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by SlyShy 3262 days ago
As a former employee I have to say that Kaplan did a very fine job of running the place into the ground. Kaplan management managed to take an industry leader with first mover advantage and completely squander it by myopically focusing on quarterly profits. They really should have switched to a pay-after-getting-a-job tuition model that schools like AppAcademy offer. That would have simultaneously better met the mission of serving diverse students (students who can't afford $17,000+ and living in an expensive urban area for almost five months) and improve long term outcomes.

The pay-after-getting-a-job model creates virtuous cycles, because the schools that implement it suck up the most prepared students. Schools not offering that model end up with the leftovers after admissions to the top schools.

Arguably colleges and universities should also adopt pay-after-getting-a-job but that would probably hurt their bottom lines substantially. It definitely creates the correct alignment of incentives for the school to educate well.

Pretty amazing too, considering Kaplan has very deep pockets and could easily have financed the slight lag in revenue switching to models would have required. To me it just reeks of old-school short sighted corporate management thinking.

For a bootcamp to not adopt pay-after-getting-a-job just shows that they lack faith in their own product. Funny because many schools end up having to hire lots of their alums as a way of bolstering their employment numbers.

On a closing note, huge props to all the extremely hardworking teachers and students who went through DBC, they made it an amazing place despite all hardship. I made many of my most meaningful relationships there and I witnessed tremendous transformations in people.

1 comments

Why is that superior? Strictly speaking, Dev Bootcamp doesnt have to worry about the success of students because it takes the payment upfront. AppAcademy take the first year payment with average graduating salary of $83K which works out at around $13K return for AppAcademy - the same tuition fees roughly as Dev Bootcamp - am I missing something here?
Former A/a grad here. The average graduating salary in SF for App Academy is 105k [1]. They charge around 20% which is 21k. They also have other revenue streams, so on average they likely make more per student on average than that.

[1] https://www.appacademy.io/

Thanks dbz thats really useful to know!