Pick up any newspaper today and you’ll read the doom-and-gloom statistics about out of control student debt.
But despite its problems, higher education still offers the best chance at climbing the economic ladder and helping our country remain competitive. It’s a vital industry, but certainly one ripe for disruption.
Thankfully, ex-Googler Sebastian Thrun and his company, Udacity, are taking a bold step in the right direction with “NanoDegrees,” a new kind of degree that teaches a narrow set of skills online in fields like front- and back-end coding, mobile development and data analysis.
It’s knowledge presented in small, digestible chunks by an expert (you aren’t left to fend for yourself) and, unlike most online options, it offers skills that can be clearly applied to a job for immediate motivation and tangible results. The best part? It takes less time (six to 12 months) and less money ($200 per month) to complete than almost any other type of learning out there.
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For the many young Americans for whom college has become a distant, unaffordable dream, a NanoDegree lets them harness the web to provide effective training and to begin a career. Intended to teach anyone with a mastery of basic math skills for entry-level job at a company like AT&T, it’s a plausible path for those who may not have the time, money or ability to make it through a four- or even two-year program.
NanoDegrees also have implications for the wider workforce. Today’s industries, especially digital ones, change significantly year to year; skills learned in 2009 might be irrelevant by 2014. But even well-educated adults who can afford to update their knowledge might not have the time. With the NanoDegree you can do so through a “stackable” curriculum that allows you to continually learn new, relevant skills as your career progresses.
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What really sets the NanoDegree apart, though, is the corporate partnerships. Engaging with companies in need of high-demand skills sends a strong signal that if you do the work there’s an actual payoff (a light at the end of the tunnel, so to say). Udacity’s first partner in this initiative, AT&T, said it will accept the NanoDegree as a credential for entry-level jobs and has reserved 100 internship slots for its graduates. Udacity promises further programs with corporate partners and AT&T is already encouraging more companies to get in the game to help.
Such an explicit arrangement might make purists cringe, but this isn’t traditional education. And while it may not offer all the advantages of a liberal arts degree, for example, for people seeking a realistic, viable alternative, the NanoDegree has some serious appeal. NanoDegree graduates can always read Shakespeare while on vacation from their new job, right?
Tag: Higher Education
Why It Took A Plea From A Pizza Guy to Increase Michigan’s Higher Education Funding
As the recent news of Starbucks offering to pay for its employees college tuition reveals, higher education is not a privilege of the elite.
That’s a message education leaders in Michigan have been trying to illustrate to lawmakers as funding for higher education was reduced by about $1 billion in total cuts over the past 10 years. Back in 2011, the leader of another national chain pitched in to persuade Michigan lawmakers to include Governor Rick Snyder’s proposal for a 6 percent increase in funding higher education in the state’s 2015 budget.
“The fact that the pizza guy is coming to them to talk about higher education funding is unexpected,” said Patrick Doyle, the CEO of Domino’s Pizza.
Doyle, as a part of the Business Leaders for Michigan, argued that the state was not producing enough candidates with the skills to run and operate the online component of his Ann-Arbor-based company, which is one of the state’s biggest employers. In fact, just three in 10 adults in Michigan held a college degree—including only some, but certainly not all, of the state’s lawmakers themselves.
The Business Leaders for Michigan coalition, which is comprised of Michigan’s highest-ranking business and university leaders, contends that investing in higher education is integral to growth — just as much as population or jobs programs.
“It’s a producer of economic impact. It’s part of the overall economy,” said Doug Rothwell, president of the business leaders.
The coalition recognized higher education as an asset in its first release of the Michigan Turnaround Plan in 2009. The plan identified the state’s major strengths and areas for potential growth, which included Michigan’s higher education system as a major economic asset. Like elsewhere in the country, the group found a disparity between the available jobs and the workforce’s skills. Michigan ranks 30th for the nation’s educated workforce.
So why are they not being filled? In part, it’s because of the [lack of] college affordability,” Rothwell said.
The group began lobbying for performance-based funding as a means of increasing cash for colleges in 2011 before lawmakers allocated $21.9 million in new appropriations in 2014. Success rates are determined by such factors as graduation rates and administrative costs.
Though support has been gradual, Governor Snyder’s 2015 budget includes the largest increase to higher education funding in more than a decade. The boost — $80 million out of the $1.4 billion in funding — includes a 3.2 percent cap on tuition increases in order to receive full state funding.
Michigan’s inclusion of higher education funding is part of a greater trend sweeping the country. Only nine states have decided not to include some sort of funding increase for the 2015 budget, and 25 states have implemented policy for performance-based funding for their higher education institutions.
While performance metrics aren’t ideal for larger universities, the method does benefit all types of colleges and universities as a whole. As the Business Leaders for Michigan have illustrated, the education system is better off when higher education receives a bigger piece of the funding pie.
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Inside the $100,000 Deal to Skip College and Start a Company Instead
Imagine that you’re a senior in high school and a man approaches to you with this proposition: He’ll give you $100,000 and mentorship to start a company. The only catch? You can’t go to college.
Do you take him up on it?
Well, for the past four years that’s exactly what Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, has offered high school students across the country.
Out of this year’s 550 applicants, only 20 were chosen this year to become a part of the Thiel Fellows Foundation. Of that group, one quarter are women — a better percentage than last year when only four of the 22 participants were female.
This is a unique opportunity for students, especially considering the growing wealth gap between those with high school degrees and college graduates. Interestingly, despite the lack of higher education, past fellows have contributed to the economy by creating over 182 jobs and adding $87 million in economic action. In the first year of the foundation, five fellows returned to school but since then, Thiel has a perfect record.
Undoubtedly, being a Thiel Fellow becomes more appealing when once you start looking at the success of former program participants. For instance, Dan Friedman is now the co-founder of a company called Thinkful which works with mid-career professionals who want to switch to technical careers. Another, Laura Deming, is now a venture capitalist focusing on anti-aging projects. And Paul Gu is the co-founder of Upstart, a financial company.
This year’s applicants are just as impressive. This year, many proposals focused around bitcoin, machine learning, and hardware, but also include creating a tool kit to help investigative journalists, using technology to improve the hospital-patient relationship, curing cancer, and conducting research on streamlining satellite development. To meet this year’s fellows, click here.
With college becoming an expensive option, Thiel’s offer is a tempting alternative. The opportunity he gives these students is a once in a lifetime chance and is challenging both the role and the importance of higher education. The question is, then, would you apply?
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This Venture Capital Firm Bets on College Students
In this country, we used to talk about ballooning credit-card debt. Now the bigger money worry? Student-loan debt.
As more students graduate with a crippling amount of it (the total amount of student loan debt now tops $1.2 trillion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), Silicon Valley is rethinking the way in which we ask people to pay for college.
As it currently stands, borrowers carry all of the risk while the government lender is only responsible to make up for unpaid balances through taxpayers around two decades later. Private lenders are only responsible for paying a collection agency to chase the unpaid balance and schools receive tuition regardless, all the while a borrower could go into default and ruin their credit for the rest of their lives. And for low-income students, this risk is even greater.
Instead of placing the entire burden on students, financial executives at venture capital firm 13th Avenue Funding believe that education loans should be perceived as equity, placing bets on a student’s potential achievements and earnings.
Two years ago, the New York-based firm offered four students at Santa Barbara’s two-year Allan Hancock College $15,000 for tuition to become a part of a “cohort” before transferring to a four-year institution to earn their bachelor’s degree. The students leave college without the possibility of defaulting and are expected to pay a small percentage of their salary each month if they make more than $18,000 a year post-grad. If they should surpass an annual income of $25,000, they’re required to pay back five percent of their income for the next 15 years.
Granted, borrowers do run the risk of paying back more than they received — but the money is used to cover other members of the cohort who are unable to repay the loan. And any additional remittances are used to fund new scholarships for future cohorts.
“It’s pooled venture capital,” said Casey Jennings, chief operating officer for 13th Avenue. “It’s sharing risk.”
The 2012 experiment, which is the first of its kind in the United States, was backed by four of the VC firm’s founders as well as two board members. The firm put together enough money to support a second cohort of seven students last year and hopes the model will be successful enough to continue.
While the idea is unique, it’s actually similar to that of investing in any small tech startup in Silicon Valley. You run the risk of failing — more often than not — but the chance of success can be worth it. The challenge therein lies with convincing higher education professionals to take the gamble on the concept of “income sharing” agreements.
“It’s really painful,” Jennings said. He continues to meet with college administrators to make them the “investors,” but has found no school wants to be the first to take a chance. “We talked to a bunch of colleges. They’re like, ‘It’s interesting, but come back when you get another college.’ “
If the 2012 experiment succeeds, it shows that students — especially those with low-incomes — can be an untapped market for investments. When it comes to funding those low-income students, Jennings added, “the payback for getting that group to go to college is unfathomable.”
After all, having a more diverse group of college graduates is something that you can’t put a price tag on.
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How One Community College Works to Get Transfer Students More Education
For some students, two years of schooling at a community college is all they’re interested in. But for others, it’s just a stepping stone to more education.
Two-year schools overwhelmingly enroll low-income, minority, and first-generation students, while California’s four-year universities have a disproportionate number of white students coming from wealthy families, according to National Journal.
The state’s community colleges are pioneers in building a bridge between the two types of institutions, and Santa Monica College — having stressed a culture of transferring within the school — seeks to provide disadvantaged students with more opportunities.
Santa Monica College’s success is due to its programs that help students navigate the application process. Not only does its class schedule help students enroll in courses that four-year universities require, the two-year school also holds workshops, visits, and sessions with “admission evaluators” from four-year colleges in the area.
The school is equipped with 45 full-time and 70 part-time counselors who provide extensive guidance during the transfer application process, and as deadlines draw near, these counselors create “panic rooms” to help students complete their applications.
“We sit with them, we hold their hands, we read their essay,” Brenda Benson, the college’s dean of counseling and retention, told National Journal.
Transferring more students into the University of California four-year system than any other community college in the state, it’s clear that Santa Monica College is leading by example. If more community colleges across the United States offered these programs and services, minority students from low-income families would have the same opportunities as white students from affluent backgrounds — ensuring a diverse student body that can produce a competitive workforce.
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This Non-Profit is Making Sure Kids of Fallen Heroes Can Go to College
Funding a college education can be a difficult proposition for anyone, but for children of parents who died while serving in the military, it can be downright daunting. According to the Jacksonville, Florida-based nonprofit Children of Fallen Patriots, 15,000 American children have lost a military parent over the past 25 years. Now, the foundation is on a mission to identify as many of them as possible and offer them help paying their college bills. So far they’ve found 5,218 of these students, and paid $7.5 million toward their college educations.
“Our focus is on military children who have lost a parent in line of duty or any related deaths, like PTSD suicide or illnesses from exposure launch,” Army veteran David Kim, the founder of Children of Fallen Patriots, told Helena Hovritz of Forbes. “When government benefits don’t come through, we step in and pay for what they need.”
Hovritz writes that before Daniel Richard Healy’s final deployment, he told his son Jacob Centeno Healy that what he most wanted was for him to go to college. When Senior Chief Petty Officer Healy died, Jacob didn’t know how he could pay for college. “The VA wouldn’t provide benefits to me because they didn’t recognize me as my dads’ son,” Healy told Forbes.
So Fallen Patriots stepped in and funded Jacob Healy’s education. Now he works as a program administer for the organization, helping other people who’ve lost parents in the military find all the scholarships and government aid available to them, and covering the rest of the costs with funds from the nonprofit.
On this Memorial Day, Children of Fallen Patriots reminds us that we owe our fallen heroes so much. They gave our country their parents: the least we can do is provide them with a college education.
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Ask the Experts: How Can We Keep From Drowning in College Debt?
Have you paid off your student loan yet? If not, you’ve got lots of company. In 2012, total student debt in the United States reached $966 billion, a tripling over the previous eight years, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Current estimates put the figure even higher — more than $1 trillion. Over the past 35 years or so, the cost of college has also ballooned by a staggering 1,120 percent, so it’s no wonder that people are questioning whether higher education is really worth it.
The consensus, however, is yes. Going to college is still a good investment. You’ll earn more: On average, college graduates aged 25 to 34, who are employed full time, year round, make 50 percent more than their high-school-educated peers. Over a lifetime, that college diploma will earn you about $500,000 more on average, even after factoring in the cost of school.
And yet many graduates are withering under the weight of their student loans — a problem that could potentially negate any economic benefit of going to college in the first place. So, how do we ease the burden for students who need to borrow money to pay for their education? NationSwell convened a panel of experts to talk about how to fix the student loan system, as well as ways to help families spend their education dollars more wisely.
Read on for our experts’ thought-provoking ideas, and then join the conversation by leaving your own ideas in the comments box.
Beth Akers
Fellow, Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution
NationSwell: What can be done to fix our broken college loan system?
Beth Akers: I’m not sure it’s entirely broken, but there are two areas where we can make some improvements. First is on the front end. Students are going into college and blindly taking on debt without a lot of information about the investment they’re making or the amount they’re taking on. The [Obama] administration has taken the first step toward solving that problem with the college-ratings system, and [once they] incorporate earnings information into the data available to prospective students, that will help families make wiser decisions on the front end.
Second, on the back end, a lot of these debts are actually affordable. For the most part, students are making good investments in higher education that do pay off over the long run. In theory, it shouldn’t be problematic for the majority of students to repay these debts, if their repayment period is over a sufficient period. So, what we need to do is focus on creating a repayment program for federal loans that makes the process more painless for borrowers. One way is through income-based repayment. Right now, this program is available only to a certain set of students [with low incomes]. I don’t think it’s crazy to expand eligibility for that program to people with larger earnings so that on average, people are repaying their debts over a longer period of time.
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Like everything in education, there are a lot of barriers to information. It’s a very complex — perhaps unnecessarily complex — system. The result of that is that people underutilize the benefits that are available to them. We see that in a lot of different ways. [For example], students are taking on private student-loan debts, when they’re still eligible for government loans at a much lower interest rate. There’s evidence that people are not utilizing the programs properly and that they don’t have the information necessary to make good choices.
NS: How can students and parents be smarter about spending college money?
BA: You have to make wise decisions about where you spend your money and how much you’re willing to spend. There are a lot of great institutions that provide a good return on investment for students. But there are others that do not. The government is not in the business of telling students where to go, and as a result, the responsibility falls on parents and students.
One thing [prospective students] should look at is if people are actually graduating from the school. Graduation rates across institutions vary widely, and that’s a great indicator to see if the institution is doing at least the minimum of what they should. If students aren’t graduating at a sufficiently high rate, then you might want to be skeptical about spending your money there.
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In the future, it would be great to have employment information on the college scorecard, and that’s something that the administration is working on. Once it’s there, I would advise strongly that prospective students use this to make sure that they’re going to see a return that will justify taking on debt to go to college.
Choice is good, right? We have all these institutions, and students can pick a place that’s a perfect fit for them. That’s a really great environment to be in. Unfortunately, that also means that you have a lot of homework to do. There are so many options and the consequences are really very great for making the wrong decision.
Jessica Thompson
Senior Policy Analyst, The Institute for College Access & Success
NS: What can be done to fix our broken college loan system?
Jessica Thompson: I think the No. 1 way is to reduce the need for students to borrow on the front end. That’s going to involve two things: First, increasing our investment in grant aid, especially the federal Pell Grant — which now covers the lowest share of costs at a four-year public institution than it has since the program started — as well as state grants and institutional grants. The other piece is to restore state funding to public higher education, which has played a large role in shifting costs of public higher education from the public to the students and families.
If students do need to borrow some money in order to get to and through college, we have made several recommendations for improving the loan system. First, the current system is far too difficult to manage and understand, and can lead to suboptimal decision-making. There are currently four different income-based repayment plans for loans, and several non-income-based plans. It’s difficult to figure out what you qualify for and how. We recommend streamlining the repayment process so there’s only one income-based repayment plan that any student can opt into, and a limited menu of traditional plans, so that it’s easier for students to understand. We are big proponents for income-based repayment. It’s a crucial safeguard for borrowers who end up being unable to manage their loan payments. However, we don’t support making it the automatic or default repayment plan, because it’s not the best plan for all borrowers.
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Additionally, we need to improve student-loan counseling before, during and after college. This is a great opportunity for us to figure out what actually works to try to empower students to get the information they need in a way they can understand, enabling them to make good choices about borrowing and repayment.
Lastly, we have to educate people about private student loans and make sure that we are reducing the extent to which students and families are relying on them. These loans have variable interest rates, require co-signers, are not dischargeable in bankruptcy as of 2005, and don’t have repayment protection like income-based repayment, deferment and other options that federal student loans have. It’s the riskiest way to pay for college.
We found that over 40 percent of students who take private student loans have not maxed out their federal loan eligibility. Because of this, we support mandatory certification, which would require banks to go through higher ed institutions. In this case, the institution has the ability to counsel the students and tell them whether or not they still have federal student loans available. Currently, institutions don’t automatically package your maximum federal student loan availability in initial financial-aid offers. Many students just look at what the package offers and assume that anything beyond that, they’ll have to find another way to cover. In reality, they may have more federal loan eligibility.
NS: How can students and parents make wiser decisions about college?
JT: I don’t want to leave the impression that students and parents bear the sole responsibility for finding their way through this very complex and confusing process. But I think that actively seeking out as much information as possible to help make the best decisions for students on the front end — what types of schools to apply to and how many schools to apply to — can help maximize the benefits for the student.
Also, taking advantage of consumer tools like the net-price calculators, which all colleges now have on their websites, financial aid shopping sheets, which allow you to compare financial aid offers to one another, and the college scorecards, which give you basic metrics about each institution, can help arm students and families with information they need to make savvier decisions.
Students should also avoid private loans and certain types of institutions that data clearly show leave students worse off than before they started school. Frankly, the for-profit college sector has a poor track record in that regard. But also [families should] look at the repayment options and know that having to borrow some money is not a reason not to go. In the long run we still see that if you complete school and receive a quality education, this is an investment that will pay off. We want to make sure people aren’t scared away from higher education. It’s absolutely still worth it.
Melinda Lewis
Policy Director, Assets and Education Initiative; Associate Professor of Practice, School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas
NS: What can be done to fix our broken college loan system?
Melinda Lewis: A lot of the conversation is about how much people pay in interest rates or the sheer amount of debt that students are taking on. Those are valid points, but we don’t think that they’re going to lead us toward the policy changes that are needed. Instead, we start by asking if the current debt-dependent financial-aid system and the rise in borrowing to finance education are eroding the power of higher education to facilitate economic mobility and greater equity in society?
These are large sums that students are borrowing, and when you look at them in comparison to earnings differential between a student who doesn’t go to postsecondary education and one who does, then clearly this is an amount of debt that’s “worth it.” But is the student who goes to college and obtains a degree and finances that education with student debt getting the same return on his or her college education as a student who gets the same degree but is able to finance his or her education without debt? We believe the answer is no. Therefore, there is reason to believe that our reliance on student debt is making it more difficult for an entire generation to use higher education as a platform for greater economic mobility and prosperity. In fact, a study published in November found that households with outstanding student debt had 63 percent less net worth, 40 percent less home equity and 52 percent less retirement savings than those with equivalent education but no outstanding student debt.
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If those are some of the effects of student loan debt, and student borrowing is going to be a part of the financial aid landscape, then what we need to do to fix the system is determine how to help post-college leavers — whether they’re graduates or not and we hope they are — accumulate assets even while they’re dealing with their debt obligations. Otherwise they will be hindered financially potentially decades into the future because of that student debt, particularly because it hits them at a critically important stage of their economic lives, when if they don’t build assets then, they’re going to be at a disadvantage in the future.
You know what every financial planner says, if you put a little bit of money away now, it’s better than trying to save a lot in the future. And that’s what a lot of these college leavers aren’t able to do because they’re diverting so much of their income to their debt maintenance. That means we’ve got to think about ideas like delays in repayment, so that individuals are able to purchase homes. Or maybe looking at more income-based repayment measures, where we divert some of those payments to an escrow account, so they’re simultaneously building assets. Quite honestly, we’re not spending enough time parsing out the different policy mechanisms that could help individuals and households build positive financial assets to compensate for the drain that the outstanding student debts represent.
Evidence about the inadequate accumulation of assets suggests that we could have a far bigger problem in the future. If we know that Americans across the board are not saving enough for retirement, and that’s a pretty well-accepted economic fact, and that households with student debt are saving 52 percent less that those that don’t have student debt, what are we going to see when this generation reaches retirement age? How can we expect this generation that is dealing with the effects of their own student debt to be adequately preparing for their own children’s college education?
NS: How can students and parents better prepare to pay for college?
ML: It’s really quite clear. We have a new paper coming out soon that looks at the ability of parental college savings to reduce student debt. It kind of sounds obvious, right? If your parents are saving for your college, you have to borrow less. But there hadn’t been any research done on it. Our analysis finds that students whose parents were saving for them have around $3,000 less in student debt. In this particular data set, what that suggests is that the way that students and parents need to prepare for higher education in this debt-dependent, financial-aid landscape, is to save.
This is difficult to do, not only because we have relatively low college savings across the board, but also because we don’t have adequate vehicles to facilitate college savings. There are not enough incentives, especially for those who are lower-income and don’t benefit equitably from the tax-based incentives that are a part of things like the state 529 college savings plans. But it’s going to be even more difficult if parents are paying their own student debt at a time when they should be saving for their children’s future education. It becomes very difficult to imagine how, without some significant policy changes, we can expect families to get out of this debt cycle.
That’s why we need to take a step back and look at what the debt effects are on multiple levels. We need to build structures to help families save. How can we link college savings opportunities with employers? How can we make our existing tax credits for higher education refundable so that low-income families can benefit equitably? How might we explore something like what they do in Canada and the United Kingdom, what some states — like Maine, North Dakota, Nevada — are doing, in making deposits in children’s college savings accounts? Governments are structuring this asset-based approach to financing college a little bit differently, but all with the same rationale: We can use the same net resources, timed differently and delivered on the front end, instead of as a guaranteed debt at the point of enrollment and get better outcomes not only in college, but also for those who leave college, therefore enabling higher education to play the role that it’s really designed to in our society and our economy.
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How an Innovative Scholarship Encourages Low-Income Families to Save
When bills for food, housing, and transportation consume most, if not all, of a low-income family’s money, saving for college can seem impossible. But some think that society is so convinced of poor peoples’ inability to save that they aren’t giving them a fair shot by encouraging them to do so. And that a good saving habit, once established, will help these people in college and beyond.
A new program in Arizona, AZ Earn to Learn, provides low-income families with college scholarships while rewarding them for doing their own saving for school. The program, which currently exists in all three of Arizona’s state universities, provides low-income students with a $4,000 scholarship each year. In return, the students and their families must attend financial literacy workshops and save $500 of their own money toward college each year.
So far 1,500 scholarships at Arizona State, the University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University have been funded through a $3.47 million grant from the Assets for Independence Program which the universities are matching with their own funding.
Katrina Verduzco, who is a freshman at the University of Arizona and the first in her family to attend college, told Michael Stratford of Inside Higher Ed, “I had never saved a dollar in my life,” but “If someone says they’re going to give you $4,000, you do it.” She put together the required annual $500 by working three part-time jobs. By combining this grant with Pell Grants, she’s able to attend college loan-free, saving herself from massive future debt.
Because of this important encouragement through AZ Earn to Learn, Verduzco sounds like she’s well on her way to breaking the cycle of poverty for good.
A Unique Class Helps Vets Find Their Footing in College and Beyond
Dealing with someone who is suicidal can have a lasting effect on a person, as Sacramento State professor Beth Erickson learned from one of her students.
When Erickson noticed that the performance of one of her “A” students, a military veteran, started to slip, she talked to him and learned that he was suffering from PTSD. “He was suicidal that day in my office,” she told Nick Janes of CBS Sacramento. She sought help for him through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and eventually, he was able to graduate. Inspired by that upsetting event, Erickson, a professor in the Department of Recreation & Parks and Tourism, decided that she wanted to help other students who happened to be veterans as well. So she started a class that’s exclusively for ex-servicemembers.
Her “Perspectives on Leisure” class has the sort of title you’d think would only appear on transcripts of students trying to coast by — but the work she’s doing with veterans is real.
The two-semester course is a part of the university’s Veterans Leadership and Mentorship Program. It focuses on writing, outdoor activities, and fostering leadership through student veterans mentoring other student veterans. Erickson told Alan Miller of Sacramento State that it’s “the most amazing course I’ve taught in 13 years…My objective is to help them translate the training and leadership they learned in the service into measurable civilian skills.”
The class includes field trips to connect with nature through whitewater rafting trips and hikes in Yosemite National Park. Erickson invites the students to reflect on their lives and experiences in their writing assignments. Upperclassmen in the course mentor students who’ve just begun their transition from the military to the civilian world to help ease their way.
Coast Guard veteran Sean Johnson, a student in Erickson’s class, said that the veterans-only approach to the course has bolstered him. “I realized these guys are my family now,” he said. “These guys are just as much as family as I had in the military.”
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One Small Tweak Made a World of Difference in This Computer Science Class
Something revolutionary happened last spring at the University of California Berkeley. For the first time ever, as far as digitized records indicate, more women than men enrolled in Professor Dan Garcia’s introductory computer science course, “Beauty and Joy of Computing.” Men have long outnumbered women in computer science majors, earning 81.8% of the bachelor’s degrees according to a 2010 National Science Foundation report, and are far more represented in careers in the field. So professors at Berkeley, Stanford, and elsewhere have retooled their computer science classes, especially introductory ones, with the hopes of attracting more women to them.
Garcia told Kristen V. Brown of the San Francisco Chronicle that he conceived his computer science class for non majors as being more than “just programming,” and he made it “kind of right-brained as well.”
Sumer Mohammed took Garcia’s course without plans to major in computer science, and the class changed her mind. She’s now an electrical engineering and computer science major. In recent years Berkeley and Stanford have about doubled their computer science enrollment among women, who now comprise 21% of the students in this discipline at each school.
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