Dive Brief:

• New York City’s Flatiron School, which offers accelerated coding programs, has announced its 2015 jobs report with a 98% employment rate and average starting salaries of $74,447.
• The company reports that 40% of its graduates are women and 24% are low-income, with outcomes including graduation rates, time to job placement, and starting salaries consistent with the overall averages.
• While coding bootcamps have been criticized for serving an already educated population, Flatiron School reports that more than half of the low-income students it serves had not earned a college degree before enrolling in its programs.

Dive Insight:

Flatiron School is based in New York City, but it launched an online program this year that comes with a job placement guarantee once students qualify for the self-paced course. Last year, the company reported a 99% overall job placement rate, or 94% within four months of graduation. These numbers are contested in some quarters by critics who say coding bootcamps can manipulate the portion of their students who are counted in the metrics, removing those who, for example, do not apply to enough jobs per month or who turn down certain jobs. In a recent interview with Education Dive, Flatiron Founder and President Adam Enbar stated that his school's report is the only one verified by an independent audit.

Conversely, online coding school Bloc, which hopes to replace the four-year computer science degree with a new software engineering track, does not report overall job placement rates as a way to dissuade prospective students from putting too much emphasis on the unregulated metrics.