8 ms·

I didn't read the article that way (although it's clear many posters did). The author learned a lot independently. There's a question of what to do with that k

by blagie 5y ago

I didn't read the article that way (although it's clear many posters did). The author learned a lot independently. There's a question of what to do with that knowledge. A system like WGU does a few things: 1) Identify gaps and help fill them. Independent learners almost always develop gaps. One benefits from bringing that knowledge to a uniform "undergrad CS degree" level 2) Provide a certification once that's done. A traditional university degree takes 4 years, costs $200k, and has mixed quality. Being able to do 75% of that independently, and having an institution gap-fill for a few grand? That sounds awesome. For brand recognition, I don't see WGU as any better or worse than the 4500+ other random universities and colleges in the US. It doesn't match the top few hundred, but that's okay. Most don't. I'm not sure who would compare it to Phoenix, ITT Tech, DeVry, or other scams like that. I'd much more place WGU as more a competitor to ASU. ASU is awesome, and is really trying to pioneer models of innovative, quality, low-cost, scalable education. I hope one of them succeeds. By the way, yourself being a former WGU student, would you recommend WGU to a super-gifted kid? E.g. having someone start college there at e.g. age 13? That, plus CMU OMSCS, seems like something they could finish by age 17. Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early. Academically, middle / high school seems like a waste of time.

jwilber 5y ago
Doesn’t starting someone at 13 fly in the face of the whole “prerequisite experience learned on the job” bit?
- macksd 5y ago
  "on the job"? Most likely. But I spent a lot of time and money getting a degree from an accredited university, where I was bored the whole time and maxing out the number of credit hours they would let me take while also working as much as I could. Why? Because I could've aced the first 2 years of CS classes by the time I was 13. I would imagine that's not uncommon among people who grew up with a hacker mindset and had the resources to explore it. I surely had gaps in my knowledge - not saying I didn't learn anything from the college experience. But I would love to live in a world where I didn't feel like I would, at some point, be better off with an accredited 4-year degree just to get or keep a job in the first place.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  13 seems low, but I had 3 years of full time programming experience by the time I was 17. It's really important to note that I'm not particularly gifted. I was required to work "real jobs" over the summer starting at 15 and the only way to convince my parents that programming was a "real job" was to make as much as I could working at the community pool. After the first summer I kept working over the semesters nearly full time. I was doing freelance Perl CGI and PHP+HTML+JS junk. my main advantages were: 1) I could do piece work for $8/hr, (2) I presented professionally because I was usually the only native English speaker bidding on the project, (3) I was a single person doing full stack + sales/bidding (the competing offshore outfits mostly sliced up labor between backend, frontend, and sales due to language barriers and extremely low-skilled programming labor. For projects of the size I was bidding on this introduced a lot of expenses/overhead without any real advantages), and (4) I was available in US time zones when bidding on these projects. Even during the school year my after-school availability was way better than the offshore shops could usually offer, and I could answer emails during the school day. To reiterate: not a genius! Just a kid slinging super simple HTML+JS+SQL+PHP/Perl. I didn't even know SQL for real; I knew CREATE, SELECT (without joins), UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE. Joins were implemented using multiple queries and for loops. Didn't matter for my clients, who just wanted cheap CMSes/ordering systems/etc. for random folks' .com get rich quick schemes, pizza shops who thought they really needed a customer website, etc. I'm pretty sure grubhub/slice/google maps/social media destroyed my old market a decade ago ;) So a real genius getting there by 13 seems like an extreme outlier but not at all impossible.
suresk 5y ago
I think that is a pretty fair and accurate assessment of it. For me, with a lot of experience, the credential + filling in some gaps were what I really needed and the WGU degree was a great way to take care of both. As for recommending it to a super-gifted kid - I don't think the program is setup to allow that. You have to have a high-school diploma and at least a bit of work experience to even be admitted. I also think that one drawback of the program is that you can graduate without having written a ton of code, which is fine for someone who's been doing it for a long time, but less ideal for someone who hasn't?
- blagie 5y ago
  As two points: 1) A GED would be trivial for this kid. So the high school diploma, I'm not worried about. 2) Kid started doing (real, not Scratch) programming in 1st grade. I'm not worried about coding experience or computer science background. I am worried about software engineering background, but that could come later.
  - leoqa 5y ago
    I’d be more worried about social development. Of the small sample size of gifted people who didn’t want to be with their peers, how many have formed last relationships, friendships etc. We had obviously gifted kids in my school and they came across as arrogant and entitled. 15 years later, most of them went on to get graduate degrees but don’t seem to be progressing socially (i.e. absent from reunions, weddings, small town bar run-ins)
    - kingrazor 5y ago
      I'm not sure attending traditional school with chronological peers does all that much to improve that situation. I know very few people who are still friends with anyone from high school, for example. I only have two friends from high school that I even talk to anymore, and only one that I'm close with. I don't feel like attending a traditional school did much of anything to help me develop social skills, as I still struggle with those quite a bit even now.
  - 5y ago
cperciva 5y ago
Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early. Speaking as someone who went to university at 13: Socially I fit in better with my intellectual peers than my chronological peers. Which isn't to say that I fit in well... but at least there was a level of mutual respect. Few educators appreciate the social distance created by a large IQ gap, probably because they haven't experienced it themselves.
- freedomben 5y ago
  I think you nailed the key with "mutual respect." That to me is what distinguishes children from adults. Some people achieve it at age 12, others maybe never in life. I'd rather be around a mutually respectful 12 year old than a same-aged person who still thinks and acts like a child.
- smeej 5y ago
  Speaking as someone whose school administrators wanted me to start university by 13 but whose parents objected and held me back, being the same age as my chronological peers was meaningless and did not help me relate to them. The odds that an 18-22yo traditional college student will overlook a 5-9 year age gap because you share a lot of interests and can have interesting conversations are much higher than the odds that another 13yo will overlook the fact that you have no shared interests at all because hey, you're the same age. I found it extremely difficult to make friends until I got out from under the limiting influence of my parents who didn't want their kid to be "weird." Now I have a whole bunch of weird friends who are fascinating, joyful dorks, so it's not hopeless either way, but I'd have loved to experience this much sooner.
  - data_spy 5y ago
    Grass is always greener. You don't know the counterfactual and you would have likely been disappointed in your parents had they sent you to college early as well.
    - smeej 5y ago
      I'll let other people, like the parent comment, speak to their experiences. He, at least, doesn't seem to think my grass was greener. I do think listening to any of the professional educators who unanimously and repeatedly told my parents it would have been better to accelerate my path through school would have been a good idea.
triyambakam 5y ago
> Independent learners almost always develop gaps. I think that goes for any leanrer, independent or traditional. Ask a random sample of college graduates to lecture for an hour on their degree focus and you will see the evidence of this.
- randcraw 5y ago
  The purpose of national college accreditation standards (as ABET does for engineering) is to avoid those gaps. This is accomplished publicly by their specifying core courses and syllabi that span the competencies expected from anyone earning a given degree (BS, BA, etc). Accreditation leaves schools little wiggle room when creating compliant courses and content. By delivering on a base set of cores that span essential theory and skills, students and employers are assured that anyone who earns that degree in an accredited school will indeed possess a standard set of core skills and thus will not suffer from gaps. Accreditation is important, especially if the school is not well known nationally.
  - iratewizard 5y ago
    I've seen far more incompetence out of college educated engineers than autodidacts. I've seen far more time spent unteaching bad habits and bad ways of thinking for juniors. Computer science theory is mostly useless and only midwits who are wooed by theory would think otherwise. Big O notate the $80k on a degree you didn't need.
nnoitra 5y ago
A university doesn't cost 200K. Even in the US residents pay less than that and if you take into account community college for the first 2 years it's not really as absurdly expensive as it's made out to be. Please don't spread half-baked misinformation. >That, plus CMU OMSCS, seems like something they could finish by age 17. Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early. Academically, middle / high school seems like a waste of time. Apparently even high school is a waste of time. What's not a waste of time for you? Are you to be put directly as head of engineering at Tesla so that someone as gifted as you doesn't "waste" their precious time?
- raunak 5y ago
  Average 4-year private school would cost 200k, if not more if you're going to any private T100. Average person in this community also wouldn't go to CC.
  - nnoitra 5y ago
    Why wouldn't an average person in this community go to a CC? I understand there's some stigma for community colleges but you can get a great education without getting anywhere near 200K. Won't be Ivy League though. For example, Stony Brooks costs 10K in tuition per year for in-state residents.
    - Calavar 5y ago
      Stony Brook isn't a community college. It is a 4 year university. I do agree though that there are many great universities where you can get an education for a fraction of the $200k bill that top private colleges have.
- bombcar 5y ago
  4 years at a random WI university as a resident sets you back $60k. Swap that for a random CA university and we're at $150k (using their numbers!) If you focus on tuition alone it's cheaper, but room and board do add up, and if you come from out-of-state you're even worse off.
randcraw 5y ago
I know very few graduates of schools outside the "top few hundred" in the US who received thorough grounding in core skills unless they took the personal initiative to fill those gaps through self study. That's hardly a rousing endorsement for that track, if the student has to later plug the holes that a poor school left in their education. I have no personal experience with WGU or Phoenix or other online unis. But I've met a few folks who graduated from lesser schools (outside the top 200) on traditional campuses. Unless those kids were preternaturally bright and took the initiative to teach themselves (fill the gaps), they often face an uphill battle to recover from the poor preparation that an undemanding and incomplete academic program can inflict on 1) their ability to compete in those skills on the open market and 2) their passion for learning. IMHO, that's a high price to pay. My advice: don't cheap out on your education.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
> costs $200k Jesus. Is this how much CS degrees cost in America? I thought that price was only for Medicine :headexplode:

by blagie 5y ago

jwilber 5y ago

Doesn’t starting someone at 13 fly in the face of the whole “prerequisite experience learned on the job” bit?

macksd 5y ago
"on the job"? Most likely. But I spent a lot of time and money getting a degree from an accredited university, where I was bored the whole time and maxing out the number of credit hours they would let me take while also working as much as I could. Why? Because I could've aced the first 2 years of CS classes by the time I was 13. I would imagine that's not uncommon among people who grew up with a hacker mindset and had the resources to explore it. I surely had gaps in my knowledge - not saying I didn't learn anything from the college experience. But I would love to live in a world where I didn't feel like I would, at some point, be better off with an accredited 4-year degree just to get or keep a job in the first place.
throwawaygh 5y ago
13 seems low, but I had 3 years of full time programming experience by the time I was 17. It's really important to note that I'm not particularly gifted. I was required to work "real jobs" over the summer starting at 15 and the only way to convince my parents that programming was a "real job" was to make as much as I could working at the community pool. After the first summer I kept working over the semesters nearly full time. I was doing freelance Perl CGI and PHP+HTML+JS junk. my main advantages were: 1) I could do piece work for $8/hr, (2) I presented professionally because I was usually the only native English speaker bidding on the project, (3) I was a single person doing full stack + sales/bidding (the competing offshore outfits mostly sliced up labor between backend, frontend, and sales due to language barriers and extremely low-skilled programming labor. For projects of the size I was bidding on this introduced a lot of expenses/overhead without any real advantages), and (4) I was available in US time zones when bidding on these projects. Even during the school year my after-school availability was way better than the offshore shops could usually offer, and I could answer emails during the school day. To reiterate: not a genius! Just a kid slinging super simple HTML+JS+SQL+PHP/Perl. I didn't even know SQL for real; I knew CREATE, SELECT (without joins), UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE. Joins were implemented using multiple queries and for loops. Didn't matter for my clients, who just wanted cheap CMSes/ordering systems/etc. for random folks' .com get rich quick schemes, pizza shops who thought they really needed a customer website, etc. I'm pretty sure grubhub/slice/google maps/social media destroyed my old market a decade ago ;) So a real genius getting there by 13 seems like an extreme outlier but not at all impossible.

suresk 5y ago

I think that is a pretty fair and accurate assessment of it. For me, with a lot of experience, the credential + filling in some gaps were what I really needed and the WGU degree was a great way to take care of both. As for recommending it to a super-gifted kid - I don't think the program is setup to allow that. You have to have a high-school diploma and at least a bit of work experience to even be admitted. I also think that one drawback of the program is that you can graduate without having written a ton of code, which is fine for someone who's been doing it for a long time, but less ideal for someone who hasn't?

blagie 5y ago
As two points: 1) A GED would be trivial for this kid. So the high school diploma, I'm not worried about. 2) Kid started doing (real, not Scratch) programming in 1st grade. I'm not worried about coding experience or computer science background. I am worried about software engineering background, but that could come later.
- leoqa 5y ago
  I’d be more worried about social development. Of the small sample size of gifted people who didn’t want to be with their peers, how many have formed last relationships, friendships etc. We had obviously gifted kids in my school and they came across as arrogant and entitled. 15 years later, most of them went on to get graduate degrees but don’t seem to be progressing socially (i.e. absent from reunions, weddings, small town bar run-ins)
  - kingrazor 5y ago
    I'm not sure attending traditional school with chronological peers does all that much to improve that situation. I know very few people who are still friends with anyone from high school, for example. I only have two friends from high school that I even talk to anymore, and only one that I'm close with. I don't feel like attending a traditional school did much of anything to help me develop social skills, as I still struggle with those quite a bit even now.
- 5y ago

cperciva 5y ago

Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early. Speaking as someone who went to university at 13: Socially I fit in better with my intellectual peers than my chronological peers. Which isn't to say that I fit in well... but at least there was a level of mutual respect. Few educators appreciate the social distance created by a large IQ gap, probably because they haven't experienced it themselves.

freedomben 5y ago
I think you nailed the key with "mutual respect." That to me is what distinguishes children from adults. Some people achieve it at age 12, others maybe never in life. I'd rather be around a mutually respectful 12 year old than a same-aged person who still thinks and acts like a child.
smeej 5y ago
Speaking as someone whose school administrators wanted me to start university by 13 but whose parents objected and held me back, being the same age as my chronological peers was meaningless and did not help me relate to them. The odds that an 18-22yo traditional college student will overlook a 5-9 year age gap because you share a lot of interests and can have interesting conversations are much higher than the odds that another 13yo will overlook the fact that you have no shared interests at all because hey, you're the same age. I found it extremely difficult to make friends until I got out from under the limiting influence of my parents who didn't want their kid to be "weird." Now I have a whole bunch of weird friends who are fascinating, joyful dorks, so it's not hopeless either way, but I'd have loved to experience this much sooner.
- data_spy 5y ago
  Grass is always greener. You don't know the counterfactual and you would have likely been disappointed in your parents had they sent you to college early as well.
  - smeej 5y ago
    I'll let other people, like the parent comment, speak to their experiences. He, at least, doesn't seem to think my grass was greener. I do think listening to any of the professional educators who unanimously and repeatedly told my parents it would have been better to accelerate my path through school would have been a good idea.

triyambakam 5y ago

> Independent learners almost always develop gaps. I think that goes for any leanrer, independent or traditional. Ask a random sample of college graduates to lecture for an hour on their degree focus and you will see the evidence of this.

randcraw 5y ago
The purpose of national college accreditation standards (as ABET does for engineering) is to avoid those gaps. This is accomplished publicly by their specifying core courses and syllabi that span the competencies expected from anyone earning a given degree (BS, BA, etc). Accreditation leaves schools little wiggle room when creating compliant courses and content. By delivering on a base set of cores that span essential theory and skills, students and employers are assured that anyone who earns that degree in an accredited school will indeed possess a standard set of core skills and thus will not suffer from gaps. Accreditation is important, especially if the school is not well known nationally.
- iratewizard 5y ago
  I've seen far more incompetence out of college educated engineers than autodidacts. I've seen far more time spent unteaching bad habits and bad ways of thinking for juniors. Computer science theory is mostly useless and only midwits who are wooed by theory would think otherwise. Big O notate the $80k on a degree you didn't need.

nnoitra 5y ago

A university doesn't cost 200K. Even in the US residents pay less than that and if you take into account community college for the first 2 years it's not really as absurdly expensive as it's made out to be. Please don't spread half-baked misinformation. >That, plus CMU OMSCS, seems like something they could finish by age 17. Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early. Academically, middle / high school seems like a waste of time. Apparently even high school is a waste of time. What's not a waste of time for you? Are you to be put directly as head of engineering at Tesla so that someone as gifted as you doesn't "waste" their precious time?

raunak 5y ago
Average 4-year private school would cost 200k, if not more if you're going to any private T100. Average person in this community also wouldn't go to CC.
- nnoitra 5y ago
  Why wouldn't an average person in this community go to a CC? I understand there's some stigma for community colleges but you can get a great education without getting anywhere near 200K. Won't be Ivy League though. For example, Stony Brooks costs 10K in tuition per year for in-state residents.
  - Calavar 5y ago
    Stony Brook isn't a community college. It is a 4 year university. I do agree though that there are many great universities where you can get an education for a fraction of the $200k bill that top private colleges have.
bombcar 5y ago
4 years at a random WI university as a resident sets you back $60k. Swap that for a random CA university and we're at $150k (using their numbers!) If you focus on tuition alone it's cheaper, but room and board do add up, and if you come from out-of-state you're even worse off.

randcraw 5y ago

I know very few graduates of schools outside the "top few hundred" in the US who received thorough grounding in core skills unless they took the personal initiative to fill those gaps through self study. That's hardly a rousing endorsement for that track, if the student has to later plug the holes that a poor school left in their education. I have no personal experience with WGU or Phoenix or other online unis. But I've met a few folks who graduated from lesser schools (outside the top 200) on traditional campuses. Unless those kids were preternaturally bright and took the initiative to teach themselves (fill the gaps), they often face an uphill battle to recover from the poor preparation that an undemanding and incomplete academic program can inflict on 1) their ability to compete in those skills on the open market and 2) their passion for learning. IMHO, that's a high price to pay. My advice: don't cheap out on your education.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

> costs $200k Jesus. Is this how much CS degrees cost in America? I thought that price was only for Medicine :headexplode: