For the US, something like Lambda school seems to be a great alternative. For Europeans, it’s way too expensive at $30k max.

Maybe consider studying in Europe. Good universities, no mandatory meal plans or dorms, no tuition, comparatively low cost of living, great education. Language could be a barrier, but there are international universities afaik.

Edit: This isn’t to downplay Lambda School. I think it’s great to have alternatives to US universities. It’s just to give some perspective what education looks like in other countries and that the US university system is kind of insane.

You should tell that to our rapidly growing number of German and European students :)

Maybe an explanation is: CS students usually don't get entry-level jobs that pay more than 50K EUR, often probably less. So maybe they hope that they never have to pay back. Or they don't care and are happy to have a good education after all.

I'm happy for you and the growth and maybe I missed something :)

TUITION OPTIONS - 0 up-front + 10% of salary for four years (£25k GBP / €27.5k EUR maximum total payment)

- £16k GBP or €18k EUR up-front + no income-based repayment

PAYMENT CAP £25k GBP / €27.5k EUR maximum

The five year payment window clock starts on graduation. So if you don’t get a qualifying job within 5 years of finishing class, you pay nothing.

EDIT: Not sure if you were referring to US or EU, since you mixed around the $ and € sign a little!

I love that programs like Udacity (and likely Lambda School as well) teaches Git(hub) as a 101 level course and use traditional workflows to submit, critique, and grade code.

I do, however, still think traditional universities still have a place, especially when it comes to research. I’m referring to things like AI/ML.

I can’t think of a single skill more stupid to learn in university.

My degree came a lot cheaper than the modern ones but if I got a similar experience now as then I wouldn’t feel cheated.

My undergraduate provided opportunities to program lisps & assembly & write published articles on data structures & I literally went to the local state school.

"Right! If there is one thing I know how to do, it's sorting", I though.

Finished the job in half a day (shell sort -- which sadly was the only one I could actually remember...) They thought I was a freaking genius :-) Who says you'll never use this stuff?

How many times have you told it? :)

The idea that universities should only teach theory is preposterous. While Bolonia or Harvard or Oxford might not have been founded on the idea of helping students find jobs, that’s an implicit - and legitimate - expectation since the mid 20th century.

It’d be criminal for unis to drop out students into the real world without any knowldge of git. Hell, it’s also widely used in academia, so if you teach students “research techniques”, you might as well teach them git.

I’ve used at least 8 source control systems in my career. Knowing them have not been long term beneficial. Especially in comparison to the other things I did learn.

Colleges would argue turning you into a software engineer isn't their role, which is fine, but I'd argue that is the goal of the vast majority of CS students, so there's a mismatch.

I can (for an aspiring software engineer) - real analysis, differential equations, number theory

And yeah linear algebra is definitely something I wish I got more out of. In college I did enough to get a good grade but not nearly enough to grok it. I'm hoping to take fast.ais course on it some day to rectify that mistake.

When I was in school I'm glad I went out of my way to take all the math-heavy and theoretical classes I could, and no classes like "modern web design" or "software engineering project". Learning basic programming is trivial and something I literally get paid to do (so long as I learn at a decent rate) while all the knowledge I have about math and theory is a lot harder to learn outside of an academic setting and is a force multiplier on most things I do for work.

You are thinking about this wrong.

If it is so easy and quick to teach people how to use git, then why aren't colleges doing it!?!?

Learning how to use common software engineer tools is a low effort, high reward situation. All they have to do is spend a day on it, and they have now made their students significantly more valuable.

Educational institutions that do not even bother to spend such a small amount of time, in order to make their students much more valuable, are making a huge mistake.

I can confirm that there are theory-focused professors at a particular state university that don't understand version control or have any experience with it. It's not that they don't see any value in it, they just don't have any experience with it to pass on to students.

Some of them actually do.