A Dropout’s Coding School Joins a College

Ashutosh Desai dropped out of a computer-science program at the University of California at Los Angeles after just a year. Now he is trying to remake the college experience.

In 2014, Desai founded a coding academy, Make School. It recently partnered with Dominican University of California to offer a bachelor’s degree, as well as a minor, in applied computer science. The goal, he said, is to prepare a diverse group of programmers for positions in top tech firms.

About 40 percent of Make School’s students are from underrepresented populations, according to the company. The tuition, $70,000 for the two-year program, can be paid through an income-share agreement — students pay nothing unless they are earning at least $60,000 a year after they graduate. Graduates earn $95,000 on average, the company reports.

But to make it possible for more programs like this to function, both colleges and the federal government need standards for meaningful outcomes, such as job placement and earnings, Desai argues in a paper to be published by the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that supports free-market approaches.

Desai spoke with The Chronicle about his own experience in school, the role of Silicon Valley in diversity, and the ways that colleges and policymakers can work together to help students.

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You describe yourself as a college dropout who succeeded despite the failings of higher education. But you’re not in the camp of people who say that “too many students go to college,” right? You’re saying that more students need a different kind of postsecondary experience.

I was very fortunate to be able to go to schools that were very progressive in the way they taught. My middle school was no homework, no grades, no tests, learn by doing. At my high school, in Palo Alto, it was very similar. We had a very progressive education and teachers who thought a lot about making a better and more engaging classroom experience.

My ability to forgo college was largely due to the education that I had received. It wasn’t necessarily anything I had done but just the privilege that I was granted this kind of education. For students who don’t have that kind of background, that kind of privilege, it’s hard to say “You shouldn’t go to college.”

The other thing that going to these very progressive kinds of schools has shown me was what a really, really engaging and high-quality education looks like from a classroom experience. When you talk about a minute-by-minute comparison between sitting in a classroom in my high school and sitting in a classroom at UCLA, I learned a lot more and was a lot more engaged and had a lot more opportunity to collaborate with my peers in the classes I took in high school. It’s almost like going to a really great middle school and high school ruined me for higher education.

One problem you identify is that minority students are routinely passed over for good jobs in the tech industry. Is this a problem of the quality of their education or of discriminatory hiring practices?

It’s a mix of both, so I definitely don’t want to say that companies in Silicon Valley aren’t to blame. They definitely are. In addition to that, the way that computer science is taught at a lot of schools is still not very relevant to the way it’s used in the industry. It’s relevant for things like research labs at institutions, but it’s not relevant for building great software in a commercial capacity. When you have schools like Stanford or MIT, what happens is there are more classes that are tighter with industry. You end up getting exposure to the relevant types of skills that you will need. And so usually from these top schools, which tend to be less diverse, you do have a bit more industry transfer But most colleges don’t have strong industry ties, and as a result the education tends not to be as direct there.

You argue that the tech industry needs another 40,000 employees every year because colleges are not adequately preparing them. Your pilot university started in 2014, accepts only 30 percent of applicants, and has just 200 graduates so far. Is it possible to do this on a larger scale and with less selectivity?

It’s worth thinking about what the selection criteria are. What ends up happening in our application process is that students who don’t have a strong body of evidence to gain admission, we usually will send them to do what we call the Ramp program to basically do some work to demonstrate that they can get through that.

I don’t think it’s wrong to say we want to select students who we feel will be successful in the environment that we are creating at the institution. It’s impossible to serve every student with a different baseline admissions score. I think the question then is how do you treat that: Do you treat that as a gate and say, “Oh, you didn’t get in, and therefore you will never be a part of our institution”? Or do you put someone on a ladder and say, “Here are some specific things we didn’t see in your application today, but if you go and do this program and come back to us in a year we would be happy to support you”? Actually, about half our students this year came to us through the Ramp program.

You also seem to be pushing for a lot more government oversight, including applying gainful-employment rules to all colleges; mandatory job-outcomes reporting, which can be expensive and hard to verify; new requirements for accreditors; and regulations on income-share agreements. How should we balance the freedom of the market with necessary consumer protections?

You create a really great container for these kind of free-market ideas, by making sure that the students are protected from downside risks that they have a degree and not a job; that they cannot get a mortgage because they’re stuck in education debt; that the debt continues to go on and has super-high interest rates, or they’re paying way too much for an education that they could have gotten for less money.

That’s what these different corrections are about. And so, when I think about government regulations, you should absolutely slap on as many of those bounds as possible. And then, within these bounds, what you’ve now done is create a bit of a safer space. What the challenge might have been for the for-profit colleges of the past is that we didn’t set these boundaries right. If you just set limits on behaviors that could be harmful to students, then the dangers of free-market ideas and allowing for innovation are lower because you have these checks and balances in place.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.