The Learners Guild in Oakland is a coding school that promises to create developers out of its graduates. This isn’t new. There are seemingly a never-ending supply of coding schools opening with the same kinds of promises. One of the most interesting aspects of this program is its cost—zero dollars until you land yourself a job of $50,000 a year or more. The school’s business model is based on “income-share agreements.” 31-year-old Diana Vashti couldn’t afford to go to a coding school that might cost anywhere from $8,000 up to tens of thousands of dollars. She doesn’t have to.
The program is one of a handful of coding schools that offer “income-share agreements,” which means students don’t have to pay until they get a job making more than $50,000 a year. And depending on their salary, graduates will fork over 12 to 20 percent of it for three years.
The coding school also offers a monthly stipend. For Vashti and the other students at Learners Guild, the stipend and income-share agreement allowed them to pursue a career change.
The idea is a simple one. All training schools promise job success and Learners Guild believes it too will be successful and if they are successful in getting their students work, they will make money. Quite a few years ago now, a programmer named Shereef Bishay created a program called Dev Bootcamp where he brought various working tech people together to teach and learn about coding and various computer engineering avenues in 10-week sessions. These were successful and while they were much less expensive than four years at a college or university, they were still very expensive for many people.
The way Learner’s Guild works is that we invest in you, time and money and mentorship and computers and real estate. We try to get you to a job and if you succeed in getting a job, we make our money by taking a percentage of your salary. There’s never a situation where you “lose” and we “win.”
While the financial aspect is incredibly appealing and innovative in this day and age, the focus on making sure the program is diverse is also a breath of fresh air.
Learners Guild president Ian Inaba believes that by using this income-share agreement model, the school removes barriers that can keep women and people of color out of tech. He said that the school is more diverse than the tech industry at large — 50 percent of students in the program are African-American and Latino, and 35 percent are female.
“There’s no reason why there aren’t women or African-American, Latino programmers,” Inaba said.
The school also does away with grades and competition, opting for group activities and teamwork. People learn how to work with one another, what their weaknesses are and what their strengths might be. When the people who teach you are truly invested in your success, the sky is truly the limit. The technology industry is very big on the idea of “disruption.” Shaking up the foundations and constructs of old systems and in doing so, finding new and innovative ways forward. By disrupting the financial incentive package in training programs, maybe we will begin to get more viable vocational training programs, and less Trump University scams.