Coding camps are not happy campers
For-profit schools have faced fines, long delays in California
In January 2014, the state bureau that regulates for-profit vocational schools sent cease-anddesist letters to nine coding boot camps operating in California without a license, threatening to shut them down if they didn’t get approval.
It later sent similar letters to at least eight others that appeared to be unlicensed boot camps. Yet in all that time, only two have gotten licensed — Dev Bootcamp and General Assembly.
Of the original nine, eight have “submitted some kind of application,” said Joanne Wenzel, chief of the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education.
The bureau fined five boot camps $50,000 apiece for operating without a license. Two of them, Coding Dojo and Rocket Space, paid a reduced fine after agreeing to submit an application. Fines are still pending against Hackbright Academy, App Academy/Hash Map Labs and LAN WAN Professional, according to the bureau’s website.
Some coding schools blame the bureau for the delay in approving coding camps. The bureau says camps often submit incomplete applications.
Coding camps have sprung up in the last four or five years to help fill the gaping shortage of hightech workers. They generally offer nine- to 12-week training programs for jobs in software development or related fields. Full-time programs cost around $9,000 to $18,000.
Their students are not eligible for federal grants or loans, because the camps are not accredited. Getting licensed is not the same as getting accredited and does not make the camps eligible for federal financial aid.
The bureau is part of the California Department of Consumer Affairs and is concerned with “basic consumer protection,” Wenzel said.
Among other things, the schools must publicly disclose their refund policies, program-completion and job-placement rates, and alumni salary ranges. The bureau does not verify this information before granting a license, but once a school is licensed, it is subject to compliance inspections at least once every five years. If a li-
censed school shuts down abruptly, students are eligible for fee reimbursement from the Student Tuition Recovery Fund.
Vocational schools are supposed to be licensed before they open, but in the beginning, boot camps did not think they were subject to this requirement. “They don’t see it as a traditional education,” Wenzel said.
Many of their students already have four-year degrees. Many of their teachers do not have a degree in computer science, which some camps thought would prevent them from getting licensed.
“We don’t hire Ph.D.s in computer science. We hire practicing engineers who have been writing code on software development teams for 10 years. So far, when we explain that (to regulators), it hasn’t been an issue,” said John Stowe, president of Dev Bootcamp. The San Francisco company was acquired by Kaplan, a large forprofit education provider, in mid-2014. That made it easier for it to get licensed in the three states where it operates.
General Assembly was licensed in California early last year. “Our experience with California regulators has been extremely positive, (although) it did take more time than a lot of places where we have gotten licensed,” said Liz Simon, the New York company’s vice president for legal and external affairs. She said the disclosure requirements are more extensive in California than elsewhere. “I think that’s a good thing.”
Coding camps are required to post fact sheets for students on- line, including placement rates and salary ranges. For example, you can find General Assembly’s data by clicking on “Regulatory Information” at the bottom of its home page. Its fact sheet for San Francisco has information only through 2014, and little salary data. Information for 2015 should be available in August, Simon said.
Dev Bootcamp’s fact sheets are harder to find. “We don’t give it prominence, since we decided some time ago not to use employment and salary claims for advertising purposes,” a spokesman said.
Its fact sheet for San Francisco shows that of 243 graduates from 2014 employed in the field, 53 were making $30,000 to $70,000 a year, 52 were making $72,000 to $88,100 and 35 were making $90,000 to $135,100. The remaining 103 did not report their salary. (The fact sheet can be found at http://bit.ly/ 1MspAUl.)
Some boot camps have faced longer delays getting licensed in California. “We submitted our full application for licensure in early June of 2015,” said Jenna Wolfe, director of corporate and legal affairs for Coding Dojo. “We pretty quickly got a confirmation that the office received it. We haven’t heard anything since then.”
The company, based outside Seattle, submitted a licensing application in Washington the same month and it was approved in early October. “They have a very user-friendly website ... and more immediate back-and-forth exchange of information,” Wolfe said, adding that she is eager to get licensed in California. “We really want that stamp of ap- proval.”
Hack Reactor said the bureau received its licensing application last March 30. “It took them three or four months to review it,” said Sam Singer, an outside spokesman for the company. It took Hack Reactor several more months to provide the bureau with information it requested. The application requires “a tremendous amount of documentation,” Singer said. “Hack Reactor is pleased with how the state is being thoughtful about its regulation of coding academies.”
Sharon Wienbar, CEO of Hackbright Academy, said in an email, “We are working closely with (the bureau) to become licensed. Our application is under review.”
Eric Choi, executive director of LAN WAN Professional in Irvine, said his company does not teach coding, it trains network engineers and architects. He said it should not be regulated by the bureau because it is a membership organization and students don’t pay for training until “after services are rendered.” They typically pay a percentage of their salary for three years.
Wenzel said the bureau “does have a backlog. But for most of these applications that we have pending, it has taken a while to get complete and compliant applications from them.” Some of the schools that got ceaseand-desist letters after the initial nine “have never responded to us.”
Meanwhile, the bureau has been holding task force meetings, required by a 2014 state law, to determine whether coding camps should be regulated differently than other postsecondary schools.
The task force met seven times last year, said Angela Perry, a law fellow with Public Advocates, a civil rights law firm in San Francisco. A report issued at the end of December recommended “an expedited approval process for coding boot camps,” she said.
Her firm does not think these camps should be treated differently. “These are untested programs. Most approvals are delayed because schools make errors in filling out their paperwork. We think that should raise a red flag,” Perry said.
California “has a long history of computer training programs. We’ve had these tech booms multiple times.” And in the past, some programs “have enrolled a lot of students and then did not deliver on their promise,” she said.
“There’s nothing inherently wrong with coding boot camps,” Perry added. “We just want to make sure if a student is investing $10,000 or $20,000 for a 10- or 12-week program, they are getting the services that are promised.”