Slashdot Mirror
ArsDigita University
Philip Greenspun, whose name you may recognize from photo.net or Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, is founding a tuition-free program in computer science that's intended to provide the equivalent of four years' worth of CompSci in a single, 6-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day year. You heard it right: tuition-free. And they're accepting applications. There are a few catches: you'll need a bachelor's degree already, and you'll need to be so bright that people put on sunglasses when you walk into a room. But even the rest of us can eavesdrop with lectures and course notes to be made available online. See this column about the program, or visit ArsDigita University.
You could also argue that if you're smart enough to get into this program in the first place, you're probably smart enough to figure out most of the stuff by yourself anyway. Computer Science degrees are really about teaching you how to approach solving computer-related problems. A vast majority of the classroom content is either out of date or has little practical application for most graduates. So whether you get that in a year or 4 is irrelevant. What you're missing is the years of training your brain to look at and solve problems that are fundamentally different from most other disciplines.
I don't believe you can compress that experience into one year, and I certainly wouldn't consider hiring someone who claimed to have accomplished it in that timeframe.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Some of the folks who have applied to ArsDigita University already have MDs, for example, and they fit your profile of the "costing these people $125K". But others have history degrees from Ivy League colleges. High SAT scores + a Yale degree in humanities big bucks job. Even ArsDigita.com pays graduating CS nerds a mere $100,000.
:-)
But you're kind of missing the point. This isn't career prep. We don't teach C programming or Oracle DBA. We teach the standard MIT/Stanford-style CS curriculum. We want to teach people who are going to change the world in some interesting way, not get all excited about $125K one way or the other (that's kind of like a rounding error for someone skilled in IT).
On the social life score, all I can say is that we expect our students to enjoy the same rich social life enjoyed by top computer science students around the world
Here's a fine example of how MIT turns out better engineers than Swarthmore. Elliot is whinging about Tcl and AOLserver while the engineers at AOL built a $120 billion business serving over 30,000 hits/second with AOLserver. Elliot hasn't bothered to check the arsdigita.com Web site (we've announced Apache and 100% Java versions of our toolkit, which really never used Tcl for much more than presentation; the Apache version is already up and running (it was authored by Robert Thau, the designer of the Apache module structure)).
If Elliot had looked at the curriculum, he'd have noticed that, just like MIT, we don't actually teach any computer languages. We expect the students to be bright enough to pick up the syntax as they learn the concepts (we might have to break the rules a tiny bit at http://arsdigita.org/university/ because we're introducing Java relatively early and Java has so much syntax and machinery).
As for teaching the "elite", Elliot, well we're sorry that we don't meet your standards. But with my piddling $1 million/year that I could afford to invest, we can't innovate too much. We're going to teach the Stanford/MIT stuff to people who had the qualifications necessary to get into Stanford and MIT in the same way (face-to-face education) used by Stanford and MIT. We're also going to let it all hang out on the Web for those who want to be monsters of self-motivation, but we don't judge ourselves by how well those folks learn.
Anyway, the bottom line Elliot is that if we had your intelligence and generosity, we could do more. But we don't so we're limited to just teaching 30 people/year in Cambridge for free.