
Grace Hopper Academy - wyclif
http://gracehopper.com/
======
pincubator
A while ago, someone wrote to Systers (a highly activated women in CS e-mail
list) the following, which is highly accurate:

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What a great business model Grace Hopper Academy has.

First, you find women who are very smart and highly motivated. You make sure
they are highly motivated by making them take the first part of the course
online. (Massive Open Online Courses have a completion rate of 10%, and the
vast majority people finishing them _already have a Bachelor 's degree_). The
cost to run the online course is very cheap, and now you are guaranteed to
have _easy students only_.

You then teach these easy students Javascript stuff for one semester. (13
weeks).

Then you take 22.5% of their year's paycheck once they have a nice job -- and
they will have a nice job because they are very smart and motivated. If they
make $70,000, that's $15,750 a pop.

A state university education in Ohio is $12,000 for 15 weeks by the way. Other
bootcamps range from free to $21000 with median around $8000. (Grace Hopper
Academy is not the only one to get tuition paid via a cut of your pay after
graduation either). [http://www.skilledup.com/articles/the-ultimate-guide-to-
codi...](http://www.skilledup.com/articles/the-ultimate-guide-to-coding-
bootcamps-the-exhaustive-list)

The Dean of Grace Hopper Academy has no academic credentials listed
whatsoever, nor is there any information about the instructors. Do they have
academic credentials? Do they have industry experience and teaching
experience? Do they have names? Are any of them female?

Buyer beware.

\---

PS: The exact link to the discussion is somewhere in the Systers archive..

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dhenu2
Makes sense. I'm a woman with a BS degree already from a highly-ranked
college, still considering applying to this school, however, because:

I don't have the upfront money to pay tuition for other private schools. Total
cost of a college degrees to job is ~$100K which is way higher. I don't want
to spend 4 more years and accumulate a ton of loans. Colleges also don't share
the risk with me of getting a job. This makes me think this school has much
more incentive to educate me well. My undergrad college took my tuition
whether I got a great job out of it or not (which I didn't :P). The school is
new though so I'm a bit weary of not seeing a track record. I'm going to do
more careful research now before applying.

~~~
Kalium
A business like this has a strong incentive to get you a decent job for a few
years after graduation, because that's how they get paid. The incentives of a
regular college or university are longer-term, and play out over the course of
decades. These are alumni networks, alumni donations, legacy students, general
reputation, and so on.

As a result, this business has incentives to teach you what will be profitable
for them in the near future and neglect the medium to long term. A college's
incentives favor the medium to long term, with a corresponding potential
short-term sacrifice.

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patmcc
Is anyone else displeased by their use of Grace Hopper's name? Has this
academy contacted her estate for permission or blessing? If not, using her
name to advertise a for-profit company is unethical at the very least.

Admiral Hopper is a pillar of computer science. It's shameful to make money
off of her name like this.

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AlexWest
I assume you have the same problem with Tesla?

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patmcc
I'm not crazy about it, but using just a last name feels different than
first+last - to me the latter seems like an active endorsement. Also Telsa has
been dead 50 years longer than Hopper, which helps. And some names become
genericized, almost like brands do - Einstein was a person but is now a
synonym for smart/genius, so the Einstein Academy would bother me even less.
Telsa feels somewhere between Hopper and Einstein on that scale.

I'd also have a problem with a 'Steve Jobs school for iPhone app development'
or the 'Robin Williams comedy training centre'.

~~~
qq66
Also, Tesla is the SI unit of magnetic flux density, so it's in the lexicon
independent of Nikola Tesla himself.

~~~
patmcc
True, although both the company and the unit were named after Nikola, so not
sure if that changes much.

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bzalasky
For advertising no up front costs, 22.5% of first year salary upon graduation
spread over 12 months is a pretty aggressive payment plan. At 100k that's over
$1800/month. It could be a good deal for someone that's still increasing their
monthly take home though.

It'd be interesting if the payments were structured so that they were made by
the hiring company, bringing the developer on with a reduced salary (or not)
for the first year... or if they could be taken care of pre-tax. Not sure
about the feasibility of those approaches.

~~~
giaour
Those terms end up collecting far more than coding bootcamps normally charge,
so one of two things is going on. The first possibility is that the academy
either believes that many of its graduates will not find high paying jobs and
that they therefore need to recoup lost costs from those graduates that do
find work. The second is that they're looking to exploit their potential
recruits' present poverty by charging them far more in future dollars than
anyone would pay in present dollars.

Neither option reflects well on the people who run this bootcamp.

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ChristianGeek
If this is a program for women, why do the photos on their web site feature
mostly men?

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danso
Seeing Grace Hopper's name makes me smile. My war refugee parents owe their
white-collar careers to COBOL, both in getting programming jobs relatively
soon after arriving in America, and for continued employment through
retirement due to the apparent difficulty there is in outsourcing COBOL jobs
overseas :)

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giaour
I was kinda hoping from the name that the first COBOL bootcamp had opened.

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wyclif
This is the perfect name for a coding academy for women. Gives credit to one
of the giants while raising awareness.

~~~
vlehto
Lovelace Academy might have gotten bit more attention. :P

Edit: Incase someone doesn't know who I was referring to:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace)

~~~
mlpinit
There is already Ada academy:
[http://adadevelopersacademy.org/](http://adadevelopersacademy.org/)

~~~
vlehto
Looks lot better in regards to all criticism here.

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lexcorvus
It's disappointing to see a potentially valuable educational program frame its
activities in terms of closing a diversity gap rather than simply helping
people. Can you imagine a similar academy dedicated to closing the gap between
whites and people of color? The latter are overrepresented in tech, and yet I
know of no one concerned with that gap. (Yes, I said that people of color are
overrepresented in tech. The only way to avoid this conclusion is to ignore
people with recent ancestors from Asia.)

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gracelovelace
Great time to be a woman in tech!

