As Coding Boot Camps Grow, One Tries a Nonprofit Model

Chronicle photo by Goldie Blumenstyk

The Turing School of Software & Design is a different kind of coding boot camp.

While most of these upstart education providers are for-profit companies, either backed by venture-capital funds or owned by older for-profit education businesses, Turing is a nonprofit organization, and it sees itself as a coding school with a “social justice” mission, particularly focused on enrolling women and members of minority groups who are underrepresented in the tech industry.

Boot camps play a growing role in higher education. As they began popping up about four years ago, they were largely separate from traditional colleges — often offering pricy short-term courses in computer programming, web design, and other tech-related fields to recent college graduates or people hoping to switch careers. They are a kind of antidote to online degree programs, since the teaching takes place in person and students are encouraged to work intensively, night and day, to quickly learn material and build skills that employers are looking for.

There are now about 200 for-profit boot camps, and recently some have begun to work more directly with traditional colleges. A few are creating joint computer-science degrees or providing their programs as substitutes for a college’s own curriculum. In May a data-science program run jointly by the University of New Haven and the Galvanize boot camp graduated its first seven master’s students, and although that first class was small, 32 students are currently enrolled, and the organizations say they expect 28 more to enroll this month for the fourth class of the yearlong program.

One traditional institution, Northeastern University, has even created its own boot camp.

Most coding boot camps are unaccredited and ineligible for federal financial aid, although an experiment announced last year by the U.S. Department of Education could open the door to that for some of them. Turing says it was turned down for that pilot program (the winners have yet to be announced) but is now exploring accreditation on its own so its students could eventually receive funds from federal student-aid programs and the GI Bill.

Turing is one of the few independent nonprofit coding schools in the country, and it represents something a little different, combining the focus of the for-profit boot camps with what Louis Soares of the American Council on Education calls “the missionable purpose” of traditional colleges. Though not directly familiar with Turing, Mr. Soares, ACE’s vice president for policy research and strategy, is a close observer of the evolving education scene, and sees Turing as “a new hybrid in the ecosystem.”

Personal Bootstrapping

Turing was founded in 2014 by Jeff Casimir, a Teach for America alumnus, and it operates out of the basement of a downtown office building here, where the clutter of bikes, exposed pipes, and bare concrete walls lends it a Brooklyn-hipster vibe.

Before starting Turing, Mr. Casimir created the education program at Galvanize, which also operates as a tech-business incubator and has attracted VC money. He left Galvanize after a year and a half, selling his stake back to the company for $1.

“Once we got rolling I just realized that the goals of business, especially one that takes investment, weren’t totally aligned with my goals of running an educational institution,” he says. “Every business that has investment, you need to pay those investors.” And in the tech sector, he adds, “They’re looking for five- to 10-X returns on that investment.”

Investors see boot camps as hot targets right now. But he says his goal was to create an organization that would “last a hundred years — to build a thing that seems like it’s always been there that we take for granted in the same way we do MIT or Stanford.”

Mr. Casimir, who had previously started a charter-school campus in Washington, D.C., bootstrapped the start-up of Turing with the capital he raised by selling his house and “a month’s worth of credit-card debt.”

Turing now enrolls about 90 students every seven weeks, and has graduated about 300.

It’s not cheap — the program runs for 27 weeks and costs $17,500 — but he says that’s longer than most coding schools and, on a per-week basis, is one of the most affordable in the industry. About a third of its students use its tuition-deferment plan, paying $5,000 upfront and the rest over the three years after they graduate. It also offers a small number of $4,000 “diversity scholarships,” to students from groups traditionally underrepresented in technology.

Turing’s goal is for students to be able to pay back their “real costs” of attending, including tuition and any lost wages, within two years. In 2015 the average graduate gained an annual pay increase of $33,000 and earned back the cost in less than 20 months, according to the school’s “2015 Outcomes” report, which also includes statistics on the kinds of jobs graduates have landed.

“Our industry has talked big about transparency,” says Mr. Casimir, but few other coding schools have published such audited reports describing what happens to their students.

The Language of Diversity

In seeking a more-diverse enrollment than traditional coding boot camps, Mr. Casimir says one key is “the language that we use to talk about the program and the issues we choose to get involved with.”

Last month, for example, after a police shooting of a black driver in Falcon Heights, Minn., and the killing of five police officers in Dallas put issues of racially charged gun violence back in the headlines, Turing held what he calls “extensive conversations” about the issues with its students, including one who came to school after working for 10 years as a police officer. A student then put up a summary of the conversations on Turing’s blog. “That’s the stuff that’s hard to do when you have shareholders and investors and owners,” he says.

Mr. Casimir, who has taught computer coding since 2003, says Turing employs many former teachers and the organization has “a very high respect for the profession of education.”

Out of a staff of 23, 14 are women. “It’s one of the first things people remark when they come in this space,” says Mr. Casimir “There are a lot of women here.” About 30 percent of Turing’s students are women, about double the percentage in the software-development industry, he says. More than a quarter of students are people of color.

Even the name of the school is meant to be symbolic. It’s named for Alan Turing, the British mathematician and pioneering computer scientist whose work in breaking German codes is credited with shortening the duration of World War II, but who also faced criminal charges for his homosexuality. Mr. Casimir says the name is his way of signaling: “Let’s use technology to do important work, but create an environment where people are not just accepted but actively welcome into what we are.”

Because of their price, many coding boot camps have developed a reputation as options designed for well-off college graduates looking to add a hard skill to their résumés. Mr. Casimir says he hopes that Turing is “lowering the risk profile of what it means to become a student” at a coding boot camp.

Turing faces stiff competition: Galvanize has a higher profile in Denver, as does General Assembly, and the Iron Yard, owned by the parent company of the University of Phoenix, is opening a campus in South Denver. But Mr. Casimir believes there’s a place for Turing. “Does MIT care what University of Phoenix is doing?” he asks. “No, so why should we?”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.

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