Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 49

a career. Because when it comes to learning and work, the most
important thing is work itself.
To enroll, students go through a job interview-like process designed to gauge their commitment to the $4,000 course.
Many for-profit colleges will accept virtually anyone who can
sign their name on federal student loan documents. The worst
for-profits simply pass students through, imparting virtually
no useful skills. GA doesn't take federal aid. The first page of its
application says, "In addition to the 9am-5pm class time, you
will spend 10+ hours a week building your portfolio and honing
your skill set outside of class. Do you anticipate any barriers that
would prevent you from devoting this time to the program?"
Kate Tikoian, one of the students taking the user experience (UX) course in the D.C. office this spring, is a D.C. native
who earned a Spanish degree from Emory University in 2002.
Since the recruiters weren't lining up to hire Spanish majors, she
moved back to her hometown and became a self-taught IT person for a couple of small startup companies. That was enough
to earn a living. But keeping the servers running and the email
system from crashing was a technician's work, not a career. Kate
wanted to do something more creative, complicated, and lucrative. That would require skills she couldn't pick up on her own.
In her first week in the course, Kate and a partner student
presented one another with a problem to solve by designing a
mobile app. Kate's partner and her spouse had recently moved
in with her father-in-law, which meant that their household
now had two, sometimes overlapping and redundant, weekly
grocery lists. Kate's solution was to create an app called Already
Got Spinach, a home pantry manager that generated automated
shopping lists based on unavailable food.
Kate conducted "user interviews" with family members to
get more specific information on their shopping habits, created "user flow" analyses that tracked how people would progress
through the application, and sketched out app designs. This led
to "content mapping," a synthesis of the visuals and the user experience, a prototype app on paper, and then usability testing.
The results were then presented to the rest of the class. All of
this was done in the first four days of the course. The rest of the
UX class was built around a series of projects, each taking students in greater depth into skills like researching user preferences, designing friendly, intuitive interfaces, prototyping and testing products, and working with teams and clients.
The UX course was project based because skills are acquired
through practice. While some theory is important, learning to
work does not primarily involve the accumulation of facts and
abstract concepts-unless, as with traditional academic subjects
like history, dealing with facts and abstract concepts is the actual job. Reporters become better reporters by reporting, with the
guidance of an editor. Chefs become better chefs by cooking. If
you want to learn UX design, pick a problem and get started with
an experienced UX designer looking on.
The UX students come to General Assembly every day during the week, where they split their time between attending classes taught by industry experts, working on projects in teams, and
studying on their own. The atmosphere is quiet, informal, and col-

laborative, with a lot of huddling around laptops and sketching
out ideas with markers on whiteboards. Nights and weekends are
spent refining projects and working online. The educational model itself is not particularly dependent on technology. Much of the
learning takes place as students and faculty interact in person.
The course length and intense workload are also no accident. There's a reason the Marine Corps doesn't send fresh recruits straight to the front lines: they need basic training. But
there's also a reason boot camp takes only twelve weeks-not
coincidentally, the length of the longest course at GA and many
of its competitors. Marines don't leave Parris Island with the full
complement of knowledge and skill needed to be the best soldier
they can ever be. They leave with enough knowledge and skill
to make a positive contribution to the organization, and to get
started learning everything else they need on the job.
Ron Lin, chief technology officer and co-founder of the prepaid Visa card company Card.com, says he likes to hire GA graduates because they represent "the convergence of aptitude and
commitment." He knows that the admissions process selects for
students willing to do demanding work. And because the project-focused GA curriculum produces a detailed portfolio of work
that is easily displayed electronically, he can evaluate candidates'
skills and abilities directly. In the end, he said, "whether or not
someone has a college degree is predictive of certain things, but
it's not the primary qualification. I want to know: What do you
know? What have you done? How do you work?"
Lin isn't the only one who thinks this way. According to the
company's self-reported statistics, over 90 percent of students get
a job within three months of graduation. The number of GA graduates increased from 3,000 in 2013 to a projected 8,000 in 2014.
Ron Lin's three questions have become incredibly important for young adults struggling to launch their careers. General
Assembly and companies like it live in the growing chasm between the end of college and the beginning of meaningful work,
a gap that exists because neither colleges nor businesses are willing to give students the training they need.

he legions of new college graduates struggling to find good
jobs in a weak labor market are living in the aftermath of
a historical economic transformation. When modern colleges were created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, the economy was largely composed of agriculture and
manufacturing. The Industrial Revolution created huge firms
and sectors dedicated to mass production. Companies competed by becoming more efficient at making better things for less
money. The nature of work was, within a given field, predictable
and narrowly defined by the processes of production.
But as society grew wealthier-inflation-adjusted GDP
per capita tripled from 1950 to 2010-people starting spending
a greater portion of their newly earned dollars on personalized
services instead of mass-produced goods. Meanwhile, jobs in the
relatively shrinking manufacturing sector were lost to automation or competition from cheaper workers overseas.
Burgeoning sectors of the advanced service economy like
finance, insurance, marketing, education, health care, and softWashington Monthly

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Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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