Darrell Silver

If you can donate this year please consider The Young Center, a non-profit helping unaccompanied children who seek asylum in the US.

This year I've had the privilege of joining their board, coming to understand how much work goes into creating our freedom, and just how much that relates to my own family's Jewish history.

When you read about unaccompanied minors immigrating to our country it's The Young Center team advocating in US government shelters, in our courts, and across our bureaucracy. It was The Young Center, for example, helping dozens of kids who suddenly arrived in Chicago from Afghanistan this summer, and The Young Center who serve over 1,000 each year from our Southern border.

If we've not spoken in a long while, I hope you're doing well, and if we have I hope the same :)

TechCrunch was kind enough to publish my latest:

Last night we learned that Kaplan Test Prep is shutting down Dev Bootcamp. Maybe this means bootcamps are dead? I mean, Kaplan has infinite money and DBC was the pioneer of now nearly billion dollar industry that’s only five years old. Why shut it down?

It wasn’t incompetence, though that’d be easy. DBC, Kaplan, Kaplan Test Prep, and Graham Holdings are all run by career educators with a keen understanding of how to build successful education companies.

Dev Bootcamp failed because it was acquired too early.

Kaplan can’t afford (nor would it have made sense) to take the big risks necessary to innovate in this competitive market. In the three years since the acquisition DBC had to keep to only one web dev program (imagine the finances of a college if it only offered one major) despite clear adjacent opportunities in design, ux, etc. DBC had to stay only with rails while many of its peers moved to full stack JavaScript. DBC couldn’t report student outcomes despite pleas from CIRR and others. DBC couldn’t offer any form of money-back promise or guarantee, alternative funding, or test corporate sales.

In the end, two great forces came together for an amazing opportunity and the result was less innovation.

Startups in education have to walk a very thin line: Take risks to innovate (as all startups do) but don’t ever EVER put students on the line for those risks. So where an Instagram can add a feature and cut it a month later, schools adding a new program must commit to every student who enrolls for the year(s) it takes them to succeed, even if that means it’s a major financial loser for the business. If Kaplan had made the acquisition five or ten years later DBC would have had the chances to work this stuff out on its own dime and oversight.

— Obama, defining Computer Science better than anyone (here).

My father has a PhD in physics, which at the time in the 60s was really just Computer Science before it was called “Computer Science.”

In another 50 years it looks like the same will happen again: “Computer Science” as the thing I learned in college, and spent half my life doing – coding, algorithms, patterns, system design, etc. – will be known as the quaint precursor to what will be much more far-reaching. That thing it seems, specifically, will be exactly what Obama calls it here.

Certainly if you believe (like I do) that 1) not everyone needs to actually write code, 2) coding is just like the “Three R’s” in education, then 1 plus 2 must equal analytical problem solving as he describes it.

Obama continues,

In the new economy computer science isn’t an optional skill, it’s a basic skill.