n a Boston basement that houses a new kind of vocational training school,
Katy Feng says she’s working harder than she ever did at Dartmouth College.
The 22-year-old graduated last year with a bachelor’s degree in psychology
and studio art that cost more than a quarter-million dollars. She sent out
dozens of résumés looking for a full-time job in graphic design but wound
up working a contract gig for a Boston clothing store. “I thought, they’ll
see Dartmouth, and they’ll hire me,” Feng says. “That’s not really how
it works, I found.” She figures programming is the best way to get the job
she wants. Hence the basement, where she’s paying $11,500 for a three-month
crash course in coding.
Feng sits in the class five days a week from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., tapping on
a laptop and squinting at the syntax of the programming languages
JavaScript and Ruby. Homework swallows her nights and weekends—a big change
from Dartmouth, where after a few hours of class “you could just do
whatever,” Feng says. “This is definitely like, you’re doing it all day
long.”
Feng is among thousands of students, about 70 percent of whom already have
college degrees, flocking to coding boot camps. Hers is run by a company
called General Assembly that promises to transform “thinkers into creators,
” not to mention holders of well-paying jobs. It’s an especially
attractive pitch for humanities and social sciences majors who didn’t learn
the skills they need to compete for the plentiful jobs in the technology
industry.
Katy Feng. Then: Psychology and Studio Art, Dartmouth. Now: Code at General
Assembly
Photographer: Eva O'Leary for Bloomberg Businessweek
Four years ago, General Assembly was among the first of these training
schools; now there are more than 80. About 6,000 students graduated from a
coding boot camp in 2014, triple the previous year, says Course Report, a
website that lets students rate the various courses. The schools took in a
combined $59 million in revenue, or about $9,833 per student, estimates
Course Report co-founder Liz Eggleston.
Code-camp students don’t get a diploma they can hang next to an Ivy League
one, but they come away with projects they can show off in interviews,
typically apps. Six months after finishing, 59 percent report a salary
increase, averaging $23,000 annually, according to SwitchUp, another rating
site. “They do seem to be effective at helping their candidates win entry-
level tech jobs,” says Tyler Willis, a spokesman for tech headhunter Hired.
Jensen Bouzi, Amherst College class of 2014, finished at Dev Bootcamp in
December and by March had a coding job at Avrett Free Ginsberg, a New York
ad agency. “This is the best way to go in terms of getting a foot in the
door,” Bouzi says.
Dev Bootcamp, now owned by Kaplan, the SAT-prep and education company, was
founded in San Francisco by a former Microsoft engineer; it also operates in
New York and Chicago. General Assembly started as a co-working space in New
York’s Flatiron district in 2011 and evolved into boot camps in 13 cities
across the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Hong Kong. The startup has raised $49.
5 million from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Russian e-mail billionaire Yuri
Milner. City No. 14, it says, will be Singapore.
The biggest concentration of schools remains in California, and some,
including Dev and Hack Reactor, have established another source of revenue.
They’ve cut deals with employers such as tech-industry PR firm Cision,
promising an early crack at top graduates in exchange for fees worth 10
percent of each new employee’s first-year salary. Hackbright Academy in San
Francisco, which enrolls only women, is a feeder for Facebook and Pinterest
. The schools tailor programs to industry needs, says Harsh Patel, a former
grade-school math and science teacher who co-founded boot camp MakerSquare.
By contrast, he says, “Colleges are preparing students for things that
employers were hiring for 15 years ago.”
Max Blaushild. Then: Political Communication, Public Advocacy, Miami
University (Ohio), Emerson College. Now: Code at General Assembly.
Photographer: Eva O'Leary for Bloomberg Businessweek
The boot camps don’t guarantee employment to graduates, and some students
struggle to finish. Fifteen stories above Wall Street, students in Dev’s
open-plan office break only for lunch and occasional snacks, which they
store in plastic bins. Alex Homer, who graduated from Tulane University in
2013 with a degree in English, says he found Dev’s pace exhilarating but
fell ill while toiling 14 hours a day on his final project, though he did
finish. Those who can’t keep up can be held back or even kicked out. “I
need time to learn, and this didn’t fit the way I learn best,” says Vivek
Ratkalkar, 26, a Pace University communications graduate who was asked to
leave Dev in March.
In lieu of tuition, App Academy makes students agree to fork over 18 percent
of their first year’s pay. A 12-week boot camp at Hack Reactor in San
Francisco costs $17,780; that’s $1,482 a week, about the same as a week’s
worth of tuition at Harvard. The cost covers an 11-hour, six-day-a-week
program that has led many to jobs at companies such as Facebook and Google,
says Hack Reactor co-founder Shawn Drost.
The boot camps offer a coding curriculum that’s more accessible than those
at many colleges, says Anna Taberski, an alumna of Dev’s New York school
who now codes for Web designer Blenderbox. She graduated in 2012 from the
University of California at Berkeley, which has a top-ranked computer-
science program, but she found the programming classes there forbidding.
Instead of comp sci, she majored in comp lit. “I think it’s clear that
there was something missing at Berkeley,” she says. The university says it
added a more accessible computer science course, the Beauty and Joy of
Computing, in 2010 and is considering an even more basic offering.
Back in the Boston basement, Katy Feng is working on her final project, an
app that helps users personalize their websites with photos and news sources
. Dartmouth says employers highly value its graduates, 90 percent of whom
headed to paying jobs, grad school, or volunteer positions in 2014. Feng
says General Assembly has given her practical training she didn’t get at
Dartmouth. “Your day-to-day job, you’re probably not going to learn that
in college. This is where you learn how to do it.”
The bottom line: Coding boot camps didn’t exist four years ago. Now 80 of
them pull in $59 million a year, mostly from college grads.
