To elaborate a bit, one form of deceptive figures I’ve heard about is to only count successes as percentages of people who go through the entire program. It makes sense to do this to some degree since you don’t want to count people who dropped out after a day, but depending on how the program is run, it’s not hard to weed out a lot of people part of the way through and artificially increase your success rate.
There’s also the difference between the percentage of people who get jobs and the percentage who keep them, and the possibility that past performance covers a time period where the job market was better and won’t generalize to your chance of getting a job from the program now. Not to mention that success rate partly depends on the people who take the course—if most of the people who take the course are, say, high school graduates with high aptitude but no money for college, their success rate might not translate to the success rate for an adult who moves from another area.
And there’s the possibility of overly-literal wording. Has everyone who has gotten a job gotten a job based on a skill learned during the program? Is an “average salary” a mean or median?
Then there’s always the possibility that the success rate is simply false. Sure, false advertising is illegal,. but with no oversight, how’s anyone supposed to find that out?
I don’t know specifically about App Academy, but I’ve found a hacker news thread where there is some speculation that these “coding bootcamps” might inflate their statistics by having a selective enrollment interviews that screens off most people who are not already employable and/or hire their own students as instructors or something after they complete the program, so that they can be counted as employed, even for a short time.
To elaborate a bit, one form of deceptive figures I’ve heard about is to only count successes as percentages of people who go through the entire program. It makes sense to do this to some degree since you don’t want to count people who dropped out after a day, but depending on how the program is run, it’s not hard to weed out a lot of people part of the way through and artificially increase your success rate.
There’s also the difference between the percentage of people who get jobs and the percentage who keep them, and the possibility that past performance covers a time period where the job market was better and won’t generalize to your chance of getting a job from the program now. Not to mention that success rate partly depends on the people who take the course—if most of the people who take the course are, say, high school graduates with high aptitude but no money for college, their success rate might not translate to the success rate for an adult who moves from another area.
And there’s the possibility of overly-literal wording. Has everyone who has gotten a job gotten a job based on a skill learned during the program? Is an “average salary” a mean or median?
Then there’s always the possibility that the success rate is simply false. Sure, false advertising is illegal,. but with no oversight, how’s anyone supposed to find that out?
I don’t know specifically about App Academy, but I’ve found a hacker news thread where there is some speculation that these “coding bootcamps” might inflate their statistics by having a selective enrollment interviews that screens off most people who are not already employable and/or hire their own students as instructors or something after they complete the program, so that they can be counted as employed, even for a short time.