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Comment by gregschlom | Hacker News Reader

I visited 42 in Paris a while ago and chatted with some students. It's impressive. Technically, the program is really good. They start with some pretty low level stuff (they learn C and reimplement bits of the std lib) and go from there.

But the most impressive thing was the potential of the school as a "social elevator" (ascenseur social) as we say in French - meaning a way for people from lower class backgrounds to land middle / upper class jobs. One such story that stuck with me was a guy who used to work construction jobs. Then he landed a job as a sales guy at the French equivalent of Best Buy. There he heard of 42 and signed up for it on the demo computers in the store (he had no computer or internet access of its own). When I met him, he was halfway through 42's program, and he's probably working a pretty nice job now. Truly an inspiring story.

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I was poor. I joined the US ARMY. I went from poor to lower-middle class. When I left the army, I took what money I had earned and went to The Flatiron School (a ruby-on-rails bootcamp) for $6000. 3 years later, I make pretty good money. All these schools have the potential to become social elevators. It's awesome that free organisations exists. I may have not joined the US ARMY if 42 US existed.

EDIT: typos

Coding is very easy. Anyone can learn how to do it within a few weeks and make over 6 figures in any city in America. Congrats for figuring it out!

> There he heard of 42

There are many French universities with CS programs that are virtually free (and work as social elevators too).

Maybe that's one of 42's strengths. Via their media exposure, they can attract students who wouldn't have thought about studying otherwise.

Virtually free but maybe not as relevant for the training it provides or the time it takes (years vs weeks)

Universities, especially French ones, are far worse for teaching programmming, for several reasons:

- they are highly theoretical and biased against people who are not good at math; I studied CS, and I had to take more electrical engineering and math courses in my first two years than programming-related classes. This is very demotivating for someone who goes to university to learn programming, rather than physics or advanced mathematics

- they take too long and are full of useless classes (useless for getting a job, not in general)

- although the courses are free, it is very expensive to support yourself for the 3-4 years it takes to finish university, and you also need to buy books and other materials

- the most difficult courses are usually not programming related, but science; so you could invest 4 years of your life and end up without a diploma because you couldn't pass Advanced Physics or Calculus 3, despite being a good programmer.

> they are highly theoretical and biased against people who are not good at math

Maybe it has changed but it's certainly not the case currently.

> I studied CS, and I had to take more electrical engineering and math courses in my first two years than programming-related classes.

Nowadays, most of the classes are CS related. There are still some (basic) maths because they are relevant to so many branches of CS.

> are full of useless classes

Well, that may be true. There will always be useless classes because there are many different career paths.

But I think you shouldn't underestimate the value of more foundational classes.

To give you an example, when I was an undergraduate 20 years ago, I was taught OCaml (many people complained it was a useless academic language), as well as tons of maths. Recently, I decided to learn myself some machine learning and Spark. It was a breeze as I already knew most of the maths and the functional programming model. It would have been much more difficult otherwise.

Each university is different. So, your experience will vary from the other person's experience.

At my (American) university, we do take more non-CS-related courses than CS-courses in our first two years.

The USA is similar. If you go for a bachelor's degree in CS you take a ton of mathematics ("hard" cs concentration) or a ton of business classes ("information sytems" concentration) to backfill your degree.

Alternately you can bypass most of that by going to a technical vocational school. They focus entirely on occupational values and send you out in half the time.

Downsides to vocational school: The "idea" behind higher education is that you continue to learn to be a well-rounded person. If you never took physics/literature/calculus/art/Latin/... (because you went to vocational classes that focused on practical business value), it's a hard, high mountain to climb between changing diapers, chauffering to soccer class, etc. ;-)

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