WeWork has bought Flatiron School
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
[1] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-announces-37...
Our accreditating agency insists that that faculty members have got a degree (actually 18 credit hours at graduate level) in the subject they teach. If you are a foreigner it's a pain in the arse, because you need to produce an equivalency evaluation, even more so when your degree wasn't modular.
It causes complications when you teach an allied subject (say your degree certificate says you are a physicist and teach physical chemistry in the chemistry department) but it's easy to see why the accreditator insists: there was a time when there were too many unqualified people teaching.
The real trouble occurs when the institution mistakes certification for qualification, but that's a different story.
If a school won't comply to licensing requirements they government will levy a fine. If a school fails accreditation students will run away, they rightly think that employers won't take their degree seriously. There also won't be federal student loans.
Sometimes professional bodies approve degrees. There are no consequences at all, except that the more capable students stay away from unrecognized degree programs. At my department they are actually moving away from adjuncts because the professional body requires that courses be taught by full-time lecturers or professors. Leadership has decided that the extra expenses for full-time faculty members with benefits are justified by the improved quality of students.
Five weeks is not enough prep for most teachers. I know many awesome teachers for whom it worked out very well. For me, it didn't. But Teach For America is extremely selective in trying to identify people who will be successful with minimal training. That's what it takes to roughly match the performance of traditionally trained teachers. I don't think we need lower barriers to entry, especially without a similar level of accountability.
When the former students are justly compensated for their dashed hopes and tarnished reputations† -- that I'd consider to be "probably a good move all around."
† "Ah, I see you went to the Flatiron School - heard about all the crazy shit that went down there. Which we won't hold against you. But please understand that you'll have to go through 3x as many Dance Monkey sessions as most of the other candidates, just so we can be doubly sure we aren't taking on any damaged good, you see. Oh you've never played Dance Monkey? It's easy, just come to this whiteboard here. Yeah that's right, the one with the squeaky markers, behind the busted swivel-chair..."
The way we define success. The ways we measure knowledge and success in students. The entire system from education on upward needs a good long looking at. Under our current way of doing things (I can only speak for the US) we've realized that throwing money at a problem is not the only solution but so long as delivering "results" is the metric by which grants and money is given to school districts we will always run into people stopping at nothing to meet the qualifications for such endowments.
However, I think this fine is somewhat bullshit. Flatiron did release all of the relevant job figures in an accurate way, even if the marketing headline was, indeed, misleading.
What is the benefit for students of the school being licensed? What does that process bring to the table? I'm sure justifies the existence of some bureaucrats, but it's my understanding that truly terrible GI Bill scam schools are licensed.
I have friends who went to a T3 law school in the Midwest. The total cost of attendance is estimated at $62,500. The bar passage rate is around 74% (#157 nationally). On the marketing site reporting their stats, they tell prospective students that "nearly 75% [of] class of 2016 students [are] employed, pursuing further education, or not seeking employment", but when you actually dig into their ABA disclosure numbers (tucked away on a subsite, clearly obscured), you can see that only 73 of 127 grads are employed in full time, long term positions that require a JD. Since the reason most people go to law school is to get into those kinds of positions, it is more accurate to describe the employment rate as "around 54%". And from knowing some of the people graduating, I can tell you that the salary at those positions isn't great. Average starting salaries hover in the $50-55k range (self-reported, so...with a huge caveat). Given a price of $187,500, that level of bar passage, employment rate, and salary is criminal.
That's a real scam, and it's replicated all over the country in hundreds of terrible law schools, and most of them have the imprimatur of a legitimate educational enterprise via their associated universities and the tacit or explicit support of large chunks of society. And it's only now, after two decades of the problem getting worse and worse, that states are starting to crack down on the worst offenders (while the ordinary every-day criminals, like the school in the previous paragraph, are allowed to go unchecked). I would appreciate if the scrutiny being applied to bootcamps (which I think is necessary and important) was applied equally to other potentially-scammy educational enterprises, no matter how long-running the con is.
It’s truly a horrifying scam at the lower ends, and eventually something will give.
That being said, NY AG is a political hack. He is not doing that well so he needs to get some wins he can flaunt and going after bootcamps is much easier than doing after finance companies or real estate schemes.
If AG supported the real change, he would have used the effectively an unlimited legal muscle his office has to go after the "in the wrong" real estate tycoons.
But in this topic in NYC and in the US in general, there is a real lack of effective, job-getting education, as you of course already know. And then these for-profit ed institutions claim to be solving this problem. I'm not sure oversight can be the way forward here. There is just too much political interdependency here. Perhaps the way forward is for people to speak out about their experience with bold honesty. This is difficult for students to do at these schools, and therein lies the dilemma, because they don't want devalue this $$$ education before it even helps them. What many realize later is that this idea of "culture fit" in every sense of the word will bar many of them for the field. This is why people need to start speaking out about diversity in tech. Well, it has started, but we need a deluge of truth here. We need real reporting on this false idea of a skills gap that isn't real if it doesn't admit members of certain groups unless they are the next Wozniak on crack.
TBH, a vast majority of our students find their employment with companies outside of the co-working space. It's value to our students and school has had more to do with offering a collaborative and exciting environment to the students as well as affording our school more flexibility regarding classroom spaces/sizes and basically allowing us to keep costs down versus building out our own space. The service layer of a co-working building (cleaning, kitchen, IT, and so on) are invaluable for smaller organizations like ours.
It will be interesting to see if WeWork uses this as an added service for it's members - in which case, it will need to be very flexible in it's curriculum to match it's course to the needs of members across a huge number of facilities. Or, if it keep more of the Flatiron approach and attracts students outside of WeWork - and how that works with things like fees, parking costs, membership, and if they meet member hiring needs.
- They all had high powered professional careers before deciding to attend Flatiron. In a sense, the deck is already stacked in favor of these kinds of people succeeding, because they are generally successful in the things they pursue.
- The project phase of the boot camp is set up to show off skills to potential hiring managers. I have attended these and have been impressed by the big picture view of the grads. They understood the project, the tech stack involved, the product level objectives, etc. Again, this is partly because of the high quality students going through, but I found that many of them had a very mature outlook on their projects.
- The founders and core team at the Flatiron School are all very passionate about teaching and creating a system that embraces well rounded learning and not just whatever hot buzzword will get someone an interview. In working with Flatiron you get the impression that unlike most boot camps it will still be there in a few decades.
For potential coding bootcamp, it makes so much more sense.
Pay $1500/month for some classes but still have to find distraction free space to practice (for a lot of people, not easy to find).
Or pay $450/month and get 24/7 access to an office space and the may be pay extra $100/month for a specific coding class? Totally doable.
Just having 24/7 access to a real office will be big boost to anyone learning to code.
As I was sitting there typing away, it dawned on me that the place reminded of a college library, but better with coffee/snack being allowed.
I can't think of a better place to learn how to code than a coworking place. With so much energy of people working away, you will be energized to work/learn and not waste time youtubing. And you have other coders you can ask for help. Wasn't that the promise of bootcamp anyways? Keeping out the distractions?
Hopefully WeWork won't try to keep the old Flat Iron School way of charging $1500/month training. Instead they should grant anyone who uses WeWork facility the added bonus of (free or with a minor fee) attending Flat Iron School coding classes.
Maybe ask a locally based dev to offer service as a tutor to Flat Iron School attendees in return for reduced/free private office space. Students can come into the enclosed office hour during set hours. I can see even some devs volunteering for this as a way to network with future hires.
Asking someone to pay the $1500/mon for coding training while still having to find a place to study (starbucks sucks for this purpose) is not feasible. But asking someone to pay $450 a month for a dedicated desk (with 24/7 access) and grant the option of attending a bootcamp with a little bit extra fee? I think that's a very good option. Try the service for 1-2 months, and if not working you can quit. Without being burdened with big debt. And you have experienced devs and other students in the office locally that you can network with.
There's a broader question of whether the industry is consolidating after the high profile closures this year. Can and should bootcamps survive long term as independent entities? Is the influence of VC money forcing bootcamps to have bigger ambitions than they "naturally" should have (vis a vis other trade schools which are typically small and local?)