Hacking College

I would be the first person to tell you a story about how college wasn’t for me. But something interesting is happening in the world of programmers that I think may echo the start of the demise of what college is today.

There are currently two career paths that work well if you don’t go to college. Programming and Entrepreneurship. If you choose one of these two paths it’s not frowned upon that you didn’t get your higher education. In some cases, it’s even preferred.

So why is that? What is it about being a programmer that allows you to get a job less the degree? I think the answer is accessibility. A large percentage of people have access to computers, therefore access to practice. And that means they can gain experience, something that almost any job in any field will lust over.

But there is another type of education that is helping out programmers. It’s the world of privatized jump start systems. In other words: bootcamp. Programmers found that there weren’t good resources in traditional education, so we created our own education system. I love programmers.

Programmers found that there weren’t good resources in traditional education, so we created our own education system.

In most major cities, there are now these 6–14 week (sometimes longer) bootcamps for people to learn to program. A lot of these will get you a job right out of ‘graduation’.

I think over time we will see other career paths follow this idea. We’ll see bootcamps for robotics engineering, camps for sales and camps for design. We will start to see 8 week courses on insurance, title work, manufacturing, farming, management and economics.

If you take someone that is really passionate about wanting to learn something, and you put them in an environment surrounded by other people as eager to learn as you — you will get amazing results. College doesn’t focus on one thing, you have several classes over 4 years that defocus, spread out and cost a fuck ton of money.

To contrast, a bootcamp may cost between $5k and $20,000. So you could spend 20k for 3 months or 60k for 4 years and the 60k doesn’t nearly focus the way the 20k would.

Focus is a really big deal. It’s something that traditional college sucks at. You may take 4 classes a semester but they won’t be in the field you care about. And thus they become a huge distraction to what you’re trying to learn. Ever weakening your hardening of whatever skill you want.

I think higher education needs a system like this. It needs low cost, high intensity, high focused learning environments. So, to the rest of the world, let’s take a page out of the book of programmers and let’s see a 3 month law boot camp.

I make youtube videos helping more advanced programmers learn to code. Youtube.com/optikalefxx