EDUCATION SPECIAL................... A school for dropouts

A school for dropouts





The founder of a new startup school wants to prove you don't need a degree to break into the technology industry

Ashu Desai built his first iPhone app when he was 16; a game called Heli copter. It was a modest hit, with 50,000 downloads.A few years later, sitting in lecture classes as a freshman at the University of California, Desai found himself bored stiff. He wanted to learn to build more products, not regurgitate textbook chapters, and he began to doubt that the six-figure cost of a four-year degree was worth it.

Desai dropped out after his first year. Now he's offering other young upstarts the opportunity to do the same: The San Francisco company he founded in 2012, Make School, is rolling out a two-year certificate program that aims to help techies get a job in Silicon Valley without a college degree.

More than 350 people have applied to join the inaugural class of 50 students. They'll learn how to develop iOS apps using such programming languages as Objective-C and Swift, build websites using Ruby on Rails, and network, with the goal of becoming startup founders or joining companies. “In the technology industry , companies care a lot more about what you build than where you went to school,“ he says. “We're trying to create an institution that reflects our values in education and what we think will help make people successful in tech.“

There's a Cinderella-story aspect to Make School's promise, one that has lured hopeful young people since demand for software engineering jobs began to boom. Since 2012, underemployed and uninspired career-changers have flocked to coding bootcamps from Silicon Valley to the Silicon Prairie. For around $10,000, the schools promise to transform former humanities majors and recovering bankers into entry-level web developers -12 weeks to a sixfigure salary . Yet they have experienced growing pains, too, facing accusations of shoddy teaching even as they surge in popularity . And forgoing a bachelor's degree has risks. “It's a gamble skipping college,“ says Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University .

Make School has a way to sidestep some of those problems, Desai says. Unlike existing coding bootcamps that hope to turn career-changers into nov ice developers, Make School is intended to fast-track the careers of “kids who started hacking at age 9, computer science majors who are considering dropping out of college, and students who've already shipped 10 to 20 apps to the App Store.“

Perhaps the toughest sell will be mom and dad. Josh Archer, a sophomore majoring in cognitive science at UCLA, is dropping out to attend Make School. His parents, both doctors, weren't thrilled at the idea. “But once they understood how I could get an education in two years, rather than four, they felt this might be okay.“ Even successful entrepreneurs aren't immune to parental criticism for taking an unconventional career path.“My mom occasionally calls asking me when I'll be back at college,“ Desai says.

Akane Otani

BLOOMBERG