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Enstitute, an Alternative to College for a Digital Elite

May 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Ms. Gao decided that she didn’t want to continue studying at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. At first she considered transferring to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, but she changed her mind when she saw that her tuition bill would be around $44,000 a year, with only a small amount of financial aid available. “I didn’t want to come out of college with $200,000 in debt and have to spend 10 years paying it off,” she said.

Yet she still sought a way to nurture her interest in technology. A year later, Ms. Gao holds the title of data strategist at Bitly, the URL-shortening service based in New York.

How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.”

The Enstitute concept taps into a larger cultural conversation about the value of college — a debate that has heated up in the last few years. In important ways, the value is indisputable. The wage gap between college graduates and those with just a high school degree is vast: in 2010, median earnings for those with a bachelor’s degree were more than 50 percent higher than for those with only a high school diploma, according to the Department of Education.

But college is expensive, and becoming more so — between 2000 and 2011, tuition rose 42 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics — and students fear being saddled by debt in a bleak job market. (Students from the class of 2011 who took out loans graduated with an average debt of $26,000.) And some employers complain that many colleges don’t teach the kinds of technical skills they want in entry-level hires.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor, upped the ante to this argument when he started the Thiel Fellowship, which pays a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 for young people not to attend college and to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams instead.

Enstitute doesn’t offer anything like $100,000 to its apprentices. Still, it is aimed at intelligent, ambitious and entrepreneurial types — people like Ms. Gao, who participated in the Technovation Challenge, a nine-week program and competition for high school girls to design a mobile app prototype at Google in New York.

“If I had known at 19 what Jasmine knows, I would be ruling the world,” says Ms. Mason, who is 34.

The concept is not a perfect model by any stretch. For one thing, a college degree is still the assumed prerequisite of most any professional job. But more people seem interested in testing alternatives.

“We need educational research and development for a new time,” says Tony Wagner, an innovation education fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and the author of “Creating Innovators.”

“I have no idea whether Enstitute is going to be successful,” he adds. The only way to find out, he says, would be to follow the apprentices over time after the program and compare them with their college-educated peers. “Yes, you get exposed to a lot of great things by going to a liberal arts school,” Mr. Wagner says, “but you have to look at the cost-benefit analysis.”

MR. SARHAN and his co-founder, Shaila Ittycheria, met when they worked at LocalResponse, a social media company in New York. They selected this year’s first class of fellows — 11 in all — from a national pool of 500 applicants ranging in age from 18 to 24.

Ms. Ittycheria, 31, and Mr. Sarhan, 26, call the program “learning by doing.” Students train under a master, in the way that many trade professions have operated for centuries. “It’s a level of experience that an intern never sees,” Ms. Ittycheria says.

For participating companies, the program offers cheap, talented labor for a much longer period than a typical internship. But the fellows are betting that their minimal wages will turn into full-time jobs once they complete the program — perhaps even at the very company where they apprenticed.

Nine of the fellows have attended at least one year of college, and three are college graduates. Most say they do not plan to return to school. But what will the apprentices miss if they forgo the four-year period of intellectual exploration and cultural knowledge that college is meant to provide? Defenders of higher education argue that college students gain important knowledge as well as critical-thinking skills that are crucial to a meaningful life and career.

The Enstitute’s founders contend that their program does teach critical thinking, but in different ways. “They are not debating Chaucer; they are debating product features,” says Mr. Sarhan, who graduated from Pace University. “But it’s the same idea of how do I write down and communicate an argument.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/business/enstitute-an-alternative-to-college-for-a-digital-elite.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Economix Blog: Degree Inflation? Jobs That Newly Require B.A.’s

December 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

CATHERINE RAMPELL

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

Despite the sob stories you hear about unemployed college graduates, bachelor’s degrees have actually gotten more valuable over time. The wage gap between the typical college graduate and those who have completed no more than high school has been growing for the last few decades. In the late 1970s, the median wage was 40 percent higher for college graduates than for people with more than a high school degree; now the wage premium is about 80 percent.

Some of that wage premium has to do with the changing nature of American jobs and the skills (and social networks) attained in college. Some of it may have to do with a change in the mix of students who go to college and those who don’t. As college enrollment becomes more expected of high school students — as of October 2011, 68.3 percent of 2011 high school graduates were enrolled in college — the shrinking group of students forgoing college may have other characteristics that are associated with lower wages.

At the very least it seems as if more employers are using bachelor’s degrees as a signal of drive or talent, regardless of of the relevance of the skills actually learned in college.

That is one implication of an analysis from Burning Glass, a company that analyzes job ads from over 20,000 online sources ranging from major job boards to small and midsize employer sites. The company’s chief executive, Matthew Sigelman, says that employers are increasingly requiring college degrees for positions that did not traditionally require higher education.

I asked his company to compile a list of occupations that have shown the most “up-credentialing” in the last five years — that is, occupations whose job ads were significantly more likely to name college diplomas as a prerequisite in 2012 than they were in 2007.

Here is a look at the 10 occupations with the biggest percentage increases in requiring a college degree.

*2012 data is from Nov. 1, 2011, to Oct 31, 2012

Some of these occupations may actually require more advanced skill sets than they used to. Others may require the same old duties and skills, but employers assume that people who don’t go to college in this day and age must be inferior candidates. There’s also still an oversupply of workers, so employers know they can afford to be picky.

A lot of jobs on this list fall into various categories of logistics. The people at Burning Glass say that college-level technical training, and not just possession of a fancy sheepskin, may be newly important in a lot of these positions.

“Supply chain management has gotten more complex, and companies have started to bring in quantitative expertise into roles like ‘purchasing manager’ that formerly would have been filled face-to-face by someone on the floor,” Mr. Sigelman said.

Many administrative jobs — human resources manager, property manager, school administrator, desktop publisher, security manager — also appear on the full list.

These tend to be jobs that require fewer technical skills, so it’s not clear why a college-level education would suddenly become more important — except maybe as a sorting device for narrowing down the deluge of résumés to the most qualified (or overqualified) applicants.

In most of these administrative occupations, hiring has fallen over the last few years, as you can see in the columns further to the right showing the total number of jobs posted. That could also mean that the openings that are left — the ones that have been harder to fill even when workers are abundant — are disproportionately the ones actually do require more advanced skill sets.

For other categories of jobs, it’s harder to tell whether the “up-credentialing” reflects changing job duties or mere degree inflation.

A lot of the jobs listed are medical technician positions, for example, which typically require some kind of technical skills that can be achieved with postsecondary schooling like an associate’s degree or a certification of some kind. It’s unclear whether these jobs have gotten more technically sophisticated in the last five years, or whether employers just want to narrow down the pool of potential applicants to those perceived to be more ambitious.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/degree-inflation-jobs-that-newly-require-b-a-s/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Bucks Blog: When Non-Driving Factors Affect Auto Insurance Premiums

September 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Automobile insurers may use factors unrelated to driving, like education and occupation, in determining rates.

Now, a consumer group is urging state insurance commissioners to restrict insurers’ ability to use those factors, arguing that the result has been unfairly high rates for lower-income drivers. Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, said in a call this week with reporters that premiums should mainly reflect factors like accidents, speeding tickets and miles driven.

The federation analyzed auto insurance premiums quoted on the Web sites of the five largest insurers (State Farm, Allstate, Geico, Progressive and Farmer’s) to price minimum liability coverage in five cities. Using an example of coverage for a 35-year-old woman with a good driving record, the study obtained quotes while varying characteristics like marital status, education level, occupation, home ownership and gaps in insurance coverage. Her driving record was the same in all instances.

The group found that in most cases, annual premiums were much lower if the woman was a married homeowner with a college degree, a professional job and continuous insurance coverage. In four of the examples, the premiums fell by at least 68 percent.

Premiums tended to be high if the woman was single, rented in a moderate-income area, had a high school degree, worked as a bank teller or clerical worker and had a gap in insurance coverage.

The analysis first obtained quotes for the “standard” example — a 35-year-old single bank teller with a high school degree and good credit record who rents a house in a moderate-income Zip code. The hypothetical woman had driven 15 years with no accidents or moving violations, and sought the minimum required liability coverage on a 2002 Honda Civic. Then, the researchers changed the criteria to see what the impact was on the quoted premium.

For instance, the “standard” quote of $2,696 from Progressive, for coverage in Baltimore, fell to $2,212 when the woman’s status was changed from single to married. And when all the criteria were changed to more a “favorable” status, the quote dropped to $718.

J. Robert Hunter, insurance director at the consumer federation, said a difference of nearly $2,000 based on non-driving factors is “patently unfair” and “actuarially unsound.”

Jeff Sibel, a spokesman for Progressive, said the insurer “works to price each driver’s policy as accurately as possible, so that every driver pays the appropriate amount based on his or her risk of having an accident.” He added: “To do this, we use many different rating factors, which sometimes include non-driving factors, that have been proven to be predictive of a person’s likelihood of being involved in a crash. Because different insurers use different information, which can cause rates to vary widely, we encourage consumers to shop around to find the combination of price and service that’s best for them.”

Alex Hageli, director of personal lines for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, disputed the federation’s position in an e-mail, saying that data have shown “consumers’ age, marital status, place of residence and occupation to be among the best predictors of future loss.” When such factors are “blended together” with criteria like driving experience, previous claims and vehicle age, he said, “these factors help to ensure that low-risk consumers can be better identified and pay less for insurance. In the final analysis, consumers benefit when insurance underwriting and rating decisions are based on a wide variety of fair and objective factors.”

Loretta Worters, spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group,  said in an e-mail, “What’s missing from the C.F.A.’s analysis is that every one of these factors that they attack is correlated, and highly correlated, with loss.”

Mr. Hunter of the consumer federation said his concern with using factors like occupation and education is that such factors are “surrogates” for criteria that states aren’t allowed to use in setting premiums, like income. At the very least, insurers should give less weight to non-driving factors in setting premiums, he said.

Los Angeles had the lowest quotes, he said, because California limits the use of non-driving factors in setting insurance rates. It is up to state insurance commissioners and legislatures to take action, he said, because auto insurance is regulated at the state level.

“We’re not trying to say get rid of these entirely,” he said. “We’re saying, you have to look at the combined effect and study these factors more carefully.”

Using non-driving factors drives up premiums, and forces many working families to drive without insurance, even though they risk paying fines or criminal charges for doing so. “Many low- and moderate-income citizens can’t afford required insurance because insurers use unfair rating factors,” he said.

Do you think non-driving factors should be used to help determine insurance premiums?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/when-non-driving-factors-affect-auto-insurance-premiums/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,