Kevin Carey on Vocational Education for College Grads

He writes,

The obvious next target for boot camps is the expanding market for professional master’s degrees. This is really a case of one for-profit business competing with another—master’s degrees are market-priced revenue generators for “nonprofit” colleges and are treated as such. If more employers send the signal that “college degrees are not the primary qualification,” there could be a great many more students who decide that $8,000 for three months of intensive work is a much better deal than $50,000 for a master’s degree of questionable quality.

The article describes a program in which young people obtain computer skills using very practical exercises. Read the whole thing.

2 thoughts on “Kevin Carey on Vocational Education for College Grads

  1. This is a crude article. Sure, doing entry level programming is an alternative to a masters degree, just like delivering pizzas or being a substitute teacher, or every other possible choice. That’s really a silly tautological thing to say.

    The skills taught by a masters degree and the career options they open up are completely different than what these programming boot camps do… Basic programming careers have always been accessible to non formally educated types. That isn’t news. This article is rather disappointing.

    • Eh, programming requires a mindset that pizza delivery and substitute teaching don’t. Neither approach six figure salaries in the USA, while programmers without a CS degree may readily achieve such. Much of a CS degree is wasted on such positions, anchored moreso on systems and open source software methodologies and experience.

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