Page 17 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

STEM EDUCATION
• Boot camps focus on the latest technology;
• Instruction uses experiential learning and hands-on practice; • Soft skills are a big part of the curriculum alongside the
technical work;
• Students work on real-world projects; and
• They achieve greater diversity.
That last point can’t be over-emphasized. With well-nigh every
institution in the land declaring its pursuit of women for STEM study, boot camps are succeeding wildly. According to Lyon, who serves as principal researcher on the study, around 35 percent of boot camp graduates are female compared to just 14 percent for bachelor’s programs in CS. Why the difference?
What women told her research team was that either they were “turned off by CS” or the college-level classes they tried were so “dominated by men,” they felt “uncomfortable, intimidated or uninterested” and they chose to switch majors. (As Lyon put it, “You can get through six months of something, but four years of being the only woman in the classroom is harder.”) Then, when the women moved into careers that required technology, they found that programming or related skills were “the favorite part of their work” or they realized that it could be “a direction they could go to get a better job.”
Rather than going back to university for a second bachelor’s, women found that boot camps could provide a “super-intensive” programtoteachthemtheskillstheyneededinashortamount of time. “They didn’t know about it, really, and then they found
they really liked it, so they looked for a quick way to get more of those skills and be able to move in that direction,” Lyon said.
What Universities Have to Learn
Before your college jumps into a deal with a boot camp, due diligence is in order. After all, Lyon pointed out, “This space can be complicated.” Even the term “boot camp” encompasses a lot of different kinds of operations. “Some are in person, some are online, some are 10 weeks, some are two years.” Her caution: “Be a little careful when you use that term, because it actually encompasses a lot of different models and institutions, some of which are more successful or better than others. You can’t generalize too much.”
Her advice is to consider the tradeoffs. “If you incorporate a boot camp, does it mean students are not getting as much theory in classes that maybe could help them later? Are you focusing more on the skills and less on the theory, and does that have some disadvantage?”
Then there are the faculty concerns for their students. “A lot of them are interested in how they can serve students best,” she asserted. “Is there something happening in a boot camp that helps serve students and what could we learn and incorporate from that?”
Eggelston said she believes the big lesson is fairly obvious. Collegesanduniversitiesneedtoputaheavierfocusonstudent outcomes — specifically, employment. “While a university may
not as be as super-accustomed to actually getting a student a job when they graduate, that’s what people expect from a coding boot camp. If they pay that money up front, they’re going to be ready and introduced to a job when they graduate.”
Vanderbilt’s Schmidt could envision a marriage of the two kinds of education providers that plays directly into university gaps.
He’d like to see the people taking the boot camp courses at his institution working with the on-campus business incubator The Wond’ry. By teaming up students in the coding classes with those entrepreneurs, the boot camp students would have the chance to work on actual projects and the people who pitched the ideas would get the help they need.
Or take the graduate in some “nondescript major,” pursuing a given topic because it’s their “intellectual passion,” he offered. Nothing would prevent a senior nearing the end of that degree program from entering the boot camp as a last semester effort. “They could finish up by the time they graduated, and they could do it in evenings and weekends, which is not going to conflict with classes. They’d obviously have a time management issue on their hands, but leave that aside. If you’re sufficiently motivated, you would perhaps have the best of all worlds. You’d have a Vanderbilt undergraduate degree and a skill that you could parlay in the workforce very quickly.”
Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for Campus Technology.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2019