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Ask Slashdot: Is Going To a Technical College Worth It?
First time accepted submitter blandcramration writes "I have recently decided to further my education with a technical school associates degree. I am a first quarter student in my third week as an IT student. I have taught myself Python and have been working with computers for over 10 years. We've been learning C++ and though my instructor appears to know how to program, he doesn't really understand the procedure behind the veil, so to speak. In a traditional learning environment, I would rather learn everything about the computer process rather than fiddle around with something until I figure out how it works. I can do that on my own. I think the real issue is I'm not feeling challenged enough and I'm paying through the nose to go to school here. Am I even going to be able to land a decent job, or should I just take a few classes here and move on to a traditional college and get a computer science degree? I'm much more interested in an approach to computer science like From NAND to Tetris but I feel as if I should get a degree in something. What are your thoughts?"
My two centavos:
No, no, and hell no. A technical college is likely not certified, so you will end up with a worthless paper in "fiber optics" or "homeland security" as a major... and have absolutely zero chances of job placement... coupled with student loans that are rapidly accruing interest which can't be discharged, EVER, through bankruptcy. Even a guy gambling his wages away and running up credit card debt can dump that stuff off at the bankruptcy court and walk away a free man.
There used to be a pact: Students would put up with professors and deal with the "game" of getting an education. Once you graduated, then the other part of the deal is that you land a meaningful job, pay your loans back in a couple years, and actually have a meaningful career.
Not any more. The "good" jobs are either owned by people there for 10+ years, or there is a H-1B having them. Management is usually whom is good at the golf course. The ONLY chance of getting anything meaningful these days is an internship where you have to behave like your job interview best for six months so you have a shot at something when you graduate college.
I'd do some market research. A coder or developer is like being a meat packer or a textile worker -- was a good job, now is available for pennies on the dollar from offshore outsourcers. You can pay Tata $10,000 and get more coding done for your dollar than you can with five senior devs that run 100 grand apiece... and to boot, you don't have to deal with the payroll taxes. You also get an actual guarantee of code working as well.
Want to run the school game? Get your B. S. and hit the law schools. Pass the bar, and you have a career for life. You would have to commit a felony or get disbarred. Once you have your bar membership, unemployment is up to you. No, you might not get the Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe senior partner, but you will always have somewhere at some company that is 9-5 and full benefits.
Avoid trade colleges like the plague. They teach you nothing viable, and just take your money... and you have zero prospects of work afterwards.
Sounds to me like you're more interested in _Computer Science_ than programming or "IT".
Maybe you need to reconsider the program you are in, or attend a more serious education institution?
For the money, an Associate's Degree at a Community College would impress me more than an ITT degree, and it would cost you a lot less. At a CC you can study CS or IT from people who know their subjects well, and have a passion to teach.
Don't get me wrong, I think that a lot can be learned from a technical college, and I've met quite a few people who have taught there and know what they're doing, but bang-for-your-buck can 't be beaten at a Community College.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
It's very likely that it will cost the same or less and will lead to more gainful employeement later.
The point of all the extra non-computer science classes is to teach you how to learn and process new material.
Having a 4 year degree from an accredited and respected school will also serve you well.
Here comes the rub... Most start-ups and even smaller mid-sizes might not care or hold it against you but then if you can impress them now why go to school at all?
Just my two cents from a guy works in the fortune 200. Right or wrong I see good people held back by lack of a 4 year degree all the time.
I'm always amused at the people working for me who command ridiculous (eg, six figure) salaries with absolutely no college education whatsoever, who are for some godforsaken reason impressed with my completely useless A.A.S. in Computer Information Systems.
But...
technical school associates degree
Go with an actual community college rather than a "technical school".
Or consider ignoring the degree crap altogether. Ten years, you say - do you have actual job experience? If not, a degree isn't a bad thing. If you do, it quickly becomes useless, especially if you learn that networking (as in, person to person social stupidity) is far, far more important than any actual talent at doing your job. :p (As horrible as it is - you can always learn on the job, if you have any skill whatsoever.)
I went to a technical college (state accredited, so it counts as a community college) directly after high school, as an alternative to the pricey 4-year universities. I earned an Associate of Applied Science in Networking in the first two years, and an Associate of Applied Science in Telecommunications with one more year of classes, due to overlap in the two programs. Immediately after graduation, I was hired at a nearby university for an open position with their IT team. They interviewed multiple people for the spot, ranging from next to no education to Bachelor's degrees. I was hired immediately after my interview. Granted, this is an entry-level position, but I'm still not necessarily the most impressive candidate.
In short, it all depends on where you want to go with the schooling you take. In the end, it's still a pretty piece of paper saying how much class you sat through, not a direct expression of what you know.
- and it's stuff you could do on your own - then it's already not worth it. If you're capable of learning it on your, which it seems you are, then my suggestion would be to put that money toward self-teaching, and then taking certification tests. No one will give a rat's ass that you have an associate's degree in IT from a for-profit technical school, but they'll drool all over your resume if you put just one semester's worth of tuition towards stuff like the CCNA or the MCSA.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
The Nand2Tetris is a great resource and I am working through it myself. I wish there was something like this available when I started college 20 years ago. The start of our instruction centered around a variable, then loops, data types, etc. I assume it's because students could related to variables through Algebra. It worked well enough though.
Don't go to a technical school. Go to a state sponsored 4 year university. They're cheaper, better value, and your professors, if you impress them, have some really good in's into hiring companies.
Get your foundation there. Understand *why* companies are willing to pay you 6 figures. Understand the value of scalability and maintainability. Understand how to build a proper ERD. Understand your data structures and why coding something one way is inefficient and doing it another way will make it 1000 times faster. Become an engineer, not a mechanic.
If you want to learn the behind the scenes parts of the language and the computer, get a BS in CS or CE. It will take a few more years, but your earning potential will be much higher than with a two year degree. You can learn all of that on your own, but it is difficult, and that piece of paper will get your resume in the door more easily than trying to explain autodidacticism to an HR drone.
But never stop learning, whether it be through tinkering, online stuff like the NAND-Tetris course, or formal, for-credit courses.
Unemployment amongst recent law school graduates is the worst it's been in history, and there is no sign of that changing. I've worked in the legal industry for a long time now, and it's ugly. I wouldn't wanna be someone with a law school loan right now. http://chronicle.com/article/Unemployment-Among-Recent-Law/132189/ etc.
It's really rare to go to a technical college for CS-related stuff and have it work out. The entire concept has been sullied beyond redemption by the ITT's and Devry's of the world. The best bet, money wise, it to take your first 2 years at community college, get all your prereqs like History and Calculus and CS101 out of the way for cheap. Then transfer to a traditional state 4-year for the last two years, even if its just a satellite campus. It's going to be much more expensive, and more challenging than CC, but you will hopefully end up with knowledgeable professors right when you need them, and after 50% of the class has dropped for lack of interest or plain immaturity. Also do your best to work with the school and line up an internship during your summer break between 3rd and 4th year. You'll have a degree that helps your resume instead of hinders it, a token amount of real world experience, and spend a bit over half as much money as just going straight to the 4-year.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
I'm a high school drop out with a 6 figure income as a software developer.
The overall quality of instruction and graduates in many of these tech schools is often pretty low. Technical College not only costs more than Community College, but is an indication that you didn't have the academic chops to get through Community College. I can tell you how I would stack my resume pile if I was hiring and all that hr was providing was a brief summary: Experience+College, Experience (no degree), Self-taught limited experience, College Grad (no experience), Technical Trade School, No apparent Qualifications. Self study, some certifications, and anything you can do to demonstrate competency will put you ahead of the Trade School Graduate and at least equal to the no-experience college grad. Do it on your own or go to a legitimate college that fits your budget.
minds, get scrambled like eggs, abused and erased. Hard Hearted Alice is who you want to see.
Do a great job where you are that shows you can tackle a 2 year project and achieve great results.
Nose your way into doing extracurricular activity you are interested in with a professor or private programming somehow, someway.
You will never stop learning, and it is impossible to get more than a good introduction in 2-4 years so go for it. You never know where you will eventually wind up, so get everything you can in training at school.
I can't imagine a Public Technical School being that expensive. I have friends that earn 90K+ (Senior SQL Server DBA) and 115K+ (Senior Network Engineer) that both attended an inexpensive Technical College for Associate Degrees in I.T. specific areas. Both had technical certificates (MCDBA at one point, A+,Network+ for the DBA/Cisco for the Network Engineer) prior to obtaining Associates Degrees. The Network Engineer's employers have paid for additional vendor specific certificates for him. I attended an inexpensive Public University in Alabama and have a B.S. in Business Admin (M.I.S major) and earn 90K+ as a Senior SQL Server DBA. We all live in areas of the Southeast U.S. where the cost of living isn't that expensive. I worked for a very large global website where at least 2 of the Directors was a self-trained programmers that had no formal education prior to joining the company as programmers. The easiest route is to attend a traditional University and an accredited public one to keep cost down if you have no experience otherwise in a career field. However some of the best and brightest I have worked with developed an urge to teach themselves more about information technology and talked their way into entry level positions (often Help Desk) at I.T. companies before pursuing any formal education.
1. sex
2. networking with other people who will be in your profession (try not to mix with #1)
3. learning something from a genuine authority on a subject (try not to mix with #1)
4. learning something that is hard to teach to yourself (music performance, foreign languages)
If you are having trouble finding a job, it is probably where you live or your soft/social skills.
A little comp sci theory is a good companion to the stuff (you say) you already know, but it can be self-teachable.
Get your generals out of the way at a community college or similar but be SURE the credits transfer to THE four year college you want to attend.
This will save you thousands of dollars and you end up getting your BA or BS from the school you wanted.
Think about marketing. Huge opportunities for growth positions and most marketing departments have a tight relationship with their corporate purse holders.
You need to consider the reputation of the school
This is good advice. Where I work, all resumes from these colleges go straight into the trash:
Devry
Heald
ITT
Univ of Phoenix
It is possible that they produce some good graduates, but I have never seen one, and it isn't worth going through all the chaff to find one. You are better off with no degree that with a degree from one of these diploma mills.
Have to give the OP that.
Check the box. Pick an easy major and get it done. Take as many CLEP tests as you can. Ten years from now no one will care what you got your degree in, and unless you go to a top school no one will care where you went. Skip the for-profit schools and find a nice affordable state school.
...I think you have already answered your question. You are spending a lot of money on something that will bring you very little in return.
My priorities when choosing a candidate to hire in my company are:
So, as you can see, you would quickly sink to the bottom of my pre-interview list of candidates. It's highly unlikely you would be called in for an interview. It's not so much that you are getting a bad education at the tech college, but that education is going to be very generic and give you little-to-no idea of what working within an IS/IT group is really like. These schools air commercials during the soap opera and Dr. Phil time of day for a reason: they target unemployed people without any skill sets. These are your peers in a tech college. They cannot be turned into IT wizards in two years. At best, they can get a very simplistic overview of the career field that is about equal to what you can learn on your own, online, for free.
Sorry to be so harsh, but it's my reality, and I imagine the same for many other hiring managers in the field. We value experience over education (and certifications) because the most important consideration before we spend the time and money to recruit and hire someone is "do they have a career path here, long-term?" And the best way to gauge that is experience, plain and simple. That puts you in the age-old conundrum of "how do I get experience without a degree?"
And my answer to that is internships. Work for free. Volunteer your time for a community organization. Have mom or dad or Uncle Joe get you something entry-level in their company. Show me that you not only know your stuff, but have a work ethic, know what you want to do with your life, and can work with the wide range of personality types found in any given company. Talent is everywhere; the ones that get hired are the ones I feel will work hard, get along with their colleagues, and have ambition to work their way up to something other than what they are interviewing for.
:q!
I know that when it comes down to the wire, experience will win over school credentials 95% of the time, but the fact is that a lot of companies do want, if not *require* an undergraduate degree. I'm in a similar boat right now, in that I'm working full-time, and trying to teach myself programming on the side. While I can do it, the structure of having classes helps me quite significantly, and I'm likely to learn more and faster in school than on my own. (And slightly off topic, if anyone has any suggestions for online CS or similar degrees, I'd really love to hear about them. I'm tempted by Full Sail's mobile development degree, but the reviews I've seen lately aren't that promising.) So like people have said, a local public community college/university might be your best bet. Also an option, assuming you're young and semi-mobile is internships and the like. ArenaNet is offering an internship right now that pays about as much as my full time job. Or just get a low, grunt position at a company you can see yourself working at long-term, and tell and show them that you're dedicated and want to move up.
Having dealt with tata before, I can agree with that and more.
In addition to dealing with the shitty bug ridden code that barely meets spec.
You will actually spend more time and money writing the perfect specs, having Product Owners, Process Managers, Business Analysts, Architects, SMEs and Sr. Engineers working on getting the specs and design to a point where the software is actually usable, than you would if you just built the software in house.
Of course I've only been in the business for 15 years.
Traditional college sucks as well and 4 years is to long for tech.
IT needs a Badges system.
IT needs trades based learning not college where to spend years in a class room with little hands on skills.
Years ago I had a junior technician working on my crew with an H1B, he was a bright Iraqi fellow with a Ph.D in Physics. Middle management had him doing programming work for $8.50 an hour with plenty of OT.. With cuts looming in the near future he was safe but that meant that someone else would be taking the cut. So I had to get him a promotion within the company to ensure the safety of my crew.
Since that experience I have really hated the way H1B works. Though I don't have animosity t'ward the H1B holders.