Given Niel's [nee-ell] outstanding track record, in terms of turning upside-down old markets paralyzed by established fat cats; given how firmly education belongs to this category; and given how badly it needs to be reinvented, this experiment is really intriguing.<p>For a bit of cultural context, higher education in France works quite differently from the US: it's mostly tax-funded; what we call cheap education is a couple hundreds € a year, full medical insurance included; a very expensive school would be €4-6€ a year. The best schools are cheap (a few select ones even offer a modest salary to their students). The worse ones, "universités", are cheap as well. Expensive schools are in the middle, for kids of wealthy parents who do OK at school, but aren't good enough to pass the best schools' very selective entry competitions.<p>Of course, these institutions being run by academics and civil servants, they aren't exactly reactive nor modernist; I've recently read a prominent school official explaining that Wikipedia wasn't trustworthy because it was user-editable, as opposed to journalists' papers... They offer a very solid mathematical and scientific background, but usually not much in terms of immediately employable skills. I'm not sure whether it's a good or a bad thing: school ought to teach you what you won't learn by yourself, the rest you'll pick up at your first employment, in exchange for a junior salary. But I've got the impression that schools filter mathematically-gifted student more than they train them.<p>Niel seems to concur, and to believe that maths/science gifts don't correlate well with actual development skills. Even if it's not true, there certainly are potentially skilled developers who do poorly at maths and science, and this talent pool is totally unexploited today, so he's right to try and valorise it.
For non french speaking people : Xavier Niel is the founder of Free, a major french internet and phone provider, known for kicking hornet nests (he's the "inventor" of low cost unlimited offers, ADSL back in the days, mobile phone very recently.)<p>42 is a programmer school, totally free of charge, with a "peer to peer" approach to education (whatever it means)<p>It'll take 4000 students and, after a marathon month (15 hours of programming a day), keeps the 1000 best.
An english language story reporting the same news about this new Parisian developer school "42": <a href="http://www.rudebaguette.com/2013/03/26/rumor-confirmed-xavier-niel-launches-tuition-free-developer-school-baptised-42/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rudebaguette.com/2013/03/26/rumor-confirmed-xavie...</a>
interesting - the high intensity coding approach did not start with Epitech. It started with Epita, the school created before Epitech. The 15 hours on boarding was called the swimming pool (you learn to swim or you drown). You started that right at the beginning of school with no programming experience. Number of students "giving up" (leaving the school right away) was broadcasted via a Unix based IM system. Goal was only to keep the students who "get it". We would have daily projects to turn in before midnight and most projects names where taken out of the Hitchhiker's. Nicolas is an awesome guy and is very smart as is his right hand Kwame.
He was the sys admin for the school and led all the technical curriculum. They are both big believers in learn it / dot it yourself and that's what Nicolas already implemented at Epita as most of the technical classes were led by students. They can be tough but they are great technical mentors. I learned a lot there and I think it was worth the money.
I remember that on our first day we had to code 'bdsh' (a light database in bash). I went to them to ask "what is bash?" (because at the time I was barely nailing the login screen). Answer was "man bash". Then I asked "what's man?" - answer was "man man". That's pretty much the approach.