Houston Breedlove had several reasons for enrolling in the coding boot camp that Trilogy Education Services now runs in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
At a cost of $9,500, the six-month course was less expensive than those offered by competitors. It was designed as a part-time program, so Mr. Breedlove, who worked his way through the University of North Carolina at Greensboro as a martial-arts instructor and graduated in 2013 with a religious-studies major, could keep his job at a nearby hotel. Just as importantly, he says, the program had “that legit university” behind it.
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For Mr. Breedlove, it paid off. Partway through the program, he felt confident enough and “hireable” enough to quit his hotel job to focus exclusively on his boot-camp assignments. A week later he landed a paid internship at a nearby company that develops an app to help manage workflow on creative projects. Once he finished the boot camp in January, he was hired at the company full time. “If I had to do it again,” he says of his educational journey, “I would have gone straight to boot camp.”
Coding boot camps, which burst onto the education scene about five years ago, initially developed their caché as the antithesis to traditional colleges. Their courses were intensive, narrowly focused, and job-oriented. They attracted career changers, students who had never finished college, and recent graduates like Mr. Breedlove, who were seeking specific job skills.
The alums want jobs. The companies want talent.
That’s all still true. But today, with more than 90 companies and a few nonprofit organizations in North America operating short-term programs in software coding, data analytics, and other information-technology fields, several of the boot camps are discovering the value of a more direct connection to universities. And vice versa.
“The alums want jobs. The companies want talent,” says Ann Kirschner, who just stepped down as special adviser to the chancellor for strategic partnerships at the City University of New York. “Over time, if we don’t address that, we in higher education are giving away our birthright.” Earlier this year, she brought a coding training company called Revature to CUNY’s Queens College.
Revature, along with Trilogy, a company called the Software Guild, and the boot camp called Level, which Northeastern University created in 2015 and now boasts campuses in five cities, is among the most visible examples of this growing university-boot-camp symbiosis.
Trilogy, in fact, bases its entire business model on its partnerships with universities, much in the way companies like 2U, Pearson, and Learning House have contracted with institutions to help them design and market their online courses and degrees. In distance education, such outsourcing companies are known as online program managers, or OPMs. Trilogy is the first OPM for coding boot camps, and works primarily with colleges’ continuing-education divisions.
Besides UNC-Chapel Hill, Trilogy has current or pending partnerships with 17 institutions, including Northwestern and Rutgers Universities and the University of Central Florida. The universities typically provide the space — for the boot camp here, it’s a modern university conference center located a couple of miles from the historic main campus — and they OK marketing materials, admissions criteria, and curricula.
Revature has active or pending partnerships with 10 colleges now and expects to add a few more soon. Unlike most other coding boot camps, where tuition can run as high as $15,000 for an intensive six-month course (the national average is about $11,500), Revature has an unusual business model: It pays its admitted students a stipend during the 12-week coding course and then a salary of at least $50,000 after that, for the remainder of the student’s two-year commitment. Revature makes its money from companies that pay it once they hire trained employees. Currently Revature recruits recent college graduates from more than 700 institutions, but within the next 18 months it hopes to find up to 80 percent of its new recruits from its partner institutions.
I think the universities are happy to have their brands rented. They need the money.
For the college partners, says Joe Mitchell, who oversees Revature’s partnerships, “it’s about ensuring access to high-value jobs in technology.” For Revature, the partnerships create a pipeline for new talent, including minority students. “Every major organization has a diversity agenda,” says Mr. Mitchell, and the colleges, particularly institutions like CUNY, can help fulfill that.
Colleges in partnership with Revature have no direct financial relationship with the company; other boot camps with ties to colleges typically share the tuition revenues under formulas that are not generally made public.
The Software Guild, which was acquired by Learning House in 2015, now boasts a half-dozen college partners. In most cases, the partnerships are primarily co-branded ventures, in which ties to the university are slight. But at two of the partners, Concordia University in St. Paul, Minn., and Stark State College, in Ohio, the Software Guild’s courses can also count toward a degree.
Although the company receives the lion’s share of the revenues, Eric E. LaMott, Concordia’s provost, says the arrangement helped the college establish its own computer-science degree recently. The boot camp began on the Concordia campus but has since moved to what Mr. LaMott calls “a hipper location in Minneapolis.” Since it began in 2015, only 57 students have taken the Software Guild’s courses for credit, and only seven have gone on to enroll at Concordia. But the provost says the university sees this as a long-term play. If a boot-camp student eventually decides to pursue a full degree, says Mr. LaMott “we want to be the path of least resistance.”
For all the hype about them, boot camps still make up only a small niche in the educational market. Course Report, a search site for students looking for boot camps, has estimated that the 90-plus such schools in the United States and Canada had about 18,000 students complete their programs in 2016. That’s less than a one-third of the estimated number of students graduating from college with computer-science degrees annually, but a notable uptick from the 10,000 boot-camp graduates the year before.
Some boot camps also have a spotty record in reporting their job-placement rates and graduates’ salaries in a way that would be truly useful to prospective students, although several efforts are now underway to correct that. (This month, for example, the 14 founding members of a new Council on Integrity in Results Reporting plan to publish their first set of results, based on a uniform set of reporting standards for boot camps.)
Better reporting of results would be a welcome improvement, says Rich Flynn, a managing director at Tyton Partners, an investment-banking firm, who follows the boot-camp industry. “Everyone’s not getting 98 percent” job-placement rates, he says. “There’s a lot of BS out there.” Still, he regards boot camps as a good, albeit pricey, career investment for students. As for the university relationships, even if some might see those partnerships as a way for boot camps to “rent” the university’s reputation, Mr. Flynn says they serve both parties: “I think the universities are happy to have their brands rented,” he says. “They need the money.”
Dan Sommer, Trilogy’s founder, insists that the academic partners are more than just window dressing. “We wouldn’t be successful if the universities weren’t involved,” he says.
J. Jeffrey Jones, vice provost for regional campuses at the University of Central Florida, says his institution vetted the Trilogy program before signing on and continues to do so. So far, most of the students have not had direct ties to his university, but, he says, “There clearly is a need for this in our economy.”
One of the costs Trilogy assumes is that of helping its students find jobs. The company claims a 90-percent success rate. Two months after graduation, at least a couple of Mr. Breedlove’s classmates are still looking. But like him, both say they’re far more hireable now than before. They expect to land jobs soon.
As for Mr. Breedlove, he’s not only happy with his job, but also reports that he’s about to get some additional responsibilities. And this month he’ll start supervising a new intern: a student from the Trilogy boot camp at UNC-Chapel Hill.
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.
