MindShift – Anya Kamenetz, NPR
Our Ideas series is exploring how innovation happens in education.
Accordingly, the company tends to favor Ph.D.s from Stanford and MIT. But, it has just partnered with a for-profit company called General Assembly to offer a series of short, non-credit courses for people who want to learn how to build applications for Android, Google’s mobile platform. Short, as in just 12 weeks from novice to employable.
This is just one of a slew of big announcements this fall coming out of a peculiar, fast-growing corner of the higher education world: the coder bootcamp. This is really an entire new industry within higher ed that’s grown up in about five years.
Bootcamps are designed to teach cutting-edge technical skills like being a web developer or a mobile-app developer. Charging between $10,000 and $20,000 for tuition, with no previous experience required, in the course of just three to six months they promise to make participants highly employable in a lucrative and fast-growing industry.
As the industry grows, there are still a lot of unanswered questions, notably about ensuring quality and honesty in reporting of statistics like job placement. (A recent survey by an organization called Course Reportsays 66 percent of bootcamp graduates are employed in a related field and that they experienced a 38 percent salary bump on average.)
Still, the sector has attracted attention not just from major employers like Google, but from startup private education lenders, the big for-profit education companies and, not surprisingly, from regulators within the Department of Education as well.
For more thoughts on the future of tech-skills education and skills training more generally, I called up Jake Schwartz, CEO of General Assembly — one of the emerging leaders in this new sector.
Schwartz didn’t expect to go into the education business, much less start “a global educational institution.” In 2011, he and cofounders Adam Pritzker, Matthew Brimer and Brad Hargreaves opened a co-working space in Manhattan, where startup companies could rent desk space and share resources and networking opportunities.
To help pay the rent, they started holding workshops at night on topics like web design. Today they have 14 campuses in seven countries.
How did the new collaboration with Google arise? What are they getting out of this?
Android is one of the fastest growing platforms in the world — they have a billion users worldwide. We released a jobs report this summer with Burning Glass showing that demand for mobile developers has grown by over 150 percent in the last five years. I’m pumped that Google wanted to do this with us.
How heavily involved was Google in helping you develop these programs?
They made introductions, offered input on best practices, collaborated on the curriculum and contributed devices for students to use. And I expect they’ll continue to be involved and to offer networking opportunities to students.
So, this makes me think of how, in a previous generation, a community college may have helped trained welders to work in the local factory. Do you all see yourselves as the technical-skills providers for a new industry and a new generation?
This is not a new idea — I’m sure Detroit was filled with these kinds of programs back in the day. GE and AT&T had their own college campuses where new hires and employees would spend weeks at a time. They were making massive investments in training. And as average employee tenure went down, these investments also decreased.
We focus on the students first, but we see this as a two-sided market, addressing the needs of both companies and employees.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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