This is apprenticeship. It's how the trades are taught and learned. I'd love to see more of it in the white collar world as well. Been thinking about how we can do more of this at 37signals.
Switzerland has a great apprenticeship system in which you do three years of apprenticeship with 3 days of work and 2 days of school per week, after high school (and instead of college). This exists for a variety of jobs, and includes the option to do a degree that allows you to study afterwards, either during your apprenticeship (more complex school studies in the same time frame) or afterwards, as a one year, purely scholarly extensions of your degree.
If you do this study-ability option, you can go on to an applied university that offers a BA for a lot of degrees, although not all that 'proper' universities offer. Afterwards you can go on to an MA still.
In the entrepreneurship world, three years may be too much. But I can see a solution in figuring out a system where each company keeps each apprentice for one year, so each apprenticeship includes work at three different companies. This would allow the apprentice to get to know the world of start-ups and big companies alike, allowing him to make a differentiated decision when it comes to search for an employer afterwards.
While many companies in Switzerland will prefer a university graduate over an apprentice, I do think especially Silicon Valley would be open to look at (at that point) experienced programmers with a wide variety of start-up and enterprise experience under their belt, as well as a decent basic level of general knowledge due to the two days of school each week.
What I'm coming at is that I doubt you would have to reinvent the wheel. Look at well-organized examples of apprenticeship-systems around the world, adopt and adapt the best-fitting one, and make it work for your ecosystem. It's a great way to make more practically oriented people more valuable for society.
I think the system can and should be adopted for young programmers who would rather dive in than go to college, or even for college grads.
Structure it exactly like a kitchen in the fine dining world. Young commis chefs start with learning products and techniques by doing the low-level prep work. After that's mastered, they graduate to garde-manger where they generally are in charge of cold apps, soups and sometimes more. Not only does this expand their technique repertoire and palate but it introduces the concept of being responsible for your dishes, with no excuses. This continues around every station, with the cook learning more and being responsible for more as they continue.
While this is hard to reproduce exactly in a tech startup, it certainly wouldn't be hard to take on an apprentice who starts at the bottom and learns the basics under the mentorship of a more experienced developer while learning more and taking more on.
The University of Waterloo Computer Engineering department offers a "Co-Op" Engineering degree. My understanding is that the students take five years to graduate, rather than the traditional four, and alternate by semester between work and school. One semester in classes, the other semester at internship. The graduating students I've met absolutely dominate technical interviews and the like.
The Rochester Institute of Technology has also has Co-Ops as a graduation requirement for most technical and engineering degrees. The number of quarters required depended on the degree. For example, I had to do four quarters for my computer science degree.
It was a fantastic experience, and every job I've held has come to me in some way through contacts I made through that program. Plus, it was extremely valuable to come back after a co-op and connect what you were learning with the real world.
The school I'm attending now, University of Cincinnati, has a compulsory co-op program for the majority of technical degrees. I'm going into my last year of school having around a year and a half of work experience already. I've learned just as many things while working as I have from taking classes.
It's actually all Engineering departments. The Science, Arts and Math faculties also have either optional or compulsory coop degrees for their students.
Consider hiring minors through school vocational programs.
I had an apprenticeship between the ages of 15 and 18, at an ad agency that was using the newfangled computers to move faster than their competition. I was bored with high school and my neighbor's son owned the company. He liked to hire kids and teach them to program. I learned a lot, and got school credit even while almost-not-quite dropping out because of my school's voc-tech program.
It was a great experience, and I hope to set up something like that in the future.
Well, it was a small company, a Yellow Pages ad agency. At the time "cut and paste" mostly meant "scissors and glue". The owner's idea was to automate the process of designing, billing, placing, and accounting for advertising. He ended up with a program that scripted Photoshop and Pagemaker and created layouts on the fly, including rate cards and all the other paperwork then required. This was in the early 90s.
At the time I wanted to be an illustrator and calligrapher, if you can believe that. Half of the day I spent managing the phone book library. We had a subscription to every book in North America, something like 8,000 volumes.
The other half I spent more or less dicking around, doing creatives for the ads, special projects for sales, tinkering with layouts, reading manuals, and teaching myself about design theory and how to use the whole Adobe suite.
We were paid minimum wage for 25 hours a week, so I don't think us kids were a huge burden on the business. And we all turned in useful work. My high school had a program that gave us school credit for working, as long as we took core classes and stayed employed.
Ivan Illich called this "building education into the world" in Deschooling Society. The idea was to implement this on a universal level by having a government provide citizens redeemable education vouchers that private companies could accept in exchange for some apprenticeship.
jason, I need the same thing at our company. I am going to spike a quick prototype tonight and I was wondering if I could bounce some things off of you so it would have value in your eyes?
To quote just one example: "One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots."
That's what internships mean for many students not in IT or engineering nowadays.
The problem isn't that nobody wants to mentor people and pay them, the problem is that a whole host of companies aren't paying interns and aren't teaching them anything either, knowing full well that colleges will keep sending interns their way, and that the interns themselves won't complain as long as they get course credits and something to put on their resume, even if it means nothing.
"If you want to do grunt work in exchange for having Apple or NBC or GE on your resume, you should be allowed to do it. If I see a kid come in with those three companies on their resume, she has a good chance of getting a job -- I don’t care what she did there."
I spoke with a professor at a regional nationally-known university a few months ago. He was setting up a program for students to get real-world experience working with startups.
"Awesome!" I told him, "If I can have 2-3 kids for 3 days a week of around 4 hours, it will provide me with enough value to be worth my time, and in return they're going to get a lot of great experience. Just don't tell me you're sending a group of them here to do some kind of bullshit interviews, research, and reports. Really don't need much of that."
To his credit, he agreed with me that yes, that was exactly how he was planning it: the post-grads would roll in, take a look at some problem, go away and study it, then provide me a nice bound report at the end of their time. He wanted me to present them with little nicely-wrapped problems to consume.
I pointed out that this was not working in a startup. This was not entrepreneurial. This was -- for lack of a better term -- pre-consultant training.
We parted on friendly terms, but it really made me sad. I feel like both the students and I could have gotten a lot of value from a short time together, I was willing to invest in infrastructure and my time in return for their participation, and it was a shame that the university couldn't work out something that would be beneficial to us all.
The solution to a broken higher-education system is not to encourage people to avoid it entirely. It's to fix the problem and make higher education affordable in the US in the same way it's affordable overseas.
It's great to say "don't go to college" but the reality is that most employers NEED people with college educations. It's unlikely that any amount of mentoring it going to create the technical employees that our businesses are desperate for right now. Yes, a lot of kids are wasting their college education and not ending up with marketable skills.
A big reason for that is our loan system that makes it easy to get a tuition loan for a field you'll probably never make a living in, because the party making the loan doesn't have to worry about a default.
If the effective cost of an engineering degree was half that of a degree with fewer job opportunities, because there was real risk of default and that was priced into the interest rate, we'd see a much better hiring market for new college grads than we do right now. Loaning someone $100K so they can get a photography degree at NYU and make $40K a year (as per a recent NYT article) suggests that the market is not functioning properly, and it's obvious why.
To do what you suggest would require a massive restructuring of the entire US university system, and the governmental systems that continuously feed it easy money. There's a reason why college costs go up as federal educational dollars increase.
Colleges don't care what you major in, as long as the dollars flow. Colleges have absolutely no incentive to provide educational experiences that are useful in the working world, since the money is already in the bank account. They have every incentive to maximize enrollments [1] and keep students enrolled as long as possible, while reducing costs via cheap graduate student labor.
Colleges also have every incentive to massage outcomes statistics to keep federal dollars flowing. When a student defaults on a loan, the college doesn't bear the brunt of the impact - it's the responsibility of the government, and therefore, the taxpayer.
"Fixing" the college system, as you suggest, would require eliminating many administrators and/or substantially reducing their salaries, structuring departments based on market demand vs. academic interest (no more liberal arts), and largely eliminating federal subsidies for academic research, student loans, and grants.
You can bet that every single individual involved in credentialing as it presently exists will fight those changes to their dying breath. Since being "strong on education" gets politicians elected, this faction will find it easy to maintain political support.
Personally, I think this sentiment sums up the alternative approach:
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller
Employers don't NEED people with college educations. They need employees with economically valuable skills. They're not the same thing.
I don't think you have to do a thing to the college system to fix the problem I'm pointing out. You have to fix how we finance education in the US.
Government guarantees of loans are always a recipe for moral hazard and inefficiency. Look at housing.
Either the government should directly fund higher education, as in Canada, Australia and other countries, or it should end guarantees on education loans from the private sector, so that they can have a more effective market. I'd be fine with the government subsidizing loan rates (say, paying the first 3% of the interest rate.) But the overall rate should be determined by market forces and the risk that a student will not earn enough to pay back their loans.
Borrowing 100K to learn basket-weaving should not have the same implicit risk as borrowing 100K to learn software development. As long as there is, you're effectively subsidizing the basket weaving at everyone else's expense.
Also, the solution suggested by the OP doesn't scale. There aren't remotely enough available internship opportunities to handle the demand if a large percentage of college students went this route, nor would big companies want to spend their time attempting to filter what would essentially be high school graduates looking to work in the corporate space.
I don't think the problem of higher education is affordability, there are more bachelor/master/phd graduates than ever. The problem is the content, and the methodology. A great deal of college comes down to little more than: read a book, do some exercises, and then tests to verify you learned what was in the book. But much of that is at the wrong level, too much breadth, not enough actual mastery of the fundamentals. The result is CS graduates who struggle on anything other than non-trivial programming projects, or chemistry graduates who don't understand that the bulk of the weight of a piece of wood comes from CO2.
Sadly, most of the "value" of college today is due to the failure of high schools. If you require a basic level of literacy, numeracy, computer literacy, etc. you have to set your level at college graduates, since a HS diploma no longer guarantees such skills.
* I spent about $20/year during my college years. That was tuition, room, and board, for graduate & undergraduate from 2002-2009 or so.
* Interns at my company get paid, and well enough they can survive. But they usually work for 1-2 years, I think. Not 10 weeks. This is in line with a trades apprenticeship.
I think the core problem is "going to expensive schools".
edit: And there's an underlying surge in the cost of education, which is working to make all schools expensive.
My total cost of college probably sat around $140K, but that that is far more than my debt load, and I made some poor strategic choices for college: a better set of choices would have dropped the TCC down to 100K or so.
Free labor in exchange for education, contacts and a resume builder.
The idea sounds noble, in that, if such mentorship program is used in the right spirit, it could have a very positive impact on the youth's education and professional development. This sounds good on paper but I see potentially big downside with abuses. As a slightly related example, you could just look at the plight of illegal or early immigrants who end up working at below-market below-minimum wage jobs. If there are no laws to prevent such abuse of interns, people (read "market") would figure out a way to do just that. Such programs would help only in hands of right mentors.
I also tend to disagree on the notion of 35K a year wasted on college. College is much more education than education about a profession. It teaches kids social interaction, and gives them lifetime friends.
"It teaches kids social interaction, and gives them lifetime friends."
I guess I did it wrong. The only friends I have from college are the same ones I had before college. I have a few facebook acquaintances too, but it would be a stretch to call them friends.
One of the benefits of going to an elite school in an area you don't directly live in is that you are forced to make friends with the people around you. I'm confident that after I graduate I made some serious friends (and connections) here not only because I had the experience of being forced to socialize with a new group of people, but also that I know everyone else was in the same position.
I'd almost say that the network itself is worth the price I paid for college. Just looking at the people I know, I can probably connect myself to someone in any of the top 20 US schools in one or two degrees of separation. I assume this is how things like banking and executive networks are built, although that's not my field.
I possibly did. I worked 3 jobs while mostly putting myself through school. My parents helped a bit in the first and second year, I took a semester out, and ended up taking out a student loan the last year (and still had some credit card debt as well).
I had friends in classes, and we'd hang out sometimes, but this notion of 'lifelong friends made in college' just doesn't seem to feel very real. It also doesn't seem to be the case for many of the people I know. Yes, they made friends in college, but for the most part those friendships have about the same impact as high school friends - typically, not much after you leave the shared space.
I had friends in classes, and we'd hang out sometimes, but this notion of 'lifelong friends made in college' just doesn't seem to feel very real
Same boat here. I worked year-round to put myself through state school, and lived at home (20 miles off campus). I had few peers in my CS program, most others had only casual interest. My friends who went to Berkeley made life-long friends by living in dorms and playing sports with fellow nerds.
I don't buy the "social interaction" stuff one bit. Most of my college friends were also my nerd friends I met from being a large city and going to tons of networking events.
If you want, put your kid up in an apartment, do tons of networking in/out of their field of interest /and mentorship. Then let them figure out what to do after: be it a company, job or college.
College is one way of making great connections, but it's a really expensive way!
I agree that colleges are really expensive and they are getting more expensive by day. This still does not take away the fact that college education and, in larger context, the existence of (high-reputation) Universities, is vital to society. The solution is to make colleges less expensive somehow, not to replace colleges with unregulated mentorships (which as I said earlier, will be effective only in hands of good mentors). There are numerous countries where college education is highly subsidized by the Government (example, India, where I went to college -- paid a total of $120/year as fees, for a top college). Universities also employ many scientists as professors and have a very good research output, that certainly has a bearing on our scientific progress.
We were discussing Uni as useful to make connections (which it really isn't better than networking), so I don't at all want the research function to go away - the NSF/NIH should be subsidized with the money from the government education funding that used to indirectly fund them.
I also would contend, as studies show, that most Uni students come out without an appreciable increase in skills - compared with mentor/protege I think this underperforms society.
Unpaid internships aren't illegal just because some students get taken advantage of by doing grunt work and not getting experience, it's because they have been used for discrimination.
Top law firms are a great example. It used to be that if you wanted to get a job at a top law firm you had to do an unpaid internship for that company. Who has the money to not work for 3-4 months and still be fine? Kids with wealthy parents. This system ensured that minorities and underprivileged couldn't get into the field because they couldn't afford to take an unpaid internship. They were made illegal partly to try to prevent this "old boys" network from continuing and to instead help people succeed on the merits of their work, not who their parents were.
A top law firm could just start a minimum wage internship which would have the same effect -- with $100,000 or more in law school debt, most people couldn't afford that either.
There are other ways to help people from outside the "circle" break in, this in fact the genesis of most diversity programs at white-shoe firms.
A year in school from ages 4 to 18 inside this insanity costs $30K to $40K a year.
People are spending $500K on their kid’s education -- before college! Insane!
I'm dumbfounded by this. I went to a state school (well 4 actually, parents moved a lot) in the UK, left at 15 years old and haven't had any formal education since. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, i'm an autodidact and i only started real learning after realising there was a difference between education and school, after that epiphany i began to love learning.
In the 10 years since leaving school, i've done pretty well for myself, i'm financially stable, know my shit in my chosen field and earn a good wage when i choose to work.
While i'm not arrogant enough to think i've got everything sorted, i've always wanted to be a mentor to others and hopefully show them that school and education are different, i know i'd have done better if i had a mentor when i went through my learning experiences. Although, i suppose its still not too late for me to find some.
The prices he mentions assume that everybody's sending their kids to private schools prior to college. That's really not the case. In cities, you'll see a higher percentage of it because city schools tend to be worse environments for learning and are stretched thinner budget-wise, but the vast majority of students in small towns and suburbs go to public schools paid for by their taxes and do not incur the kind of pre-college expense for education that he's talking about. Sure, the taxpayers are still paying towards their education ... but it's spread across the entire community, whether they have students in school or not, and not coming directly out of the pockets of individual students' families.
I'm in the UK and neither my wife or I went to private school (in fact I went to a school that consistently appeared towards the very bottom of the league tables in Scotland, before they stopped producing such things). However, our son has been privately educated for the last nine years and probably has another six years to go - and I have never regretted it, the quality of everything is qualitiatively better than state schools (even good state schools).
One thing that is particularly noticeable in private schools is that the emphasis is not purely on academic performance (although that is important) - they are excellent in providing a very rounded education.
My only regret is that the same level of education is not available to all children - regardless of the parents ability to pay (which is obviously the main selection criteria at the moment).
Side note: Yeah, I got problems with Arrington, but I can’t deny that his prose can be compelling. Not as compelling as mine, mind you, but he’s in the top 10 of tech writers
> These interns are not slaves or indentured servants. They can walk out at any time
Not in a school with coop degrees. If I had walked out of any of my internships I would have lost the credits, set my progress towards my BS degree back 6 months, and been out 6 months of tuition (Drexel University charges the same annual tuition for a year where you have classes for 12 months and one where you spend 6 months doing one of your 2-3 required internships).
Why limit it to just kids? We all need someone to give guidance and support some time in our lives. There seems to be some mentorship matching services but they're geared towards matching local mentors and mentees.
How about an online mentoring matchup where:
- Mentors and Mentees create a profile and upload bio (preferably a video bio) about why they are qualified to be a mentor and who they want to mentor and mentees talk about who they want to be mentored by and what they need help with.
- Both groups can apply/offer to each other and they set the time frame and hours committed to being mentored. After an engagement is complete, mentees are invited to post ratings and review their mentor.
If anyone seriously wants to do this, they need to look at the meta-problem. All sorts of hackers are going to want to work on this project, but remote collaboration tool UIs are iffy at best. What if one were to pipe a screen session to a jailed *nix terminal and build a social application modeled around the use of screen-sharing. This would at least fill the niche of universities not offering a programming course.
The "AirBNB"/couchsurfing aspect is already a philosophy of libre/open software practices anyway. By building a site focused around a shared command line, one could easily reach a wide number of hackers who would love to learn programming. They would, in practice, be building skills and a few would be able to improve the application.
Finally, with the assistance of the now-established programming community, the application could be improved and perhaps merged with other online academic endeavours (eg Wolfram Alpha).
One significant problem is the pyramid of management. Everyone would want to be managed by the top person. But these are in very limited supply, and they're being rationed one-to-one. In a university, the lecturers are one-to-many.
How many top-dogs are there? 1000? 10000? That doesn't put a dent in university admissions. So, to go 'wider' one would need some kind of advertising for the middle-managers who would like to mentor. But the facts of life are the middle-management is pretty boring (at least from the outside).
So, while the idea of being mentored by Steve Jobs (CEO) is compelling, the reality would come down to a family dinner-table discussion of whether Joe Schmo (middle-manager) is a rising star, or just someone who likes the idea of someone paying to pick up his dry-cleaning.
I find it crazy that it is assumed to be the parents role to pay for their kid to go to college or get a mentorship. What ever happened to being an independent adult when your 18? I feel like the type of kid who's parents are going to fork out the big bucks for this stuff aren't going to be the type of entrepreneurs the world needs.
There are many education programs in place that also need some funding, targeted at less affluent kids. In NYC alone there is MicroInterns (matching middle schoolers to tech startups) by George Haines:
Programs like these that are supplemental to the general education kids will be getting in middle, high-school, and college are necessary, but they would never be able to replicate everything that a young person needs to learn in order to survive.
There are many ways to make education better, lets try to have systems that support each other.
Jason, want to donate to the MicroIntern program? :-)
I've seriously been thinking about starting a site like this for several months. However, I would like it to function as a free site for all, mentor and student, instead of a pay-for-the-mentor site. I'm fairly convinced that there would be plenty of people who would help out as a charity or philanthropy, but haven't thought of a good way to execute that thought yet.
My motivation, as may be yours, is to disrupt this current increasingly flawed education system in whatever way I can. Working on a few other projects along this line at the moment...
"to disrupt" seems to me like a backwards approach. You don't need to disrupt anything, you just need to create a system that works better, at least for some, and the old system will fall back. It doesn't need to be defeated or eliminated.
But yes, mentors outside (as well as inside, perhaps?) of academic institutions is a rather good idea, i think :-)
Bruce Mau -- from Massive Change -- created a similar one-off program. http://www.institutewithoutboundaries.com/ . It is unclear how successful the program was. The main reason seems to be that the demand for mentorships exceeds the mentor ability to work directly with the interns. Many top architects actually charge students to participate in the studios as interns. They use some fancy french term to describe the relationship.
It's called the internet. Information is free - if you can't teach yourself something, you have no chance of survival in a world filled with jobs that often require you to learn and adapt independently.
What if airbnb had the equivalent of sub-reddits? For now, it just has the "sleep somewhere" sub, but you can imagine all kinds of user-created ones. A cross between Meetup and AirBnB?
I've never understood the obsession with internships. Why be an (unpaid) intern when you can hold down an entry-level tech job during college? Why aren't there more summer/break jobs for students?
(I paid my way through college by doing programming work. Part time during school, full-time during breaks)
In Canada the system is slightly different. We usually don't have as many internships as we have coops. The main differences between the two are the following:
* Coop is usually paid
* It's usually technical.
* Some universities have programs to support coops.
The biggest coop program is from the University of Waterloo. All engineering students are required to take part in the program which combines work and school by alternating between a school semester and work semester. The university has it's own job posting website, and it actively foes looking to find more employers to offer jobs. It also makes sure that the student gets to do real work, not make coffee all day. If a student feels like he's getting the short end of a stick with a job, he can complain to the university which will look into it and clear things up.
Outside of programming, many companies won't take people without the completed degree. Many people just don't work during college, and many who do, don't work in a field at all related to what they want to do. I was able to get jobs and internships that helped me gain valuable experience and lead to more job opportunities, but few students are willing to look for and hustle into opportunities outside a few job listings. The best, most valuable experiences I gained were simply by asking for a job that wasn't there yet.
Also, I was mandated to do an internship that related to my major (paid or unpaid) for at least one semester, so I presume some other people are in the same boat.
Internships, done right, offers something very different than an entry-level tech job. During an internship, you should get a chance to circulate through several different departments and try out several different positions under the mentoring of several different people and really get a chance to find out what you might want to do with your life, without any real demands to perform.
Well said, Mr. Calacanis. It'll be interesting to see if somebody actually picks this idea up and tries to make something happen with it.
Sadly, if it did happen, I can already predict what'll come next... the inevitable whining and moaning about how bloody unfair it is that "some kid gets to be mentored by J.J. Abrams, just because his parents are rich... waaaaaaaahhhhh, waaaaah.... somebody should pass a law prohibiting this sort of thing, it's a return to the Robber Baron era, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, wahahaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."
