Slashdot Mirror
California Regulator Seeks To Shut Down 'Learn To Code' Bootcamps
cultiv8 writes: "The Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE), a unit in the California Department of Consumer Affairs charged with licensing and regulating postsecondary education in California, is arguing that 'learn to code' bootcamps fall under its jurisdiction and are subject to regulation. In mid-January, BPPE sent cease and desist letters to Hackbright Academy, Hack Reactor, App Academy, Zipfian Academy, and others. Unless they comply, these organizations face imminent closure and a hefty $50,000 fine. A BPPE spokesperson said these organizations have two weeks to start coming into compliance."
Yep. This sounds like California.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
California, possibly the state that receives the biggest benefit from programmers (in the form of jobs and taxes paid) wants to limit teaching programmers because they think they should control these coding bootcamps?
Pull your head out, California before the industry picks up it's ball and goes somewhere else.
then surely there is good reason that this should be regulated.
“Our primary goal is not to collect a fine. It is to drive them to comply with the law,” said Russ Heimerich, a spokesperson for BPPE. Heimerich is confident that these companies would lose in court if they attempt to fight BPPE.
Sounds like a real charmer...
I absolutely detest the word "compliance." For some reason, it seems out of character to be used in what is ostensibly a "free society."
What are the regulations regarding wilderness survival camps? What about rock & roll fantasy camps? Is he going to start going after knitting retreats?
“Our primary goal is not to collect a fine. It is to drive them to comply with the law,” ... Least believable statement i've read today.
BPPE, a unit in the California Department of Consumer Affairs, is arguing that the bootcamps fall under its jurisdiction and are subject to regulation. BPPE is charged with licensing and regulating postsecondary education in California, including academic as well as vocational training programs.
California's laws may be stupid, but clearly they have laws requiring licensing for training programs.
If these places are not offering a recognized credential of completion (such as a degree or certificate recognized by the prevailing accreditation bodies), then they are not an educational institution subject to state regulation. Instead, they fall under Federal Dept. of Ed Work Training facilities.
Federal Law is settled on this, and there are at least 100 cases that I can find that set this precedent.
So, what does compliance involve? That's the first question we should be asking.
If your local libertarian hot dog stand guy rages at you about maybe being shut down because the health department is on his back, instead of saying "fuck guvment", maybe you should figure out if it's something as simple as them having hygiene standards for how he cooks, and some small fee for a license. I mean, maybe there is something unreasonable or crazy, and there are some industries that corrupt government and do rent-seeking in order to limit competition, but these details matter.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Ok, I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you there. Would you care to cite any of these "100 cases" for us laypeople?
Maybe if colleges could teach software development there wouldn't be a need for these code bootcamps.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
The summary makes it sound like these are people in makerspaces getting free skills. The article says that these places are charging tuition $15k - $19k for an intensive (~ few months) training course, presumably with a certificate of completion. The state and the public have a vested interest in ensuring people get their money's worth. The article also states that the bureau doesn't not demand immediate compliance in 2 weeks, but that they show progress towards attaining compliance. Look around you. Experience shows that the free market is not effective at eliminating scammers. Sometimes regulation and auditing is good.
I only checked out http://www.hackbrightacademy.c... but they don't appear to offer any kind of certification. Just 10 weeks of training for women that ends with a "Career Day".
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
No, really: Why?
Where in the Constitution (federal or state) does it enumerate regulating education as a power of government?
There's actually a pretty good reason there are accredation standards in education. People are paying a lot of money. It's hard for someone to know (without actually taking the course) if the course is valuable or worthless. There are plenty of shysters out there who couldn't care less if you learn - they're just out for your money, and provide as little education as they can get away with ('For Profit" online universities are, IMO, more scam than educators).
Whether it's a government or a private body, setting clear expectations on curriculum standards and certifying compliance with them is a highly useful service to keep students from getting victimized. Which means "compliance" with someone else's idea of what a reasonable student needs is not only not anathema, it can be a Very Good Thing.
Being free to dupe people into paying a lot of money for a worthless service isn't exactly in character with a "free society" in any but the most extreme laisse faire ideologies.
You have 15 seconds to comply. You are in direct violation of penal code 113, section 9...
Any financial transaction. This is fairly standard.
If I beat you every day your whole life, it's "fairly standard" but does not make it right.
There's lots of transactions that are not really regulated, especially cash ones...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're pissed off that they can't rip off desperate people looking for jobs teaching information freely available on the internet.
It's kind of sad, really.
Your hot dog stand may SEEM to have been doing just fine, but if you don't give a but to us hot dog stands have a mysterious way of causing terrible accidents to youse owners. So cough it up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sometimes I am annoyed that the word "too" exists. Change the spelling so that the different meaning stands out. Not like context wouldn't play a role there. But in cases like these, I think there aren't enough "o"s in "Too much" or "Too far" or "Too stupid."
What are the regulations regarding wilderness survival camps? What about rock & roll fantasy camps? Is he going to start going after knitting retreats?
Dude, don't steal my idea. In my Rock Stah Academy, students will all sit in my Mom's basement for 8 weeks talking about how they are going to get discovered. Maybe I will teach them how to write a few tunes, or maybe we'll all just sit around and smoke weed. Then I will get them ready to launch their super awesome careers by teaching them how to apply for food stamps and work in fast food jobs. Also, I will send them lots of rejection letters on (simulated) record company letterhead. For this ultimate Rock Stah Academy I will only charge $10000 for the complete course. Hurry now, space is limited in the basement!
Yes, it's Friday...
I do find the luv/hate libertarian thing kinda funny when these things come up. Statist sorts believe that since people are fallible, there needs to be people to regulate people. Libertarians believe that since people can't be trusted to run the lives of other people, then we need to trust individuals instead of groups. Both sorts miss the fact that the basic problem is that we recognize there are people we can't trust. Anyway, as far as regulation goes, I've gotten salmonella twice in my life, both times from large corporate food chains that were regularly inspected by the health department, had food handling standards in place, etc. I've eaten plenty of time at mom and pop greasy spoons and have not gotten sick from them. Likewise, I didn't go to a coding boot camp, but got my degree from an accredited four year college. While most of my professors were good, the guy teaching the .NET class I took had simply gone to a weekend seminar on coding in .NET and copied all the .ppt slides and used them as his own (I knew more than he did about .NET). I had another professor for calc who, while not intentionally being a fraud, absolutely could not communicate the subject matter in a way that was comprehensible. In both of these cases, I figure I was out money because of fraud, so it can happen anywhere. If the coding boot camps are making false claims, then it seems more like grounds for a hefty lawsuit by former students, than grounds for another layer of regulatory compliance, particularly when the products of the four year colleges may or may not be subject to the same type of scrutiny in terms of product quality (disclaimer -- I don't know what the process for this is in CA).
There are a number of training classes and "bootcamps" for various things which are based in California. Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert certification bootcamps and various others come to mind. Those bootcamps (and many others) can be many thousands of dollars.. So the question becomes, at what point do you start considering regulation for a group? When the amount of money they collect is over $X? Or when the duration of the course is over X weeks? If they are going to regulate courses at all, these need to be clearly defined and enforced uniformly. The issue here is that when it is defined too vaguely, there are a very large number of classes that should be regulated, which aren't. Cooking classes, professional certification training programs and many other classes should fall under this. Regulatory authorities in state are likely not equipped with experts in the field to be able to define what methods/requirements are "best" for every type of organization.
With that said, I think the drawbacks of regulating classes like these, is far more than the "help" it will provide to consumers.
* If someone is willing to drop $15,000 on a bootcamp without fully vetting it via research, references, reviews and the like, that's not very smart of them and they are partially at fault for signing up for something that didn't provide what they need/want.
* However, if the bootcamp doesn't provide on what it promises, then they have every right to complain to the state and/or sue to get their money back (although, I expect most would complain to the state due to resource related issues.)
In short, California either needs to clearly define exactly who should be regulated, and they should apply that uniformly, not just on a specific group of companies.
-Phasedshift.
"We don't want money. They need to bow down and acknowledge us as Lord."
Back in the late 90s / early 2000s, training companies were making tons and tons of money funneling people with zero computer experience through MCSE certification bootcamps. Basically, they would do the entire set of certification exams in 2 weeks, and not all of them were 100% honest to students about their chances of passing or even getting a job once they were done. These bootcamps still exist, but from what I've experienced, they're only for people who actually know the material and just need to update their skills quickly. The earlier iterations of these were definitely certification mills though. I went to one around 2001 because I wanted to update my certs. The class was split -- some of us were there to just do a quick skills upgrade, and others had obviously been suckered in by a dishonest recruiter. To get these folks to pass, instructors would give them copied exam questions to study and pay for these students' extra chances to pass the exams. The school would then be able to tout their super-high pass rate for the exams. And these weren't cheap either -- some were $7K or $8K in 1990s dollars. Even when you factor the cost of a hotel stay, meals and an instructor, the profit margin is huge.
Now it seems that the focus is less on system admin skills and more on "web coding" like these schools are offering classes in. Seems like a perfect hook -- young students who use their iPhone or Android mobile constantly get sold the dream that they too can be the next great app writer and make millions. And it really does seem doable -- with all the web frameworks out there, there's very little a "coder" has to know about what's actually going on under the hood to make something that works. Problem is that paper MCSEs didn't work out so well when they got on the job, so I doubt these classes will help mint genius developers either. My boot camp class back in the day had a former bus driver and someone who was fresh out of the army in an unrelated field.
Libertarians will say it's OK for businesses to take advantage of people, but I think education is a little bit different. Selling someone thousands of dollars in classes and telling them they're equivalent to CS graduates just isn't honest, and these schools profit off peoples' naivete and sell them dreams. The state gets to regulate educational institutions, so it makes sense that they're taking a look at them. And what if it was something simple like needing to publish student outcomes or pass rates? The libertarian free market would be all excited then, because the bad ones might be weeded out if students could be bothered to do research on statistics available from regulation.
It took ages to weed the paper MCSEs out of the workforce, and it's still not 100% complete. Every time I meet an "IT professional" who has no troubleshooting ability, I think back to these bootcamps.
Until one of these poorly educated individuals ends up working for a company that produces "high security" applications and they fuck it up 'cause they didn't actually learn anything while getting their certificate, then suddenly you got a few million stolen identities floating around or something.
I never even knew these programs exist. My goal is to get back into development. I'm working in a completely unrelated field, having a Major in Cognitive Science and minor in computing. Anyone know of similar programs to these in the Los Angeles area for fully employed people, at cheaper prices? I love the idea of these programs...thanks!
Here's a quick fix.. Move OUT of that bat-shit insane state.. Then let those insane asylum inmates running that state try to shut you down.. These coding academies are pretty much web-based anyway, so all they have *in* California are the offices.. Those could quickly be moved out to say, Texas or Nevada, with little or no impact on the company.. I was born and raised in California, but the wife and I got out of there in the mid-90s, and moved to Nevada. Unfortunantly, we still have relatives there, so I have to make trips yearly to that nuthouse...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I had the same question and started clicking around. I came up with this:
http://www.bppe.ca.gov/lawsreg...
Just browsing through the dense wall of legalese, it seems largely related to being clear (and documented) in purpose and intent, having structured hierarchy of responsibility, good record keeping practices, providing appropriate resources (access to staff, libraries/labs, equipment etc), having clearly defined financial policies in place, making sure your faculty is competent and up to date on their subject matter, have clearly defined admission standards, etc.
I don't see anything particularly onerous in these requirements.
=Smidge=
Those bootcamps promising/guaranteeing certain performance can all be sued for fraud if they fail to live up to those promises/guarantees. For all the rest...caveat emptor.
Time for an IT / Tech apprenticeship system that can be a good way to train people while at least keeping from being an outright cash cow with all kinds of marking BS about jobs that you will get and why you should pay 50K+ to go to classes hear.
Step 1 - all politicians need to be registered and certified. Letting someone practice politics unlicensed is highly dangerous.
Step 2 - monthly testing for IQ, education and sanity. If they fail any of these they get a warning by being locked in public stockades naked and the public encouraged to throw rotten fruit and veggies at them.
Step 3 - Did they learn anything? If no, go back to step 2 until they do.
Step 5 - if found corrupt or working against the people or the constitution, they forfeit all personal property and wealth immediately and are thrown in the stockades again but allow the people to now use rocks until their trial, after trial hard labor camp for 30 years.
No death penalty, they need to serve as a warning to others when you try and pass laws that go against the constitution or are for a special interest.
Special case 1 - if a special interest is found to be involved is a corporation, that corporation is to be put to death and liquidated immediately, it's board and executives all put in stockades and allow the public to do what they want to them. Then to hard labor camp with their friend.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Federal law normally preempts state law, in cases where both jurisdictions have an interest. However, the courts have generally allowed states to provide more specific regulations so long as they meet the requirements of the federal law. Two examples.
Consider minimum wage laws. The US Government requires a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Many states and jurisdictions require a higher wage, and are fully allowed to do so, because whatever rate they set above $7.25 meets the requirements of the federal minimum wage law.
Consider emissions standards. The EPA sets emission standards for the country as a whole, but, in practice, California does. Because the California standards meet the minimum requirements of the federal statute, they can set more strict standards.
None of the things you mention in your post are quantified. Is every single one of them up to the abritrary personal judgement of a beaurocrat? Is there an appeal mechanism spelled out?
Start with some free online courses. I just started a freebie through Coursera (it's a regular freshman EE course, which is great, but.. news flash: homework still kinda sucks :-)). If you want to get more serious, you can try a local community college. The best advice is to start with free or cheap options, because now there are plenty of those that will get your feet wet.
wasting your money on a class is nobody's business but your own.
It is everybody's business because 1. They could be making fraudulent claims about job placement and policing fraud is a job for government. 2. They could be taking money for inferior education, also a form of fraud.
If the government doesn't take care of this, what are you going to do? Read their Yelp reviews? Yeah, 10% of $15,000/student could do a lot to make their reviews look good. Why stop there? Charge more. 20% of $20,000/student and not only are their reviews good, they're damn stellar. Why, you'd be a fool not to attend and if you dare say anything negative there's another 10% coming out of the top line for lawyers to keep you gagged up in court.
Of course they could buy judges and officials with that money too. Then, and only then, should you be raging about the government, and not to destroy it but to fix it. The libertarian solution to regulatory capture is destroying government. This is like deciding to destroy all the cars because they don't get perfect mileage.
Is there any business that Kalifornia doesn't hate?
I'm simply amazed at the size of California's economy relative to its anti-business ways.
The headline and summary are about shutting them down. The article says both sides are working towards compliance.
I was going to post the same quote, but not to show my badge of uninformed cynicism like you. Since this was created by California law, much as someone thinks it unnecessary, it is state law. And working for compliance instead of shuttering these camps is a good thing.
California has piles of referendum votes, so if they think regulation is not needed they can get this stricken.
Meanwhile, this is a reasonable quote from someone charged with enforcing the law. Feel free to inform me why the sarcasm to which I responded was based in something other than the illusion of wisdom that disillusionment brings?
Fraudulent speech is still speech, yet even most libertarians agree with penalizing fraud. Commercial speech being speech doesn't automatically exempt it from regulation.
Speaking as someone who spent a ridiculous amount of time in college+graduate school, it seems as though learning to code, which I picked up in my spare time and I now make a living at, is something that can and should be done without the boat anchor of a college degree.
California Education code 94800. This chapter shall be known, and may be cited, as the California Private Postsecondary Education Act of 2009. 94800.5. Whenever a reference is made to the former Private Postsecondary Education and Student Protection Act, the former Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education Reform Act of 1989, or the former Chapter 7 (commencing with Section 94700) of Part 59 of Division 10 of Title 3 of the Education Code, as it read on June 30, 2007, by the provisions of any statute or regulation, it shall be construed as referring to the provisions of this chapter. Whenever a reference is made to the former Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education by the provisions of any statute or regulation, it shall be construed as referring to the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education. 94801. The Legislature finds and declares all of the following: (a) In 2007, more than 400,000 Californians attended more than 1,500 private postsecondary schools in California. (b) Private postsecondary schools can complement the public education system and help develop a trained workforce to meet the demands of California businesses and the economy. (c) Numerous reports and studies have concluded that California's previous attempts at regulatory oversight of private postsecondary schools failed to ensure student protections or provide effective oversight of private postsecondary schools. Previous laws and regulatory oversight were allowed to expire on June 30, 2007, with some skeletal functions, continued by urgency legislation, that were allowed to expire on June 30, 2008. (d) It is the intent of the Legislature in enacting this chapter to ensure all of the following: (1) Minimum educational quality standards and opportunities for success for California students attending private postsecondary schools in California. (2) Meaningful student protections through essential avenues of recourse for students. (3) A regulatory structure that provides for an appropriate level of oversight. (4) A regulatory governance structure that ensures that all stakeholders have a voice and are heard in policymaking by the new bureau created by this chapter. (5) A regulatory governance structure that provides for accountability and oversight by the Legislature through program monitoring and periodic reports. (6) Prevention of the deception of the public that results from conferring, and use of, fraudulent or substandard degrees. (e) The Legislature advises future policymakers to continually and carefully evaluate this chapter and its administration and enforcement. Where there are deficiencies in the law or regulatory oversight, the Governor and the Legislature should act quickly to correct them.
There's lots of transactions that are not really regulated, especially cash ones...
Really? Try paying your $20 dinner tab with a ten dollar bill. Just because there's not a form to fill out doesn't mean it's free of regulation.
Thanks! I've seen some pretty cool online courses (and I regularly take community college courses, but the programming ones fill up quick) but I'm the type where I need the stress of a physical instructor to make me succeed. It would be stupid to say I wish I was unemployed so I could do a program like this, but I wish there was one like it that allowed employed people, and at a lesser price. :-)
California, possibly the state that receives the biggest benefit from programmers (in the form of jobs and taxes paid)
What California needs are programmers with genuine talents and marketable skills. Not the diploma mill boot camp.
I know a lot of people here are upset about this, but this is one case where I have to side with the regulators. There is a big reason why such regulation is necessary. There was a time, not so many years ago, when there were a lot of fly-by-night trade schools operating. They would promise training in technical fields, like programming, and then teach courses using outdated equipment and software. Students would pay thousands of dollars to go to these schools, only to discover later on that their skills and certifications were worthless. I have seen this happen. There may still be schools like this around, I don't know. Without regulation, anyone can set up a school for anything, promising excellent education and lucrative careers, while delivering worthless training.
Proverbs 21:19
If they are trying to shut down non-profit or free institutions, that's one thing. But these programs appear to be "for profit" institutions. They should get "some" kind of regulation..
94930. Deposit of Fees, Adjustment of Fees, Reserve Balance
(a) All fees collected pursuant to this article, including any interest on those fees, shall be deposited in the Private Postsecondary Education Administration Fund, and shall be available, upon appropriation by the Legislature, for expenditure by the bureau for the administration of this chapter.
(b) If the bureau determines by regulation that the adjustment of the fees established by this article is consistent with the intent of this chapter, the bureau may adjust the fees. However, the bureau shall not maintain a reserve balance in the Private Postsecondary Education Administration Fund in an amount that is greater than the amount necessary to fund six months of authorized operating expenses of the bureau in any fiscal year.
94930.5. Fee Schedule
An institution shall remit to the bureau for deposit in the Private Postsecondary Education Administration Fund the following fees, in accordance with the following schedule:
(a) The following fees shall be remitted by an institution submitting an application for an approval to operate, if applicable:
(1) Application fee for an approval to operate: five thousand dollars ($5,000).
(2) Application fee for the approval to operate a new branch of the institution: three thousand dollars ($3,000).
(3) Application fee for an approval to operate by means of accreditation: seven hundred fifty dollars ($750).
(b) The following fees shall be remitted by an institution seeking a renewal of its approval to operate, if applicable:
(1) Renewal fee for the main campus of the institution: three thousand five hundred dollars ($3,500).
(2) Renewal fee for a branch of the institution: three thousand dollars ($3,000).
(3) Renewal fee for an institution that is approved to operate by means of accreditation: five hundred dollars ($500).
(c) The following fees shall apply to an institution seeking authorization of a substantive change to its approval to operate, if applicable:
(1) Processing fee for authorization of a substantive change to an approval to operate: five hundred dollars ($500).
(2) Processing fee in connection with a substantive change to an approval to operate by means of accreditation: two hundred fifty dollars ($250).
(d) (1) In addition to any fees paid to the bureau pursuant to subdivisions (a) to (c), inclusive, each institution that is approved to operate pursuant to this chapter shall remit both of the following:
(A) An annual institutional fee, in an amount equal to three-quarters of 1 percent of the institution's annual revenues derived from students in California, but not exceeding a total of twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000) annually.
(B) An annual branch fee of one thousand dollars ($1,000) for each branch or campus of the institution operating in California.
(2) The amount of the annual fees pursuant to paragraph (1) shall be proportional to the bureau's cost of regulating the institution under this chapter.
(e) If the bureau determines that the annual cost of providing oversight and review of an institution, as required by this chapter, is less than the amount of any fees required to be paid by that institution pursuant to this article, the bureau may decrease the fees applicable to that institution to an amount that is proportional to the bureau's costs associated with that institution.
94931. Late Payment
(a) A fee that is not paid on or before the 30th calendar day after the due date for the payment of the fee shall be subject to a 25 percent late payment penalty fee.
(b) A fee that is not paid on or before the 90th calendar day after the due date for payment of the fee shall be subject to a 35 percent late paymen
They are documented in the regulations linked by the GP and there are clearly documented compliance and appeals processes in there as well. It's a hell of a read though.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Sounds like a real charmer...
The bureaucrat isn't paid to be charming. He is being paid to be independent, honest and effective. Otherwise what you get is the politically motivated closing of the GWB.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am all for teaching people and enabling those who want to do something to do so. But why make a movement out of teaching every kid to program? How will the world be a better place if everyone knows some programming?
I see two things coming from this:
more amateur programmers
more professional programmers
Are more amateur programmers a good thing? If you are a programmer, ask yourself this. Have you ever had to take over a large project which was begun by an amateur programmer? Have you had to make the decision between continuing to patch crappy unplanned spaghetti code or take time you don't have to start from scratch on something that already has heavy use and needs fixes and / or new features yesterday?
Are more professional programmers a good thing? Many businesses seem to claim so as they push for laxer rules in bringing in cheap foreign labor. Is that anything more than BS though? How many colleges are there out there graduating whole classes of CS majors every semester? Yes, I understand, they want people with experience. There can't be anyone with experience until someone hires somebody without it though. This isn't an exclusive problem for computer programming, it is true for any profession that requires any experience. If companies can get more experienced employees by bringing them in from foreign lands then answer this... where are the foreigners getting their experience? Who hired them first?
What will more professional programmers really mean? Just more competition for programming jobs. Before smuggly thinking "that's ok I am really good" remember this... that may be true but you are still replaceable. More competition means you are more replaceable. That means you will work longer hours for less money and benefits. You will do it because if you don't someone else will! You didn't like money did you? You didn't want to have a life did you? Surely you don't expect to retire some day!
Please don't get me wrong. I'm not really selfish enough to want to discourage people from learning to program. I want to live in a world where everyone has a chance to do what they want to do and someone is willing to teach them to do it. I just don't like the idea of making it a required class that every child must take. I also don't think computer programming should be acceptable as a replacement for foreign language as the two have NOTHING to do with one another and while programming does help one develop their thinking skils such as logic, math and planning it does NOT help one develop the same kind of thinking skills that a foreign language provides. They are entirely different animals! /rant
The problem with caveat emptor, especially when it comes to education, is that the people who want to take a computer programming bootcamp are mostly the people who know the least about computer programming and are thus the least qualified to tell the difference between a scam and a legitimate computer programming syllabus.
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
Instead, they fall under Federal Dept. of Ed Work Training facilities.
I can't find a Google link to anything that remotely resembles whatever it is you are talking about.
One name: Silver State Helicopters in San Diego (technically El Cajon, but close enough). In 2008, 1 year after the previous regulation of private postsecondary schools was allowed to expire, they closed their doors taking the $70,000 per student in fees that'd already been paid and leaving the students out the money, often with the student loans for the tuition hanging over their heads, with no classes and no arrangements made to deliver the training the students had paid for. They weren't the only one, either. Another private business "college" in San Diego did the same thing that same year, tuition wasn't as much but it had a lot more students and again all of them were out the tuition and the school didn't make any arrangements for delivering what the students had paid for.
This didn't happen under the old regulations, and it stopped happening once the new regulations went into effect, because the schools' operators could be held legally liable for the costs to students. I'd say the historical record leans toward the regulations being necessary and a good thing.
I went ahead and read the regulation, with which the "boot camps" are being forced to comply.
The regulation is actually extremely minimal. It requires the educational institutions to pay a yearly fee ($3500) plus various other fees; it requires the educational institutions to track all their students and track who gets jobs, how soon, how long they took to graduate, and so on; it prohibits education institutions from making promises about future employment; it requires the educational institution to hire only teachers or instructors who have some kind of qualification; etc. There are also various other provisions, all of which seem very minimalistic.
It seemed to me that most of the regulation involved requiring that schools provide certain kinds of truthful information, such as job placement rates.
The regulation would not prevent any reasonable educational institution from operating. It would still be possible to open a "boot camp" for coding in a building you rented, provided that the instructors have some kind of qualification and you submit truthful job placement information.
Nor would the regulation impose very much burden upon small organizations. It seems to me that the cost of compliance would be fairly small.
Exemptions to the CPPEA 2009. Notice the big one: schools charging a tuition of $2500 or less. That should outright exempt a lot of places once they file the right paperwork. The target of these regulations isn't the small places or pay-as-you-go classes. It's places like Silver State Helicopters that take in large tuition payments and then evaporate without delivering classes. That's why the regulations are light on teacher qualifications and heavy on the financial aspects of the schools and their owners including things like the required tuition recovery funds.
I'm a student at Hack Reactor. I was pretty cynical about that 99% hiring rate number before I started here, but now I tend to believe it's accurate. I say that based on what I've seen from the graduates of the last 2 classes. As far as I can tell, everyone in the class that graduated 10 weeks ago has a job and everyone I've talked to from the group that graduated in December seems to be getting job interviews and having success moving forward in their job search.
The trick isn't in how they do the math. If there's a trick to it, it's that:
* Admissions are pretty competitive. They pick students who are likely to be successful.
* They have chosen the right niche. It's all JavaScript all the time around here. There's a huge shortage of good JavaScript developers in the valley. A lot of companies see value in having someone who knows a bunch about JavaScript and is clearly highly motivated to learn even if they're weaker in data structures or some of the other areas.
* The numbers are small right now. Hack Reactor is only 14 months old. There's only something like 120 HR graduates in the job market.
But, and I'm in the minority around here on this, I also think coding schools should be regulated. CA passed a law to tighten regulation of trade schools in 2009 because there were lots of scams going on- a lot of bogus CNA training programs and cooking schools, etc. That law makes sense.
And if there's a law that regulates trade schools, it seems like it should apply to coding schools just as much as sound engineering programs, barber colleges and cooking schools. Creating loopholes in a good law for one industry that thinks its special seems like a bad idea.
Besides a little regulation will add legitimacy to a young industry and keep scam artists from moving into the space. There will be some compliance costs (paperwork is a hassle!), but I can't see it being much more than that.
maybe you should figure out if it's something as simple as them having hygiene standards for how he cooks, and some small fee for a license.
Or maybe the hot dog stand is such a small-time operation that "some small fee" is prohibitive. This has happened before with lemonade stands run by children. (Google lemonade stand prosecution.)
I dropped out of college back in 1983 but did very well in the computer science classes I took. After dropping out I started tutoring computer science students at a rate of $10/hour for a little scratch. My tutored students did very well on their projects and exams and I soon had a growing list of students interested in my services.
What scares me about these types of regulatory schemes is we are replacing the market and individual choice and responsibility with government oversight that is incapable or uninterested in measuring results. Rather than allowing the market to decide on a product based on results we are implementing entry thresholds to be sure the "right people" are delivering the services. However, when we seek to abdicate all market responsibility to the government we simply create a set of rules so that our educators look the way the government wants them to look.
Some argue that the government should have the power to regulate because some of these students are using government money and that, in my opinion, is the ultimate issue. Once we start using public funds we create more opportunity for corruption. It is not longer necessary to rip off one student at a time and hope the market doesn't catch on because you can meet some bureaucratic threshold and be fed a steady stream of students who have no personal investment in the process outside of their own time.
Once we accept regulatory schemes such as this we open ourselves up to whatever whims the bureaucrats decide upon. We'll move from meeting a threshold of requirements in order to teach to a system where the content becomes mandated.
What you describe is merely a bad contract. People are not accustomed to such contracts and as such tend to accept bad ones. I grant it is a problem. That said, the government doesn't need to stipulate the contract. Rather, we need to bootstrap some kind of market consensus as to what a proper contract looks like for any given good or service. Then you have some mechanism where by people become familiar with the distinction. And thus parents in this case know what a reasonable private school contract looks like and what an unreasonable one looks like. End of issue.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It isn't "merely" a bad contract. Suppose the contract did have a provision in it requiring the school to refund the tuition. What good does that do? The student can go to court and get a judgement, but the school's still closed, the classes still having happened, and the money's still gone with nothing in the school's assets to pay any judgement out of. And no contract terms in the world will prevent the operators from just pulling up stakes and skipping town with the money,
This is why the scam artists hate the regulations so much. Among other things, they require the school to set aside a fund, held in a separate bank account and untouchable by the school for any other purpose, dedicated to covering tuition refunds if for any reason the school can't make good on it's end of the bargain. The scam artists can still pull up stakes and bug out, but they can't take the money with them.
As usual, the title makes the story out to be something it's not. They're not trying to shut these places down, they're trying to bring them into compliance with laws and regulations.
While I'm not in favor of excessive regulation, that doesn't mean I can just go out and start a business that ignores the rules. It sounds like the rules were in place well before any of these places existed, they started doing business and ignored the rules, now they're being told they can't do that and someone is annoyed that they're getting called out.
In other news, I've never much cared for speed limits so I'm just going to start ignoring them because I can get home faster that way. When I get arrested I'll post a story to Slashdot about how the police are trying to destroy my life by putting me in jail.
You have assumed that the only application of programming is being a programmer that produces programs, so the only people that program are programmers. Programming is a tool that you can use to a task. Sometimes that task is produce the program itself, sometimes the program automates the actual desired task. I write programs all of the time but I am a circuit designer, not a programmer.
A lot of "colleges" were loan scams -- qualifying students for huge tuition loans, but not graduating them with competence to get jobs to pay them back.
The loans then got handed to the federal government to repay, and the owners of the private "colleges" kept the money.
That's why you see more enforcement attention -- tuition loans were a money machine for scammers for quite a while.
Here are a couple of fairly old article as that was becoming news:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0911.burd.html
The Subprime Student Loan Racket
With help from Washington, the for-profit college industry is loading up millions of low-income students with debt they'll never pay off.
By Stephen Burd
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/business/14schools.html
The New Poor
In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt
One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.
-------
"... many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.
“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”
For-profit trade schools have long drawn accusations that they overpromise and underdeliver, but the woeful economy has added to the industry’s opportunities along with the risks to students, according to education experts. They say these schools have exploited the recession as a lucrative recruiting device while tapping a larger pool of federal student aid...."
-----
Then (per years of precedent from courts all across the land) the federal standard would apply.
| The California electricity crisis is a demonstration that you can screw up deregulation in a really bad way. But it's not a demonstration that deregulation is inherently bad or problematic.
Inherently bad, no, but problematic certainly.
Deregulation proceeded the way that free-market deregulation promoters wanted it to happen and the theoretical way it should: lowering the power of the local monopolies in favor of a (theoretically) competitive free-market. Generating assets were divorced from the consumers of them in order to create a deeper market. It turned out horribly.
Clear failures of the application deregulatory ideology are frequently retroactively declared to be "wasn't actually deregulatory". The warnings of the opponents of deregulation, even if they turned out to be right, get ignored the next time through as well. {eventually people got wise to Communists making the same type excuses}
The most pure 'theoretically' deregulatory environment is "let utilities do whatever they want", such as charge people extreme amounts for what are in practice essential services. Like threaten to turn off the juice to a hospital right before cardiac surgery unless they wired money to the CEO. Don't want that? Well, that will have to be regulated.
Texas (whose companies cheated Californians out of money) politicians mocked California without any empathy. They claimed (falsely) that the problem was entirely California's 'enviro-nazi' regulations preventing supply from meeting demand during the dot-com boom. (false).
Texas later drank its own hallucinogenic flavor-aid and deregulated its own electricity. Survey says?
http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2012/01/25/electric-deregulation-turns-ten-in-texas/
During the California crisis, municipally owned utilities (such as LA's large DWP) which had not been subject to deregulation similarly had no supply shortage and maintained stable rates.
The argument from the opponents of electricity deregulation, namely that it is a scheme to extract money from the average user for the benefit of a small number of wealthy, private owners without any compensatory benefit, is correct.
Which is why businesses can do that to each other all the time when other businesses file contracts with them.
According to you, a contract is just a license to f' someone.
Yet that isn't how it works. So clearly contracts can be constructed in such a way that that doesn't happen.
Is it flawless? Nothing is flawless. Your government regulated system isn't flawless. The only difference between what you said and what I said is that you want the government to write the contract.
That's the only difference. So under your own idea the school could have done the exact same thing if they were willing to violate a contract.
Please be sensible.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Ah, California ... clearly with your thriving economy and bright future, even more regulation is what you need.
You miss two points:
1. You shouldn't need to be an expert in contract law and negotiation to learn to be a helicopter pilot or take classes at a private business college. The regulations are there to give a standard framework so students don't already have to be lawyers.
2. No contract can prevent one party from breaching it. They can only provide remedies after the fact, and that's no use if the party you could get anything out of is long gone and can't be found. Regulation can do things like force the creation of a separate account with the state limiting the school's access to it (ie. the bank won't let the school's operator withdraw the funds if they want to scamper) to cover refunds if the school closes. A private contract could only do the same with a bit of fairly complex escrow accounts, see point #1 about us not wanting students to have to already be lawyers just to take a few classes.
Of course Slashdot is already a biased sample of public opinion and its polarities. I am assuming that the techies that post here already have some elitist pretentions, many of them thinking themselves superior in some way to people generally. The extremism of the dialogue reveals that. It is almost diagnostic for a Right Wing Bias since most Conservatives seem to come from that elitist POV.
The debate about the relative power of government vs. private business, is a straw man that like every rhetorical argument protects a much weaker agenda. The idea that government vs. business, regulation vs. non-regulation is a straw man is revealed by the access business people have to legislatures and the idea that most legislators are business men, having some experience running an organization that has a self interest and makes money. Increasingly it take lots of money to run for public office and that fact hasn't much assauged the Right Wingers here. There must be something in reality that most of them miss, or they must be lying about their true motives.
So the usual Conservative and Republican anti-government, or state's rights arguments hide a hidden agenda which is really the advantage they want for their elite to the disadvantage of those in the majority not in their elite. This is basically anti-democracy. But it is not fashionable to admit, so they have to couch it in a way that conceals the elitist ramifications which lead down the road away from inclusion of everybody to exclusion of most, to creation of oligarchies, to class war.
Even were that not true, the antisocial element of their individualism must be then considered, for to think that one does not have to compromise one-s self interest with the interests of everybody else in society, just labeling the need to be socially interconnected as "collectiveist" reveals again an elitism that results ultimately in unfairness and a breakdown of the Social Contract. The idea of fairness is crucial here, and even though competition and merit do apply to human affaird, the perception that unfairness is institutionalized is just as repugnant as forcing everyone to be equal. Ruthless metitocracy, even assuming objective standards, which is a streatch, is just has bad as ruthless equality, both being ruthless.
I am glad I live in California and all the more because if I would want the Red States to be out of my hair, my state could actually do quite well and maybe better without them. One solution to the political impasse and polarization much of it funded by capitalist oligarchs is succession.
No, I think I spoke to that. I have had the misfotune of taking over many projects which started out a little things some non-programmer thought they could do to make some task easier. Over time it grows and turns into something larger and people depend on it. Well after it went over the head of the non-programmer it finally gets pushed to some programmer. Now it's a huge project where everything was done in the worst possible way to begin with and with no planning. Everything needs redone, the whole thing SHOULD be started over from scratch but it has grown into something in active use and existing users aren't going to appreciate being beta testers on the new one.