Holberton School, the coding school that bills itself as an alternative to college for budding software engineers from all walks of life, keeps expanding. After recently opening schools in Colombia and Tunisia, the organization today announced that it will open a new campus in Tulsa, Okla. in January 2020. With this, Holberton will soon operate three schools in the U.S. (San Francisco, New Haven and Tulsa), three in Colombia (Bogota, Cali and Medellin) and one in Tunis, Tunisia.
For the Tulsa campus, Holberton is partnering with the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation to offer students a need-based living assistance of $1,500 per month to help cover expenses. Once students pass the blind entrance exam and gain admission to its two-year program, classes at Holberton are free until students get a job that pays more than $40,000. At that point, they pay Holberton a share of their income for the next 42 months, capped at $85,000.
“Holberton education will bring Silicon Valley skills to America’s heartland,” said Pauline Cohen Vorms, Holberton’s director of business development and partnerships. “By training students in the Tulsa area in high-paying, in-demand jobs, we can contribute to both the workforce development and economic growth in Tulsa.”
The school argues that its admissions process has enabled it to recruit one of the most diverse classes in the tech industry and that it has placed students at companies including Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn and Tesla. As with some of its other campuses, Tulsa brings Holberton’s curriculum to communities that aren’t typically seen as competitors to Silicon Valley but that surely have a large pool of engineering talent.