Make School

» see makeschool.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Jeremy Rossmann and Ashu Desai started it in 2012 under the name Make Games With Us, a summer program that taught teenagers to ship an iPhone game. The teaching turned out to be the business. In 2014 it became Make School PBC, a public benefit corporation running a two-year program in San Francisco for people who would otherwise have spent four years in a computer science department.

The money is the part worth writing down. There was no tuition at enrollment. Instead you signed an income share agreement promising 20 to 25 percent of your pre-tax income for at least three and a half years once you were earning, against a sticker price of roughly seventy thousand dollars for the on-campus track. California's Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education fined the school $100,000 in 2016 for operating without state approval, later reduced to $25,000 in July 2018, and the program kept running through both.

In December 2018 an accreditor put Make School into an incubation arrangement that let it administer Dominican University of California's Applied Computer Science bachelor's degree. That unlocked federal loans and Pell Grants, which is the door every unaccredited school is trying to get through. Fifteen million dollars followed in April 2019. Then on 1 July 2021 fifty-five former students filed suit over the lending, Make School PBC assigned its assets for the benefit of creditors, and the whole thing came apart inside three weeks. The accreditor denied independent candidacy on 12 July, Dominican announced it was taking the program over on 21 July, and 124 students transferred across on 1 September.

~ the case file ~

~ the instrument ~

The income share agreement was the recruiting pitch and the product at the same time. Pay nothing now, pay a percentage later, and if you never earn above the floor you never pay at all. Stated that way it sounds like the school is taking the risk. The arithmetic ran the other way for anyone who did well: one plaintiff reported paying about a hundred thousand dollars in total, against thirty thousand for a classmate who had simply paid the sticker price up front. Vemo Education serviced the paper.

An ISA is an American financial instrument before it is an education product, and it needs a labor market where a junior developer's first salary is big enough to be worth a claim on. Nobody has ever offered me one here and I would not have signed it. The interesting question was never whether the teaching was good, it was who ends up holding a contract when the school stops existing.

~ borrowed accreditation ~

The Dominican partnership was the first of its kind, and the Student Borrower Protection Center spent 2022 and 2023 taking it apart in public. A private university lent its accreditation to a venture-funded company, the company recruited under the university's name, and the students believed they were enrolled somewhere permanent. When Make School told Dominican in spring 2021 that the model was in trouble, the reasons given were leases on residential and teaching space it was not using, plus international students who could not travel.

~ what is still owed ~

Dominican did take the students, and by the numbers the teach-out worked. The contracts did not go anywhere. Insolvency at the for-profit arm left the ISAs sitting in a queue of creditors with no clear answer about who collects them or on what terms, which means the people who signed in 2016 and 2017 were still paying for a school that had already closed.

makeschool.org is still up. It is a single frozen page explaining that as of August 2021 the program runs out of Dominican, with a donate button underneath for scholarships. The Twitter account's last post is dated 1 July 2021.

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