Well, school is out. Forever.

I turned in my final Final Projects last night. Of course, I have yet to receive the grades from them; that usually takes a little while even for the most responsive of teachers. I think that the computer systems that the grades are input to are probably mainframe computers that require punch-card input, sometimes, as slow a process as that is…

Well, anyway, there is a lot that has happened in the time since I started going there, and now, when I have finished. What have I learned in the little-over 2½ years since I started going to school there? (Please note, that I was going for an Associate’s degree, which should have taken just under two years anyway, but that was not the case.)

Well, I have learned:

1. That the Apollo Group is an institution to be regarded as questionable at best, and at worst, complete fraudsters.
2. That the Apollo Group hires a fair lot of teachers who are neither competent nor qualified to teach even basic fundamental things, let alone anything at a college level.
3. That the teachers they do have that are competent and qualified are probably not getting paid nearly enough, and probably think that the curriculum is a joke. I know that I do.
4. That the reason that recruiters place people with degrees from schools run by the Apollo Group at the bottom of the stack (whether that stack be real or virtual) of résumés, is that these schools are a joke. A total joke.
5. If you want to learn something, it is usually far cheaper to buy resources devoted to the topic you want to learn, and learn it on your own (or with someone else that is also interested in the same thing. College education these days tends to be all about the degree you are awarded at the end of the process, not necessarily the roads you take heading to that degree. At least, for undergraduate programs. (If you’ve got a doctorate, you’ve had a long road, a significant one, more likely than not.)
6. If you are going to go to school, there is really only one reason to do so: Because you enjoy learning. That having been said, pick an institution that has a reputation for being highly respected for their teaching. This probably means that the professors who are there are active in their fields, and constantly doing research. If they’re not, that’s a sign that you shouldn’t be there.
7. If you are going to school to learn, it’s best to stay away from the schools owned by the Apollo Group. They’re often stated to be the drive-thru in terms of college degrees go. Insofar as I’ve been there for the past 2½ years, I would be inclined to agree. The classes that were easy, were trivial; the classes that should have been hard were easy; and the teachers in about 70% of my classes did not have any real knowledge of the core material that they were teaching. One of them—an algebra teacher—taught to the letter of the textbook, even when that textbook’s authors had recognized that the textbook contained an error. Not cool.

There are many more things that I have learned. If you’re going to go to college for a degree in a technical field, make sure that the college that you go do is respected in that field. This might involve a non-trivial amount of research. It might involve trying to get in touch with people that are in the field and finding out where they respect college degrees coming from. It might involve talking to people who recruit for the field you’d like to get into and see what they determine to be a respectful institution. It might even involve visiting different schools and looking at their programs, seeing what their instructors know, and so forth. “Doing your homework” in this part of finding a college, though, won’t be easy, unless you happen to be able to get into a college which is widely known and internationally respected that everyone knows about anyway.

All that having been said… I am glad that it’s over. I have learned more from having access to the databases at the University Library than I have from the teachers, in most cases, including my teacher in the Java™ course that I took there. She was kinda stupid for someone who claimed to have been programming for as long as she claimed to be programming. While I did learn how to write software in Java™ (and subsequently learned that I really do like C# a lot better…), I also learned that there are plenty of people in the world with Master’s degrees that do not have a single clue when it comes to the field that they were supposedly educated for.

Over the past couple of years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about credentials and their meaning when applied to people. One of the reasons that I am working on starting a business is that I have a very non-traditional belief there: The world should be a meritocracy when it comes to things like what we do and how we evaluate what other people know. Furthermore, there should be more opportunities for people that carry required knowledge, but have not put in the time at any degree-issuing institution to say that they have that knowledge. Companies should also heed the saying, “If you want something done right, you must do it yourself.” When it comes to educating people, if you get them new and talented, you can provide the education while proceeding to pay a wage to the person. You can then come up with a very excellently trained person, who is as capable or more so than the person sitting next to them with a college degree.

This leads to something else—open source software. I’ll draw the connection in a minute.

In many of the fields of science, peer-review is a very important thing. When someone does a study and then performs a write-up of the results, those results are peer-reviewed, and the end result is that before the paper is ever published, it has had many eyes going over it. That doesn’t automatically mean that the paper is worth anything, nor does it automatically mean that it proves anything. But what it does mean is that it has been reviewed, edited, read, thought about, and then sent to publishing. That will prompt more research, which will prompt more writing, which will prompt even more peer-review, and eventually, things happen.

When it comes to people in technical fields like software development, though, many companies require people to sign non-disclosure agreements which cover nearly every aspect of their job, including the source code that the developer writes. Well, this is an excellent tactic to keep a programmer: When I evaluate someone to hire them, I am going to want to see examples of their previous work. I am going to want to look at it, and ask them questions about it, and see what they say. That’s part of evaluating their ability. You would not hire an editor without seeing what they can do, for example. Now, assigning a programmer a quick test to see what code comes flowing out of them in a quick pinch is one way to evaluate a programmer, but it’s not the only way, and it’s far from accurate.

That is the great thing about open source software. You can find programmers who are good, and you can see the code that they’ve written. You can then pull them in for an interview and you can ask them questions about the code that they’ve written, and seeing it, they’ll be able to quickly and easily explain it, and this would give me a lot more confidence in their ability. Why companies haven’t learned from educational institutions in this respect is beyond me. If everyone’s software was open sourced, not only would there be peer review happening on code on a pretty well constant basis, but there would be code out there that people would be able to cite as the code they wrote, which would be helpful for programmers who are looking for jobs, regardless of whether or not they have a degree or some sort of formal education. After all, even college dropouts can become multimillionaires by knowing what they want to do and doing it well. Not that I would advocate that anyone step on as many toes as Gates did in his career.

In any case, I’ve learned a lot. I have read a lot of “classic” papers in the field of computer science, and while some of them have been over my head, I have learned a lot from them. I have also learned a decent amount of what I have yet to learn. Calculus, for starters. (Ouch. I have avoided that one my entire life, I suppose I can’t avoid it for much longer.) But, I can deal with that. After all, I do enjoy learning. And as far as Calculus goes, well, I think I have all the resources I need to be able to learn it, so I should be able to pick it up, with a good deal of effort-investment. Oh, yeah, and I have learned (once again) that “Windows” is not truly required for interoperability with the rest of the world. Where there is a will, there is a way, or so I’ve heard.

Now, on to finishing up with forming the business and getting it going…