Jake Schwartz initially missed the on-ramp from college to a career. He describes the years after he graduated from Yale University, in 2000, as a series of often frustrating misadventures — he briefly managed a singer/songwriter, created a nonprofit performing-arts space, applied to law school, and ended up going to business school.
“I spent a lot of my 20s feeling totally behind my peers and very lost,” he says.
Now 36, Mr. Schwartz is working to help others more easily find their way, leading a new kind of professional school for the digital age. It’s called General Assembly, and though many in higher education haven’t heard of it, Silicon Valley types have rushed to invest, with more than $50 million in backing. General Assembly has a growing presence worldwide, with campuses in 13 cities. Some 240,000 students have taken its courses, classes, and workshops, and more than 12,000 have completed full- and part-time courses, the company says.
His initial idea was to create a gathering place for budding entrepreneurs in New York City, a space to get work done and build professional connections. He wanted it to feel like the common room of a college dorm. Soon, though, he realized that participants didn’t want just the vibe of a college; they wanted classes. So the company tried offering a few.
Those early courses, on web development and other tech topics, were so popular that education is now the focus of General Assembly. Full-time courses, most of which deal with coding or digital design, happen in short but concentrated bursts, such as an intensive 10-week course in user-experience design from 9 to 5:30 daily, with several hours of homework each night. Part-time courses are taught nights and weekends. With tuition of about $9,500, full-time courses aren’t cheap, though scholarships are available.
Mr. Schwartz believes his model addresses what he sees as a key problem in American higher education: a disconnect between colleges and employers. Once it was common for workers to stay at one company for decades, and so employers were willing to invest in training, knowing they would reap the rewards over time. Colleges could afford to pay little attention to the needs of the marketplace.
Today employment is far more temporary and fluid, and yet colleges are still functioning as if in the old world, he says. And the cost of college has become so high that he believes it is “unconscionable” for colleges to avoid talking frankly about the return on investment they provide.
So when a reporter stopped by General Assembly’s campus in Washington recently, the 40 or so students in a web-design course were listening attentively to a panel of recent graduates talking about how they landed their jobs. From the first week of class, students — many of whom are trying to switch careers or move up — are encouraged to begin their own job searches. The company provides a dedicated career coach and an in-house social network where students can fill out profiles that potential employers can peruse.
Most of the courses take place in person rather than online. General Assembly’s digital innovation comes in applying the business practices of a modern technology company to education. For instance, to continually change the curriculum, the company applies the business-development philosophy called Agile, a process used by many software companies to encourage collaborative input and rapid upgrades.
Not everyone thinks the upstart professional school is so novel. Gardner Campbell, vice provost for learning innovation and student success at Virginia Commonwealth University, says that the best teachers have always used an Agile-like approach in their classrooms, even if they didn’t call it that.
“For years I’ve had a label on my syllabus that says ‘Beta,’ " he says. And traditional colleges do a better job preparing students for the job market by not focusing on what a particular employer or two might be looking for today, he argues. “A place like higher education gives you the richer context for an understanding of how we got here and where we go after this.”
Still, Mr. Campbell acknowledges that colleges can learn from the employment focus of a place like General Assembly. “A lot of higher education for a long time has overlooked the need to balance the deliberative with the responsive,” he says. “We’ve probably erred on the side of deliberative and need to be more responsive.”
Mr. Schwartz, who grew up in Oregon, was no star student. “I was probably 50th in my high-school class,” he says. He focused his energy on theater, starring in productions of Godspell and Pirates of Penzance.
Few kids he knew got into an Ivy League college, so when he landed at Yale (he was good at standardized tests, he says), he thought he was set for life. “Because that diploma was in Latin, I figured it was like a Harry Potter spell: It will open doors for you,” he says with a laugh.
When that didn’t happen after graduation, he eventually went to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where, he says, he found his peers equally unguided in their careers and “just needing to get this thing on their résumé in order to get to the next level.”
What most shaped his next moves was the extracurricular work he did for Wharton’s Small Business Development Center, serving as a consultant for small companies. “That to me was probably the most formative thing — understanding the emotional journey that these entrepreneurs were on and having empathy for that.” It also made him realize how many skills business leaders needed that business schools just don’t teach.
Though computer coding is the focus today, Mr. Schwartz has big ambitions to take his education model to a broader range of disciplines.
“If it stops at coding, then it’s not that big of a deal,” he says. But General Assembly’s approach could work in almost any sector of the economy, he argues. “I think we can be the most important education company of the 21st century, solely by focusing on education-to-employment.”
Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads a team exploring new story formats. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.
Correction (4/21/2015, 11:45 a.m.): This article originally misquoted Mr. Schwartz in the last paragraph. He referred to the 21st century, not the 20th century. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
