It seemed like a match made in heaven. Dominican University of California needed something fresh. The college wanted to offer students a hands-on learning experience in a lucrative tech field blooming in the Bay Area. Make School, a San Francisco-based gaming company turned for-profit educational institution, was already offering a short-term tech boot camp, designed to meet that same goal.
Together, they envisioned a setup through which Dominican students could take computer science classes and earn a minor and Make School students could take a few classes from Dominican faculty and earn a bachelor’s in applied computer science in only two years.
The partnership, established in 2018, would be the first of its kind. Although it had special approval from Dominican’s accreditor, Make School’s program received little oversight. No one was watching out for warning signs, financial or otherwise, of issues at Make School.
When Make School suddenly closed in 2021, citing financial problems, Dominican leaders were in uncharted territory, left to figure out how to help 167 students continue their education. The majority left the program without any credential to show for their time and effort.
Nicola Pitchford, Dominican’s vice president for academic affairs at the time and now its president, says the university did what it could to help the students, but she acknowledges that it was “a really lumpy ride.”
“There’s not yet a regulatory framework that provides clear guidance and boundaries for institutions trying to do this,” Pitchford says. “We would have been very grateful for not having to pioneer quite so much.”
Make School’s downfall, as documented by a Student Borrower Protection Center report provided to The Hechinger Report, should sound alarm bells about partnerships like this, advocates for students warn.
In these partnerships, the colleges typically just put their name on the programs, while the boot camp companies recruit students, develop curricula, and teach classes. Such arrangements are quietly proliferating with few, if any, quality controls in place to protect students. At least 75 such partnerships exist between colleges and three of the country’s top boot camp provider companies: edX, ThriveDX and Fullstack Academy. The colleges stand to make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on these deals, without having to do much work, according to reviews of the contracts obtained through public records requests.
When students enroll in a traditional college, they know the institution has met certain standards set by the federal and state governments and accrediting agencies. If their education doesn’t meet those standards, or if their school lies to them or closes, they are entitled to certain protections, including, in some cases, debt cancelation. But boot camp programs, which typically take two years or less to complete and do not offer academic credit, are unregulated.
“What you have is trusted brand-name schools, from community colleges to state universities, knowing that they have these valuable brands, and literally renting them out to for-profit companies,” says Ben Kaufman, director of research and investigations at the Student Borrower Protection Center. “The students will take on the debt because they trust the school, then go to a program that is usually very superficial.”
After starting in 2012 and pivoting from gaming to education in 2014, Make School operated for years as an unlicensed educational institution.
It received a citation in 2018 from California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education for operating without approval. Nevertheless, later that year, it joined forces with Dominican, a nonprofit college in San Rafael, California. At the time, college leaders were unaware that Make School was operating as an unapproved educational institution, a spokesperson from Dominican says.
The partnership was approved by Dominican’s accreditor, Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission, or WSCUC, in a special setup that allowed Dominican to essentially sponsor Make School and help it move quickly toward independent accreditation. This arrangement allowed Make School students to get federal financial aid.
Colleges that receive federal funding must uphold certain standards of “program integrity,” including accurate representations of the nature of their educational programs, the financial charges, and graduates’ employability.
Dominican’s accreditor did not review Make School’s curriculum. It did collect some financial information from Make School, but only at the beginning of the partnership to make sure that Dominican would be able to sustain it, according to Jamienne Studley, president of WSCUC.
As for employability, the Student Borrower Protection Center report says that Make School made what appear to be “misrepresentations” about the employability of its graduates, as well as about the price and nature of its program. The partnership thus violated required standards of “program integrity,” the report says, adding that Dominican is liable for misrepresentations made by Make School.
That contention is “vigorously disputed” by Dominican, according to a statement provided by its spokesperson. The statement adds that the applied computer science program was developed in full compliance with the accreditor’s standards and is certified by the Department of Education. Dominican also says that, before being contacted by The Hechinger Report, it was not aware of SBPC’s allegations.
SBPC’s Kaufman says they had not contacted Dominican, “because we didn’t think there was anything in our investigation that would have been a revelation to the school.” Ashutosh Desai, one of the cofounders of Make School, declined to comment for this story. Jeremy Rossmann, the other cofounder, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Andrea Graziosi learned about Make School in early 2020. Recently divorced, with two children, she badly needed a job. But with a decade-long gap in her résumé, she had found only a gig at a local yoga studio and occasional substitute teaching jobs.
She had earned a bachelor’s degree in finance two decades earlier, and Make School promised that it could help her land a good job. So, for an entire year, Graziosi spent 10 hours a day at her computer, listening to instructors. She found most to be inadequate at explaining the material. To complete homework assignments, she spent hours each night teaching herself the material, with help from Coursera and YouTube tutorials.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 2021, Make School’s finances were in disarray. And on July 1, 2021, dozens of students who attended Make School before its partnership with Dominican filed a lawsuit against Make School, alleging predatory and deceptive marketing and lending practices.
Shortly after the student lawsuit was filed, Make School leaders learned that they would not receive independent accreditation from WSCUC. Days after that, they told Dominican they planned to close, and a few days later emailed that news to students.
Graziosi was devastated, she says, experiencing anxiety so severe that she sought medical care. “I was holding on to it as my way to be OK, you know, to have a job and to sustain myself,” she says. “And the way they did it was so wrong.”
Dominican quickly announced that it was absorbing the applied computer science program. “We really worked as hard as we could, once that transition happened, to support the transitioning,” Pitchford says.
About 57 percent of the 167 students enrolled in Make School at the time continued their studies at Dominican, and only 40 percent went on to earn a Dominican degree, according to figures provided by the university.
Graziosi was not among them. She already had a bachelor’s degree, and, feeling that she’d wasted her time and money on the short-term program, she had zero trust in either institution.
Some experts say that Make School’s case is an extreme example. Most boot camp partnerships end up being a positive for students, says Jim Fong, chief research officer at the University Professional and Continuing Education Association. He sees the fact that colleges lend their names to these companies as an indication that the colleges believe in their quality.
But boot camp student success rates are typically self-reported and rarely externally vetted. Data often comes only from students who reply to surveys; such results are unlikely to reflect overall outcomes.
The company edX, which partners with 35 colleges to provide boot camps, reports rates of transfers to STEM careers and salary increases for its graduates, according to a survey provided by the company.
The federal government collects vast amounts of data from accredited schools, including graduation rates, and tracks earnings data for student-loan borrowers. But colleges are not required to report any information on non-credit-bearing boot camps to the Department of Education.
The department recently released guidance that would allow the government to review contracts between colleges and third-party providers, if the programs are eligible for academic credit. Most boot camps would still be exempt. Of the six regional accrediting agencies responsible for overseeing two- and four-year institutions, none monitors boot camps, according to officials at each agency.
“There really is not yet a sort of rigorous or uniform way of assuring students of the quality of these programs, what kinds of outcomes they have,” says Lawrence M. Schall, president of the New England Commission of Higher Education. “There is a need for some quality assurance in that world, but we are not there yet.”
And the costs for these programs are often immense. A review of contracts shows that short-term boot camps can cost up to $18,000, depending on program length. And because these programs typically aren’t eligible for federal aid, students must pay out of pocket or take out private loans.
The financial benefits of these partnerships for the colleges can be large. A review of seven contracts, including at least one each from edX, ThriveDX, and Fullstack Academy, shows that colleges typically receive about 20 percent of the boot camp revenue, while the for-profit companies collect the rest.
In return, colleges are not responsible for much. They often just approve access to their logos and alumni databases, which give the boot-camp companies a captive audience for recruiting.
No boot camp providers agreed to be interviewed for this story. A statement from edX’s founder Anant Agarwal emphasizes the quality of its programs and says that its boot camps engage top engineering faculty from colleges across the country.
“With the labor market the tightest it’s been in a generation, and with the rapid pace of technology projected to displace millions of jobs over the next decade, effective and accessible programs are necessary opportunities for workers, particularly those underserved by traditional 2- and 4-year pathways,” Agarwal wrote.
One student, Andrew Rodriguez, says that an edX boot camp at the University of Central Florida helped him get out of the service industry and into developer jobs building websites for causes he cares about. He says it was worth taking out a private loan to finance his boot camp education.
“My associate degree, I haven’t been able to do anything with it,” Rodriguez says. “Getting a bachelor’s degree gives you more options, but I got pretty good options with just the boot camp.”
He says he understood that the program wasn’t entirely run by the university, but that UCF’s endorsement helped him trust it.
Others have had less valuable experiences. Jonathan Hammond, who took out a private loan for $10,000 for an edX coding boot camp at the University of New Hampshire, says he had no idea that the boot camp wasn’t run by the university until after he’d enrolled.
Emails show that the person he messaged back and forth with about financing used the email address coding.bootcamp@unh.edu and had an email signature identifying the correspondent as an admissions coordinator for the “UNH coding boot camp.”
The spokesperson from edX says it takes measures to ensure that students are aware of the partnership between the university and the company, including training staff to answer phones by saying they are from the university “in partnership with edX.”
Hammond says that since edX “disguised themselves” as UNH, in his view, “I don’t know if I have ever spoken to someone from UNH directly.”
This story on coding boot camp programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for its higher education newsletter.
