Page 11 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

STEM EDUCATION
“The motivation here has always been to build the workforce,” Schmidt said. “There’s this huge demand for talent. Having a good tech environment is great for everybody. And so that was the pull.”
The push was the opportunity to work with Trilogy, which specializes in helping universities create a form of continuing education program in “hot tech topics.” In mid-January 2019, Vanderbilt kicked off its first cohorts: two separate sections of web development, twice what the institution expected to have at launch. The program lasts for 24 weeks, costs participants about $11,000 and is hosted face-to-face in campus classrooms. Those who finish successfully earn a certificate. But more importantly, they gain access to Trilogy’s own career services, which helps them plug into local opportunities for “better paying jobs that will help them support their families,” as Schmidt put it.
Vanderbilt is just one of 40-plus schools that have signed agreements with Trilogy to deliver an intensive education in web development, data analytics, user interface design and cybersecurity. Others include University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Central Florida, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Georgia Tech. And while Trilogy is arguably the largest company in the boot camp space partnering with higher education, it’s not the only one.
Revature, which pegs itself as a “leading-edge technology solutions firm,” takes a different approach. Working with its own A-list set of set of institutions (including George Mason University, Ohio University, Arizona State, California State University and the University of Missouri), this company sets up classrooms on campus, then recruits students to take a free, 12-week crash course in coding with a guarantee of employment as a software consultant at the end.
A Meeting of the Minds (and Models)
According to Liz Eggleston, co-founder of Course Report,
which monitors the boot camp market, it’s a sure sign of maturity that boot camps and universities are working together. A few years ago, when the boot camps first began gaining traction, there was a rivalry between those promoting formal computer science degrees and those endorsing the considerably shorter training programs that prepared students to quickly pick up work as full-fledged developers.
Now, noted Eggleston, there’s a meeting of the minds. “Boot camps are getting a bit more mainstream and education is becoming a bit more flexible and skills-based and actually training students in skills they need to get jobs.”
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