Slashdot Mirror
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.
...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 href="http://www.al-awa2el.com/%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%B8%D9%8A%D9%81-%D9%85%D8%AC%D8%A7
If they happen to have a relative who's a retiring crane operator and inherit the job. Otherwise, no.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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.
It's quite bad. For $15k and 4 years of time, I had a 100% chance of getting a full-time job in domain within 6 months of graduation with a typical starting pay of $70k-$90k. At least that was the results of all of the alumni that graduated with my "programming" degree for the past 30 years.