed (bootcamps tend to go light on this part when recruiting) while looking for a place that wants to hire a bootcamp graduate.(hint: tough for diversity candidates here) These places are hard to find for many, even many who previously attended and paid for! an ivy school in a dying field. If this were such a wonderful model, and if we actually had a skills gap that needed filling, why aren't these hundreds of desperate and honorable tech employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves? If there were such a clamour for those with basic tech skills, why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months and months? Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students?
  - austenallred 9y ago
    We're not a bootcamp, but your points are well-founded. > But then one has to be $$ enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to get educated or re-educated You're right: Not everyone can afford to not work for six+ months. We don't have a perfect solution for everyone yet. But it's much easier for most Americans to find a way to stay alive for 6 months than it is for them to find $10,000 lying around. Basic subsistence, especially with a tiny bit of help from a safety net of some sort is generally close to within reach, and if it's not we don't have a way to help yet. For example, we had a student last week that has been living with a friend, and we learned she was so poor she couldn't afford a computer to code with, and had been using an old Android tablet and a cloud editor. We shipped her one, but for many "enough to stay alive" is much, much easier to find than some amount of cash. > If we actually had a skills gap that needed filling why aren't these employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves? Well, some do. Others have ridiculous recruiters' fees that are enough to pay for student tuitions. This is true not just of alternatives to higher ed, but of colleges. Why doesn't Google also become Stanford? Probably because that's a lot of work and what we have is close enough. To be clear, with regard to SWE, I don't think there's that big of a skills gap. It's not like there's a desperate shortage for junior rails semi-devs out there. But employers definitely hire folks and they definitely pay big recruiting fees and there's definitely demand. > Why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months? Other than the requisite time to get your first job (which is generally 3-6 months regardless), I haven't seen that any from tier one bootcamps struggling to find work for months. Probably three months on average, but that's pretty normal. Maybe we have a different understanding of "tier 1." > Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students? Because crappy bootcamps want to lie and make money. I mean look, there's ITT Tech, which is a complete rip-off for the vast majority of people, but that doesn't mean college in general is a bad thing for everyone. Somehow, though, that's how non-university programming academies get lumped together - one bad bootcamp? This entire idea must be horrible! As with everything, there are shades of grey.

KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago

I don't know if this is accurate, but reading between the tea leaves it seems the commitment to diversity compromised their ability to signal their student quality. Their values are certainly laudable, but perhaps unprofitable. Maybe they would have been better off as a non-profit? It seems like rich and famous people would love to throw money to this initiative as a non-profit.

austenallred 9y ago
How diverse was charging $10k/head in New York City in the first place? Are we just talking about racial diversity? Seems like an awfully strange hill to die on.
- Melchizedek 9y ago
  Diversity usually means diversity of race, sometimes gender and sexual orientation, hardly ever age or wealth, and never diversity of opinion.
- fav_collector 9y ago
  I'm guessing not very diverse at all since most people had to float 6 months+ without income.

marcoperaza 9y ago

Another part of the value of a university is that they factor in SAT scores heavily into admissions. SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ. Hiring based on IQ tests is illegal, but hiring mostly from certain universities is not.

learc83 9y ago
It's not illegal, it's just considered defacto discrimination and you have to prove it's actually beneficial. There's no reason that you couldn't be sued the same way if you're only hiring from a certain university and that leads to excluding people from a protected class.
- marcoperaza 9y ago
  You can use "disparate impact" doctrine to argue that just about anything is illegal. It's pretty hard to full proof yourself against that. But there's a big difference between something that existing legal precedent has ruled as strongly likely to be illegal for hiring (IQ testing), and a currently widespread hiring practice that may at some future date suffer the same fate (hiring from particular schools). The legal risk of the former is extremely high, while you would have to be extraordinarily unlucky to suffer damages from the latter. Even if the courts do so rule in the future, you'd have to win (lose?) the lottery and be the one or two companies that get taken to court in that test case.
- drpgq 9y ago
  Interestingly the NFL uses the Wonderlic test.
philipps 9y ago
For those (like me) who immediately wondered if SATs correlate with socio economic status rather than IQ, this Slate article covers some of the debate about standardized tests and points to meta studies. SATs do track IQ and predict college success, but social emotional skills, grit, and other factors also count. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/04/what_do_sat_and_iq_tests_measure_general_intelligence_predicts_school_and.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...