quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by jan.

So basically this is a technical/vocational school.

It's great that they're embracing the constructivist/constructionist approach to education (i.e. experiential learning through project-based education) but they aren't fulfilling the most important role that universities in the U.S. serve--providing a well-rounded liberal arts education that ensures students have a decent foundation in a bit of everything (arts, literature, maths, sciences, and physical education). University differs from a vocational school in that it isn't supposed to be preparing you for a particular job--it's preparing you to be a (hopefully) better human being.

I'd also be concerned about the fact that the people who attend this school only ever interact with other techies. Another big part of the university experience is to bring you in contact with people of incredibly diverse backgrounds, interests, opinions, and ideas. This experience hopefully gets you to question your own beliefs and ideals and expand both your social circle and your mind.

That all said, college isn't for everybody and I have friends without college degrees (in the tech industry) who do just fine. If you know you really want to be a programmer and you just want to get out there and start making stuff then a program like this might be good for you.

An engineering school really is a special case. Though I do think more humanities classes would be better, it isn't really possible to fit them into a typical engineering curriculum. As I recall from my school days, you needed 15 humanities credits over the four years to graduate. The typical overall class load was between 16 and 19 credits per trimester. And even with all that engineering education, you're usually still not ready to just immediately start performing at some job. You'll need a year or two of work experience before you're a fully productive engineer.

You just couldn't get a well rounded liberal arts education and a solid engineering education in four years. In fact, on average, it takes someone five years to get a bachelors in engineering.

I'm not really sure what the solution is. Even though I can accept the utility of it, I'm not sure I like the idea of the earlier educational specialization of some European models.

My advice to someone graduating from high school in the US is take two or three years off first, get any random crap job, and get some experience of life before you commit to a serious education.

I got an Engineering degree (well, Computer Science, so kinda "Engineering lite") from a traditional 4-year (state) university. And I think it was not a complete waste of my time, but a 50-75% waste.

What I expected / wanted to get out of my degree was a foundation of knowledge and training in order to get a job in my chosen area of specialization (computer programming). My degree gave me that, sorta, but in an incredibly inefficient way. I took a bunch of classes that were in NO WAY relevant. Even classes in my major were very hit or miss; I had ONE class that was centered around working with a team and producing a software project over the course of a year / two semesters that stands out as the only class I think was 100% worthwhile.

Overall, the 4.5 years worth of classes that I took could easily have been condensed into "just the relevant stuff" and fit into a 2 year curriculum. Universities say that they want to produce "well rounded citizens", but they actually want to produce well rounded University coffers.

It IS true that a degree can be a significant barrier to entry for a lot of jobs, so in that sense getting a degree can be "worth it". But I tend to think that in the vast majority of cases that is just employers playing things safe and traditional rather than being a truly necessary requirement for the jobs they want to fill.


High School is the perfect time to "broaden horizons" and expose people to a little bit of everything. I'm all for University-level education trending in a vocational/technical direction like this with much more emphasis on specialization, and where not all degrees/programs require a cookie-cutter 4 years to complete. If you pick the wrong specialization and "waste" 1-2 years learning something that you don't end up actually wanting to do for employment, you could still take a mulligan and start over learning something else in less time than it would take to get a single degree from a 4 year University. More non-traditional students, more specialization, more focus. I wish these guys well and hope that they make some waves.

Something most overlook, and I certainly did when I was too young to know better, is the absolute critical value of a general education. I know first hand how crippling that can be when interacting with others, and how absolutely ignorant you can sound when you don't have that foundation. I had a terrible education but was fortunate enough to discover the spark of inspiration for learning, so I ate knowledge up as soon as I was able. I have met many people who embraced the "I can accomplish my own goals with out this structure" who are intelligent enough to succeed on their own, but who are complete fucking idiots in every other way, causing them to take their wonderful success and new-found influence and resources, and make terribly ignorant, socially-harmful things with it.