A study that came out on Monday reveals that women make 36 percent of the students who enrolled in private coding schools and boot camps. In traditional universities, ladies who are computer science majors amass to around 14 percent.
The massive appeal that coding boot camps and coding courses is due to a continuous and sustained effort to bring women and minorities into programming. Scholarships and learning programs tailored to the specific group's needs make these programs very popular.
The 2015 Student Outcomes and Demographics Study, managed by the Course Report startup underlines the results. More than 660 coding camp graduates took part in the survey.
"Getting women into technology" is a task that the educational model woks hard to complete, said Alaina Percival, CEO of Women Who Code. She said that the market is ready for the alternative code writing tuition, and her organization backs her words. Since the beginning of 2014, Women Who Code offered scholarships in total value of more than $150,000 to coding boot camps with a special focus on women coders.
Liz Eggleston, co-founder of Course Report states that diversity integration in the tech world may have something to do with the surging numbers of female programmers. She further explains that big companies from tech desire an equal quota of male to female developers.
Some minorities are also poorly represented in the university coding world. If we look at colleges, 3.2 percent of computer science graduates are African-American, while 6.8 percent are Hispanics. The numbers are higher for coding schools, where the enrollment goes as high as 20 percent for Latinos and five percent for Blacks.
"Higher education [...] is more discouraging to women and minorities than boot camps seem to be," co-founder of San Francisco-based Make School, Jeremy Rossmann, pointed out.
The survey demonstrates that coding schools up the chances for women and underrepresented minorities to find qualified jobs. Sixty-six percent of the participants in the study confirmed that their current workplace makes use of the coding skills, and added that they found better jobs just four months after graduation from the coding boot camp. An approximate 38% percent increase in salary level was also reported. This means that women and minorities who took coding classes in boot camps were likely to get an extra $18,000 a year after graduation.
The Student Outcomes and Demographics Study from 2015 portraits the average coding school graduate as a 31-year old with a bachelor's degree, who worked for more than seven and a half years outside the coding world. Considering this, it may be that coding schools are a viable alternative to a CS master's degree or maybe even an MBA.
Deldelp Medina, co-founder at Avión Ventures and CEO of the firm that acts as a pre-accelerator for Hispanic entrepreneurs warns that students should do their research prior to enrolling. The coding courses don't come cheap and, at $11,852 per course, future software developers would better know what they want.
