This isn't even close to an apples-to-apples comparison and looks like mostly an advertisement. You're looking at broad academic institutions preparing students for a huge range of careers vs. an institution that takes advantage of quickly ramping up a student for a specific career that currently has very good average salaries.<p>Besides that, I don't get this:<p>"Part of it is that the cost of delivering that education are very reasonable."<p>He then preaches about how higher ed's cost structures are terrible. But when you look at the cost per week of education, Flatiron is over 3x higher than a 4-year college. That doesn't suggest to me that higher ed's costs structures are all that ridiculous compared to Flatiron.<p>Overall, I get the impression that Flatiron is providing a valuable educational program to its students. However, if you really want to impress me or inspire others, show me how this model can be successfully applied to careers outside of software engineering.<p>It would seem a better argument would be made for time spent rather than dollars spent.
A huge problem with this comparison is that the field of software engineering is really, really, really hot right now. So you can get away with studying up for 16 weeks, and get a $70k job. We've been here before -- <a href="http://www.defmacro.org/2013/12/09/learn-to-code.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.defmacro.org/2013/12/09/learn-to-code.html</a>. When the field encounters a short-term cool-off (as it inevitably will), these hires will be the first to go because 16 weeks is absolutely not enough to get a strong base of fundamentals. You could (barely) learn Rails and JavaScript in that time, but you really aren't getting a strong enough engineering skillset to build a resilient career.<p>The bigger problem is that high school seniors don't understand basic economics of supply and demand. The job market is becoming polarized -- top people in their fields are doing better than ever, and the market doesn't really need anything else (with software engineering currently being an anomaly). So I'd say it isn't worth going to college (from an ROI perspective) if you aren't positioned to be in the top 10% of your field. This used to not be the case, but the world is very rapidly going in this direction and I'm not sure if there is a solution to this problem, any more than there was a solution to manual labor jobs disappearing post industrial revolution.<p>> EDIT: <i>When you always add and never subtract, you get cost structures that are not sustainable.</i><p>That's brilliant.
This blog post is <i>extremely</i> misleading: the three featured alumni [0] on the Flatiron School's web site <i>all</i> have 4 years of college at good schools (one even has an MFA)<p>Saron Yitbarek - University of Maryland College Park
B.A. English, B.S. Psychology
2007 – 2011 [1]<p>Justin Belmont - Tufts University
BA, English
1999 – 2003
Columbia University in the City of New York
MFA, Nonfiction Writing
2005 – 2008 [2]<p>Danny Olinsky
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Kenan-Flagler Business School
BSBA, Business Administration; Entrepreneurship [3]<p>[0] <a href="http://flatironschool.com/web#block7" rel="nofollow">http://flatironschool.com/web#block7</a>
[1] <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/saronyitbarek" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/saronyitbarek</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinbelmont" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinbelmont</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyolinsky" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyolinsky</a>
It's not an apples to apples comparison. As a Flatiron grad myself I can tell you that most my classmates already had college degrees. They do have a program that serves as a substitute for college, but it's not clear that the main program has been filtered from the data.<p>That said, I thought Flatiron was an exceptional investment, much higher ROI on my salary than college, but also served a fundamentally different purpose and role in my education than college.
Despite the obvious flaws of comparing a coding "bootcamp" school to a 4 year higher ed institution, I think there is a very valid argument in thinking about ROI when picking degree choices. While not everyone can be coders, (if everyone could, then the salary/demand would drop and this solution would be invalid) everyone should seriously think about ROI. Counselors almost never discuss ROI when advising 17-18 year olds on college choices. Questions like, can you pay off a 6 figure debt to pursue a comparative literature degree?<p>If you pick a program that has high salary/demand, you will have better ROI. Even if you spend lots of money on it, you will be able to pay it back. That is ROI. (Not just cost by itself)<p>Here is a list of top ranking salary schools. They are almost all dominated by Ivies, tech/engineering (and interestingly, Military) schools.<p><a href="http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/full-list-of-schools" rel="nofollow">http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/full-list...</a>
"<i>The Flatiron School started two years ago and teaches students, both high school grads and college grads, how to become software engineers in a twelve week course that costs $15,000.</i>"<p>Wow. It's a good thing that whole "software engineering" thing isn't a profession or anything. I wish this had been available 25 years ago, before I wasted 4 years and roughly 9000 hours (4 years, 2 semesters per year, 15 weeks per semester, 15 class hours per week = 1800 class hours; by their class+lab+deployment numbers, a 5/1 ratio) getting a bachelors.<p>Plus, even if I had decided to stick to the BA, on their schedule I could have packed all that into a little over 2 years, instead of 4.
Like the old saying goes, if you want to burn down a house, you don't burn it down from the outside, you light the fire inside. An individual who has just invested thousands of dollars in their own self-education and (most likely) heard the negativity and 'you're crazy' from their family and peer group has a lot to prove. Their house is on fire. Your ability to learn has nothing to do with your age - it has more to do with your mindset and your ability to proactively deal with frustration and failure. And let go of your ego (code reviews).<p>I know programmers with 15+ years of experience who are doing the same thing year after year. After a while, the years of experience for that type of programmer are meaningless. Also, either the company or their peer group restricts their ability to learn new things. Many of them with families and (now) college tuition bills to pay don't mind this restriction on learning. There are many more 9-5 programmers than the people who live and breathe on the bleeding edge.<p>The reality is that while there are only a couple superb programmers at the level of Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy, Thomas Knoll in the world's history - there are many orders of magnitude more programmers who might not change the world but help keep the increasingly technological world running. There is room for many more programmers and we don't need to restrict the industry to the narrow intake funnel of 4 year CS degree.
It’s been an interesting comparison. However, there are programming Bootcamps that are free of charge, like <a href="http://pilot.co/bootcamp" rel="nofollow">http://pilot.co/bootcamp</a> (disclaimer: I work for Pilot). The ROI comparison is quite interesting in that case… :)
Instead of charging tuition, I wonder if employers would be willing to pay Flatiron $15K per hire as a finder/training fee.<p>That might be a good test of demand for junior Ruby/Rails/Javascript developers, in addition to how good Flatiron is at preparing them.
I thought the comparison of graduation rates between the Flatiron school and universities was very misleading. Most stste systems have open enrollment in community colleges and some four year colleges with low, low standards. The truth is that there are tons of private and public universities that will let anyone in who can fill out a student loan application.<p>I don't know anything about the Flatiron school but I discussed App Academy with a graduate of the first New York class. They made it sound like the excellent results were all selection effect rather than treatment. A lead mentor who was never there and two assistants who had finished the previous San Francisco cycle. Some of the people doing the course had more programming experience than these teachers. It is very likely that the graduation rate reflects selectivity as much as good teaching and curriculum.