Risks and rewards

LIBERAL-ARTS degrees and computer savvy rarely sit comfortably together. But computer-programming is increasingly where the jobs are. This logic guided Adam Enbar and Avi Flombaum in 2012 to found Flatiron, one of many coding boot-camps sprinkled across America. The camps offer intensive courses in web development, usually lasting three to six months. They aim to prepare students for software-engineering jobs, while offering career advice and the chance to network: in short, vocational school for the information age.

They have emerged to fill a pressing demand for coders. Software-engineering jobs will grow at a rate of 18.8% by 2024—nearly triple the rate of overall job growth, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics. So boot-camps are multiplying. In 2015 more than 16,000 students graduated from them, a 138% increase from the year before, according to Course Report, an organisation that tracks the industry. They are also big business: publicly traded for-profit education companies are crowding in.

Most boot-camp students are between 22 and 35 and have a college degree. Some have developed an interest in programming since graduation, or see it as a route to higher pay. Sarah Natow, a Harvard graduate, worked in museum fundraising until, dissatisfied with the non-profit sector, she gave up her job and started a course at General Assembly, a boot-camp in New York. She felt she needed “some skill set that would give me an entrée into some other area”, and General Assembly offered a fairly quick fix: three months for $13,500, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a two-year masters programme.

The first job after a boot-camp may not pay that well, explains Natacha Springer, who worked in biotech for ten years, took time off to bring up children, and then attended Flatiron. But she saw a 40% salary increase when she started her second job, and now works as a software engineer for a salary in six figures.

Boot-camps claim that over 95% of graduates find jobs as software engineers; starting salaries, they say, average around $65,000. Such claims are seldom independently verified. As the camps proliferate and more second-rate schools enter the market, quality may suffer. Critics also argue that no crash course can compare with a computer-science degree. They contend that three months’ study of algorithms and data structures is barely enough to get an entry-level job.

Until now, worries about quality have mattered only to those who can afford boot-camps or can secure private loans to attend: tuition fees range from $10,000 to $20,000. That is about to change. Last year the Department of Education announced a pilot programme to make federal funds available to boot-camps, which are currently unaccredited and whose students are therefore ineligible for federal aid. As part of the programme, up to ten accredited colleges will work in partnership with “non-traditional providers”, like boot-camps, and the quality of the camps will be assessed by a third party. The goal is both to open the boot-camps to students from poorer backgrounds, and to improve oversight of the courses offered.

Many who follow the education business worry about federal involvement. For-profit education companies have a mixed history in America; they have been known to take federal money while over-promising, offering sub-standard instruction and saddling unsuspecting students with debt. So far, says Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, boot-camps have not been proved to do much for low-income students without a college degree.

Mr Nassirian is right. The vast majority of today’s boot-camp students are sophisticated consumers who have gone through college. They view the courses as an expensive but necessary add-on, and judge their quality by how much private investment they attract. That is how for-profit education companies should work. To offer these companies the open spigot of federal funding seems too risky, both for taxpayers and for student borrowers.