In general, students should be suspicious of results that are only published directly by the school. CIRR does not allow after-the-fact removal of students from their tally. According to Speakman, prospective students should beware of any non-job-seeking rate above 10%, as this is a sign that the school is seeking to remove the students who did poorly. The Course Report's survey similarly showed that 91% of graduates attended a bootcamp primarily to get a programming job.įor this reason, bootcamps that report to CIRR ask students whether they are job-seeking before they enter a program and are not allowed to remove those students from their placement rates once they've graduated. Speakman says nearly all boot-camp students classify themselves as "job-seeking" when they start their programs, because these programs are designed for students looking for a career in tech. Coding Dojo spokesperson, Luke Lappala, told Insider, that students who are unresponsive "are classified as opted out of Career Services due to nonresponsiveness" and this is "explicitly conveyed in our reporting." Flatiron School did not respond to a request for comment. General Assembly spokesperson, Tom Ogletree, told Insider, omitted students chose to "go it on their own" and their 99% placement figure was one piece of data that prospective students seek before enrolling. Typically, these "non-job-seeking" students are designated as such after they've graduated from the program - which is a red flag, according to Sheree Speakman, a former CEO of the Council of Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), a nonprofit that tracks bootcamp performance. Maybe they're not responding because they're ashamed." "Maybe students aren't responding to you because they're angry with you. Some schools omitted as much as 40% of its graduates from its placement rates.Ī Lambda School instructor told Insider, the rate of non-responsiveness at bootcamps is alarming. Looking closely at the aforementioned schools you'll find graduates are routinely omitted from their tally for a number of reasons including being unresponsive to career services or failing to apply to enough jobs in a week.
Placement rates are the most visible estimate a student has for whether their career switch will be successful. In their quest to compete with each other for enrollments, bootcamps have a potential financial interest in overstating their effectiveness, and prospective students should be wise to a few of the tricks the biggest bootcamps employ.Ĭherry-picking data is rife among the largest bootcampsĪccording to Course Report's 2020 survey of bootcamp graduates, students primarily chose schools for the perceived outcomes of alumni, according to Course Report's 2020 survey of bootcamp graduates. However, not all bootcamp reports are equal. Uniquely among postsecondary schools, bootcamps have a cultural history of disclosing important numbers about how many of their graduates get jobs. Last year 35,000 students graduated from these bootcamps.
They cost between $10,000 and $20,000, around 15 percent of an entry-level salary in tech - a price that is well-worth it if the student lands a job. Other schools like Coding Dojo excluded as many as 40% of graduates.Ĭoding bootcamps are private, for-profit schools that typically take adults with some work experience and retrain them as computer programmers. Flatiron School, with over 2000 students, omitted 22% as non job-seeking. With these nonparticipants removed, they could then claim that the remaining 99.2% of their graduates successfully found jobs. In this, they may be correct: General Assembly, for example, dropped more than 30% of its graduates for not "participating" fully with its career services. The school itself countered that any such discrepancies were simply a result of standard practices for bootcamp outcomes reporting. My reporting showed that the school's advertised rates omit a large section of its graduates. According to my reporting, the school's job placement rate for its graduates was around 30% - far lower than the 74% it currently advertises. Last month, I reported on what appears to be exaggerated reports on student outcomes by the coding bootcamp Lambda School.
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