The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

A bit tangential but related.

I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1].

I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel like I was getting a lot out of school and I would paradoxically do pretty poorly because I was half-assing everything.

It wasn't until I found out about WGU in 2021 where I actually decided to finish my degree, primarily because WGU lets me work at my pace. Since I already knew a lot about computer science, I was able to speed through the classes that would have been very boring to me, and I finished my degree really quickly as a result. I don't feel like my education is appreciably worse than people who did things in a traditional brick and mortar school, but I'm not 100% sure if I'm a test for this.

It made me realize that, at least for people like me, EdTech can be extremely powerful stuff. School can be a lot more engaging when it's personalized, instead of the frustrating "one size fits all" of traditional lecturing.

[1] I say "lucky" because I think it was exactly that: luck. Yeah I learned this stuff on my own for fun but finding an employer who was willing to hire someone without credentials was never guaranteed and I feel extremely fortunate to have accidentally timed my dropout about perfectly.

EDIT: For those confused, WGU means "Western Governors University" in this case.

WGU was a customer when I was at Learning Objects, they always impressed me visionary and outcome oriented. glad to hear a positive anecdote more than 10 years later.

I dropped out around the same time, and one other key thing I’ve noticed is the tech bootcamps hadn’t completely taken over yet, so there was less of a flood of other entry level people to fight for every single opening. You would even get a call back sometimes applying cold (no internal referral).

I tend to throw “lucky” in there too when telling the tale of how I got my foot in the door— it’s hard not to, considering my jobs before that were call center rep, bus boy and dishwasher at restaurant, camp counselor. Tech changed my entire life.

I'm sad WGU is only for US citizens. I hear lots of good things about it but can't join in.

Also tangential, but do you feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth out of the WGU program? I have also been employed as degree-less an engineer for a long time (I have a BA in an unrelated subject), and I’ve occasionally thought about going back to get a BS or a masters in comp sci. Partially for the signaling aspect, and partially to fill in any knowledge gaps that I’m unaware of. WGU’s pacing and pricing sound great. I’ve also heard that it can sometimes be a questionable resume signal. Any thoughts?

WGU BSCS grad here as well. Regular brick & mortar schools never worked for me, but WGU clicked and let me finally get my degree. Now I’m working on my MSCS with CU Boulder, which although being managed via Coursera has the same feel overall as WGU. In some ways I can see how some think EdTech failed… but I do think there are players in the space that are doing good things

I dropped out and became an engineer at almost the exact same time. I've thought about going back for a degree but I was always so horribly bad at school that it's scared me off. I was bad at it mainly for undiagnosed ADHD reasons that I'm now getting successfully treated, but I'm still worried that if I went back the same things would just happen again. I'd join a class, I'd already kind of know what they're teaching (or think I did), I'd get bored and be unable to pay attention, I'd suddenly find myself MASSIVELY behind.

I really hope this isn't just an ad or something because I'd really love if there was a decent way for me to get a degree without having to go back to a college campus at 35

Not OP, but I think it was worth it. Within a year of getting my BSCS, I added almost 25% to my salary. It gave me the leverage I needed to push for more. For someone coming into it with no experience I can’t say how well it will play out, but for a degreeless developer, I think it just checks that one box and helps.

I think many people have very positive experiences and data, at scale, speaking to the kind of success Edtech can have.

I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).

This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.

This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.

These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.

Here's a 5 minutes vid the center for Game Science published at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdrraeJyhoQ Some numbers here: https://dragonbox.com/about/algebra-challenge

What was your motivation for getting the degree? It does not seem, from your story, that its absence blocked the growth of your career; were there subjects you wanted to learn for which self-education proved difficult, or does the credential itself have some value?

In some economies, to be an engineer means a chartered engineer, which demands completion of a formal assessment by the national engineering council.

I'm not throwing shade on you, my degree from 1982 was 1 year too early to make certification in my field and I have worked for 42 years in software and systems without charter status.

I am however cautious of using the word. I call myself a computer scientist even when what I do is systems and network engineering.

I had a similar experience but I dropped out of high school.

For years the social stigma about being a high-school dropout got to me, and I was determined to enter University as an adult student and get my CS degree.

The problem was that I already had steady work as a software developer. And the entire reason I wanted to go to school in the first place was to level up those skills. It didn't help that, in my late teens / early 20s, I was working for a dot-com startup and we had coop students from the local University, and they weren't being taught anything that I didn't already know or understand.

Eventually I came to the opinion that, at least for me (not necessarily for others), formal education institutions amount to little more than institutional child abuse. For hyper-independent and high IQ students, particularly those with aspergers (I've never been diagnosed, but even my mother says it would put my childhood into perspective), class rooms are not a positive experience.

And I can't honestly look back at my time in public school and identify a single subject that I learned in class, as opposed to independently. According to my parents I was literate before entering kindergarten and I taught myself maths and history as an adult because school taught me to hate both (I don't hate either now, but the way they were taught in school divorced them from our day to day lives, created busy work and the impression that what we were being taught was irrelevant and unnecessary).

I tried online learning for a little bit in order to get my GED but I abandoned that as well because it still felt like boring busy work.

EdTech seems like it might offer the solution to younger children with my personality type. But honestly, I personally learn best by reading books, experimenting (hands on learning) and having goals that I actually care about and can relate to. If school had taught us to prepare a tax return, balance a household budget, that history gives us predictive "power" by examining how humans dealt with certain situations historically, if English class focused on effective communication rather than trying to guess at metaphors and hidden messages in the writings of dead authors who can't be asked to comment on that conjecture... maybe I wouldn't have loathed the experience so much and felt like I was just in a prison for children.

In other words, my personal experiences with EdTech has seen these trying to take a standard public school curriculum and package it in a digital "work at your own pace" format. Whereas my issue with school was at least in large part the curriculum itself. The pace was a factor too ... just not the only one by far.

So much this. I studied and got a degree in civil engineering and only call myself studied as an engineer because I never apprenticed or took the professional engineer exam. Despite doing a ton of software now I still feel it would be an insult to my friends who are P.E.'s to call myself an engineer.

That's fair, I say the word "engineer" because that was the job title at the companies.

Generally when people have asked what I am, I just say something kind of hand-wavey like "Eccentric" or something.

Nope, not an ad, I promise. I have negative things to say about WGU too, if that would help (mostly in their class selection for the CS degree).

Feel free to email me if you have any specific questions, I think you and I might be pretty similar in this regard.

> "It wasn't until I found out about WGU"

Could I politely suggest writing out the full acronym the first time, and then using WGU subsequently? It'd be a good deal more considerate of non-U.S. readers.

Sorry, what is WGU?

Yes it leaves me guessing.

West Georgia University?

Washington, George Understanding-Builder?

+1, very powerful stuff.

My anecdote: I was expelled from a vocational school my senior year, thanks to EdTech I returned and finished the year within a month

Western Governors University

But they rarely use the full name, even on their own site.

I dropped out of school for adhd reasons and after getting treatment I went back and finished my last couple semesters (and wrote a novel, that first year on vyvanse was insanely productive). I found it a lot easier to engage with the work and pay attention long enough to take notes in class.

I see this type of comment on HN frequently. I have a dim view of national certifications for software engineering or computer science. Are there any highly advanced economies that have "a formal assessment by the national engineering council" for software engineering or computer science? If so, are they useful? Do they actually indicate quality? For me, the field(s) are changing so fast, that it hardly makes sense. If you are working in an area that is not life threatening, I am not a believer in certifications. It all seems like a bunch of gatekeeping.

Today, I was listening to the Lex Fridman podcast with John Carmack. It reminded me that John Carmack does not have a university degree, yet, he is one our generation's globally recognized masters of software optimisation. There are few in the world who can do what he does, and he has no uni degree, nor (I assume!) any "national certifications". Michael Abrash is similar.

On a personal note: (US) Wall Street has similarly ineffective gatekeeping with the Series 7 & 63 exams: My father called it "toilet bowl knowledge" when I studied for it. He said: "Once you are finished the exam, you can flush away that knowledge. You will never use it again." He is right about more than 90% of the "knowledge" required to pass those exams.

Just adding this on OP's behalf:

WGU = Western Governors University

https://www.wgu.edu/online-it-degrees/computer-science.html

Yes, I'm wondering if there are alternatives outside the US to get a full undergraduate or master's degree online at your own pace.

In the software industry and related domains in other industries (i.e. software at a bank, software for retail systems, etc.) the words engineer, developer and programmer can be used interchangeably. I think "engineer" is more trendy these days than "programmer". Other industries also use the words "architect" or even "sanitation engineer" and they mean different things.

I don't think its a big deal that the same words are used in job titles in different industries. The second anyone reads the job description or follows up with a question will understand the domain someone works in.

I usually go with "I work in software" and non-software people equate all of that to "IT", much like I classify Doctors as "medicine" and there are different disciplines.

In civil engineering especially, you sort of assume senior people have PEs because they have to sign off on certain official documents. But, in general, outside of a few contexts like that, very few people pay any attention to whether someone is a PE or not.

A few reasons.

For the most part, my career was fine. I had a job at Apple as a senior software engineer at the time (though I didn't really enjoy the job itself).

Part of it was just a bit of an inferiority complex over insecurity of not having a degree. People were generally very polite about it, but internally it felt like every bad thing happened to me in my career was because of the lack of a degree; every comment felt like it was loaded with passive aggression, even if that wasn't true.

Kind of the straw the broke the camel's back was actually a bit funny; I had applied for a job as an engineer at Microsoft Research, and I was declined for it. It was far from the first time I had been declined for a job, obviously, but in this case it was the first time that the declination specifically said "declined because you don't have a degree". In the nearly a decade of working as a software person prior to that, I had never explicitly been told that my lack of degree was the reason for a rejection.

That rejection coincided with another milestone: my 30th birthday. I had told myself I'll finish my degree "next year" for nearly a decade, and now I wasn't in my 20's anymore. Obviously there's no real difference between 29.99 and 30 years old, but it just kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. I registered for WGU that day.

There are probably numerous other reasons, I did want to transition to a more theoretical role as well, but those are the main ones.

Oregon State has a online BSCS program

> Are there any highly advanced economies that have "a formal assessment by the national engineering council" for software engineering or computer science?

The EUR ING certificate from Engineers Europe can be awarded to those who have attained a degree in engineering, but also for those with "no exemplifying formal qualifications, but will have engaged in professional Career Learning and peer review via the individual route".

https://www.engineerseurope.com/what-eur-ing-certificate

Since Engineers Europe is a private organization (albeit one that is widely recognized), I would imagine that individual European countries have their own rules about when someone can call themselves an engineer. I am pretty sure that Germany only requires a degree for instance. Looser still are the rules in Britain: the UK does not require any certification at all for the basic term 'Engineer', although there are more specific titles that are strictly protected (ICTTech being one of them, and yes they really do use that silly abbreviation, obligatory italics included). Theoretically, a country could refuse to recognize certifications from Engineers Europe, but that would not exactly endear them to the European Commission or to other European countries!

I was skeptical when I first started treatment because I've internalized the whole "You don't have ADHD you're just lazy" thing for literally my entire life, and then imagine my surprise that the medicine designed specifically to make my brain work, actually makes my brain work!

I still get feelings of skepticism that it actually does anything every once in a while. Despite the overwhelming evidence from my wife, my coworkers, and my life in general that it absolutely does.

In Canada, Thompson Rivers University offers a bachelor's in computer science as a fully distance option. On the French language side, Université TÉLUQ (part of the Université du Québec network) also offers a BS in CS.

It is a little amusing when people get fussy about credentials and certifications for the term "engineer" given that an "engineer" in the railroad industry is simply a person who operates a locomotive engine. It seems a very small stretch to analogize software engineers as operators of computing engines!

It also worked for me. Whatever material you already know you can mostly skip (though you will get tested on it).

Check out /r/WGU and /r/WGU_CompSci

Apologies for confusion, I forget people don't have a direct microscope to my brain sometimes!

I edited the post to clarify.

> I’ve also heard that it can sometimes be a questionable resume signal. Any thoughts?

There are jobs that require a degree, and there are jobs that require a degree from MIT. This will get you in the first door, but not the second.

Also consider GaTech's OMSCS, though there are CS entrance requirements.

A few Canadians can sneak in, depending on location.

I would be skeptical of granting that much power/mental space to gatekeepers you didn't elect. You're fine at your job without the certification right? so maybe it's not needed?

The UK has Open University which has been around for a long time (since 1969) and has a really good reputation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University

Yeah! I used Dragon Box in my high school math class back in 2015. Loved it!

On personal note, Series 7, 63, and 62 are not hard tests....one can pass it without much study...I did pass the series 62 in my sleep.

But keep in mind those are legal compliance tests...WTF?

In short words, they give the legal basis for why in finance we have to follow a sales script as it then covers the legal boilerplate mess...

On the other hand in the late 1980s I had a chance to be in the Turtle Trading class in Chicago....obviously that would have been more helpful as I think the success rate was over 50% for students of that pratical turtle trading class.

Thank you for sharing your story.

I, too, dropped out of college, but finding employment as a programmer back in the mid-90s required very little luck. It became difficult to justify the time and expense of further education when my career already seemed to be launching, ready or not.

Funny that you mention MSR - I also applied there, back in 2007, and they are also the only people who have ever turned me down for lack of a degree! (Though I still got an offer out of it, after they passed my information along to devdiv...)

A big difference though between how you're able to leverage online learning as an adult with at least some real-world life experience vs. what a 3rd-grader can do.

I am a strong advocate for zero technology in schools until high school.

One thing that is rarely mentioned is that schools that issue technology to students and use it in the classroom now need to have a hardware, software, and network support person at every school. These jobs use funds that could otherwise be used to pay for more instructional staff, reduce student-teacher ratios, provide more special-needs instructional specialists, etc.

I got kind of double-lucky in my case too.

When I dropped out, I assumed that my job options were limited to minimum wage work, so I applied to McDonald's, Lowes, Target, Walmart (as a cashier), Aldi, and a few other places in one day (driving around the Orlando area). When I got home, sort of on a whim I applied to junior-level Coldfusion+Flash job I saw on Craigslist, thinking that there's no chance but it also didn't cost me anything to apply.

The only job that called me back was the software job, which I thought was bizarre, but it's what kickstarted the career.

In hindsight, I think the reason none of the others called me back was because they saw some college and they were afraid that I would quit the second that I went back to school.

I learned two important lessons that day: 1) The typical Wayne Gretzky "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take", and 2) the less qualified you are for a job, the more willing a company is to overlook a lack of qualifications.

I'd like to elaborate on point 2 because I don't see it mentioned much.

The conventional wisdom for finding a job (qualified or otherwise) is to see what's in demand and learn that skill (e.g. something popular like Java), but then you hit a problem: everyone is applying to that job. There are lots of people who learned Java from school or work, and you're competing with all of them. 2012-dropout-tombert would be applying for the same job as a 4.0-GPA'd-Harvard-Graduate, and as such the company will almost always choose the latter.

When I applied to the Coldfusion job, I accidentally discovered that because it was (even in 2012) a pretty niche bit of tech, no one applied to it. I didn't really know Coldfusion either, but the fact that I applied at all was an artifact of me not having the option to work in a more popular platform, and I was able to learn it quick enough to where it wasn't really a problem.

WGU is a real and legit, and probably one of the top things I would consider if needed to get a bachelors degree while working as a now middle aged adult.

And so what?

Those gatekeepers might not accept a John Carmack or a Palmer Luckey (or Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Vitalik Buterin, etc, etc), but how many of their certificate-holders have done any comparably significant engineering work?

Does it matter for them? Would any employer/investor, seeking to hire/fund carmack etc hold back because they didn't have a cert? The vanishingly few with those levels of talent stand out quite easily and don't need "proof of competency" to be evaluated.

For the _vast majority_ of others, certification allows employers to have externally-validated trust in an engineer who mightn't stand out as obviously.

> For me, the field(s) are changing so fast, that it hardly makes sense.

This applies to CS degrees too. But while there's immense amounts of churn in the hot language/UI framework of the day, the basics like algorithms and data structures barely change.

It depends on how you define things.

I didn't really go to school with the expectation of making more money; I already had a decent job at a FAANG, and finishing my degree hasn't really translated to "more" money. In the "killing the inferiority complex" and "proving to myself that I'm not an idiot" sense, it was definitely worth the money to me.

I'm not at a FAANG anymore, but I really like my current job, and while I'm not 100% sure on this, I'm pretty convinced that the interview for it wouldn't have happened if I didn't have at least some form of a bachelors.

I also had a lot of fun doing the degree, but that's harder to quantify.

But I'm not going to sit here and bullshit you, it's not a perfect degree. I've been trying to break into the finance world for a couple years [1], and finance people really care about which school you went to; most of them seem to simply not have even heard of WGU, and it appears that the rule of finance work is "if I haven't heard of the school, it's not a good school" and then they decline you. Finance jobs want a fancy expensive university; whether or not they're right to do so is orthogonal to that fact.

I was doing a PhD at University of York (distance), but I've since dropped that and am doing their online masters in computer science. York is honestly an extremely decent school, and their online masters is perfectly fine and fairly reasonably priced (about 11,000 British Pounds total I believe, about $14,000). I'm hoping that that can "cleanse" my WGU degree in the eyes of finance.

Outside of finance, as far as I'm aware no one has really given a shit about where I got my degree outside of the "is it accredited?" question, which it is.

[1] I want lots of money, finance jobs on Wall Street can pay pretty well.

I'm not sure I'd call it legit. As someone who hiring for low-to-mid level IT roles the caliber of WGU students vs. real brick and mortar schools is vast, like vast.

There are edge cases, but if you didn't have the grades and SATs to do real college you're not going to be competitive in this market. I'd take a WGU grad but would put that degree under a VA Tech, RPI, UC Davis, etc. for sure, and way under Stanford or MIT (or Cambridge, or one of the better IIT campuses, etc.).

Honestly this whole thread seems like submarine ads

I'm not sure I know what a "submarine ad" is.

I don't really know any other WGU graduates in person, so it's hard for me to say the quality of student is "worse" and than anywhere else.

Obviously I am biased, but I don't think I'm appreciably dumber than the average student who went to a brick and mortar school, but admittedly I'm a pretty weird dude who did use WGU as a "rubber stamp" school for me. I finished quickly, though I don't feel like the work was "easier" than when I was learning shit at Florida State, outside of me being a decade more experienced in it.

I'll agree there's definitely selection-bias with WGU for students who underperformed in high school, which can translate to poor work performance. Hell, I underperformed in high school due to at the time undiagnosed Major Depressive Disorder, so I am grateful for something like WGU existing.

It's tough to say. I think if you're in a position like I was, WGU is fine. It is there to demonstrate that you have a Bachelor's worth of CS knowledge; if I were 18 again and had had medication for depression, I would probably apply to some of the nicer public UK schools (e.g. University of York, Manchester, etc.), if I'm being honest, but until someone invents a time machine I'm stuck with the world as it is, not how I want it to be.

I saw a blog post a few years ago about a Canadian dude getting an exception to go to WGU. You might just email WGU and ask if you can get an exception.

https://miguelrochefort.com/blog/cs-degree/

Thanks for sharing all of this Tom. It's always cool to learn the various backstories behind mainstay HN contributors. Hope the rest of your career is going as well as that first day!

I'm a little jealous that they passed your information along devdiv, I would have liked to work on something like the TypeScript compiler; I just got an unceremonious form letter.

I obviously don't blame them for declining me, they don't owe me a job, but I still find it a bit amusing that in my entire career exactly one entity has declined me for that reason, or at least only one has been brave enough to state that that was the reason why. I'm sure a lot of the places that never got back to me might have declined me for a lack of a degree behind the scenes, but I was never made aware of it.

You're absolutely right, apologies for that. It can be easy for me to forget that people don't have every acronym that I know implanted into their head.

Sibling comment already stated this, but I'll just say I was referring to Western Governors University. I have added an edit to the post to clarify.

Ha! Never really thought of myself as a "mainstay" contributor, but I'll take it.

I mean, like most careers its had its ups and downs. 2023 was an exceptionally awful year for me (like many, many people in tech), but this year has been pretty alright.

> Within a year of getting my BSCS, I added almost 25% to my salary.

Why do you think that was related to the degree?

My salary history, in some abstract units, is 15, 50, 100, 600 (yes, that was good), and 50 (not just earning ten times less, but also working about half the hours, very happy with it).

I can't help but see 25% as really insignificant: I've never experienced such a small change! And I don't even have a degree.

Not using modern technology has its own tradeoffs too. We don't use chalk tablets or kerosene lamps anymore.

That said, I'm a fan of forcing kids to check any phones at the door.

Instructional staff doesn't scale. One teacher can teach only one class at a time. The whole idea of EdTech is to scale learning beyond that.

Lots of folks do IT and learn on the job, so why would going to (even a mediocre) school hurt any?

Except it doesn't work, as the subject article demonstrates. At least not for primary education.

I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I have enough experience to get in the door, so if I’m being honest I’d probably be doing it to prove to myself that I’m not an idiot, too.

Early in their careers, even exceptional people face obstacles from gate-keepers. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there have been Germans of similar temperament, credentials and talent as Carmack or Luckey but who struggled much longer to stand out to a sufficient degree that they could get great job opportunities or funding in a that much more credentialist environment.

I like to imagine that such people would have found a way to emigrate and make their impact abroad. Either way, the cost to Germany itself (and Europe generally) has been immense.

I think you might be right about why you didn’t get the retail job callbacks. On the other hand I bet today that’s no longer the case, because it’s so hard to find anyone to staff a retail job who is even remotely competent or reliable. Even if you did quit 3 months later, that’s probably above average now.

Happy for you that you found your niche!

I think part of it also goes to my second point; since lots of people are qualified for retail jobs, they get a lot of applications, meaning I was competing with a very large pool of people.

I never got confirmation on this, but I am about 95% sure that I was the only person who applied to the Coldfusion job. Compare that to Target, where there was literally a queue of people applying at the terminal in the store.

I’ve been declined for enough jobs to know that you can be declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, so trying to reason about it is an exercise in futility, but I am pretty sure that a lack of applicants is the reason I got the coldfusion job

It doesn't work yet. The industry will try again and again.

By the way, check out the School product line from Constructor Tech (disclosure: I work for this company on a different product): https://constructor.tech/solutions/schools?tag%5B0%5D=16. They are backed by hard science, and their founder made a scientific career while researching this topic. Evidence shows they are working, especially for kids lagging behind classmates.