Coding bootcamp Nucamp will no longer publish job placement metrics in its advertising materials, a move that CEO Ludovic Fourrage is making to rebuild student trust in the industry.
“Students have to be accountable for finding the right job in the industry, and too often placement is easily used as a justification of increasing the cost of education without necessarily looking at the quality of the kind of education,” he said.
“Now, that does not mean we don’t care about the placement; of course we care and we measure it, but we will never want the registration decision of the students based on that promise, because right now that promise is extremely disputed in the industry.”
The move is less about Nucamp declaring that it doesn’t market its placement rates, and more indicative of a broader issue: job placement is the most in-demand outcome, but also one of the hardest to deliver. Edtech has always been in pursuit of a magic metric, but measuring success for the sector remains elusive.
Fourrage launched his bootstrapped startup, a full-stack coding bootcamp with a focus on affordable education, in 2017 – a year before Lambda School raised its first millions from venture capitalists.
“What we found about [income-share agreements], which was very intriguing and surprising, is how much students are not able to understand the value of what they are buying,” Fourrage said. “[They were] very confused between the value of the education, with the value of the outcome, or the potential outcome.” He believed that consumers didn’t question Lambda’s high price tag because of the advertised and promised outcome of job placement.
Fourrage immediately saw Lambda, which recently rebranded to Bloom Institute of Technology, as a direct competitor, even though tuition at Lambda was nearly double that of what Nucamp charged. The flashy Lambda, led by Austen Allred, sported a Y Combinator stamp of approval and an enticing pitch in the income-share agreement: Graduates only pay tuition off a future income.
“The challenge with that is that promise very often doesn’t materialize, and so that’s the vicious cycle that we want to break,” he said.
BloomTech has been scrutinized for years in response to its job placement advertising. Beyond facing a slew of ongoing lawsuits, BloomTech received pushback after a Business Insider investigation alleged the company intentionally misled students through its placement rates.
“Job outcomes are clearly top of mind of students – how do you get to the truth while really making sure that students feel comfortable about their choice?” said Fourrage. For now, Nucamp is tracking course completion rate, as well as how many students are applying skills they learned on the platform in their current jobs, through surveys and daily updates.
Of course, the obfuscation of metrics can cast a questionable light on a startup. Nucamp doesn’t even share job placement metrics with learners once they join the platform. What it aims to gain in lack of deception, it could lose in lack of transparency. After all, if your job placement rates were so good, why wouldn’t you advertise them?
Springboard CEO and co-founder Gautam Tambay thinks the solution to opaque reporting and confused students “needs to start with more transparency, not less.”
“Withholding outcomes altogether is certainly not the solution,” he said. “We need to publish outcomes in a way that is both transparent and easy to understand, instead of burying our heads in the sand.
“While nobody is perfect, leading with transparency forces us and the industry to acknowledge that, and make improvements and create better experiences for our students as we go,” Tambay added.
Springboard recently announced the launch of a 12-week tech sales bootcamp to help non-tech workers break into the career path. It is in the process of publishing updated outcomes data in the coming weeks in an effort to appeal to prospective students.
It’s a story that Flockjay founder Shaan Hathiramani knows too well. The co-founder built exactly what Springboard’s new product is offering: a tech bootcamp that helps sales folks get into tech jobs. Hathiramani, however, recently laid off half of his team. Flockjay’s new focus is a B2B SaaS platform that helps with the retention of new employees.
Hathiramani said misleading marketing, in which students are tempted with job placement data that is calculated through questionable means, has grown to be enough of an issue that students should be thinking about it when picking a bootcamp. Ironically, he added that traditional edtech doesn’t even measure job placement that rigorously — so bootcamp transparency is more an opportunity than a trigger response.
“I believe upward mobility doesn’t end with landing a job after a bootcamp, and in many ways is just a beginning,” he said in a text-message exchange. “It’s incredibly important to set grads launching their careers up for success and measure impact through their upward mobility and success on the job.”
When Flockjay was more directly in the bootcamp business, it tracked placement rates, as well as three-month, six-month and one-year retention rates. In advertising, the startup sought to offer a holistic picture of merits, including historical placement rates, testimonials, graduate retention and promotion rates.
The debate about whether it makes sense to share outcomes data in the form of placements is part of the appeal of a platform like Career Karma, which recently raised $40 million to bring its bootcamp navigation services to the enterprise. CEO and co-founder Ruben Harris noted that schools measure, collect and report data in different ways, but said disclosing outcomes is “a decision that a school should make themselves since their reputation is on the line.”
“The student should read about the methodology of who was surveyed and make an educated choice for themselves,” he said. “For that reason, we built a directory to gather applicant, graduate and alumni reviews in order to raise transparency from peers going through similar journeys.” As the market grows, resources that explain what students are paying for – and not just how much they are paying – will be even more imperative.
Nucamp’s Fourrage agreed with the idea that customers, or students, are asking for more transparency, but he said it doesn’t make sense to share his startup’s placement rates if other bootcamps are lying about theirs.
The co-founder acknowledged that taking out job placement data creates “an enormous risk” for the bootstrapped company, but stronger financial footing will help it weather any potential pushback. For now, he’s sticking with affordability as the key way to attract students to his platform.
“When you promise jobs, that gives you the liberty to increase your cost as much as you want because you promise the job.”