[HN Gopher] Students paid thousands for a Caltech boot camp that...
___________________________________________________________________
Students paid thousands for a Caltech boot camp that Caltech didn't
teach
Author : goldfishgold
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-09-29 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| NohatCoder wrote:
| https://archive.ph/BgZZu
| progbits wrote:
| Are any of these bootcamps actually good? Every time I looked
| into them it seemed like a ridiculously shallow syllabus that
| would leave you far from being able to do the job they claim.
| Maybe you could pass HR interview by knowing some keywords and
| last a month or two before getting fired.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| About 2018 I was helping with Operation Code (tech for vets)
| and doing their podcast. There was one guy who said he knew
| people in his bootcamp who got job offers before they were even
| finished. A number of my interviews got jobs that lasted.
|
| The job market is different now, from what I hear.
| ta988 wrote:
| At that time people making bootcamps was a way to show that
| they were willing to learn, a big positive factor when hiring
| somebody. Today it doesn't mean much, a lot do the bootcamp
| and believe that they now know everything and that there is
| no need to do any additional learning effort. And it is
| difficult to filter those people out to get to the genuinely
| interesting ones.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > a lot do the bootcamp and believe that they now know
| everything and that the effort is not necessary to pursue
| anymore.
|
| I don't understand this. What does "the effort is not
| necessary to pursue anymore" mean?
| everforward wrote:
| That they don't need to study anymore. That they think
| they've studied enough in bootcamp that they don't need
| to learn anything else to get a job and be a functional
| engineer.
| ta988 wrote:
| fixed it
| ta988 wrote:
| No they are not. They are mostly one additional way to take
| money from people who are desperate and bury them under loans
| making them believe a sticker on their resume will make it more
| appealing.
| HPsquared wrote:
| On the other hand, they were a way to get large numbers of
| people into the field and staff unfilled positions. The
| market was very hot a couple of years ago.
| ta988 wrote:
| Sure and a lot of those are being kicked out in the current
| layoff cycle. So it helped, maybe, companies with their
| engineering seats beeing filled, but didn't necessarily
| help at all with getting things done.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Easy come, easy go. Now everyone is looking for machine
| learning engineers instead of front end for the "current
| thing".
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| Some are good, some aren't. The problem is, a Bootcamp student
| can't tell the difference and there's nothing like an
| accreditation system for them so it's full on market for
| lemons[1].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
| vunderba wrote:
| This exactly. It reminds me of the "ESL certifications" you
| can get online - there's no presiding international body for
| guaranteeing some minimal level of quality / competency.
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| Well at least for those CEFR and TOEFL exist.
| vunderba wrote:
| I should have been more clear. Those are for students who
| are learning, ESL is for people who intend to _teach_
| English. There are only two real recognized certificates
| for it - Trinity which is Oxford, and CELTA which is
| Cambridge.
| sputknick wrote:
| I used General Assembly to learn frontend web development about
| 5 years ago. It was a positive experience, the two types of
| people I saw succeed were
|
| 1. people with some kind of tech background already and
|
| 2. people who were really smart but not technically oriented
| (we had 4 former professional artists and musicians in my
| cohort, one of whom was a Princeton undergrad).
|
| The people who failed were people who had no curiosity to
| genuinely grow their knowledge and were just there because they
| wanted to check a box before getting a better paying job.
| underlipton wrote:
| I've found that my curiosity drops commensurate with my
| savings (and therefore the chance I'm going to get kicked out
| of my home, my belongings repossessed, and find food
| unaffordable). If people are so insecure that this
| opportunity to retrain an entire workforce was squandered -
| the money was there, the desire was there, the expertise was
| there - it comes off to me as more of a, "If you owe the bank
| $1 billion...", sort of problem, for society.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| I find it very surprising that prestigious colleges are willing
| to outsource their online courses at the expense of diluting
| their own brand.
|
| I guess I should not be that surprised, college admins are some
| of the worst business people on the planet.
| hnfong wrote:
| But they are already delegating teaching (of undergrad level at
| least) to people who generally aren't interested in teaching...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Academia is mostly about multi-level marketing. Teaching and
| research are side effects. There are a lot of similarities to
| nightclub promotion.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| University of Oregon did a lot of this around 2015. Imagine
| the passion a post-grad math scholar has for teaching
| calculus to undergrads. Zero.
| linguae wrote:
| Yup; this is common at research universities, where
| professors' tenure evaluations are largely based on research
| accomplishments and fundraising. I've had many friends tell
| me that they had better experiences with community college
| professors compared to university professors, since the
| community college professors are there to teach.
|
| (Disclaimer: I am a new community college instructor of
| computer science who worked as a researcher in industry for
| nine years before wanting a career change.)
| akomtu wrote:
| What's "tenure evaluation"?
| badlibrarian wrote:
| Parodies of the atrocious Wharton offerings during the pandemic
| referred to the overall effort as "Whoreton." Some would say
| it's destruction not dilution.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's not clear that their brand actually gets diluted. Lots of
| top-tier universities run extension schools and certification
| programs. I suspect that it really is free money from the
| school's perspective, even accounting for the occasional
| expose.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Given the recent events, I would say even top-tier
| universities are quickly destroying their own brands, and
| outsourcing their online education is one way they're doing
| it.
| xyst wrote:
| If you think of these entities as plain ol businesses instead
| of "prestigious colleges". Then nothing will surprise you.
|
| College used to be very affordable. Before the massive
| injection of funds from the "student loan bubble", you could
| take on a minimum wage summer job and pay for a semester of
| college and living expenses.
|
| Now, college tuition has far outpaced the cost of living. And
| subsequent entities (ie, book publishers) are increase the cost
| of the books part of the courses. A parasite on top of a
| parasite. I remember older editions of introductory course
| textbooks cost 10X than the latest edition.
|
| What changed between the latest and oldest? The publisher moved
| the chapters around. The worst part of it is that the author
| doesn't even get paid.
|
| It was at that point, I began pirating every textbook I was
| forced to buy and shared it with all the classmates at the
| start of every semester.
|
| Also, college today is less of an institution for learning and
| more of a 4-yr "experience". Colleges (private and public) have
| amenities such as "lazy rivers", "luxury" dorms, zoos to
| attract victims to their ~~~scam~~~ institution.
|
| I feel society has oversold the idea of college and looked down
| upon trades colleges. We honestly need more trades people
| rather than STEM, doctors, and (especially) lawyers.
|
| If I had to start over, I would probably be an electrician.
| Maybe plumber. Maybe architect with an emphasis on
| green/sustainable housing and building practices.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > The university, he learned, had largely outsourced the program
| to a company called Simplilearn.
|
| > A spokesperson for Caltech, Shayna Chabner, said that the
| university viewed its online programs as "a way that we can bring
| value"
|
| Sounds more like Caltech views its online programs as a way to
| exchange credibility for short-term profits
| octopod12 wrote:
| The same can be said of Stanford which charges ridiculous
| amounts for "certification" courses.
|
| Basically cashing in on the institutions reputation and
| student's hunger to get the institution's stamp on their
| resumes.
|
| Glad to see the pushback. eventually stupid money runs out.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| I think there is a fundamental difference if the content is
| created by and taught by Stanford staff.
| octopod12 wrote:
| fair, but is there are too many such courses, the
| exclusivity of the brand dilutes.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| I fail to see how. If the content quality and
| instructional quality is the same then there is no damage
| to the perception of quality. So then if they charge a
| lot for the targeted certification, then they don't
| diminish the value of the degree programs.
|
| The difference then is scope of instruction. I think high
| quality certification programs are quite valuable to the
| market and properly run ones but trusted institutions are
| a benefit for the institution and the marketplace.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| "Someone might be misled!"
|
| Classic cry of the people who want to regulate and
| control everything.
|
| Maybe if the certificate is worthless, the students will
| figure it out? Maybe by doing a little research before
| they invest their money and time.
|
| I know that for a course to be eligible for government
| reimbursement under any program (job training, GI Bill,
| etc.) the government has to investigate it. So presumably
| the bad ones are either already ineligible, or someone's
| not doing their job.
| octopod12 wrote:
| premium brands like coach, rolex thrive on exclusivity.
| same with the premier institutions. they want to keep
| their brand allure so someone can boast that they are
| from stanford, or that they own a rolex.
|
| If every tom dick and harry has a stanford cert in their
| resume, the value of the brand diminishes. so, you are
| from stanford, big deal, i got a certification too.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/
|
| Most of these classes would fall under the heading of
| "light entertainment for people with the money to afford
| it."
|
| Take a look at this one:
|
| https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/detail/20241
| _...
|
| It doesn't claim that Anja Lee has anything to do with
| Stanford, except for teaching this class.
|
| https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/detail/20241
| _...
|
| You probably do learn something about photography from Mr.
| Feria for your $480.
| delichon wrote:
| > eventually stupid money runs out.
|
| It appears to be a renewable resource.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_.
| ..
| Tarsul wrote:
| he, I got the popup to donate to wikipedia. The irony.
| chii wrote:
| > student's hunger to get the institution's stamp on their
| resumes.
|
| but this is exactly what the students were after isnt it? The
| certification is a resume checkbox rather than an actual
| education.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| that is how every elite school that offers these views it
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > a way to exchange credibility for short-term profits
|
| Immediately on reading this I thought "ah yes, Hewlett-
| Packard's business model for the last few decades".
| sokoloff wrote:
| The part of HP I most respected became Agilent in 1999 (then
| later Keysight).
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| In the spinoff, the part that became Agilent should have
| stayed "Hewlett-Packard." Because you're right, Agilent and
| its spinoffs are the true inheritors of what Dave and Bill
| built.
|
| The part that stayed HP should have been renamed "HP
| Computing" or some BS corporate acronym ("HPC"??)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Mixed feelings on this. I've taken Extension courses from UCSC
| and from Stanford, and was never under any illusion that the
| teachers were affiliated with the schools (although one was). For
| all of them, they tell you in the course description who the
| teacher is. There's always a course evaluation at the end.
|
| If Caltech isn't monitoring the content of their courses and the
| student evals, then they're being negligent, for sure. But I
| don't see this as a systemic problem, other than maybe lack of
| disclosure.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| > I've taken Extension courses from UCSC and from Stanford, and
| was never under any illusion that the teachers were affiliated
| with the schools
|
| What does this mean? Someone from those schools hired a teacher
| to teach a class sold under their schools brand. That's an
| affiliation. If the teacher dropped out and you didn't get a
| refund, you would sue those schools.
|
| What this seems like are schools outsourcing their hiring to
| private companies. It's a problem precisely because the random
| teachers get affiliated with the school.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > That's an affiliation.
|
| Wrong. The teachers aren't professors of any type, or student
| assistants, or even employees. Their classes don't give
| credit towards a degree.
|
| They're contractors.
|
| > It's a problem precisely because the random teachers get
| affiliated with the school.
|
| Wrong again. I haven't taught a class at UC Berkeley
| Extension, but if I had, I would not be entitled to say I was
| "affiliated with Berkeley."
| goldfishgold wrote:
| Classic game that universities love to play where they hire
| someone but that person isn't "really" part of the
| university. Happens with extension but happens in degree
| granting programs too with adjuncts.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| As I remembered them, many of the "extension" courses at
| universities are taught by people with at least a minimal
| affiliation to the university. I took one at Harvard that was
| taught by a graduate student, and another that was taught by an
| assistant professor.
|
| I'm personally glad, as a Caltech alum, that Caltech got called
| out on this bullshit, because these bootcamps really are not
| related to the university, and just cribbed the branding.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| > many of the "extension" courses at universities are taught
| by people with at least a minimal affiliation to the
| university.
|
| That might be true at Harvard, but it's not at UC Santa Cruz,
| UC Berkeley, or Stanford. Probably others, but those are the
| ones I see catalogs for.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| (Also an alum) If you look on Reddit people were calling them
| out two years ago.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| That was also good, but the university president doesn't
| read or pay attention to reddit. He does read the New York
| Times.
| evanelias wrote:
| > many of the "extension" courses at universities are taught
| by people with at least a minimal affiliation to the
| university
|
| This is true, but it's not necessarily an _academic_
| affiliation. That isn 't inherently a bad thing though,
| especially for more practical-minded courses. In the mid-
| aughts, when I was employed by Harvard FAS as a web
| developer, on the side I also TA'ed for the Intro to Web
| Development class at the Extension School for a few terms.
| The instructor and most of the TAs worked for various parts
| of Harvard IT.
|
| The course material was very current and high-quality as a
| result of being based on our hands-on day-to-day experience
| working in web dev, and we generally received very positive
| scores on student-submitted course evaluations.
|
| Granted, at my day job I also wrote a majority of the online
| course evaluation system used by FAS + Extension School, but
| I swear that didn't impact our high marks :) The underlying
| Oracle DBs were appropriately locked down anyway, as we took
| privacy laws like FERPA quite seriously.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| This is the problem with "branding" and ranking in the American
| university system. People believe Caltech is a good school, so
| they automatically assume it is worth the high price.
|
| Maybe a solution is to be clear if a class or program is taught
| by an FTE instructor, or if the program is outsourced? There's
| nothing wrong with trying new things to make more money (student
| enrollments are declining), but be clear about who is teaching
| the course and how they are affiliated with your brand.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| There's a pretty clear delineation between courses that lead to
| a degree, and "extension" courses that don't.
|
| > automatically assume it is worth the high price
|
| Data needed: what do "regular" bootcamps cost and is Caltech's
| cost any higher?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Is there really a difference? Most of these universities
| outsource the actual teaching to grad students.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| Grad students who are technically under the employ of the
| University...that is not outsourcing.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| To me the difference is just a technicality. My point is
| you're not getting taught by who you're paying for.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| > who you're paying for
|
| Only ignorant people think that all beginning courses are
| taught by real professors. That hasn't been true for
| generations.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Right but what you're paying for is still not a random
| grad student of unknown reputation for whom teaching the
| class is a way to build favor with the professor
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Aside from the fact that you've got your negatives
| confused:
|
| Grad students' assistantships often _require_ them to
| teach classes. It 's not "a way to build favor with the
| professor," it's required for them to stay in grad
| school.
|
| As for whether they're "random" or not: how would you
| know how they assign classes? I doubt it's by lottery.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| at least at harvard you can get a degree in "extension
| studies"
| jmyeet wrote:
| What we're seeing is how the profit motive is anathema to higher
| education. Colleges view their reputation as their brand that can
| simply cash in on for even more profits. Some colleges are
| basically hedge funds masquerading as colleges at this point.
|
| What we need is a high-quality, no or low cost state university
| system (like California and other places used to have) as a
| balancing force to keep skyrocketing tuition costs in check.
|
| I'd even go so far as to say that state college systems should
| not an athletics department at all [1]. Or let that aspect be
| completely privately funded.
|
| Now there's a lot to criticize with the military but the one
| aspect I'd like to emulate is the idea that you qualify to do a
| job, you choose to do that job, you get trained to do that job
| and then you do the job.
|
| We don't need to turn higher education into job factories to do
| that.
|
| As for these courses, almost all of them in every area is a scam.
| Any course teaching you to make money (eg in stocks or crypto) is
| a scam because if someone was capable of making money, they'd do
| that. They wouldn't tell you how. The course is their income.
|
| This is a little different but still, Caltech is selling their
| name to profit off of third-party courses.
|
| [1]: https://www.collegevine.com/faq/112712/do-most-college-
| athle...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| > What we need is a high-quality, no or low cost state
| university system (like California and other places used to
| have) as a balancing force to keep skyrocketing tuition costs
| in check.
|
| Doesn't California show exactly why this doesn't work?
| California has, today, a large system of well-supported state
| universities where tuition is under $10,000 per year. But the
| best students don't want to attend them. Since most people
| understand high-quality to mean things like "will I be
| surrounded by some of the smartest people in the country" or
| "will employers looking for the smartest people seek me out",
| they often don't get perceived as high-quality no matter how
| good their instruction may be.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > But the best students don't want to attend them
|
| Admissions at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD is near Stanford
| level for in-demand programs like EECS and Business, and
| plenty of us Ivy and Ivy-adjacents didn't get into a UC or
| didn't get Regents (thus potentially making an Ivy Adjacent
| cheaper).
|
| My sibling is much younger, and in their time (late
| 2010s/early 2020s), admission stats to CS or Business even in
| "middling" (imo criminally underrated) UCs like UCR or UCSC
| became comparable to UCB barely a decade ago.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'd reemphasize my point. When the discussion turns to
| public colleges in California, people often think
| exclusively of the UCs, which are genuinely prestigious and
| (non-coincidentally) expensive. The CSU system is larger,
| much cheaper, and thus entirely invisible to most who
| identify as Ivy-adjacent.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > The CSU system is larger, much cheaper, and thus
| entirely invisible to most who identify as Ivy-adjacent.
|
| For top Californian students targeting Eng/CS these
| programs are very visible.
|
| The good CSU programs (Eng/Business @ SJSU, SDSU, and
| CalPoly SLO) tend to overprotect their yield rate.
|
| Personally, I and a significant proportion of my HS
| friend group would have preferred attending CalPoly SLO
| (it's a fun campus, great hiking, great beach, great
| academics, great job placements), but we all got rejected
| because our scores (SAT/GPA) were way higher than the
| median, yet we ended up at Ivy Tier programs
| (EECS@MIT/Berkeley/Stanford/etc). Same thing happened to
| my sibling as well.
|
| This has been an issue for almost 2 decades now because
| high demand programs in Californian public universities
| (STEM, Business) haven't increased the amount of faculty
| or seats per department yet the number of students trying
| to apply to these programs has skyrocketed
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Prop 13 (Property tax revolt) wreaked havoc on the UC,
| Cal State, and Community College systems. Tuition started
| to creep up at Berkeley shortly after I started a couple
| of years after the vote but it was absolutely nothing
| like it is today. Also, the competition to get in to UC
| schools is crazy. No way in hell I could get in were I to
| apply today with my high school grades, test scores, and
| extracurriculars.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Prop 13 wasn't the issue for us younger applicants
| (graduated HS in the last 20 years) - it's the austerity
| measures that were in place across California from
| 2009-2013.
|
| That prevented UCs and CSUs from being able to
| dynamically expand STEM and Business faculty headcount.
|
| That said, even Ivy League programs have fallen into the
| same trap - CS@Harvard is bursting at the seams and imo,
| the course quality is middling compared to UCs, UT, UIUC,
| UW, MIT, CMU, GT, etc, and recruiting isn't that
| different between a top public CS program and Ivies (the
| only difference is VC Analyst recruiting, but that's a
| horrible career that expires in 2-3 years. Only MBAs or
| experienced EMs/PMs/Founders or a handful of IB Analysts
| break into partner track [associate and above] roles).
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| I think that was another of many blows to the head and
| gonads that the California public Universities have
| suffered.
|
| Prop 13 forced the state schools to adopt a private
| school model. Way back when, there was a tacit agreement
| that the public schools wouldn't tap private sources and
| in return, the private schools would be generally
| supportive of the state schools with respect to
| Sacramento.
|
| That all went by the boards and everyone is now selling
| off chunks of schools to private entities. In the early
| 1990s, the UC schools had to offer buyouts/retirements
| and a lot of very senior faculty left. Many were still in
| their prime and went to other Universities. Nasty brain
| drain.
|
| I'll defer to your assessment of CS programs. I studied a
| science but not computer science. In my experience, an
| Ivy league name is worth a huge amount in prestige.
|
| Edit: Also, the contacts one makes at an Ivy or a
| Stanford are leagues ahead of what's available at a
| public school.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I'll defer to your assessment of CS programs. I studied
| a science but not computer science. In my experience, an
| Ivy league name is worth a huge amount in prestige.
|
| Fair enough! I can't speak for the sciences - only
| Engineering/CS.
|
| CS/Eng is much more driven by defense and private sector
| funding, which is biased towards National Labs, which are
| overwhelmingly managed by public universities.
|
| At the federal level, the DoD and DoE has held this bias
| for decades due to a mix of pork barrel politicking as
| well as the fact that public university graduates tend to
| be overrepresented in career civil service roles.
|
| I personally know a couple SES types who purposely
| redirected CHIPS and IRA funding to flagship universites
| due to a bit of a grudge against the Private School IVorY
| tower (though lack of STEM research capacity also played
| a role)
|
| > Also, the contacts one makes at an Ivy or a Stanford
| are leagues ahead of what's available at a public school.
|
| As someone who attended an Ivy/Ivy Adjacent, I highly
| disagree, at least in Eng (and Eng adjacent roles like
| PM/EM/Sales/Entrepreneaurship and even VC to a certain
| extent)
|
| Middle management turned upper management in most tech
| companies tended to attend flagship publics in the West
| Coast/TX/Midwest plus some elite privates like
| Stanford/Claremont Colleges/USC/CMU, which impacts
| recruiting as well.
|
| Ime, other than Penn and Cornell, Harvard and other Ivies
| are not as well represented compared to a program like
| EECS@Cal, CS@UT, CS@UW, etc.
|
| Most upper level Ivy grads I end up meeting tend to have
| done grad school at an Ivy (MBA@Wharton/HBS/CBS/Johnson)
| but undergrad at a public university either domestically
| (state flagships) or abroad (IIT D/K/B/M to Wharton
| pipeline)
|
| Stanford and MIT are a different story, but they also
| have much more rigorious admissions and student body.
|
| In addition, a lot of my professional (not age -
| precocious little scamp ain't I [0]) peers in
| Eng/Sales/VC leadership are at the "sending kids to
| college" stage, and most of them are sending their kids
| to flagship public and private engineering programs - not
| Ivies.
|
| This has a downstream impact on the network, as parents
| will help their kids and their kids friends get jobs and
| referrals. I personally know a Tech Billionare who sent
| their kids to a top public CS program despite having the
| option to send them to MIT or Harvard due to the larger
| network of mid-level managers turned founders/VCs from
| that school.
|
| And as you can probably tell from this conversation, I'm
| probably not in favor of giving a leg up to hiring or
| funding Ivy/Ivy Adjacent graduates, and I am in a
| position to make that choice. There are plenty of others
| like me.
|
| Tl;Dr - the tech industry has made upward mobility easier
| by overemphasizing work experience over Ivy/Private
| pedigree to a certain extent.
|
| [0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uofjc65LEJM
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Very interesting perspective, thank you.
|
| >> Also, the contacts one makes at an Ivy or a Stanford
| are leagues ahead of what's available at a public school.
|
| > As someone who attended an Ivy/Ivy Adjacent, I highly
| disagree, at least in Eng (and Eng adjacent roles like
| PM/EM/Sales/Entrepreneaurship and even VC to a certain
| extent)
|
| In my long but undistinguished career, I don't see that
| my Berkeley undergrad classmates and I have set the world
| on fire and we're not powerbrokers by a very long shot.
| We were all (at that time) from the same chunks of
| middle-class Northern and Southern California with almost
| no out-of-staters. Many of us including myself commuted
| and there was almost none of the stereotypical college
| social life due to courseload and research (a very big
| emphasis).
|
| Now, I am sure things have changed in the nearly 40 years
| since I graduated. Perhaps the increasing cost and
| explosion of Silicon Valley/CS has changed who came
| after, where they come from, and their family
| backgrounds.
|
| > CS/Eng is much more driven by defense and private
| sector funding, which is biased towards National Labs,
| which are overwhelmingly managed by public universities.
|
| That used to be true when UC ran LBL, Livermore, and Los
| Alamos but these days they are run (poorly) by
| "public/private" consortia. Stanford runs SLAC, Chicago
| for the moment runs Fermilab - both are private schools.
| I don't think wealthy families send their kids to any of
| these private schools with a view to jobs at LocMart,
| Boeing, or Argonne.
|
| > Middle management turned upper management in most tech
| companies tended to attend flagship publics in the West
| Coast/TX/Midwest plus some elite privates like
| Stanford/Claremont Colleges/USC/CMU, which impacts
| recruiting as well.
|
| The real surprise here is USC which was a scorned
| backwater when I was in college. "University of Second
| Choice" took great strides in the 1990s under Steven
| Sample. IMO it is far from an elite[0] place like
| Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, etc. but the USC network is
| a Very Big Deal at least in So Cal. At my company, their
| alumni association virtually guarantees that an applicant
| will get a face-to-face with a decisionmaking alum while
| others are getting screened out by the AI or HR.
|
| Edit:
|
| [0] I mean elite in terms of academic quality vs.
| job/networking opportunities.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Prop 13 is such a sad story of the narrow self-interest
| people vote and act with. Like it's the reason Disney's
| tax rate for their park in Anaheim was set in the 1960s
| and basically hasn't moved. Does that sound like a good
| idea? But no, all people see is "my property taxes won't
| go up (as much)"
|
| It just keeps getting worse too because you can inherit a
| property on a stepped-up basis (meaning the cost gets
| reset to market value for capital gains tax purposes
| should you then sell it) but you can inherit your
| parents' advantageous property tax rate.
|
| This problem is so bad that a minimal claw back of Prop
| 13 benefits (Prop 19), which would limit you to only
| inheriting ONE beneficial tax rate, _barely_ passed.
|
| Are half of CA voters really inheriting multiple
| properties with tax rates set in the 70s? Of course not.
| But people vote agains this kind of thing anyway.
|
| The other argument for Prop 13 is kicking seniors out of
| their houses when they're on a fixed income. I mean, do
| you really still need that 5 bedroom house in Los Altos
| whhen you're a retired couple? Of course not, but you'll
| happily pass it onto your children with no taxes and the
| low property tax rate if you can.
|
| If you're really concerned about seniors, you can carve
| out an exception just for them without giving an
| exception to everyone (including Disney). This is
| actually something that Texas handles better. You can
| stay in your house and defer your property taxes until
| you die. So there's an incentive to downsize and you're
| not priced out of your house if you really want to stay.
|
| And for the longest time (only up until the last 5-10
| years), Texas managed to have relatively good control on
| house prices. It's why it was so popular to move to
| Texas. But national trends finally caught up with Texas
| too.
|
| Imagine what could've been funded if Prop 13 never
| passed. Infrastructure, education, health care, whatever.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| I'm now sensitized to the senior citizen housing issue
| now that I'm approaching that age. I can't downsize - no
| place to go to. Lots of people are nominally leaving
| California to be just outside of it in Nevada (Reno,
| Tahoe, LV) but I don't want to do that. I don't know what
| it would have been like had Prop 13 not passed of course.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I'm a big fan of what Georgia Tech, UT Austin, UIUC, and CU
| Boulder did with their online masters programs - the courses
| are the same as on campus (and I've verified this with alums
| and/or having taking courses at these universities as an
| undergrad), and they give the hard skills needed to truly
| become a decent SWE.
| donatj wrote:
| I had the University of Minnesota's "Coding Bootcamp" reach out
| to me a couple years ago about possibly teaching a course. I was
| genuinely excited at the prospect, it's always been something of
| a dream of mine to teach, so I scheduled a call. I never talk to
| recruiters but I wanted this.
|
| The call very quickly went down hill and they became visibly
| angry when they found out I was not a NodeJS expert.
|
| You reached out to me. I never represented myself as such. You
| likely saw on my credentials on LinkedIn which shows I have been
| writing JavaScript since the late 90s.
|
| I hadn't entirely given up hope yet and said something a long the
| lines of "I am sure I could pick it up very quickly, I just
| haven't had the need so far" and the already visibly annoyed
| interviewer basically shouts "NO, we need someone who is an
| expert from day one!"
|
| I apologized for wasting their time. They say that they will
| contact me if anything changes. I, a grown adult of near 40, went
| in to the call giddy and left tearing up a little. Good riddance.
| kstenerud wrote:
| You didn't waste their time. They wasted your time.
|
| They're the ones who contacted you and didn't check your
| abilities before scheduling a call.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Did you point out to this person that they contacted you, that
| you never claimed to be a Node expert, etc.? If so, did they
| have any sort of coherent response to that observation?
| donatj wrote:
| Yep, I sure did. I never got anything about why they reached
| out to me specifically or any such explanation. Just that
| they needed a "node expert". The call lasted maybe 5 minutes
| when they'd scheduled half an hour.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Sounds like you dodged a bullet, even if you were a Node
| expert.
| uzername wrote:
| That's probably the same bootcamp that my friend took. I was
| really excited for them, but unfortunately the bootcamp was of
| poor quality. No enforced gates, no meaningful feedback on code
| quality, too little explicit mentoring on tech skills and soft
| skills, no support finding work at "graduation". That was in
| 2019, before the markets churned. Those courses were branded as
| UMN but we're reskinned Trilogy bootcamp materials, and there
| was ultimately no UMN staff involved except maybe an admin
| somewhere.
|
| Good riddance indeed.
| willmeyers wrote:
| I was cold called by one of these programs a while ago that was
| offered through Columbia University. They wanted around $13,000
| for a 4-something week bootcamp. It's honestly disgusting that
| schools with billion dollar endowments feel the need to prey on
| people like this.
| skyde wrote:
| Is MIT class also taught by outsourced instructor instead of MIT
| instructor?
| SSJPython wrote:
| Higher education has become too powerful and influential due to
| unlimited government loan guarantees. They used that to charge
| insane amounts and hired bloated administrations.
|
| Get the government out of the student loan business and take a
| lesson from the Germans: promote vocational and technical
| schooling. Not everyone needs to go to university or get a
| university education.
| piva00 wrote:
| > Get the government out of the student loan business and take
| a lesson from the Germans: promote vocational and technical
| schooling. Not everyone needs to go to university or get a
| university education.
|
| And while taking that lesson top with another: remove the
| profit motive from education, since you want to remove the
| government from providing loans you will need a backstop so the
| have-nots don't stay forever bound in the have-not enough money
| for education.
| SSJPython wrote:
| How exactly can you "remove" the profit motive without
| outright taking control of private educational institutions?
|
| If you want public education to become more affordable, then
| standards must be raised and it must become more scarce.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I suppose a root cause of sorts is that for the first time in
| millennia there is a surplus of ambitious people with the means
| to pay for education, but a shortage of adequate warm bodies to
| teach. This in turn means top universities can provide a low
| quality course taught by outsourced teachers and know it will
| sell regardless.
|
| I'm not sure how you fix it. There's only so many people who are
| smart and want to teach. It doesn't help that teaching doesn't
| pay well, but paying more only sort of helps: there would be a
| greater supply of teachers, but surely paying more can't make it
| cheaper.
| goldfishgold wrote:
| Not sure about this. Generally there's a line out the door of
| highly qualified people to teach at places like Caltech for
| little or nothing. A few years ago, UCLA tried to hire someone
| to teach a chemistry course as a volunteer position.
| https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/03/21/ucla-criticiz...
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Sure, but somehow these people aren't teaching, one way or
| the other. Maybe it's not a shortage of able people (in fact
| you're right, it definitely isn't) but they aren't teaching
| at top universities. Or there isn't enough of these teachers.
| underlipton wrote:
| People who feel comfortable and safe exploring topics govern
| their own learning, especially when there's a small but healthy
| amount of peer and supervisory pressure. So, don't pay a small
| army of adjuncts. Pay students to show up to a classroom and to
| complete standardized measures of progression.
| paxys wrote:
| Students care more about the university's name on the certificate
| than who is teaching the course.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Same applies to companies also. They also give more attention
| to people who studied in ivy leagues etc..
| fragmede wrote:
| That depends on a view of students as a monolithic group of
| mouth breathing individuals who only care about the name on the
| certificate, and not being comprised of individuals who are
| nerds, which students who go to CalTech, a top private
| university, might possibly be. I'm sure some students were
| excited to be taught by astrophysicist and Nobel prize winner
| Kip Thorn, to the point that the fact that the fact that he was
| a teacher there landed him a spot on the TV show The Big Bang
| Theory about him being a teacher there.
| omoikane wrote:
| I tried to go on Caltech's site to see if there was any
| indication that this bootcamp was taught by Caltech. After
| reading the bootcamp page for a few seconds, a chat window popped
| up on the side asking if I needed any help. So I asked: "is this
| bootcamp actually taught by caltech?"
|
| The response was: "Hello and welcome to Simplilearn! My name is
| Priyanshu and Your current Country would be?"
| 1024core wrote:
| > The federal government helped kick off the gold rush in 2011.
| The Education Department, under the Obama administration,
| loosened its guidance on revenue-sharing relationships between
| colleges and for-profit companies.
|
| Thanks Obama!
| alephnerd wrote:
| Blame Harvard and MIT - they founded EdX and used it to print a
| buttload of money with extremely high margins.
|
| Everyone else is just copying that model.
| underlipton wrote:
| This feels like it might have had something to do with the
| likely demise of a bunch of for-profit "educators" (ITT, AI,
| and the like). That was still a few years away, but the writing
| was on the wall for investors who wanted to get off the sinking
| ships but still continue the grift. I suppose the view on the
| government side was that for-profit education wasn't an
| inherently corrupt venture, but that the independent nature of
| the companies involved made the profit motive take precedent,
| and that tying them to institutions with their reputation on
| the line would help to maintain instruction quality. So much
| for that.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| "This is an ugly word, this 'scam.' This is business. And if you
| wanna be in business, this is what you do." --- Marlon Brando,
| 'The Freshman' (1990)
|
| Caltech offers certs in Program Management, System Engineering,
| and a lot of other frobozz not in line with their deservedly Tier
| A+++ reputation. I work with people who've gone through these
| courses and 'unimpressed' would be an understatement. Of course,
| nearby UCLA and USC do this as do schools up and down the coast
| and eastward. These are Extensions and they bring in cash.
|
| https://ctme.caltech.edu/
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| These aren't even Extension courses, but a "bootcamp" cash
| grab. Extension courses are usually courses offered to
| students, but often taught at a lower level so that the general
| public can attend.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| They have other offerings besides the explicitly titled
| "Bootcamps." Extension as I've seen it used are for people
| outside University enrollment (undergrad/grad/postdoc) who
| want some enrichment or additional training whether for
| curiosity or, in these cases, advancement.
| mitchbob wrote:
| https://archive.ph/2024.09.29-101523/https://www.nytimes.com...
| belter wrote:
| https://archive.is/BgZZu
| rchaud wrote:
| What is the point of having almost $5bn in endowments[0] if the
| school still has to chase after revenue like this, at the cost of
| its credibility and reputation?
|
| [0] https://investments.caltech.edu/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-29 23:01 UTC)