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Code Bootcamp Fined $375K Over Employment Claims and Licensing Issues (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
[O]ne of the most prominent institutions, New York's Flatiron School, will be shelling out $375,000 to settle charges brought by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office. The AG said the school operated for a period without the proper educational license, and it improperly marketed both its job placement rates and the salaries of its graduates. New York regulators didn't find any inaccuracies in Flatiron's "outcomes report," a document the company is proud of. However, the Attorney General's office found that certain statements made on Flatiron's website didn't constitute "clear and conspicuous" disclosure.
For instance, Flatiron claimed that 98.5 percent of graduates were employed within 180 days of graduation. However, only by carefully reading the outcomes report would one find that the rate included not just full-time employees, but apprentices, contract workers, and freelancers. Some of the freelancers worked for less than 12 weeks. The school also reported an average salary of $74,447 but didn't mention on its website that the average salary claim only applied to graduates who achieved full-time employment. That group comprised only 58 percent of classroom graduates and 39 percent of those who took online courses.
The school's courses last 12 to 16 weeks, and cost between $12,000 and $15,000, according to a statement from the attorney general's office [PDF]. (Or $1,500 a month for an onine coding class). Eligible graduate can claim their share of the $375,000 by filing a complaint within the next thee months.
For instance, Flatiron claimed that 98.5 percent of graduates were employed within 180 days of graduation. However, only by carefully reading the outcomes report would one find that the rate included not just full-time employees, but apprentices, contract workers, and freelancers. Some of the freelancers worked for less than 12 weeks. The school also reported an average salary of $74,447 but didn't mention on its website that the average salary claim only applied to graduates who achieved full-time employment. That group comprised only 58 percent of classroom graduates and 39 percent of those who took online courses.
The school's courses last 12 to 16 weeks, and cost between $12,000 and $15,000, according to a statement from the attorney general's office [PDF]. (Or $1,500 a month for an onine coding class). Eligible graduate can claim their share of the $375,000 by filing a complaint within the next thee months.
The real results are actually pretty impressive.
For that same amount of money, those with good hand eye coordination will be better to become crane operators who earns well in to six figures.
...Trump 'university'.
When you're unemployed, you get desperate. And desperate people often will let their guard down in their desperation. You also quickly discover that there is a whole industry of trade schools, bootcamps, etc. happy to exploit that desperation with all kinds of bullshit promises.
I had the misfortune of being unemployed for a while not too long ago. And while I found few real jobs available (most job postings are complete BS, for those who don't know), I found no shortage of schools promising to GET me a job. They trade on success stories of people who went through their course and had great job offers thrown at them as soon as they graduated. Of course, most of those success stories are complete BS too, but when you're desperate you really WANT to believe that you've finally found your answer. I came very close to letting myself get taken advantage of more than a few times, in sheer desperation. And I'm normally a pretty hardcore skeptic in normal circumstances.
In short, if it were up to me I wouldn't just fine schools like this. I would send their administrators to prison for a long, long time. They've done one of the lowest of the low things a human can do--exploit the weakest and most vulnerable of their fellow men for a quick buck.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A roommate took out student loans to attend a for profit technical school to learn electronics and couldn't find an electronics job in the late 1990's. He took the courses because the sales person... uh, guidance counselor... told him that he could make the most money doing electronics. Unfortunately, society didn't need any more TV repairmen. His new job skills were obsolete upon graduation. He kept working as a taxi driver, made good money driving passengers out of the airport, and got used to being rob with a gun pointed to his face every six months.
Are these effective? Is there evidence to support this? Why aren't we seeing John Carmacks piling out the doors?
I really think software development is something that is self-taught and inherent in the individual psyche. I've never met anyone who went to a "code school" that was worth a shit. Sorry.
There seems to be some confusion about what the word prominent means. I'm from New York, and I just asked three colleagues about the Flatiron School. Pretty sure someone has to know you exist before you're considered 'prominent'.
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I feel like Flatiron is getting kind of screwed here. I've looked through their jobs reports and it is very clear that only about 50-60% of their grads get full-time work as developers right after graduation.
But I'm still considering going because if you ask me, that kind of number for what the program is is still pretty good.
Anyone who just takes their 98% number (with the big freakin asterisk next to it) at face value and doesn't read the jobs report (that they repeatedly emphasize), before they drop 15K, is simply not doing their due diligence.
I think the bootcamp field is ripe for abuse but the AG should have gone after the scummier schools. Instead it seems like they wanted to make an example of one of the more prominent ones, which seems to me misguided.
student loans need to have chapter 11 and 7
It's considered good writing not to write utter crap in the first half-sentence of an article.
Of course, on a decent site the editors would pick that up.
This is precisely the reason K12 needs to drop calculus and mandate instead statistical reasoning.
And there should be an entire test along the way where every question involves reading some promotional brochure, preferably sourced from the certification industry (if the documents remain identifiable, even better—perhaps supplied by those entities convicted of fraudulent representation, as part of their penance).
Time for the old 3Rs to step aside, in favour of factual, figurative, and fraudulent—the three modes of cognition essential to modern life.
And yet government and its collaborators in media keep peddling college, one of the greatest financial scams of all time, as being a good investment, despite the fact that tuition keeps rising and tens of millions of Americans are straddles with huge student loan bills and degrees that are virtually irrelevant in the modern job market.
Community College is the fix for this.
a) it isn't pay-through-the-nose expensive
b) it has **realistic** expectations for how long learning this stuff requires
c) For most people, coding is an entry level job. I coded for about 10 yrs, then moved on into architecture, CIO, retirement (in my early 40s).
d) I never took a programming class for my college BS degree in engineering.
e) I tool C, C++, intermediate C++ courses at a local community college POST-University graduation (paid for my the company where I was working). Then I took an advanced C++ class at a partner company "night school" taught by their employees - which greatly upped my C++ skills.
Online courses should be $120-$180 tops through an accredited college. You can learn the same material watching select youtube videos for free. YOU just have to decide and follow through daily to get the knowledge. MIT Courseware teaches Python FOR FREE! There's a great free Ruby on Rails training book that teaches everything related to professional programming using Ruby, Rails, github, TDD, etc. Work through the 13 chapters on your own and you are ready for a beginning level RoR job creating internal webapps for any company.
Paying someone $1500/month is just crazy. Crazy.
This happened at the height of the last Dotcom Bubble, except the bootcamps were for MCSE or Java/Solaris certification. Now that everything's code and in the cloud, the people running the schools are just changing the advertisement a little bit.
The thing that sucks is that just like ITT Tech, U of Phoenix and other for profit schools, these places live on student loans and GI Bill education grants. Back in the early 2000s I went to one of these bootcamps because a consulting company I worked for at the time paid for it. It was obvious that a lot of people in the classes had just gotten out of a low-level job fixing tanks in the military, or were total newbies with zero experience or desire to learn beyond "make lots of money in tech!"
What I think is even worse this time around is that everything is so abstracted that coming in from the level of a JavaScript framework is going to produce not only people who aren't useful without using the framework they were taught, but also ignorant of what's actually going on inside the abstraction. It's way easier to understand this stuff if you start at a first-principles level and build up, but coming in at the top or near top of the abstraction tower ensures you'll never know what's happening inside the magic box. In this way, coder schools who just pump out Node.js or JQuery robots are doing their students a real disservice.
Learning to code is like learning a foreign language. It's going to take a long time to become fluent. With a crash course you can learn enough to make things work but you likely wont be writing maintainable, performant, accurate, correct, reslient, stable, future proof, reusable, adaptable, organised, secure, scalable and relatively bug free high quality code. Like with languages, it's not until you're fluent that you're going to be writing novels. Reading code written by such people would be like reading a novel written in terrible English with crazy structure, sequence of events, etc. You might just about followthe story but it wont be a pleasant read. In the worst cases it will end up completely broken. In other cases it will be filled with hundreds of pointless words, sentences and even pages with things like a character being killed off too early so now you have to implement a hack such as time travel to bring the character back later on. This is basically what this course is. You might learn enough to ask for directions to the nearest restaurant but don't expect any kind of sophisticated conversation to be efficient or entirely free of misunderstandings.
On top of that, writing really good software is difficult. The probability of doing it well is low at the average IQ range meaning that the majority of the population is going to do poorly without really intense hands on assistance. On top of that you have a numbr of necessary character traits. These are things that are high in demand and that many other industries. After all of this you start to have only a small percent of the population available for programming that are really well suited and generally speaking that proportion of the population still needs a lot of the right type of experience to become fully fluent.
There is massive demand for programming but just not enough really good programmers and courses like this try to cater to demand but they don't really give the ideal product.
What's his latest obsession with Lillyayayko55@yahoo.jp?