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Google's Plan to Disrupt the College Degree Is Absolute Genius
- Animats 6y agoThe current offerings are: - Data Analyst - Project Manager - UX Designer - IT Support Specialist I wonder how specific to Google products those courses are. It sounds like Google's answer to Microsoft Certified Microsoft Product Fixer certifications. It's just courses on Coursera for $49/month.
- raverbashing 6y agoOh yes, let my project be managed by someone with a 6 mo course. I'm sure that will work just fine
- 0_gravitas 6y agoSix months of onboarding is plenty of time to form someone you'd want to keep around.
- raverbashing 6y agoNo. Not because of the project management side (which ok, can be a long and specialized career by itself) but by the side of "how do you have someone manage something they don't know how it works" (which is needed in smaller projects)
- farfegnoogin 6y agoFor the IT Support Specialist, really none at all is specific to Google products. The major focus is Windows and Linux. When mobile devices are discussed both Android and iOS are treated in equal measure. ChromeOS is mentioned but never used really. A lot of the questions and examples mention competing products like Office365, they don't mention G Suite at all that I remember. The brief cloud section is pretty general and doesn't discuss GCP in specific. I see it as an abbreviated version of A+, Net+, and Sec+ in one. For someone at a beginner level I think it's a pretty good introduction to IT support.
- dredmorbius 6y agoProducts ... or internal tooling and processes. There'sba long history of dominant monopolies structuring pedagogy and business skills training to their own internal ops, dating to DuPont, GM, AT&T, IBM, Xerox, Microsoft, Cisco, etc., etc., etc.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoWhat I've been wondering is, if these kinds of programs succeed, how do we ensure a smooth transition to the new career paths at the high school level? I worry that we're going to enter (or maybe have already entered!) a long period of bifurcation, where most schools continue to teach kids they'd better go to college even as college increasingly sets them up for failure.
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- hizxy 6y agoRace to the bottom.
- gostsamo 6y agoIs there such a term as "edmill"? A process of mass producing cheap labor for low-paid positions. This post just smells of hype and marketing for something like that.
- rokobobo 6y agoI think back in the Soviet-influenced days of my country, people went to college knowing which job they'll be assigned at graduation. I guess this is the modern day PTUs? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_technical_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_technical_school
- gostsamo 6y agoSoviet block country here as well. However, profession training schools are not communist invention and have their place in educating people for useful jobs. At least, I don't know how to build a high-quality bathroom and I don't think that people who can should not be valued less than someone who can make a terrible electron app. My UX in the former is much better tbh. :) My issue is that this stuff now pretends to substitute for colleges which is totally different category. Six months of youtube videos are just professional training for office workers of the disposable type, not the creative/problem-solving variety that needs broad understanding of the field.
- rokobobo 6y agoI agree with you about PTUs having their place in planned and free market economies alike. I think you’re saying that if people have the option to go to a good “traditional” school and learn CS there (and meet a bunch of students and professors, etc), they shouldn’t throw away that option for something like this, is that right? On the other hand, I feel like there are plenty of people who have either graduated with a humanities degree or simply do not have the ability to go to a good technical school: I would hope that this provides a new on-ramp for people like that, and it actually adds value to people’s lives. Even though as most people here have stipulated, this seems commercially motivated by Google’s interests.
- EFruit 6y agoI don't trust a company like Google to act in its students' and certificate holders' best interests. It's not hard to imagine that the certifications will all be tied back to a Google account that they can terminate at any time, at their discretion. On a more Google-y note, I wouldn't want to get an email in five years telling me that they're sunsetting their online certificate verification portal, meaning no one can actually trust my claims as a certificate holder.
- viraptor 6y agoThis is only a problem for a specific implementation. You can skip the online verifier for example by handing out a certificate-signed PDF. Until we see the actual implementation or plan, there's no need to criticise the potential ones. Thought exercise: how do employers verify certificates currently, and how would they do it if your college shut down? In my experience, it's "they don't" and "they couldn't". It's both a bit more and less tricky with jobs that require recognised certification - there will be likely a nationally issued certification which matches your education one.
- blackflame7000 6y ago> "there's no need to criticise the potential ones." Why not? There might be people on these forums who could take note.
- EFruit 6y agoI agree, my speculation is just that: speculation. I sincerely hope they can come up with a generic, decentralized way to verify professional credentials, as that could bolster certification's viability as a career path. Elsewhere in tech, Cisco's certifications come with a sort of verification code which you can punch in to their site to check (in addition to the paper trail from Pearson and the physical certificate they mail you). If it weren't such a long-running part of their business, I'd be equally skeptical about them maintaining the certification infrastructure, as it's wildly tangential to the business of building networking equipment. As to the question of what a potential employer would do if Cisco (or Google, or a college, or a bootcamp) did shut it down their verification systems? I couldn't say, I've never hired anyone, nor have I had HR breathing down my neck to check off position requirements.
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- goatherders 6y agoCollege in the USA is an economic plague on young people. This most certainly can't be as bad.
- thehappypm 6y agoExcept that’s completely untrue. College degrees are well worth the investment — the earning potential increases of having a college degree vastly dwarf tuition costs. When people are young, debt is a problem, but those same people continue to see (exponential) income growth over the course of their careers and eventually beat the debt, and then some. Folks without degrees struggle with income growth.
- hamandcheese 6y agoThis is just... not true? At least not among anyone I’ve ever known who didn’t go to school for CS, law, or med school.
- thehappypm 6y agostudy backing me up: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/06/despite-rising-costs-college-is-still-a-good-investment.html https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/06/despit...
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoThis would be a more persuasive argument if graduates weren't faced with an entire horizon of corporations, that aren't very interested in candidates w/o job experience.
- aaxxaab 6y agoSome college degrees are worth the investment. The productization of college degrees being offered by second-rate institutions has created a race to the bottom. I see many young people graduating with little in the way of employable skills with (usually non-STEM) degrees that are merely a piece of paper that they paid tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars for. I was one of those people. It took me years of grinding away at entry level jobs and self-learning in my spare time to create income growth. When I look back, I wonder why even have gone to school at all? All the skills I learned were on the job or were through knowledge I knew I needed to learn to get to the next level in my career. Could I have made better choices with my degree? Sure. If I could do it over, I would. The common narrative is what you have said above, any Bachelors degree == good. I think the reality is much different for many of us.
- pkage 6y agoI question the depth of education you can receive from a six-month course set as opposed to a full four-year undergraduate experience. This feels like the same kind of marketing you saw from Flatiron School or one of those other coding bootcamps, but with a larger name attached. Cynically, I'd say that Google is just trying to increase the number of qualified individuals to fill grunt-work positions so they can pay each employee less.
- FpUser 6y agoThere is not much to question here. If you look at the list the positions listed are not rocket science type and basics of each can be squeezed into 6 month. Problem is that the result is most likely very narrow skilled individual with not much future unless of course they keep learning.
- F_J_H 6y ago>>...individual with not much future unless of course they keep learning This is now true no matter what level of education. Just need to start somewhere, and this is a great option for those without access to funds or the desire to take on the crippling debt increasingly associated with a 4 year degree.
- hardwaresofton 6y agoWhile much of the full four-year undergrad experience is full of other priorities (ex. socialization, networking), there is usually a lot slow learning and almost traumatic adaptation that happens that I'm convinced can't happen on a shorter time frame. Being in a competitive learning environment with colleagues and resources specialized to help learning is hard to replicate. Many of the biggest and most interesting ideas require you to sort of soak your brain in them. Unrelated to the four year undergrad experience, coding bootcamps and the like that are 3 month and 6 month courses do not work for building deep knowledge for complete beginners -- IIRC their most common usage was for people already in tech to make a change to different specializations. I think the claims that Flatiron School or a bunch of other coding bootcamps sold is basically fraudulent -- it would take over 6 months of high quality practice just to get a handle on HTML, CSS and Javascript, but they throw random new programmers into HTML, CSS, then JS by way of React (and sometimes even rails/backend stuff). Deep, stable knowledge is not built that way. > Cynically, I'd say that Google is just trying to increase the number of qualified individuals to fill grunt-work positions so they can pay each employee less. This is exactly what they're trying to do. I guess I could think about it as trying to vertically integrate employee education. This is also what Flatiron School and those other coding bootcamps were trying to do as well IMO, as well as getting at some of the funding that was made available for those efforts. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though -- while people in those positions might see a drop in salary (or rather a slowing of growth in salary), more people with those kinds of skills is probably a net positive.
- blackflame7000 6y agoHalf the classes they make you take at universities are worthless anyways. They're just there to keep you 4 years and get more money. A CS major doesn't need to learn about Greek Mythology.
- viraptor 6y agoThat sounds like a strawman. Does any CS major require Greek mythology?
- ryandrake 6y agoI don’t know how it is today but when I went, you had to take a certain number of credits in humanities, social sciences, etc, no matter what your major was. So while they didn’t specifically mandate “Greek Mythology,” they mandated a certain number of credits from courses in that bucket, which stretched the time commitment for the degree at least a year from what it would have been if I focused on just my major requirements.
- viraptor 6y agoCS requires some humanities and CS requires mythology is pretty different. And ideally CS would include some relevant topics for understanding how tech can inadvertently mess up people's lives.
- cratermoon 6y ago> ideally CS would include some relevant topics for understanding how tech can inadvertently mess up people's lives I saw this elsewhere on HN and thought it was worth bringing to this thread. https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-young-stanford-graduate-tried-to-teach-me-about-life-it-didnt-go-well/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-young-stanford-graduate-trie...
- anonymoushn 6y agoI would have preferred Greek mythology to art history, which I took to meet a requirement of my CS major.
- wyxuan 6y agoGreat idea as the article notes, subpar execution. I took a similar format course offered by IBM in data science on Coursera, and my goodness, I found a lot of pure junk work in the peer review process. Either that, or it was straight up copy and pasted from somewhere else online. Online classes might definitely work, but they need more iterations to make it work.
- adventured 6y agoA comprehensive implementation of something akin to the German vocational training system is what the US needs. It has been discussed across the political spectrum. The US needs to finally take concerted action toward this, with big investment behind it. It was widely floated as an approach a few years ago by Benioff (and countless others) and the government made some basic motions in that direction: https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/trump-wants-to-create-5-million-apprenticeships-in-5-years-because-marc-benioff-.html https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/trump-wants-to-create-5-mi... It's not nearly enough. The government has to go a lot bigger to make a dent in a job market the size of the US.
- robomartin 6y agoI see a lot of negativity in this thread. What’s wrong with Google giving a bunch of people a taste and the opportunity to grow? I prefer to believe in the ability of people to reach beyond their station in life. Sometimes all they need is inspiration. If Google can provide that it’s great.
- farfegnoogin 6y agoI don't get the negativity either. For someone with experience they could do it essentially for free if they have time and form their opinion that way. They even give people a $150.00 cash card if they commit to completing the course in X number of months. Overall, as I posted elsewhere I think the IT one is a pretty good intro to the subject, definitely best for people who have some skills and passion for the topic tho.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThe concern is whether Google actually is giving them an opportunity to grow. As was mentioned downthread, most existing training certificate programs offer no real growth and exist only to create a stagnant job pool in service of the commercial interests of the company issuing them. I'm optimistic that this program will be different, but I understand why someone who distrusts Google might be concerned.
- robomartin 6y agoStrictly speaking, neither Google nor any other single entity is responsible for giving anyone any opportunity of any kind; to work, learn, grow, etc. That they do is is very cool. From my experience, the best people at anything (it doesn't have to be coding, anything in life) are those who caught a glimpse of something that resonated with them and, from that point forward, could not let it go. In other words, from my perspective, the opportunity to grow is created by the person, not by external actors. Here's a simple example: How often the children of very rich people end-up being complete losers? They don't lack resources at all. They don't lack opportunity at all. What they lack is hunger, exposure, discipline, struggle and that something that creates that spark that inspires so many to excel. This is why I said that what Google is doing is great. You don't need to put people through a full CS curriculum for them to be useful and, more importantly, to change their lives. What they do with the experience and insight after that is up to them.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoThe author seems to exist in a permanent state of enthusiasm, for mega corps and their corpy things. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=Justin+Bariso https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=Justin+Bariso Just an observation.
- judge2020 6y agoI took the IT Support Specialist in early 2019 and it only took 1 week of dedicated video watching and test-taking to do (I did this so that I wouldn't need to pay the Coursera membership fee) (but that was because I already had a strong background in IT support/troubleshooting, software development, cybersecurity, and was intermediate in networking). I feel like the course is solid for explaining the concepts that it talks about, but I can't attest to how well it works for people with very little experience in IT.
- grugagag 6y agoYou solidified your knowledge with your prior experience. Without practice one may potentially get good scores on tests but can't magically skip the practice. Learning takes time
- Jimmc414 6y agoThe author doesn't seem to understand how supply and demand work. Unless there's about to be a massive increase in the availability of these jobs, this is going to create a bubble that will reduce these salaries and lower the skill level in these positions.
- robjan 6y agoIt doesn't push down salaries but does increase the signal to noise ratio when it comes to hiring and therefore the cost of talent acquisition. In influx of bootcamps in my area caused something similar with Software Engineers. We didn't want to automatically exclude people from these institutions but we ended up having to.
- Jimmc414 6y agoIf you had not excluded them do you believe it would have pushed down salaries?
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- 0x008 6y agoYay more gate-keeping!
- bassman9000 6y agoA new chapter in the SV Neofeudalism saga. More dependency on large corporations, on yet another aspect of life.