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Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

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Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#71

Post by shawndrost »

dopamean wrote: post #5

Though it may seem obvious to people here (on HN) this is a much bigger problem in the industry than people realize. In many ways these bootcamps are repeating the problems found at trade schools in the past. I taught at one for a year, MakerSquare, and found it to be a rewarding and positive experience however I know people at others, including the company that ended up buying MakerSquare who have had different expe…

Hi there -- I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.

I agree with your headline: this is a much bigger problem than people realize. The solution is CIRR (http://cirr.org). CIRR schools -- including Hack Reactor -- generally report outcome statistics that are similar to Course Report's third-party industry averages (~70% placement rate), whereas non-CIRR schools generally report 9X%.

It sounds like you've gotten the a couple of wrong impressions about Hack Reactor. No offense taken (thanks for the kind words too!) and I hope you don't mind if I issue some corrections:

We don't use out-of-date statistics in our marketing, and we really don't market based off of statistics at all. It is hard to do so given the problem you pointed out. If you see out-of-date statistics anywhere, it is a grave error that I would love to correct. Please screenshot and email to shawn@hackreactor.com. Current statistics are on our site and cirr.org.

Students in our remote program receive the same career services that our other campuses do: about a third of student-facing staff work full-time on helping alums get jobs. The program is not very large (~20 students per cohort) and is one of our better-performing "campuses".

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#72

Post by ptero »

asciimo wrote: post #44
jefftk wrote: post #6

"Between January and June 2017, Flatiron claimed that 98.5% of its students received employment less than 180 days after graduation and that Flatiron graduates had an average salary of $74,447. However, Flatiron did not disclose clearly and conspicuously that the 98.5% employment rate included not only full time salaried employees but also apprentices, contract employees and self-employed freelance workers, some who…

I think it's fair to demonstrate that you actually know how to teach adult humans, regardless of the subject matter. A license is a fair standard to measure. Maybe the license criteria need to be modernized?

> I think it's fair to demonstrate that you actually know how to teach adult humans, regardless of the subject matter.

This is way too generic. To grant a standardized degree (e.g., BS, MBA, PhD), sure. As a generic, "show me that you are qualified to teach adults before I let you" I could not disagree more. Adults can decide what they want to learn (karate or Python, basket weaving or machine learning) and where they want to go. The state's role, if there is one, should be to inform, not limit the options. My 2c.

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#73

Post by shawndrost »

dopamean wrote: post #67
PagingCraig wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I graduated from HR recently and they do have their CIRR reporting stuff and it's pretty well done. They have tried to drag other bootcamps into using the same statistics, but there is no incentive to do that. I can't speak to their advertising and if the new numbers are reflected in that. I can't see bootcamps being around in 5 years without some major changes. P.S. Career services are provided for remote students.

> P.S. Career services are provided for remote students. Good to hear. There was some debate about whether or not to provide services when I was there. I do wonder how effective those services are however. A big part of providing them is relationships with hiring partners in cities. It's a very tough thing to do from afar.

Oh shoot. Now I see what you're talking about and there's something real there. There are actually two teams that help students: one that builds employer relationships, and one that is a career coach and accountability buddy. The latter does the lion's share of the work at all campuses. The former is less-useful to remote alums that look for jobs outside of SF/LA/NY/ATX but they do still put in serious effort (eg we have partners in ATL, Dallas). Hope that clears things up.

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#74

Post by amcooper »

sevensor wrote: post #15
1_800_UNICORN wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The school, which has taught approximately 1,000 students, charges students between $12,000 and $15,000 for a 12 to 16 week in-person class and approximately $1,500 a month for online coding classes. Let's assume a very conservative estimate of 800 students doing 1 of online work, and 200 students paying $12k for a class. That works out to $1.2M in online tuition, and $2.4M in in-person tuition. Given how conservativ…

It's funny, I did the same math and concluded there's no way they profited enough from this scheme to cover the cost of noncompliance. Even if they took $3.6M in revenue, they had to pay salaries, expensive rent, and overhead for 5 years. That's barely scraping by. Hopefully they're sitting on a pile of investor money they can use to pay this settlement.

You're forgetting the dropouts. For every online student who graduates from Flatiron, there are many—maybe a dozen, maybe more—who drop out. Flatiron bills online students monthly, so they're raking in a good deal of money from dropouts who can't get their money back.

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#76

Post by nervousvarun »

arkades wrote: post #47
segmondy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

58% of classroom graduates making $74,447 average seems better than most universities out there. Too bad they had to lie about it.

Is it better than a university CS degree?

This could be tricky to quantify. What percentage of these bootcamps jobs are based in the Bay Area? Salaries are obviously "higher" there (quotes because cost of living is as well).

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#77

Post by Dtrane »

Disclaimer: Former Flatiron School student here. I'm seeing a lot of comments (and the title) about fake employment stats. There is nowhere in the article that alleges this. FS clearly publishes their jobs report and make it extremely accessible from the homepage of their website. The AG does not dispute any numbers in this jobs report.

The main allegations, aside from the SED license, are that they did not clearly state their methods of arriving at these numbers on their marketing materials. While that's true, I have faith that someone who has been thinking seriously about a career change enough to apply to a costly educational program such as Flatiron School would do their research.

Based on my experience, I don't find the numbers they report to be surprising. I'm personally more than a year into my first job (was hired almost immediately out of FS at almost exactly their 'average salary') and many if not most of my classmates have a similar experience. Flatiron, like any school, has students who put in the extra effort and students who expect to be successful when they're done just because they showed up every day. Those students tended to struggle throughout the course, and many needed to take internships before landing a full-time gig.

When I first looked into Flatiron, I checked the jobs report. When I saw that 52% of grads landed a full-time job, my thought was not 'oh good this school gets me a job.' It was 'I know with relative certainty that I will learn enough to be useful in a full-time junior dev role if I continue to work my ass off.'

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#78

Post by learc83 »

segmondy wrote: post #43
jefftk wrote: post #6

"Between January and June 2017, Flatiron claimed that 98.5% of its students received employment less than 180 days after graduation and that Flatiron graduates had an average salary of $74,447. However, Flatiron did not disclose clearly and conspicuously that the 98.5% employment rate included not only full time salaried employees but also apprentices, contract employees and self-employed freelance workers, some who…

58% of classroom graduates making $74,447 average seems better than most universities out there. Too bad they had to lie about it.

Their acceptance rate is much lower than all but the very top tier schools. Plus the students are a good bit older on average, they have more work experience, and most of them already have degrees.

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#79

Post by throwaway-2942 »

It's no surprise that DevBootcamp and Iron Yard, who recently closed, are not on the list of schools participating in CIRR (www.cirr.org/about). Also no surprise that Flatiron is also not in CIRR. Basically, any bootcamp not in CIRR is shady imho.

Full disclosure: I graduated from Hack Reactor in Austin, and got a job 2.5 months after graduation at a very reputable company in town. We also have 3 other HR grads, and a 30-ish person engineering team. This shit works. It's a shame schools like Flatiron drag the industry name down.

Pardon the throwaway to not identify myself from my actual account, which has lots of identify-able info.

Re: Flatiron School settles for operating without license, employment/salary claims

#80

Post by learc83 »

jcwayne wrote: post #54
arkades wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it better than a university CS degree?

After accounting for the difference in cost and time required, quite possibly.

They have a much lower acceptance rate than the vast majority of CS programs.

You'd need to compare them to Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley etc...

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