- MakeSchool is a college in San Francisco that offers a bachelor's degree program in applied computer science.
- Students only have to pay tuition if they get a job, and the curriculum is project-based with industry-experienced faculty.
- The intensive track allows students to graduate with a four-year bachelor's degree in two years.
- MakeSchool focuses on preparing students for the workplace and structuring their week like a work week.
- The college emphasizes building portfolios to differentiate students from traditional CS program graduates.
- MakeSchool's income share based program has a track record of students getting jobs at top companies.
- The college goes into debt to cover the cost of education and only gets paid back if students get a job.
- MakeSchool serves a diverse student body and integrates a liberal arts component with the technical education.
- The college teaches students how to be lifelong learners and adapt to new technologies through mentorship and dedicated curriculum.

- The speaker believes that mentorship, dedicated curriculum, and structure are important for students to become lifelong learners and future-proof.
- The speaker shares their own experience of struggling to teach themselves computer science and the importance of having good CS teachers in high school.
- The speaker argues that self-serve education, like MOOCs, may not be suitable for the majority of people who could be great software engineers.
- The speaker emphasizes the value of structured education and mentorship in accelerating learning and helping students overcome self-doubt.
- The speaker discusses how their college provides project-based learning with live tutors and mentors to accelerate learning and provide a 10x acceleration in speed.
- The speaker explains how they communicate their college's benefits to both potential students and parents, addressing concerns about future-proofing and integrity of education.
- The speaker acknowledges the changing landscape of higher education and the need to adapt to the shifting needs of students and the job market.

- The speaker believes that traditional higher education will face increasing pressure to align their incentives with students' needs.
- The speaker's college was one of the first to be created under new accreditation rules and offers an accredited bachelor's degree.
- The financial structure of college will need to change as students realize that the current incentive between them and colleges is not right.
- Income share agreements are being adopted by other colleges, indicating a potential shift in higher education financing.
- In the future, options for education will be more obvious and colleges like Harvard will be recognized as luxury goods.
- The speaker believes that there will be a pattern of lifelong learning, with students entering the workforce earlier and returning for further education later.
- While some companies have dropped the college requirement for certain positions, top schools continue to be the major hiring funnels.
- The speaker hopes that there will be more equity in accessing high-earning software engineering jobs for low-income Americans.
- The speaker believes that degrees are dropping in relevance in many parts of the country, leading to a potential higher education bubble. However, efforts will be made to make degrees relevant.

- The false choice between getting a degree or acquiring relevant skills is being challenged.
- Accreditation standards have hindered the ability to offer both, but new regulations have made it possible.
- Accreditor WASC is open-minded and allows project-based learning and faculty without degrees.
- The relevance of degrees varies based on privilege, leaving behind lower-income and underrepresented individuals.
- Income share agreements (ISAs) can align incentives between colleges and students, and should be adopted by more institutions.
- Some schools misuse ISAs by replacing scholarships with them, increasing the cost for students.
- ISAs should only be used if colleges are confident in delivering the American dream for students.
- Startups like the school discussed prioritize student success over other factors.
- College students who want to be entrepreneurs may lack experience and exposure to real-world problems.
- The school's education focuses on building products to solve real problems, preparing students for entrepreneurship.
- The school expects many students to start companies a few years after graduation, benefiting the ecosystem.
- Some students have already started companies while in the program.

- The speaker advises YC batch participants to not think they are above the generic foundational YC advice, which includes making something people want and focusing on customer needs.
- They warn against playing optimization games around funding and emphasize the importance of being aware of the company's financial situation on a regular basis.
- The speaker suggests that shifting the company from default deadness to default aliveness is crucial and advises against focusing too much on fundraising terms.
- The speaker concludes by stating that the biggest tragedy is to have a promising idea but run out of money due to strategic mistakes.

MakeSchool is a college in San Francisco that offers a bachelor's degree program in applied computer science. The college focuses on preparing students for the workplace through project-based learning and industry-experienced faculty. Students only pay tuition if they get a job, and the intensive track allows them to graduate in two years. MakeSchool emphasizes building portfolios, offers mentorship, and integrates a liberal arts component. The speaker believes that structured education and mentorship are important for lifelong learning and future-proofing. They discuss the changing landscape of higher education and the need for colleges to align with students' needs. The speaker also mentions the potential shift in higher education financing through income share agreements. They hope for more equity in accessing software engineering jobs and challenge the relevance of degrees. The school discussed prioritizes student success and entrepreneurship, with many students starting companies after graduation. The speaker advises against playing optimization games around funding and emphasizes the importance of financial awareness. The biggest tragedy, according to the speaker, is running out of money due to strategic mistakes.

Jeremy Rossmann is the cofounder of Make School. Make School is a college for computer science headquartered in San Francisco. Make School students don't pay until they have a job after graduation. They were part of YC’s Winter 2012 batch.

You can find MakeSchool on Twitter @MakeSchool.

https://twitter.com/MakeSchool

The YC Podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://twitter.com/craigcannon

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year. 

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***

Topics

00:05 - What is Make School?

00:45 - How is their intensive track different than a traditional college course load?

1:55 - How are their students differentiated from students educated in a traditional CS program?

2:45 - Interacting with the parents of Make School students

7:45 - William Triska asks - What are some ways to encourage greater independence and autodidactic behavior in students pursuing technical skills and knowledge?

9:35 - The autodidact myth

15:30 - Two stakeholders making purchasing decisions: potential students and parents 

19:40 - The education landscape 20 years from now

23:30 - Education stacking

24:35 - Vikram Malhotra asks - When are we going to do away with degrees?

32:15 - Evan Ward asks - Should liberal arts colleges consider adopting ISA's?

34:50 - Are there instances of predatory ISAs?

37:00 - Make School students who want to be entrepreneurs

40:00 - Advice for people in YC

Okay, Jeremy Rossman, welcome to the podcast.

You are 1 of the co-founders of MakeSchool.

So for those who don't know, what is MakeSchool?

Jeremy Rossman MakeSchool is a new college in San Francisco.

We offer a bachelor's degree program in applied computer science.

It's a college in the ways you'd expect a college to be a college.

There's dorms and a campus and full-time faculty.

What's really special about it is that students don't have to pay tuition unless they get a job.

The curriculum is entirely project-based, and our faculty come from industry backgrounds, a lot of partnerships with the companies that our students want to work at.

And they can get a bachelor's degree in an accelerated time frame.

So you can actually graduate with a four-year bachelor's in 2 years if you take our intensive track.

And so how does that intensive track differ from the normal four-year program?

Because when I went, when I went to NYU, I was pretty much working all the time on school stuff.

So yeah, how do you guys get it done in 2 years?

So when you look at how colleges typically structure their academic calendar and even a given week, what happens is a lot of students are basically going to lecture here and there, going to lab here and there, with a lot of dead time in between that's self-directed.

We want to be preparing our students for a transition into the workplace.

And we've realized that the best way to do that is actually to structure their week like a work week.

So students are typically expected to come in at 9.30 in the morning, have what looks a lot like a morning stand up with their individual coach, which will be their coach for the rest of the program.

And then spend the day working on their projects, attending certain classes and labs.

And when you add up, doing the credit math that universities do, when you add up the time that students spend all day, every day in that 40 hour school work week, plus the time they spend outside on homework, which for us is all projects.

There's no traditional problem sets and that kind of thing.

You're able to award students enough credits that if they take the course load that we recommend, and they come in and they're spending 40 hours a week in the school and working outside on their projects, they can get enough credits to get a bachelor's in 2 years.

And so how are your students trying to differentiate themselves from people coming out of traditional CS programs?

And we equip our students with these portfolios that basically speak for themselves.

So from the very first weeks at Make School, even in your CS theory class, which almost sounds like an oxymoron, but our CS theory classes are project-based and applied.

You're going to be building and launching small projects and then larger products.

By the time you make your way to being in front of a recruiter, they can see a tremendous amount of evidence of your coding ability, the skills, and technologies you're familiar with, your theoretical background, your practical background, because that all is visible in the portfolio that you've built.

So we recorded an episode with Austin from Lambda School.

And in listening to a couple podcasts with you, doing research for this episode, you started talking about parents.

And it's something I had never really thought about with Austin, and I think perhaps the people who are attracted to Lambda School versus Make School are later in their career maybe thinking about switching up.

What is it like for you dealing with the parents of 18 year olds?

I'm usually the point person on the team for parents.

And it is important to note that our student audience is majority students who would otherwise be in college or who are college age.

So when people – we just had a prospective student weekend last weekend, 100 students coming in from all over the country, parents coming in from all over the country.

And the questions are, you know, it's make school versus Georgia Tech, make school versus Stanford, make school versus, you know, community college or at state school, not make school versus a bootcamp.

Because our student audience is really looking for, you know, they're going to a college is a question of which college,

They're looking to transfer to a better college.

And so the parent questions often have to do with why is this different?

But also how can this possibly exist where you don't pay tuition unless you get a job?

The parents have more of that, they've exposure to the professional world.

They're trying to do the math in their heads.

Like how can there be a campus and dorms, and how can all this exist if they're not charging up front?

And there's 2 simple answers to that question.

1 is that we've been running the income share based program since 2014.

So we actually have 5 years of data, our students getting jobs at Facebook, Google, and Tesla and all these great companies.

So the salaries are there and the payback is there and it's really working well.

And the other is that we get financing to cover our cost of educating students.

So we're the school that actually goes in debt when students enroll.

So normally, you enroll at a college, you go into debt.

When you enroll at our college, we go into debt and we hold the risk.

And you only pay us later if you get a job, but we're on the hook for that debt anyway.

And that puts us in a position, And that's what parents really appreciate when they realize it, where we have no other incentive than to be providing the kind of education that's gonna get you a successful career outcome once you finish the program.

Because at the end of the day, do you find that that's the core driver for parents?

Or Is everyone just going in because like job is the most important thing?

Because you know that historical thing is like, oh, expand your mind, teach you how to think, etc.

And actually we rediscover a lot of those same liberal arts concepts and values when talking to employers.

So if you say, OK, make schools primary goal is to get students access to top software engineering jobs that are typically only hiring these days out of top universities.

Everyone tries to get their fun out of the MITs and Stanfords of the world.

So if you want to go to employers that hire there and get them to consider a make-school student.

What you discover is that even they are going to tell you that a lot of those liberal arts educational experiences are part of what makes a candidate stand out.

And so even if you were just narrowly career-focused and you rediscover that actually a lot of the well-rounded education, the critical thinking skills, communication skills, cultural skills that come with a liberal arts education are things that employers do value.

But we have to realize that the pure liberal arts education that is explicitly not career focused, that doesn't make any claims about whether it's gonna be relevant to a job later.

That's an education that was pioneered for and by elites.

And any student who's considering attending a school that offers that kind of education needs to be conscious of the fact that the flagship schools, the Harvard's and the Yale's and the Princeton's, they do practically don't have low-income students.

They do a lot of PR about the scholarships they offer and all this, but the reality is anywhere from 60 to 75% of the students who go to schools like Stanford and MIT, come from the top 20% of families by income.

And oftentimes you get up to a quarter of the student body that's from the 1% of families by income.

So they don't get a career training, they learn the liberal arts, but that's really like a luxury education where you don't have to worry about your career because you're from the 1%.

Of course, there's gonna be opportunities lined up if you went to Harvard and learned about culture and literature.

We serve a student body that is demographically much more diverse.

We get students who transfer in from top schools.

We get students who come from wealthier families, but By and large, the majority of our student body come from low to mid-income families.

It's a demographic almost inverse from what you see at a Stanford or MIT.

And you simply cannot, with good conscience, provide a luxury, expand-your-mind-only education to a student who is not in a position to have any of the privileges or sort of freebies that you get from being a 1%er who goes to Harvard.

But we start with a focus of, how do we introduce a technical education that is both theoretical and practical and all project-based so that students are employable?

And then how do we ensure that 5 to 10 years down the road in their careers, they're just as competitive as a student coming out of a Harvard or a Sanford or an MIT?

And so we do also have a liberal arts component to the education that is integrated with the technical education.

So this is related to 1 of the questions that was sent in about being an autodidact.

So William Triska asked, what are some ways to encourage greater independence and autodidactic behavior in the students pursuing technical skills and knowledge?

So in the context of, okay, we're going to teach you whatever, like parse and jQuery, and whatever you might need now, but how do you ensure that you're teaching someone how to teach themselves technical skills?

So this is another thing that's very important to employers, right?

They don't want people who've just learned a trade, who know how to assemble Ruby code today, and then when the framework is updated next year, they're kind of lost, or when the company makes a shift to a different framework, they don't know how to relearn.

So we do a number of things to ensure that students are really strong in that front.

The first is we do have a robust theoretical computer science fundamentals curriculum that students have to go through to really understand kind of behind the hood, like under the hood, what is going on, and how do all these concepts work together?

How do these different paradigms and structures underpin the different technologies and tools learning how to use.

We also teach the concepts in sort of repeated in different contexts.

So if you only learn programming in 1 language or 1 framework, it's hard to actually differentiate in your mind, what is a property of the language?

And what's actually a theoretical CS concept that underlies it all?

When you start seeing this across different technologies, different languages, different frameworks, and you've had that theoretical CS education behind the scenes, then you're able to pick out and understand what is core to a specific framework versus what is a general and universal concept.

As a simple example, we see a lot of our students taking a lot of our iOS development courses and then getting jobs as Android developers.

We see students learning a number of stacks for web development, and then getting a web development job in a totally different stack and language.

And we're seeing that again repeated across data science and machine learning.

There's a number of different packages and tools that different companies use.

And onboarding onto a new 1 is not a foreign experience by the time a student has completed their main school education.

Yeah, and I'm kind of curious about this word in general.

So what percentage of the world do you think is an autodidact anyway?

So while it is absolutely important to be a school that is augmenting students' ability to be lifelong learners and making sure that they are future-proof, the way that you do that, I think for most students, has to be through mentorship, dedicated curriculum, structure.

And what I found actually was that I was not an autodidact.

And I failed over and over and over again to teach myself computer science.

I actually tried for the first time in eighth grade.

He taught himself everything out of books.

He was like, Jeremy, here's a book on visual basic.

But I was actually a very high performing programming student because I was lucky to have a really amazing CS teacher in high school, actually 2 really amazing CS teachers in high school.

What I learned then was that probably the majority of people who could be awesome software engineers are not autodidacts.

And if you look at courses that are kind of self-serve, like the MOOCs, you see that it's industry standard to have 234, 5% completion rates, meaning that probably 95% of people are actually not a fit for the type of education that is autodidact first.

And so what we need to balance is recognizing that actually when we look at industry and we see that the best programmers that we know taught themselves, well, we're probably seeing a survivorship bias.

We're seeing the fact that there aren't really good structured forms of education that enable people who are not, who are like me, who weren't good at teaching themselves to actually be excellent software engineers.

And so at the other end, you see an overrepresentation of self-taught autodidact software engineers that almost has biased the industry towards that profile.

When in reality, when you look at the data behind a lot of different educational programs and you look at, frankly, what our students are doing who have landed these awesome jobs, I'm now certain that the majority of people who could be a great software engineer at a really competitive and selective company, that the majority of those people are not, by default, autodidacts who could just go to a MOOC and get all the information they need.

So that's why students come to us, right?

An 18 year old who's looking for their first higher educational experience generally wants to go to a college because they recognize that that structure is gonna accelerate them and it's gonna be better than just trying to do something self-serve online.

And I think that addresses the majority of the population.

Basically, everything I've taught myself has been just enough to get the project done, but then if you were to throw me into a Google production level environment, it would be a disaster.

Aaron Lowe When I tried to deploy our website for the first time, because in the early days when we were going through YC in 2012, I was not only writing curriculum and basically 1 of 2 instructors, my co-founder and I were the 2 faculty.

And we were going to deploy a simple Django website.

And even at that level, even though I'm an MIT dropout, I'm decently clever, I could not get this going without a mentor.

And I hired a Django developer to tutor me for 30 minutes a day during that week that we were going to get the first website off the ground because my speed of learning and ability to actually be high performing as a software engineer was literally 10xed if I had a smart human available in real time to notice where I was blocked and unblock me as I got stuck and ran into conceptual hurdles.

And that's 1 of the things that, you know, I'm most glad that we can provide to our students and just seeing that happen live.

A lot of folks who frankly have accumulated a huge amount of self-doubt Because with that survivorship bias, you look around in your CS class, right?

And you see that maybe the faculty's not so good, teacher's not so good, curriculum is old school and traditional, it's not working for you, it doesn't match your learning style, but there's that 1 kid who's still crushing it.

And actually, if with the right teacher, with the right curriculum, with project-based learning is, in the context of computer science, the best way to activate people's passion.

Because it's like, the reason you're learning this is because you have an idea that you want to see exist in the world, and you're learning so that you can launch the thing, right?

And that's what every single 1 of our classes is about.

That kind of structure can get you to the level of the person who's been learning online since they were 12, But people often don't realize that because they look at the industry where it is today and they kind of work backwards and draw the wrong conclusions.

Well you're just like, in the fact that you're not sitting next to someone, you don't realize that even the best programmers get stuck like setting up an environment for 10 hours.

things that you bash your head against the wall and then you sleep on it and then you realize it.

Yeah, and you know, you asked me like, how can you do a bachelor's degree in 2 years?

Another thing is, just from a pure competency and speed of learning perspective, With our faculty in the room who've been engineers in the Silicon Valley, who are there, and it's all project-based learning, so they're not there to lecture to you.

They're not there to just be the transmitter of information.

A lot of it is available to students in the form of written materials that we produce.

So the faculty's job is actually to be the live tutor, the live mentor, the unblocker.

And that is, again, for most students, a 10x acceleration in the speed of learning, because you shouldn't be spending 10 hours setting up your IDE when you're starting a new framework, especially as a student, what a waste of time, right?

You should be spending 30 minutes and then learning all the concepts and the conceptual stuff that you need to know to be successful, right?

Paul Wiltzroff Yeah, I got stuck learning Ruby and then I often attribute Python to my learning, but I think actually it was learning Python while I was friends with people who are much more technical than I was.

So, a question, like going back to the parents really briefly, You are in an interesting position where you kind of have like 2 stakeholders making purchasing decisions.

How do you go about communicating to both the potential students and the parents?

So for the potential students, the message is very much from the heart, this is the college that I wish existed.

I was a student who was at the cusp, learning how to program at the cusp of the App Store Revolution.

My co-founder and I, in our junior and senior years of high school, were amongst the first to start teaching ourselves how to make iOS apps, and launched iOS apps, and that experience was so fulfilling that when I got to MIT, I was pulling all-nighters to work on my app with friends and not on my problem sets.

And that gave me some insights as to what are the motivational factors that drive a college student to focus on their education.

And so what our message to students really resonates because it mirrors my experience and my co-founder's experience, I think really mirrors what a lot of students are experiencing, which is a stagnant style of education and the in-classroom experience being very old school, and a really significant set of questions about whether what they're learning in class is gonna translate to what they actually want to do later.

Parents latch on to the fact that, you know, I'm a college dropout who started a college.

So that's an interesting thing for them to wrap their heads around for students.

It's like, oh, that's really cool, right?

For a parent, they want to know, I think they're thinking a bit more long-term.

So they're worried, is my child making a short-term decision?

Are they gonna get all the fundamentals and foundations that are gonna set them up for success later, or should they fall back on a more traditional option because that's what the parents are comfortable with.

But what I will say is that there's been a huge shift in the last 2 to 3 years.

Parents are way more aware of the student debt crisis, the ROI challenges in higher ed, the fact that a huge number of college graduates are underemployed.

And so, whereas 2, 3 years ago, a lot of my conversations with parents were dealing with skeptics, I now get more conversations proportionally that are parents asking how they can advocate, who say, we've been freaking out as our student, as our child is now a senior, or they're at a college accruing debt, and we're realizing this is not the way it was when we were going through college.

This is not a world where you can take a summer job and graduate without debt.

This is not a world in which the economy is booming to such a degree that everyone can have a middle-class life out of college, right, that you need to actually be tactical about the higher education you choose to make sure you don't end up in 1 of the many traps that parents have seen their older children or other folks fall into over the past few years.

And so, I had 30 parents visiting campus this weekend and whereas before it was a lot of questions about legitimacy, now I think the biggest questions are about future-proofing and just making sure this isn't a shortcut and that the integrity of education is still very high and not at an opportunity cost to something that might set a student up for longer term success.

And so we have to discuss how the project-based learning that we provide actually encapsulates a whole bunch of future-proof skills.

Because when you teach computer science in a project-based way, you also gotta do some design.

You gotta work on a team, and actually you get more communication skills than you might in a liberal arts communications course, and so on and so forth.

And so these are a lot of the questions that parents have that we have to address.

Yeah, it seems like a lot of these learnings, right?

It's just like 1 generation learns it the way that they were brought up and then they got their jobs.

And then they teach it to their kids and then their kids get screwed.

Well, and for many, many years, they teach it to their kids and then it worked.

And over the past 20 years, it stopped working.

But everyone going to college is a relatively new phenomenon.

Right, and it's been a huge wave since then and we're seeing the crash.

So what do you think, for instance, do you have kids?

But say we had a kid today and they were 1 year old.

By the time they're college age, what do you think this environment looks like?

I think that the landscape has dramatically shifted by 18 years from now.

We are, I think, the first of what I hope to be many new entrants in what has been a market that has traditionally been dominated by incumbents that have not faced any new pressure from new schools.

1 of the things that's really fascinating when I talk to parents and students is that it takes a few times of repeating for people to be able to visualize that there is a new college in San Francisco, that we have a campus building, we have these beautiful dorms, like that there's full-time faculty.

People are not used to the idea that a new college could be born because colleges are something that just have been there forever, right?

And so in any market where you have, the only players have been there forever, they've been stagnating and they've not been facing pressure to sort of improve their efficiencies and their quality.

So I think 18 years from now, there's gonna be an increase in pressure on traditional higher ed to be aligning their incentives with their students.

As more and more students tune into the fact that if you just copy the default path to success, which is try to get into the highest ranked school that you can, and then trust that if you follow your passion, that you will get an education that will set you up for success.

That as more and more students realize that's just simply not true, There's going to be demand for alternatives.

We are actually 1 of the first colleges to be created under new accreditation rules.

We offer a real accredited bachelor's degree, accredited by the same accreditor that accredits Stanford and UC Berkeley and so on and so forth.

But they created these new policies in 2014.

And what that means is we're relatively early in what is potentially a new wave of colleges being born all around the country.

I also think that the financial structure of college is going to have to change.

Students also start tuning into the fact that the incentive between them and a college is not right.

And for students who really are passionate about research and academia, things are working a little bit better.

And we have deep respect for students who wanna go that direction and are very close to a lot of folks who are in that world.

It's awesome to be dedicated to the furthering of fundamental knowledge and to be doing research and to be preparing for that.

But a lot of surveys show the majority of students' primary concern is, at the end of their bachelor's, are they going to be employable?

And so in the face of that primary concern, that's going to drive a lot of decision making.

That's going to put a lot of pressure into colleges.

We've started seeing actually is that other colleges, even big ones, are adopting our income share agreements.

The documents that we helped co-author back in 2014 when we piloted our first college program, which has turned into this accredited bachelor's that we offer now, those same documents, as they've been iterated on over the years, are now being used by a number of other colleges.

And so what we're starting to see is that income share agreements are not just this thing that applies to programming schools and make school the new CS college, it's actually higher ed is taking notice and is starting to roll it out at a larger and larger scale.

And so 18 years from now, I think you're gonna have options that look like the options we have today, but it's gonna be a lot more obvious what they are.

Harvard is going to be more obviously recognized as a luxury good, as an expensive purchase that works for the elites.

And it's something that if you can afford to get your kids there and you can afford to not focus on hard skills, then great, you've purchased a luxury education.

It's going to be more obvious what is actually tied to real world outcomes.

And there's gonna be schools that are increasing, gonna increase their level of innovation in curriculum and also in financing to prove to students that they're putting their money where their mouth is and that their incentive is to help students achieve their goals.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Jeremy Rossmann of Make School on Income Share Agreements and the Future of College