IT Life: An Alternative to University IT Programs

Ashu Desai, our latest guest on IT Life Radio thinks college computer science programs are failing their students. He's founded a new kind of school to make the next generation of software developers that he thinks is more cost effective, faster, and most importantly, makes better developers than traditional IT programs from four year universities.

Ashu thinks that developers aren't getting enough hands on experience or managing enough projects in college, and that the teachers they get are more interested in research than teaching. Desai knows first-hand. He dropped out of a college program himself when he realized he had learned far more from designing his own app than he was learning in school. After a few successful years as an IT pro, he decided to fix the problems he has seen. He founded Make School.

According to Desai, Make School is designed to work more like a startup than a school. The "campus" looks like any office of a San Francisco startup. And the students spend part of their day in lectures and part of the day working on projects of their own. In other words, they get the startup experience. They've only had one class so far, but most of those folks are working and some are making well above the average salary for developers coming out of college and they're doing it in less time.

The kicker? There is no tuition. Make School has a different business plan. Instead of taking money from you before you've made any they defer the tuition and then take a percentage of your salary in your first years after they get you a job. No job? No tuition.

Ashu Desai is one of the founders of Make School, a university replacement for computer science. He attended UCLA to study computer science before dropping out to join Y Combinator and found Make School in hopes of improving computer science education.