First Red Hat Academy for High School 338
FrankBama writes "As a follow-up to the story of a few days ago, Red Hat has started a program in my old hometown. The story's at the News & Record. I love this part '...this training normally would cost more than $10,000. But Weaver students can get Red Hat certification free -- and use it get a job paying more than $30,000 a year right out of high school.'"
At my high school (Score:5, Interesting)
Good on many fronts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thats too young! (Score:4, Interesting)
So instead of coming out of high school and starting work at 30k, these kids are going to goto college and pay $10k+/yr for 4 years. They are going to be able to actually afford $3000 of that. So after college they have $30k in debt.
Now. Instead of going to school they start working at 30k. They have no debts. They have a car, a job, and are gaining experience faster than any college intern for 2 months during two summers.
I went to school for 4.5 years. I had nearly a full scholarship for athletics. I still have quite a bit to pay off. I have a job that doesn't pay all that great, I am worried about losing my job, I already lost wage increases. I had no experience, I have little money, and I am just as scared as everyone else.
How is this a bad thing? Get the money first and go back to school later. That's my opinion.
Re:Thats too young! (Score:2, Interesting)
How is this a bad thing? Get the money first and go back to school later. That's my opinion.
I'll second that! I'm taking classes for my B.S. now, since I've decided that my Associate Degree doesn't really satisfy me. I'm amazed and pleased with the changes in my "study ethic" after being in the workforce for six (6) years. I find that I'm applying myself a lot more effectively, both because I've gained maturity in my organizational and time management skills, and because now it's MY money that's financing my education (though it was my money the first time, too... *sigh*).
I'm also a firm believer that the money you earn early in life is the money that's worth most to you. I'm glad I've spent the last six (6) years investing in my house and in my retirement-- that's years of compounding interest and appreciation of value that I'd have never had if I didn't start working young.
Re:Thats too young! (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see this working very well when combined with a good local after school internship program. It can allow high school students to find a career that they enjoy earn enough money in HS and later to put themselves through school. Yes this is a tough way to do things but I'll teel you this I'll hire a hot teenage geek that loves to do this over some college kid that isn't sure what they want to do with there life.
BTW dont tell me kids dont know what to do go back a few hundred years and people had families by age 18 and a career this is just our society playing one up on itself every generation.
Good Broad Experience (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft and Apple experience, why not
introduce a few of the next generation programmers
to what will be one of the competing desktops.
Hopefully an electronic ethics course comes
along with it all these computer classes
generally speaking.
Re:At my high school (Score:4, Interesting)
#1 - CCNA is worthless to a high school student (at least a sophomore) I reciveved my cert in february, got a job in march, and then after my cert expired 2 years later, i had no real desire to do any more cisco out of high shcool.
#2 - people don't realize how difficult it is as a HS student. HS was cake, but HS, Junior College, and a job as a CCNA (mostly diagnosing router problems) wasn't the best way for me to spend my time. After my sophomore year, i worked on my associates degree more fully, and let me tell you.... way more worth it. Most kids that are smart enough to get a CCNA, are smart enough to do a few/a lot of community college courses. Do that instead of a cert.... that way getting into a bigger school is cake. (only a 26 on the ACT for me, but it was irrellivent)
Too true, my MCSE did wonders (Score:5, Interesting)
I used that to leverage interviews and offers that made my friends at school jealous, and this was at MIT, they weren't slouches. One interviewer freshman year asked if I was graduating in the spring, and was quite disappointed when I explained that I was a freshman looking for an internship (then she saw the education line on my resume).
I pimped the MCSE and Citrix CCA (easy to pick up after working in Citrix's tech support department for 3 months) to get great jobs through the dot-com era. It was nice that when my friends were scrounging for money to buy shitty beer, the girls were impressed with my fully stocked liquor cabinet of premium stuff.
I turn 24 in a few weeks, run my own business, getting married this summer, and generally have my life together. The last of the credit card debts from starting a business are getting repaid, and things are going well. Take away the MCSE, and instead of getting good jobs as internships, I'm UROPing (undergrad research, most of which is just bitch work for $8/hr), and just getting my act together in the corporate world.
I dealt with clients, managed a team, and generally acquired a lot of experience while in school. Didn't cost me my "youth" either, I managed to be social chair of my fraternity among other experiences. Getting job skills in school is critical.
Hell, if I had stayed with Citrix like my HS drop-out friend that got me the job did, I'd also have a house and car from cashing in my stock options.
Skills are good, learn them. They don't replace a liberal arts education for personal growth and knowledge, but they can get you an opportunity to get rewarding summer jobs, instead of menial ones. Being a broke college student sucks, I was happier making $35/hr part time as a Citrix/MS geek than $8/hr cleaning test tubes in a lab.
Alex
Re:At my high school (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, this is exactly what I've been doing since last year. In addition to the Cisco CCNA course offered at my high school, a teacher picked a few students out of the C++ class, including myself, to learn PHP and MySQL. In fact, last year we entered the Thinkquest [thinkquest.org] USA contest, and actually took first place with this [thinkquest.org] website. So, to answer your question, yes they are teaching PHP and MySQL.
Re:Thats too young! (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course I havent worked in a corporate environment, and I dont particularly want to. I have dealt with beurocracy, I have dealt with stupid budget policys (go over budget, get more to spend next year, keep to your budget, get less), 3 day waits to get a cheque (check) signed, etc.
Half my CV is extra-curricular activities over the last 2 years. When I think now how boring my life would be had I dropped out and worked in a small buisness keeping windows from spontaneously rebooting.
A friend of mine didnt apply for uni to start with - went to work for an "e-" firm. Got a ton of paper certificates, then tried to get into uni. Didnt try hard, got on a 5 year degree course (not 3 years like most UK ones). He's got 3 years of uni left now, and will have just as many debts as me, if not more, when he graduates - he lives the $30,000+ a year lifestyle on a $5,000 loan cheque). I could have walked arround the world when he graduates!
Too young? (Score:4, Interesting)
Getting certification does not mean that one can need not go to college. However, gaining skills and then applying them, typically in a job-like setting, offers a huge set of advantages.
Internship opportunities allow you to actually _use_ these skills and do something productive with your time. Imagine if all the "14 year-old script kiddies" could put their hacking skills to use on something, whether it be Cisco routers or adding features to samba (just to name a random project). OSS gives great amounts of opportunities for students to apply their technology skills in a productive way, but this isn't enough.
Schools need to help students learn these skills and give them opportunities to use them. Would I have survived 8th grade had I not been running the lighting and sound for nearly all school productions and maintaining the school website? Probably not. Besides, it's clear that it is "fun" to crack into various systems, but what if that could be done in a productive way too? That's just what I did last week when I (at the request of the technology department) discovered that my school's security model resembles swiss cheese (I'm still trying to get them away from Windows...
Furthermore, there are some situations where just working on random hacking projects won't do. This is where an internship comes in handy: being able to apply your skills in some sort of useful way while learning. Here, there are no real expectations that you have to know how to do this or that, just lots of abilities to learn new things and try them out.
If anything, schools need to do more to encourage students to get involved in the field. Have students be working on something productive, whether it is building cgi scripts for the school website to working as an intern for the summer (or even for a two-week break), and you will see a group of students that are more prepared to face the world and have a thirst to learn more: exactly what is provided by a college education. You may even see a few less students smiling smugly when you discover that the school website was cracked yet again.
Re:Just what we need... (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of the best and brightest I.T. people I've ever had the pleasure of working with didn't possess college degrees.
By contrast, I'd be a very rich man by now if I had a dollar for every college-degreed "professional" I've seen who can't write a complete sentence to save his/her life.
If anything, the "chips on the shoulders" of the H.S. diploma only folks were placed there by the jealous majority of college-degreed folks who have lesser skills despite the formal education.
Social skills, writing skills, exposure to a broad range of topics -- sure, all are valuable and important. Does one need to attend college (or even finish college with a 4 year degree) to have increased levels of any of these? Not that I know of! These skills are developed simply by going through life, trying to be the best person you can be. That means taking a little initiative to learn new things on your own. Most self-taught I.T. people are happy to do this.
This is good for linux and here's why (Score:1, Interesting)
Everything I learned about OSS is self-taught. We learn Oracle, I go out and learn MySQL too. I spend hours tinkering with Linux, practicing for the real world. I agree that theories should prevail; but when, not if, this is successful at training IT workers, we will see Universities adopt Linux outside of the LUG environment and into the classrooms.
Tech schools are pioneering a lot of technology and many businesses are taking advantage of this. I currently look at my fellow students and can see why so many Universities are struggling to have fresh cpsc grads get jobs. When interning, I have worked with programmers who have never changed out their own RAM; notice, this will change. IMHO community college students are great for both economical and practical real-world purposes. It is sad to say that we are Intel and they are AMD. The only good thing about being Intel is upper management likes a paper tiger and the ladies love how big my pipeline is.
Re:Nice that it's free for the students... (Score:3, Interesting)
No kidding. I understand the need for teaching practical, specific skills, but only to a point. I mean, I took a programming class in high school (Pascal, whee). I didn't learn much, since I'd learned some of the basics of programming on my whiz-bang Commodore when I was 8. But I know some kids learned something. At least they learned about subroutines and somewhat structured programming.
There's this whole argument about teaching practical skills vs. a rounded liberal-arts education. It's kind of tiresome, but I have to say I lean a bit towards liberal arts. While my job is primarily in system administration, I am involved in some curriculum development. A big problem, I think, is that when a school offers a "practical" class, it is made an elective. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but electives, I think, aren't put under nearly enough scrutiny. Like you said, big deal if a kid knows what config files do what. They should concentrate on how computers work, not how to open files in redhat. Teach kids about binary math and how to subnet before you teach them how to crank up a dhcp client.
Unfortunately, the people who end up teaching these classes are physics teachers who can use word but not wordperfect or whatever. That's not really the teachers' faults, I think. The schools just don't support a more comprehensive program, especially for electives. This is often because the school administrators don't know how to properly support them, I think. They send these teachers off to a week-long training and expect them to teach a bunch of kids who were just tossed into electives because they couldn't hack it in trig.
I teach Cisco classes to teachers, and I've seen a lot of this kind of thing (no, I don't develop curriculum for Cisco). That and CS grads who think Visual Basic rocks all over C. That one always leaves me speechless.
Re:A piece of paper? (Score:1, Interesting)
And trust me, we know the difference.
Re:Great, but kids - please go to college (Score:2, Interesting)
I joined the military and served 8 years.
I would take just about any 22 year old with four years of experience from the military over a 22 year old that just graduated from college. There is alot to say for experience.
Also when I left the military it was for a job at a big bank. They hired me not because of some degree or even a cert but because of the job experience that I had.
Now grant it I was in a unique situation where the bank hired me to go into an "Academy" program where they basically trained a class of people, mostly new college grads, a few military folks, and a couple of retreads from other careers to become technical and business analysts. This was done to see if they could lower the turnover rate.
After 6 months of training I started working in a group coding COBOL, DB2, and the like on the mainframe. In the past 5 years at the bank I have never once felt worried about layoffs.
I guess the moral of my long winded rant is that college is not the end all be all that everyone likes to make it out to be.
Re:Nice that it's free for the students... (Score:2, Interesting)
looked at it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bottom line: too damn expensive for schools.
Seems as though people are over reacting. (Score:2, Interesting)