First Red Hat Academy for High School

FrankBama writes "As a follow-up to the story of a few days ago, Red Hat has started a program in my old hometown. The story's at the News & Record. I love this part '...this training normally would cost more than $10,000. But Weaver students can get Red Hat certification free -- and use it get a job paying more than $30,000 a year right out of high school.'"

Comments

At my high school

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a very similar two year course at my high school that granted certification for Cisco Router Systems. What I remember is the teachers' endless grumbling over how a kid right outta high school can now go get a job that pays better than teaching.

Re:At my high school

[dextr0us]

As a high school student that certified (CCNA), let me tell you a couple of things:

#1 - CCNA is worthless to a high school student (at least a sophomore) I reciveved my cert in february, got a job in march, and then after my cert expired 2 years later, i had no real desire to do any more cisco out of high shcool.

#2 - people don't realize how difficult it is as a HS student. HS was cake, but HS, Junior College, and a job as a CCNA (mostly diagnosing router problems) wasn't the best way for me to spend my time. After my sophomore year, i worked on my associates degree more fully, and let me tell you.... way more worth it. Most kids that are smart enough to get a CCNA, are smart enough to do a few/a lot of community college courses. Do that instead of a cert.... that way getting into a bigger school is cake. (only a 26 on the ACT for me, but it was irrellivent)

Good on many fronts

[jgennick]

This is good news from several fronts. One thing I like about it is that it gives high-school students a marketable skill. It's always been a pet peeve of mine that we can send kids to school for 12 years (grades 1-12) and when they come out the other side we still haven't imbued them with skills to make a living.

Re:Thats too young!

[garcia]

(I am not going to say that people are going to make 30k out of HS w/this cert, but for shits and giggles, let's go w/it).

So instead of coming out of high school and starting work at 30k, these kids are going to goto college and pay $10k+/yr for 4 years. They are going to be able to actually afford $3000 of that. So after college they have $30k in debt.

Now. Instead of going to school they start working at 30k. They have no debts. They have a car, a job, and are gaining experience faster than any college intern for 2 months during two summers.

I went to school for 4.5 years. I had nearly a full scholarship for athletics. I still have quite a bit to pay off. I have a job that doesn't pay all that great, I am worried about losing my job, I already lost wage increases. I had no experience, I have little money, and I am just as scared as everyone else.

How is this a bad thing? Get the money first and go back to school later. That's my opinion.

Too true, my MCSE did wonders

[alexhmit01]

I was doing tech support at a local startup (this was in '96-'97), and started studying on my own for the MCSE. The first few tests I studied for were reading the NT 4 Server Resource kit. After graduation, I landed a summer internship at Citrix, and finished my MCSE (the last test was on break during freshman year).

I used that to leverage interviews and offers that made my friends at school jealous, and this was at MIT, they weren't slouches. One interviewer freshman year asked if I was graduating in the spring, and was quite disappointed when I explained that I was a freshman looking for an internship (then she saw the education line on my resume).

I pimped the MCSE and Citrix CCA (easy to pick up after working in Citrix's tech support department for 3 months) to get great jobs through the dot-com era. It was nice that when my friends were scrounging for money to buy shitty beer, the girls were impressed with my fully stocked liquor cabinet of premium stuff. :)

I turn 24 in a few weeks, run my own business, getting married this summer, and generally have my life together. The last of the credit card debts from starting a business are getting repaid, and things are going well. Take away the MCSE, and instead of getting good jobs as internships, I'm UROPing (undergrad research, most of which is just bitch work for $8/hr), and just getting my act together in the corporate world.

I dealt with clients, managed a team, and generally acquired a lot of experience while in school. Didn't cost me my "youth" either, I managed to be social chair of my fraternity among other experiences. Getting job skills in school is critical.

Hell, if I had stayed with Citrix like my HS drop-out friend that got me the job did, I'd also have a house and car from cashing in my stock options. :)

Skills are good, learn them. They don't replace a liberal arts education for personal growth and knowledge, but they can get you an opportunity to get rewarding summer jobs, instead of menial ones. Being a broke college student sucks, I was happier making $35/hr part time as a Citrix/MS geek than $8/hr cleaning test tubes in a lab.

Alex

Too young?

[zachlipton]

A lot of posters have commented that they belive that it's "too young" to be learning this stuff and be "shipped off" to a job. As a high school student myself (14), I really disagree.

Getting certification does not mean that one can need not go to college. However, gaining skills and then applying them, typically in a job-like setting, offers a huge set of advantages.

Internship opportunities allow you to actually _use_ these skills and do something productive with your time. Imagine if all the "14 year-old script kiddies" could put their hacking skills to use on something, whether it be Cisco routers or adding features to samba (just to name a random project). OSS gives great amounts of opportunities for students to apply their technology skills in a productive way, but this isn't enough.

Schools need to help students learn these skills and give them opportunities to use them. Would I have survived 8th grade had I not been running the lighting and sound for nearly all school productions and maintaining the school website? Probably not. Besides, it's clear that it is "fun" to crack into various systems, but what if that could be done in a productive way too? That's just what I did last week when I (at the request of the technology department) discovered that my school's security model resembles swiss cheese (I'm still trying to get them away from Windows... :(

Furthermore, there are some situations where just working on random hacking projects won't do. This is where an internship comes in handy: being able to apply your skills in some sort of useful way while learning. Here, there are no real expectations that you have to know how to do this or that, just lots of abilities to learn new things and try them out.

If anything, schools need to do more to encourage students to get involved in the field. Have students be working on something productive, whether it is building cgi scripts for the school website to working as an intern for the summer (or even for a two-week break), and you will see a group of students that are more prepared to face the world and have a thirst to learn more: exactly what is provided by a college education. You may even see a few less students smiling smugly when you discover that the school website was cracked yet again.

Re:Nice that it's free for the students...

[Fwonkas]

You probably could. If you had a good understanding of systems administration in general. They wont. They'll have a bunch of general knowledge about how linux works and what some of the config files are for.

No kidding. I understand the need for teaching practical, specific skills, but only to a point. I mean, I took a programming class in high school (Pascal, whee). I didn't learn much, since I'd learned some of the basics of programming on my whiz-bang Commodore when I was 8. But I know some kids learned something. At least they learned about subroutines and somewhat structured programming.

There's this whole argument about teaching practical skills vs. a rounded liberal-arts education. It's kind of tiresome, but I have to say I lean a bit towards liberal arts. While my job is primarily in system administration, I am involved in some curriculum development. A big problem, I think, is that when a school offers a "practical" class, it is made an elective. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but electives, I think, aren't put under nearly enough scrutiny. Like you said, big deal if a kid knows what config files do what. They should concentrate on how computers work, not how to open files in redhat. Teach kids about binary math and how to subnet before you teach them how to crank up a dhcp client.

Unfortunately, the people who end up teaching these classes are physics teachers who can use word but not wordperfect or whatever. That's not really the teachers' faults, I think. The schools just don't support a more comprehensive program, especially for electives. This is often because the school administrators don't know how to properly support them, I think. They send these teachers off to a week-long training and expect them to teach a bunch of kids who were just tossed into electives because they couldn't hack it in trig.

I teach Cisco classes to teachers, and I've seen a lot of this kind of thing (no, I don't develop curriculum for Cisco). That and CS grads who think Visual Basic rocks all over C. That one always leaves me speechless.

looked at it...

[flogger]

and sure, for the students it is free, but for the schools it is 35-40 thousand dollars. That is BIG bucks for a school district. (At least it is for mine.) Why not give the whole program to the schools for almost nothing (Like MS did with office 5-6 years ago) and then teh kids will want it when they get out of school. Then when they got those $30K/year jobs they can pay for their own personal liscence.
Bottom line: too damn expensive for schools.