It is that time again, Spring. The “decision day” for millions of soon-to-be high school graduates all over the country who are making the decision of where they are going study for an even higher education. They fret about where they are going to go, they throw down deposits for their spot and make this life-changing decision for the college of their choice. But for what? As the debate grows over the value of a four-year degree, so do my hesitations about this whole system.

Is this true? Is the value of a four-year degree declining? A recent study by education technology company Greenwood Hall says that more than half of college graduates say new grads will see a lower return on their educational investment. In easier terms, past college grads are saying that today’s college grads aren’t getting enough bang for their buck.

Is this assumption from past college graduates real?

After looking into the matter more, the outlook for college seniors and graduate students preparing to accept diplomas this spring is actually not so good. The Labor Department reported recently that the unemployment rate for Americans in their 20s who received a four-year or advanced degree last year rose to 12.4 percent from 10.9 percent in 2013.

Is this lower placement rate the reason why recent graduates are saying college has a now lower return on investment? Why did that unemployment rate increase? Why are companies not hiring more?I talk to employers every day in my current line of work and not a day goes by without hearing “Tyler, I am having the hardest time filling important positions.” Which is then followed up by the routine “current graduates skill levels are simply dissatisfactory.”

I talk to employers every day in my current line of work and not a day goes by without hearing “Tyler, I am having the hardest time filling important positions.” Which is then followed up by the routine “current graduates skill levels are simply dissatisfactory.”

Is this the “skills gap” we hear about? Or is it simply companies whining?

Skills are sometimes hard to measure and to manage. Nowadays new technologies pop up as frequently as bunnies make babies. These technologies require specific new skills that schools don’t teach and that employers don’t supply. Tech has radically changed over the last couple of decades and probably even in the time that you have read the beginning of this blog post. Employers have had persistent difficulty finding workers who can make the most of these new technologies.

That is because in many cases these technologies aren’t being taught.

Consider, for example, CS degrees (the industry I am in). Over the last few decades, we have experienced a massive change in the CS degree. With the Internet, demand has grown substantially for qualified web developers. Then came smartphones and demand grew for even more developers. I can’t remember the exact figure, but the US Bureau for Labor Statistics says that by 2018 there will be 3x as many software engineering jobs than there are qualified workers to fill them.

Software developers have to keep up with new technologies and new standards that are always changing rapidly. A few years ago they needed to know Pascal and Pearl; now they need to know HTML5 & Javascript instead. New specialties have now emerged such as iOS and android specialists and many new kinds of information architects.

You are probably saying to yourself “well, the 4 year CS degree teaches all of that, right?” No, wrong. Computer Science schools have had difficulty keeping up. Because technologies and the market move so rapidly much of what CS schools are teaching becomes obsolete quickly and most are left with outdated older technologies.

Because these accredited institutions are, well, accredited, they have to get their curriculum validated & approved by their governing superiors. Universities have to jump through various hoops and red tape to finally get updated curriculum taught in their classrooms. This process is lengthy and from talking to current CS professors it can take up to 5 years to complete. In that time frame, whatever technology the school was trying to approve is already outdated.

Because of this, CS majors have to learn on the job or on their own. They do this either during their program or shortly after and makes graduates unmarketable. Learning on their own takes time and is very difficult. Learning on the job is why experience matters! But employers can’t easily evaluate prospective new hires just based on years of experience. Not every developer can learn well on the job and often what they learn might be specific to their particular employer and not easily transferable to the next.

This is the “skills gap” that exists between what universities and colleges teach and what modern day employers actually need. And when there is a “gap” in the marketplace, there is an opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Enter, “learning accelerators” and modern education. Self-taught entrepreneurs with the skill sets needed to bridge the “gap” are starting schools across the country to teach modern curriculums. These skill specific schools are delivering these curriculums and know-how in intense, condensed training sessions. These entrepreneurs have identified the problem explained in the CS degree example and are offering up to date curriculums which cut out the fluff of a typical 4-year degree. These educations are taught by people who already have the skills in an accelerated format. Typical “learning accelerators” (aka boot camps) are anywhere from 8-16 weeks long making them much more efficient than the previous learning methods. These skill specific accelerated schools have grown in popularity over the last 2-3 years simply because they are working. They serve their purpose; turning aspiring skill seekers into actual doers.

This new form of education has captured the attention of policymakers and employers alike. The schools delivering these immersive, in-person courses that train students in high-demand skills such as web development, mobile technology, data science and design are on the rise.

In 2012 was the first we saw of these high-tech accelerated education schools. Since then they have carved out their own new educational industry which equates to about $100 million in tuition.

How do I know they are successful and serving their purpose? Because I started one of these skill specific schools called DevMountain.

I work behind the scenes and know first hand that schools like mine have exceptional job placement outcomes. Employers are starting to care less of where their employees gain their skill set and are more concerned if said employees can simply perform. Schools like DevMountain offer a way to fill the skills gaps and promote employment and economic growth.

Is the 4-year degree obsolete? Personally, I think it depends on what field you are asking about. While 72 percent of educational institutions believe recent graduates are ready for work, only 42 percent of employers agree, according to a McKinsey study.

As it turns out, advances in “learning accelerators” may be the best news yet to match emerging members of the workforce with companies struggling to fill jobs. Skill specific boot camps and schools may be the answer to closing those percentages mentions above and bridging the “skills gap.”

Astro Teller told a full auditorium at the Austin Convention Center, during SXSW, that the last 5 years of Google[x] has taught him to fail and fail at the beginning. He admitted that it is hard. That the longer you work on a project, the less you want to know the world’s reaction to it. He continued to tell the crowd how a number of Google[x] projects have experienced a series of “bumps and scrapes.”

What is a Google Moonshot? They are projects that solve a huge problem, have a radical solution, and involve breakthrough technology. Moonshots must produce a massive value to make things better, not only by 10% or 20% increments, but by 10X.

Teller continued to tell us about past, current, and future projects:

Project Loon

• Moonshot : Balloon-powered internet for everyone. Astro said 4 billion people in this world are not connected digitally. Project Loon helps them to be connected.
• How : A network of balloons to act as cellular towers in the sky
• The Failure : These balloons needed to be so high that they couldn’t be tied down. The team was essentially making a cell tower that needed to be 1% of the standard weight, produce more power, and to function in 90 degrees below zero. Finally after creating a device, the balloons that were used to keep the device high above the earth started to leak and eventually burst. When their balloons failed, they had to fetch it (sailing in the pacific, scavenging the Arctic).
• Lesson Learned : Turns out it was the socks that the techs were wearing when they were manufacturing them. They found the issue, tackled it, and now the balloons last for 6 months at a time.

Project Driverless Car

• Moonshot : We spend millions of hours driving. Those hours are wasted. The goal is to make a car drive safer than a human.
• How : Through artificial intelligence that learns on the fly through it’s surroundings. Astro told the audience about an incident that happened 4 or 5 months ago. Google’s driverless car was driving on yet another test run in the suburbs of California. While driving on the road the car “saw” in front of it a women in an electric wheel chair with a broom. She was reaching into the middle of the road trying to chase a duck to shoo it off the road. The car came to a stop, waited til the woman was out of the road, then continued on it’s way. There is no way for the Driverless Car team to sit in a conference room and say “we need to watch out for women in wheel chairs, in the middle of roads, trying to shoo ducks”. Thats why there is AI. Now that specific Driverless Car computer knows what that specific incident looks like. Astro continued to say that they show the computer this moment and 10,000 other similar moments, and it learns! The more bumps and scrapes in the project the better. It is not about not getting them, its about extracting the value from them.
• The Failure : When the product was starting to become more and more developed the team started to work with safety drivers. These safety drivers were assigned to ride with cars during the test runs. The safety drivers were there to make sure the car was driving properly and to help in emergency situations. The Google[x] team had cameras watching the human’s every move. What the team found was that the humans trusted the car more and more over time and started doing stupid stuff during the testing. The humans would try to take over in weird moments, or not pay attention at all. The safety drivers, in the end, made the cars drive worse. They assumed humans were a good back up system to the driverless car.
• Lesson Learned : The Driverless Car team made a car with no steering wheel, brakes, accelerator, or other parts so the humans riding in them wouldn’t be tempted to “take over” the ride. Astro said that regulations did not require cars to have a steering wheel so they cut it out. Oddly enough it was required to have rear view mirrors, so they kept those on.

Project Google Glass

• Moonshot : Connecting the offline and online worlds.
• How : Through a smaller and slimmer head-mounted and hands-free display design.
• The Failure : They made one great decision on google glass, in that they did the glass explorer program. They made a bad decision because they allowed the explorer program to get to big for it’s own good. “We allowed and somewhat encouraged too much exposure to the program….We did things to encourage people to think that [Glass] was a finished product,” Astro said.
• Lesson Learned : The Glass explorer program led them to learn a lot on the tech front. Including battery issues and improvements. It also led them to social discoveries and how social norms could be built. But Google learned that there is a fine line between rushing into production and perfecting a product.

Project Genie

• Moonshot : Help the field of construction and architecture. It would design and architect buildings. It was a building genie.
• How : The invention is a cloud based collaboration software with “planning applications to help architects and engineers in the design process, especially for skyscrapers and large buildings. The platform includes planning tools of expert architects and engineers and advance analytics and simulation tools.”
• It is now called Flux, a stand alone business. It is the only project that is its stand alone business.
• Flux automatically answers zoning questions, and correct building codes for a specific area.

Project Wing

• Delivery of things via self flying vehicles
• Goal : Why are we sending 2-3 pound packages in 3000 pound vehicles across towns in traffic
• First road block, could they possibly use someone else vehicle so they didn’t have to build a vehicle? No. There wasn’t anything that fit what they were looking for, so they had to build one. It had to be a vertical take off vehicle because they couldn’t have run ways when out on delivery.
• They built one. They call them tail sitters. It is a hover able and wing engine vehicle. They are perfect for flight, but they are harder to control.
• After 8 months, 50% of the team knew it was a failure. Then after a year and a half 80% of the team knew it was a failure. The lesson they learned, admit when something is not working, while also trying to get out to the world as fast as possible.
• Sergey Brin saw the stall in development and said “You have 5 months….go.”
• They finally got out to the real world to a select group in australia. They learned alot and because of Sergey’s deadline they have a new and improved vehicle.

Project Makani // Failing to Fail

• An energy source
• Goal : Harvest the power of the wind at a fraction of the cost of normal wind turbines.
• They discovered that the higher they got the higher the wind speed and the more consistent the speeds. There is an enormous advantage to going up when harvesting wind for power.
• A normal wind turbine is about 100 meters and 300/400 tons. They are an incredible amount of money.
• How : Next month they have a turbine that will fly, and once it is released the length of the tie down (80ft), the wind turns it’s 8 propellors. The kite like contraption is the most efficient wind energy producer.
• Larry page said, “make sure you crash at least 5 versions of the vehicles.” So the team picked the windiest place in America to test the product. But they failed to fail. They never crashed it.

From writing code to maintaing clients of every size, the heart of everything Google is found at their global headquarters, Mountain View. I am sure you have all seen their campus from various pictures and blog posts across the web. It truly is where they dream up and design products that are changing the ways people find information, do business, communicate and learn. They call it the Googleplex. Here is a first hand look.

This globe shows the number of Google searches in real-time and where they are coming from and in what volume (brighter light).

Google employees can bring their laundry to work and get it done.

Bicycles are a big part of the Google culture.

This is an employee bowling alley. Doesn’t every company have one of these?

There is no reason to leave work. They have everything, including a chiropractor. 

A Google workspace – lots of cubicles in open space.

A Google micro-kitchen. These are everywhere. Average employee gains 15 pounds in the first 3 months.

Every building, about 50 of them, has a lot of maps . They are needed, or you get lost.

Google’s driverless car.

You know those Japanese heated seat toilets that have a sophisticated bidet system? Yes, Google has those too and in most restrooms.

Need a haircut? Google has you covered.

Need computer accessories, help with your devices, anything tech? Well, there’s a TechStop in about every building.

Served a boat of sushi at one of the Google restaurants.

One of 50 restaurants on the main campus. Food is free to all Google employees.

This is a pod for resting. You entered an enclosed environment and get a power nap.