The Iron Yard

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

~ the goodbye ~

Peter Barth started The Iron Yard in Greenville, South Carolina in 2013. It began as a startup accelerator and the code school grew out of it, twelve weeks of front-end or back-end engineering for close to fourteen thousand dollars. The students were mostly between twenty-five and thirty-five and mostly changing careers, which is the demographic the whole sector was built on.

What separated it from the schools in San Francisco and New York was where it put the classrooms. Charleston, Durham, Columbia, Tampa, Orlando, Charlotte, Nashville, Las Vegas, San Antonio, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Houston, Atlanta, Washington. Fifteen campuses at the peak, with London and Detroit tried and abandoned. The thesis was that a mid-sized American city could support a pipeline of junior developers if somebody built the pipeline.

On 20 July 2017 the board announced it would cease operations at every campus after teaching out the summer cohorts. The statement blamed the current environment and the youth of the industry, and Barth later said the regulatory climate around for-profit education had turned against them without being the direct cause. Roughly three thousand people had finished the program by then.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what phoenix paid for ~

On 11 June 2015 Apollo Education Group, the owner of the University of Phoenix, bought a 62 percent interest for $15.9 million. That money is what turned a Greenville school into a fifteen-city chain, and it arrived while Apollo's own enrollment was falling apart.

In February 2017 the Vistria Group and its partners took Apollo private for more than $1.1 billion. Five months after that, The Iron Yard was closed. Put the two events in order and the story stops being about coding: a parent company changed hands, the new owners walked the portfolio, and a subsidiary that was never going to fix the University of Phoenix got cut. The withdrawal had started before the sale even closed. Detroit shut in the autumn of 2016 and five more campuses went in the first half of 2017.

~ the teach-out ~

The board did keep its word about the students. Summer classes ran to the end, career support included, and the campuses went dark through the back half of 2017 rather than all on one day. Nobody enrolled in June 2017 was thrown out mid-course, which is more than several other schools in that collapse managed.

Dev Bootcamp had announced its own closure eight days earlier. Two announcements inside a fortnight, from the school that invented the format and the chain that scaled it hardest, is the point where the sector stopped being described as a growth story in the American press.

~ what came back ~

Former Iron Yard leaders started a new school in Greenville shortly afterward, small and local and run as one campus. That is the shape most of the survivors took. Twelve-week programs kept running all over the United States after 2017; what stopped was rolling them out across fifteen leased buildings on private equity money.

None of this happened anywhere near me. Turkey never grew an equivalent industry, partly because a four-year engineering degree here does not cost enough to make skipping it look like arithmetic. I read about the American bootcamp collapse the way you read about a housing market in another country: the numbers are legible and the pressure that produced them is not.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »