Women’s coding school Hackbright Academy acquired by Capella Education for $18M | Hacker News Reader

Women’s coding school Hackbright Academy acquired by Capella Education for $18M

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45 pointsrobbiet48055 comments

I volunteered at Hackbright for multiple classes. I supported the mission - more diversity in tech - with my personal time for hours per week. However, after a while, the idea of an army of unpaid "volunteers" to mentor students seemed at-odds with the school's startup growth and profit goals. Their policy on recruiting graduates even seemed to imply that we could owe them money if we hired a student.

I don't regret having helped Hackbright for free. I helped some ambitious students enter the tech world and begin new careers. It just saddens me that many of the shoulders on which this for-profit institution stood were ignored.

This is a huge discussion in the the alumnae community right now. While Hackbright has never been a non-profit, the equation for volunteering felt different when it was an independent startup with a strong mission. Alumnae volunteer hundreds of hours mentoring current and past students, making connections, talking to prospective students, etc. Some of us even help with admissions! I'm very interested to see how this will affect Hackbright's access to that kind of unpaid emotional labor.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

http://www.wired.com/1999/10/volunteers/

a for-profit entity will externalise any cost it can. why? in order to maximise revenue streams, nothing else. recruiting a volunteer workforce was a somewhat clever -- though disreputable -- business strategy on the part of Hackbright, and it appears to have worked really well for the folks who are now cashing out with this Capella deal.

i'm not speaking to the OP in particular but to everyone when i say this: out of respect for yourself and your own career, don't donate free labour to a for-profit entity. just don't do it.

I can't speak for all the folks who volunteer, but I was willing to give my time because I saw the impact that Hackbright had on a lot of lives. It was something I was willing to put time into to support, even though I understand the realities of running a for-profit business. I don't think Hackbright could have had those impacts without the amazing support of its volunteers, which is why many folks are a little upset about what they perceive as selling out.

It's not always a bad thing if you go into it with that in mind, but it's definitely a fine balance.

Couldn't you have had the same (or even greater) impact at a non-profit though?

Probably! For many of us alumnae, it was giving back to something that had a direct impact on our lives. Many of us already work with other groups, and/or will shift our efforts to those groups now.

I don't know of any non-profit bootcamps for women/underrepresented genders in the bay area :) The work that Hackbright does takes a lot of one-on-one time and a lot of money, and that's hard for a non-profit/volunteer model to support (I used to run a non-profit and have been a part of many volunteer groups).

There are, however, a ton of neat projects doing great work around adjacent or overlapping issues, and I'm working on a list to help provide alternatives for folks who can't stomach supporting Capella. Feel free to post suggestions :)

Plus the fact it's an inherently transphobic and non-binary-phobic institution due to its promotion and inclusion of only those who identify as female.

Really, it's just a corrupt organization all around.

Felt the same exact way with Dev Bootcamp.

$18M for a 25 person company that raised seems like an acquhire. I wonder how much of the goodwill & volunteers that kept Hackbright going will transfer over to Capella.

Disclaimer: I have a hackbright grad on my team (she's great) and a few friends who've done the program (and are mostly happy).

Google searches for Capella Education are not promising. I hope Hackbright continues to do well.

My HR team sent us an email last week that they are proud to have recruited 'all women internship team' .

Definitely a profitable move to fund women's coding school given chances of graduates getting hired at entry level is higher for women.

"chances of graduates getting hired at entry level is higher for women"

This is highly debatable. I hear a lot of men saying that, and I encourage you to read more about the very real challenges and biases that women face in the tech industry (and the rest of life, too, not just jobs). Even if there's pressure now to hire more diverse teams, it doesn't make up for the lifetime of sexism, or the faulty pattern matching of the hiring team.

http://www.cnet.com/news/google-cfo-hiring-women-is-good-for...

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/24/tech/innovation/women-at-i-o

http://www.cio.com/article/2971293/apple-intel-cite-gains-in...

One positive about this: Capella is an accredited school, meaning that there may be a way to allow Hackbright students to take out government backed student loans for the program, or even get Pell grants. Many students currently rely on outside loans, and would benefit from lower interest rates and grants.

The cynics among us will of course acknowledge that that makes it much easier for Capella/Hackbright to make more money.

This may be an incorrect association, but Capella is lumped into the same grouping in my mind with Kaplan, DeVry, University of Phoenix - maybe not total degree mills, but the kind of places that have late-night commercials on Adult Swim...

So I'm not sure it's a real credibility boost.

It's definitely a credibility hit, and those are the kinds of companies I associate with Capella, too. I believe Hackbright turned down an offer from Kaplan, which went on to buy DevBootcamp. Despite their predatory practices, however, the government has given them a seal of approval on which Hackbright can now hitch a ride.

That makes Hackbright more accessible to folks without the resources to pay 15k+ and spend at least 3 months without a job in one of the most expensive regions in the US. That's huge, because of Hackbright's commitment to taking in students with a variety of backgrounds, races, and economic statuses (no word on how that will be affected by a corporate buy-out).

Student loans are of course their own kind of mess; there's income-based repayment, less stigma, and even forgiveness, but it's also harder to get out of through things like bankruptcy.

"The cynics among us will of course acknowledge that that makes it much easier for Capella/Hackbright to make more money."

Especially with people like you spamming for them.

So how does one estimate valuations for a coding school anyway?

Their funding doesn't seem to be listed on CrunchBase, but $18M is substantial, more than an acquihire, which suggests there's something I'm missing.

If it had been a men's coding school, it would've been acquired for $25M.

Edit: Apologies, couldn't resist.

Yes, you could resist, you just chose not to. You're still free to delete the comment.

Perhaps because the market is saturated with coding schools that are chock-full of men, and thus there is no demand for a men's coding school.

I believe that my joke (perhaps in poor taste) isn't being taken as I intended. I'm a Python programmer, and my favorite feature of Python is the community. https://www.python.org/community/diversity/ I was only trying to make light of an otherwise painful reality.

There's a need for women's coding schools, and their alums will only make our field better. Congratulations to Hackbright Academy on an acquisition well deserved.

It seems quite obvious that being a women-only school was an asset for them.

Reposted to avoid trolls:

Do they accept transwomen?

How about people who don't identify as either gender?

Do they set themselves up as arbiters of who qualifies as a woman, and, if so, what criteria do they use?

The next time someone wonders why people think HackerNews is a crap place to be a woman, I'm pointing them to this thread.

One bad joke and one flagged comment. Are you kidding? This is the most well behaved thread of all time for a diversity related post.

I see more crap than just those two comments, and the ratio of comments actually related to the article is seriously low (I realize I'm not helping on that front). I do think this is a pretty good example because there's a mix of subtle sexism and silly trolling, all because the article happens to relate to women. It's not even a post about diversity! It's about an acquisition! Honestly though, I came back here to delete that comment, because it's not a big deal and I didn't think most people would get it. I'm leaving it the way it is because in your reply you countered with the fact that this is a very well behaved post considering the topic, and frankly, that's depressing.

I don't think it's silly trolling. It's subtle and overt sexism. It is a big deal. It shows a few people can derail productive discussion and flag posts off of the frontpage.

I think that we're arguing the same point...?

I'm not arguing. I literally paraphrased what you wrote in agreement.

Don't forget the transphobia and non-binary-phobia inherent in the fact this is a company exclusively for females, and how that transphobia and non-binary-phobia is being continued here in the form of comments mentioning it being downvoted and hidden by the moderation staff.

Flagged for being off-topic and insulting.

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