You can see our 2021 audited outcomes report here with all of the data https://www.bloomtech.com/reports/outcomes-report. (Note: 2021 outcomes report is very recent as you have to get students graduated, give them time to get placed, etc.)
Some of it I'm thrilled about, some of it shows us where we have more work to do (or need to do better in admissions - candidly it's always a difficult balance between giving folks chance and certainty of those folks' outcomes.)
High level:
90% of those who are job seeking got hired.
Our median hired grad increased their income by $27,500 (and that's just their first job - obviously software/data science salaries shoot up quickly after a first job).
About half of our students have degrees, and half do not.
This comment got me interested, so I dived deeper into the report [0].
Learners are divided into three groups: graduated (59%), still enrolled (5%), and withdrawn (36%). Graduated learners are further divided into two groups: job seeking (63%: ~37% of all learners) and non-job seeking (37%: ~22% of all learners). Here's the definition of “non-job seeking”:
“A BloomTech graduate who has been unresponsive to outreach, has explicitly indicated they are not pursuing a technical role, or has explicitly indicated they have paused their job search.”
When we apply the base rate to the 90% rate, we conclude that 33% of those who attend the program (learners) got hired.
I see, that’s … extremely unimpressive especially if you take the median salary increase from above. And I think maybe we should take everything else this guy is saying as potentially dishonest. Not including people who stopped trying to get a job is just an absurd way to do this calculation. Imagine a clinical trial that just ignores everyone who disconues due to adverse events. These stats seem borderline predatory
We should do a better job of getting more granular on that piece, because it really does matter, but the above isn't the right way to do that math to answer the question prospective students have, and is misleading in the opposite direction. The outcomes report is directed at prospective students who want to understand what will happen to them if they attend the school and look for a job.
You have to remember that (for this outcomes report) nearly every student uses an ISA under which no one is required to pay us unless/until they get a job using the skills they learned. There are a number of people who attend never intending to switch careers, a (large) number who ghost us the day after graduation, and a (large) number who get a job but don't tell us until we get tax returns (so we learn they were hired only after this outcomes report).
Our team works their asses off to work with these students, and is doing everything they possibly can. Slacks, calls, texts, emails, some of which are auto-generated from me personally, and in some cases even physical mail, to try to get them to work with us. If they respond _in any way at all_ with anything other than something that equates to, "I don't want a tech job" they are job-seeking in the outcomes report. We have built tooling to make applying to jobs easier, we find jobs that you should apply to for you, have an outreach generator where our team will write emails to hiring managers for you, and more recently even what we call "job search takeover" where we work with students on resume/portfolio/job criteria in advance, and we will actually do all of the work to fill up your calendar with interviews.
Students who look for a job in any way whatsoever get hired at a very high rate. In my view, if you're a prospective student, that's the information you actually want to understand. The fact that there are a number of students students (most of whom are using ISAs) who never intend to look for a job or don't look for a job is a fair indictment of our business model, but not a fair indictment of the quality of the school or the likelihood of getting hired.
So how should we treat that in an outcomes report? If you're a prospective learner do you want to know about the hiring rate of the people who ghost us or don't intend to look for a job, or do you want to know the hiring rate of people who map to the profile of what you expect to do?
If anyone has ideas of a better way to slice that data to convey the best information to a prospective learner, I would love to hear it.
Some of it I'm thrilled about, some of it shows us where we have more work to do (or need to do better in admissions - candidly it's always a difficult balance between giving folks chance and certainty of those folks' outcomes.)
High level:
90% of those who are job seeking got hired.
Our median hired grad increased their income by $27,500 (and that's just their first job - obviously software/data science salaries shoot up quickly after a first job).
About half of our students have degrees, and half do not.