In case anybody's still following this thread, the California Report radio program had a good, in-depth story about it this morning: http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201403180850/b

Pete


On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 5:59 PM, Anca Mosoiu <anca@techliminal.com> wrote:
A major part of going to a brand-name school (Harvard, MIT) is the networking and community that you join.

Just like Startup Accelerators/Incubators (another potential shady scheme!) if your school doesn't actually put you in touch with the right people, it's going to be much harder to find the success one seeks.

Anca.



On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 1:10 PM, Romy Ilano <romy@snowyla.com> wrote:
I know the people that run HackBright - it's legit, and they do place their students in very well paying jobs. They have extremely competent instructors. They are very selective about choosing the right people....

 but just as importantly, they market their students to Silicon Valley Start-ups, and frequently take their students to networking dinners. that's one of the key actions a hacker school must take, building relationships, in order for their students to get good job offers. 

  • Is a  government accreditation agency going to recognize that the networking component is crucial for such schools, justifying their costs?
  • Could a fly by night online education start-up make similar claims that their students get amazing salaries... but lack these crucial networking events?  

Wow, googling "trade school fraud" opens up a whole can of worms:







=============================

Romy Ilano




On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 8:19 AM, David Rorex <drorex@gmail.com> wrote:
Some of the "hacker schools" are awesome, 99% of the students love them, and some of them are basically scams. But they are all very expensive (eg HackBright gets nearly universal acclaim, but it's $15,000 for an 8 week class), and it's hard to tell which one is awesome and which one is a scam just by looking at their websites. So some sort of oversight / regulation is needed, but I'm not sure what the best way is. There's plenty of other vocational schools (all those ones that promise to get you a high paying job as a dental assistant or pharmacy technician or whatever) that are mostly scams and yet are unaffected by the current regulatory framework in place.


On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 8:34 PM, Romy Ilano <romy@snowyla.com> wrote:
Here's a good Fast Company article, they highlight the people who paid the money but didn't find jobs:


  • One example was pretty weird... there was a pregnant woman who enered dev bootcamp, and she couldn't compete with her 12 hours study days against others who were studying 16 hours a day. -- wow! what were they thinking? I think a hacker bootcamp would be a terrible idea for a pregnant woman / new parent. 

  • One hacker school is in the Midwest, where there aren't that many mobile developer jobs and they were training people to be iOS Developers. Kind of weird. 

I love hacker schools, but they have to be extremely selective if they advertise to people that graduating students are going to get $70K a year jobs after only 10-15 weeks of study. The advertising of salaries is what bothers me a lot... 

As we've been discussing, I see totally shady for-profit institutions copying the hacker idea and fleecing unqualified students in the future. I don't want the good hacker schools to get shut down :(


=============================

Romy Ilano




On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 10:45 AM, Hol Gaskill <hol@gaskill.com> wrote:
industrialization of education - obscuring the intrinsic value of knowledge and showing the way forward so that the technicians will know which direction to pull the carts
==

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