Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ag.ny.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 217 posts

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

#111

Post by josh_carterPDX »

This is what has always concerned me. A lot of bootcamps are popping up making it hard to figure out which ones are legitimate. On top of that, as a military vet, I have worked hard to figure out how to get the G.I. Bill to be used with these bootcamps. Today, not many qualify because of a number of variables, but mostly include how the curriculum is dynamic.

Flatiron is one of the better orgs with a pretty good reputation. It's tough to read that they've fallen short for their students. It causes a lot of anxiety for those trying to utilize these schools to learn coding.

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

#112

Post by adamzerner »

shawndrost wrote: post #71
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 coupl…

> third-party industry averages (~70% placement rate)

The ~70% placement rate seems to refer to what percentage of applicants get full time jobs within 6 months of graduating. For within 3 months of graduating, the placement rate seems to drop to 30-40%. (See https://cirr.org/data)

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

#113

Post by WindyCityBrew »

adamzerner wrote: post #109

Back in 2014, coding bootcamps were advertising rates in the 90s. See https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-job-placement-rates-at-va... . From that post, this is what the director of admissions at Fullstack Academy claims are the job placement rates of some popular bootcamps: - Fullstack Academy: 97% - Hack Reactor: 99% - App Academy: 98% - Dev Bootcamp: 90% - Flatiron School: 98% (He edited his post to take this down…

There's other ways of manipulating the numbers too. I attended App Academy, but as an "auditing student" meaning I paid the same price and did the same work but, according to the information, I might not get a pair to program with if the classroom count was odd.

However, I'd bet a shiny nickel that auditing students aren't part of their advertised statistics. Or at least auditing students that don't make the numbers better. I "graduated" just fine and found a job at above their salary avg, so who knows if I'm part of their numbers or not.

Edit to add: Not trying to say anything bad about AA here, I really enjoyed the program and it has been money well spent. I just wanted to chime in on the topic of "9X% of students make 6 figures after graduation"

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

#114

Post by brudgers »

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.

A general practice of many coding bootcamps is making admissions selections in part based on the likelihood of career (as opposed to academic) success. There is a degree of "would I like to have a beer with this person" in the application process which is absent from traditional academic institutions like 'Old State U.'

One of the operating models of bootcamps is as a recruiter for tech companies. In addition to tuition from students, the bootcamp receives a fee from employers when graduates are hired. This provides incentives bootcamps to encourage students to take jobs as apprentices. And whether a student has the financial resources to take on an apprentice role can also factor into admission selection.

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

#115

Post by ng12 »

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #92
got2surf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Better" is tough to say - coding bootcamps are focused on getting a coding job, but university CS degrees are not (CS graduates going into other fields [like finance], research/grad school, etc). If the goal is to get a high-paying coding job as quickly as possible, bootcamps look good. Would be interesting to look at longer-term trends in a few years - career advancement, job type, management level, industry within…

A bit of a rant since I worked in the industry: > CS graduates going into other fields [like finance] Finance is just like every other high-professional industry, they train you for what you need to know because they are invested in your success. I worked in that industry for 6 years. Most banks run a 2-3 month internal bootcamp for fresh college hires. I was a math/econ double major and sat next to an english lit ma…

I can't speak for Finance but if your CS degree isn't equivalent to ~4 years of work experience you went to a bad school.

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

#116

Post by shawndrost »

adamzerner wrote: post #112
shawndrost wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coupl…

> third-party industry averages (~70% placement rate) The ~70% placement rate seems to refer to what percentage of applicants get full time jobs within 6 months of graduating. For within 3 months of graduating, the placement rate seems to drop to 30-40%. (See https://cirr.org/data )

I was referring to Course Report's third-party industry averages, 75.2% within 180 days.

https://www.coursereport.com/reports/2016-coding-bootcamp-jo...

What you said is also true though.

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

#117

Post by lloyd-christmas »

adamzerner wrote: post #109

Back in 2014, coding bootcamps were advertising rates in the 90s. See https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-job-placement-rates-at-va... . From that post, this is what the director of admissions at Fullstack Academy claims are the job placement rates of some popular bootcamps: - Fullstack Academy: 97% - Hack Reactor: 99% - App Academy: 98% - Dev Bootcamp: 90% - Flatiron School: 98% (He edited his post to take this down…

There is also market saturation. My brother took the GA bootcamp in 2013, I took it in 2014. The outcomes were drastically different because their hiring partners/relationships couldn't keep up with their output. When he took it, they had a speed-dating event at the end of the course where employers had already signed up to take on an intern, i.e. 100% job placement. One year later, my class had nothing more than a meet and greet. Less than half of my classmates were hired through that event. I can't imagine the outcomes are any better now.

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

#118

Post by nether »

jerrytsai wrote: post #70
unclesaamm wrote: post #34

I know some folks who graduated from Galvanize's Data Science program. They were told that historically 90% of graduates find jobs in 6 months. She is 6 months out, and only half of her cohort has a job.

As someone who attended that program, the statistics are rosier than they're reporting. I have examined the employment claims, and know the program pretty well. I believe the 90% claim, historically, is close to valid. A fairer representation might have been 5 in 6 (83.3%), but it was pretty close to the mark. You can see where people in the early cohorts are working, and the success rate is very high. What has chang…

I've heard the cold, hard truth about DS bootcamps is that your job prospects after completing one will be about the same as they were prior to the bootcamp.

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

#120

Post by eternalban »

kowdermeister wrote: post #49
brians wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never heard of them stopping you from teaching something extra. Does this mean you dropped something to make room for grids?

In my country you can't function like a normal school if your syllabus needs to be accredited and it's not easy to change it. We didn't really drop anything, an extra day appeared because they were already better prepared before starting the course with basic materials.

I don't see the problem.

A syllabus -- per dictionary.com, "an outline or other brief statement of the main points of a discourse, the subjects of a course of lectures, the contents of a curriculum, etc." -- is required by a governing authority that presumably has an interest in what citizen/subject (per your local regime) are being taught. This seems legitimate in the general case.

Your syllabus can be "unit-n: overview of current layout technologies for www browsers". Problem solved, no?

Post reply on HN