Education

Seattle-based tech-education firm offers women-only coding boot camp, real jobs

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Employers are avoiding liberal arts majors like the plague. As the Wall Street Journal has noted, recent college grads with English, philosophy and history majors face unemployment rates just below 10 percent.

But, wait. There’s more. Turns out, a person with a passable technical background can spend a few intensive, hands-on weeks in a boot camp learning how to write code. That person can then waltz directly into a well-paying gig in the tech industry.

Seattle-based Code Fellows, a company that specializes in computer-programming education, offers the boot camps in Ruby on Rails, an open-source web application framework.

Code Fellows is now rolling out a boot camp exclusively for women interested in breaking into the software industry.

The July 8 to August 23 female-only boot camp is intended to address the dearth – you may have noticed it — of women working in computer programming.

The selling point for a ladies-only coding boot camp is that women might feel less intimidated without men around.

“Women like the idea of a network of women, too,” Will Little, managing director of Code Fellows, told The Daily Caller.

Tuition for all Code Fellows boot camps is $9000. Students can choose to drop an extra $1000 for additional one-on-one instruction and other perks.

Tech savvy and a general knowledge of coding are a must for candidates.

The student loans available for traditional undergraduates who take courses such as Queer Arts in Los Angeles (UCLA), say, or The Breast: Image, Myth, and Legend (Georgetown) are not available at Code Fellows. On the plus side, the company guarantees all of its newly-minted alumni a $60,000 per year job in the tech industry (within six months of graduation).

“There are payment plans,” Little added. “A lot of people have saved up. There are scholarships.”

Little said that there have been hundreds of applicants for the 15 spots available in the women-only coding boot camp.

The pool of female applicants is “surprisingly” diverse. Many are recent college grads.

A college degree certainly is not necessary, though. In many ways, experience with software engineering is critically more important.

“We’re seeing people who have been in their careers for five to 10 years and want to do a boot camp for a career shift to software engineering,” Little told TheDC.

People as young as high school can theoretically apply.

“High schoolers these days are way more entrepreneurially-minded,” Little explained. “They are writing programs, releasing apps. There’s sort of a do-it-yourself culture. If they’ve written code for a couple years — those are the types of people who definitely make it in.”

Code Fellows only offers its boot camps in Seattle but expects to expand to other locales in the near future.

Follow Eric, a philosophy and economics major, on Twitter and send education-related story tips to erico@dailycaller.com.