Is the master's degree an expensive anachronism?

• Author: Carey, Kevin
• Position: General Assembly, Dev Bootcamp and Koru

FOR LEGIONS OF NEW COLLEGE GRADUATES STRUGGLING TO FIND GOOD JOBS IN A WEAK LABOR MARKET, "BOOT CAMPS" ARE A FASTER AND CHEAPER ALTERNATIVE TO TRADITIONAL GRAD SCHOOL.

Washington, D.C., is a college town. Georgetown, American, Catholic, Howard, and George Washington Universities all have sprawling campuses with dorms, lecture halls, athletic fields, and tens of thousands of students. But one of the most interesting higher education organizations in D.C. has none of those things. It's called General Assembly. The entire "campus" is located on one end of the eighth floor of an office building on 15th Street, in a space that looks like a Silicon Valley startup, complete with cappuccino machines and lots of youngish people pecking away on their MacBooks. It's like the whole university is the student lounge.

The differences don't stop there. GA uses a business and learning model that departs radically from established colleges and universities. Instead of enrolling in the expensive one- and two-year master's degrees that are increasingly becoming the norm for people trying to find a foothold in the job market, students at General Assembly's twelve campuses in America, Europe, Australia, and Asia take intense, eight- to twelve-week programs in high-demand fields like computer programming and designing the user experience for high-traffic commercial websites. The goal isn't to teach them everything they need to know to be great in a job. The goal is to teach them just enough to start a career. Because when it comes to learning and work, the most important thing is work itself.

To enroll, students go through a job interview-like process designed to gauge their commitment to the $4,000 course. Many for-profit colleges will accept virtually anyone who can sign their name on federal student loan documents. The worst for-profits simply pass students through, imparting virtually no useful skills. GA doesn't take federal aid. The first page of its application says, "In addition to the 9am-5pm class time, you will spend 10+ hours a week building your portfolio and honing your skill set outside of class. Do you anticipate any barriers that would prevent you from devoting this time to the program?"

Kate Tikoian, one of the students taking the user experience (UX) course in the D.C. office this spring, is a D.C. native who earned a Spanish degree from Emory University in 2002. Since the recruiters weren't lining up to hire Spanish majors, she moved back to her hometown and became a self-taught IT person for a couple of small startup companies. That was enough to earn a living. But keeping the servers running and the email system from crashing was a technician's work, not a career. Kate wanted to do something more creative, complicated, and lucrative. That would require skills she couldn't pick up on her own.

In her first week in the course, Kate and a partner student presented one another with a problem to solve by designing a mobile app. Kate's partner and her spouse had recently moved in with her father-in-law, which meant that their household now had two, sometimes overlapping and redundant, weekly grocery lists. Kate's solution was to create an app called Already Got Spinach, a home pantry manager that generated automated shopping lists based on unavailable food.

Kate conducted "user interviews" with family members to get more specific information on their shopping habits, created "user flow" analyses that tracked how people would progress through the application, and sketched out app designs. This led to "content mapping," a synthesis of the visuals and the user experience, a prototype app on paper, and then usability testing. The results were then presented to the rest of the class. All of this was done in the first four days of the course. The rest of the UX class was built around a series of projects, each taking students in greater depth into skills like researching user preferences, designing friendly, intuitive interfaces, prototyping and testing products, and working with teams and clients.

The UX course...