Harvard Extension's new online Academic Gap Year and undergrad certificates

[DIGI-212]

Harvard Extension School has launched a new Academic Gap Year program with 4 undergrad certificates in coding, website development, professional communications, and social justice. Minimum age is 15 for the undergraduate certificates.

HSE also announced that all courses for fall, January, and spring will be offered online. They will offer "on campus" credit for enrolled HSE degree candidates with the live webinar classes. This is a great opportunity for anyone who was looking at an HSE degree but could not commit to the on-campus requirements.

INFO:
https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academ...1592594602

FAQ:
https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academ...-year-faqs

[posabsolute]

Would be the perfect time to never go back to this requirement..

[harrypotter]

No change from their normal tuition.. Pretty weird to call this a “gap year” when anyone was allowed to do this (sign up for courses without enrolling) for years.

[freeloader]

I actually find the idea that learning coding or website development as part of a “gap year” to be deeply insulting. A gap year is traditionally a year after completion of secondary (high school) and the beginning of post-secondary (college/university). Gap year is when you go work on a fishing boat, backpack though central and Eastern Europe, or work on the political campaign of a candidate who has more “interns” than people who actually vote for him/her. A gap year is not taking college classes at an institution different from the one from which you will earn your degree. That is called being a non-degree seeking student. I also feel like this is Harvard raising its institutional nose quite high in the air. These “gap year” subjects are likely seen as vocational or trade type studies, not the high-minded intellectualism of the Harvard classroom.  If it’s possible for an institution to pass judgement on disciplines and the people who pursue those disciplines, this is it!

[Stoic]

Coding certificates are generally worthless. You'll learn more about this stuff via a $20 dollar sub to next.tech or something like that and just meeting people in person and coding things up. They also keep raising the prices, so whatever.. I"m not sure why Harvard is so money hungry.  Just know that your Github account is all that matters if you want to get into programming. Just a Harvard Extension certificate by itself will just get you laughed at now in days without any meaningful projects, and even then... with the global workforce opening up and remote work being the future, companies can now hire a 19 year old kid from Pakistan who grew up seeing Javascript code  from age 8. You won't be able to outwork that type of guy in the real world with just a certificate and a few year of coding practice, so it's a spiral out into a rabbit hole at this moment.