OSU Reflection
As I near the end of my journey at OSU as part of the postbacc program, I like to reflect on all I’ve learned and can’t help but think traditional education is dying off. With my participation being 100% virtual, I honestly don’t feel like I’ve missed out at all from traditional learning in a classroom environment. I wouldn’t trade my brick and mortar college experience in but none of that really has to do with the learning aspect.
While CS is an easily malleable field for 100% remote learning, I really think it can apply for any degree. For my first degree in aerospace engineering, many courses had labs that went along with them. These labs and experimentations were considered important learning foundations to reinforce concepts from class, but I never felt like I learned more than if I had watched a YouTube video on the experiment. While I cannot speak for every degree’s need for in-person classes, I never felt limited by working 100% remote towards a degree in the material I was able to learn.
At large universities, you don’t really get any in-person 1-on-1 time with the professor unless you go out of your way to go to office hours and ask questions. You’re really just a number in the grand degree-seeking process and there’s a number of ways to transition this mentality to the digital age too.
Self-Learning is King
After setting the stage for the lack of need for showing up in-person for learning, the natural transition is remote degrees such as OSU. This is the temporary hold-over but I don’t believe this is the end goal. I think eventually, even degrees will become obsolete in certain fields. The primary value in brick and mortar education is mostly networking at this point and for some institutions name brand. When you look at a remote degree it’s hard to capture this. Remote degrees get straight down to the point of what’s desired from seeking a degree, the certified learning that goes along with it.
Many complain they’re paying $1,000s of dollars for a piece of paper saying they should know information on the requisite courses that are necessary to get started in the field. Slowly, this barrier is eroding as degrees don’t necessarily mean the degree-holder has learned the requisite information needed to excel at the job, there’s some crossover but these two distinctions can differentiate who is hired.
I feel OSU’s degree is successful because it has allowed me to dabble in a lot of foundations and provide structure to my learning. While in theory I could look up an institution’s CS curriculum and mimic everything that goes into the courses, it would be much harder to hold myself accountable for following through with it and at the end of the day, there’s no certification of the abilities I’ve learned that will help me get interviews or certify that I’m more eligible for the position than the knucklehead down the block. These have proven incredibly beneficial. While I realize that simply passing a course doesn’t mean I know the information well enough to excel on the job, I feel I have the foundations to get up to speed quickly on new concepts because all of the different courses’ information combined has allowed me to solidify a wide variety of interrelated concepts. I don’t feel gen-eds are necessary in today’s age but the benefits I’ve listed that helped me could also apply to self-learning with a higher level of discipline.
With companies going remote, it is basically expected individuals get more comfortable with knowing how to find information or knowing how to learn about new concepts quickly in an independent manner. There’s so many resources now for supporting this, such as MOOCs, YouTube, research papers from conferences easily available online, blogs, tech articles, etc. What’s difficult for individuals is knowing where to get started until they hit a critical point where enough foundations have been set and it’s easier to get motivated to understand new concepts quicker.
Employees do seem to be more understanding of those going the untraditional route. While software and IT is a pioneer in this respect, I can see this even happening in the aerospace industry. Not as many people care about holding a Masters degree anymore. Not as many people care about certifications. The ultimate goal of education is achieving knowledge that sets one up for job success. If you can shortcut the process by watching YouTube videos specifically related to the tech you would use on the job and demonstrate you understand how to apply to the concepts, is this not as satisfactory?
Education is really expensive now, and not everybody has the means to afford going to the name brand college just to rack themselves up in student loan debt. While CS students have the luxury of getting practical part-time jobs while in college, many fields do not. While software jobs have high enough ceilings to pay off large amounts of debt, many fields do not. Many employees who did go to school now regret spending so much money, and can emphasize with those who went an untraditional route to end up in software.
The Last Hurdle
The last hurdle in preventing 100% remote independent learning is getting your foot in the door, in software at least. Who is going to get the interview, the student who attended MIT and earned a CS degree or the boot camper with a couple ripped-off projects from Github (setting aside smarts for the sake of my argument)? Once that boot camper gets experience, it might not ever come up again whether they got a degree unless to check a HR box, as their work and interviewing abilities should speak for itself. There’s value from brick and mortar education that extend past the technical knowledge, such as collaboration, expanding your horizons, and living independently in formative years, but there now exists more paths to reach the same end goal. The advantage still goes to brick and mortar, college-educated students but eventually your abilities should be speaking for themselves. A degree even from coveted universities won’t save you, but that online MOOC you took related to your potential employer’s tech stack might 20 years from now.
