Grade One

Part I · Chapter 7

How to check a school, a bootcamp or a certificate

Chapter 5 gave you five grades of evidence. This chapter spends them on one purchase.

That purchase is training. A degree, a bootcamp, a certificate, a course. For most readers of this book it is the largest payment they will make before they earn anything at all. It is also bought with the worst information in this book.

The problem in one sentence

Almost every number you can find about a course comes from the people selling the course.

By Chapter 5’s system that is grade 5. Treat it as advertising.

This is not a claim that schools lie. Some publish very carefully. It is a claim about who holds the data. A school knows how many students finished, and how many found work. Nobody else does. So the school decides what to publish, and it decides how to count.

That is the whole problem. You are not reading a measurement. You are reading a choice about how to measure.

Percent of what?

Here is the most common trap. It needs no dishonesty at all to work.

A school publishes a placement rate. A rate is a fraction. The top is students who found work. The bottom is the group being counted. The bottom is where the argument lives.

Most published rates count only graduates who were looking for work. That bottom number leaves out three groups. It leaves out students who dropped out. It leaves out students who finished and did not look. It leaves out students who never answered the survey.

Work through a real example. App Academy publishes its whole funnel, which makes it both a good example and a fair one. Most schools publish only the last step.

Of every 100 students who start, about 80 graduate. Of those graduates, 98% were looking for work. Of the ones looking, 91% found work in the field within 180 days.

The headline is 91%.

Now multiply the three numbers. 80 students graduate. About 78 of them look for work. About 71 find it. So roughly 71 of the original 100 got a job in the field.

Both numbers are true. They answer different questions. You are asking the first one, and the school is answering the second.

So ask every provider the same question, in these words. Percent of what? If the answer is not “of everyone who enrolled”, do the multiplication yourself. If they will not give you the numbers to multiply, you have your answer.

Four kinds of evidence about a school

Ranked, best first. This is Chapter 5’s hierarchy applied to one industry.

An audited outcome report

An outside body checks the numbers and publishes them on a fixed definition. The Council on Integrity in Results Reporting runs the only widely used standard of this kind. Member schools report outcomes at 90, 180 and 360 days, on a defined bottom number, and an independent auditor checks them.

Very few schools take part. That is itself the useful signal. You do not need to know the exact membership. You need to ask one question: does this school submit its numbers to an outside audit? A school that does has chosen to be checked. A school that does not has chosen not to be.

A regulator that investigated

The next section is about these. A consumer-protection agency can compel documents. It sees the internal numbers, not the marketing ones. When such an agency publishes what it found, that is grade 1 evidence. It is the only kind in this book where the publisher could force the answer.

An aggregator republishing the school’s figures

Websites that compare schools mostly reprint what schools tell them. The site did not measure anything. A number that starts at grade 5 does not improve by being copied.

The school’s own marketing

Grade 5. Read it to learn what the school wants you to believe.

What regulators found when they looked

Three cases follow. All three are United States actions, and that matters. I come back to it at the end of this chapter.

BloomTech, April 2024. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau acted against the school and its chief executive. The agency found the school had advertised job placement of 71% to 86%. Its own internal figure was close to 50%.

The same action covered how students paid. The school sold agreements requiring anyone earning over $50,000 to pay 17% of their income before tax. That ran for 24 payments, up to a cap of $30,000. The school said these were not loans and carried no debt. The agency found they were loans, with a finance charge averaging about $4,000. One missed payment could put a student in default.

The school was permanently banned from consumer lending. Its chief executive was banned from student lending for ten years.

Prehired, November 2023. The same agency shut this provider down. It sold a job guarantee, again funded by income-share agreements. The order made it stop operating, pay $4.2 million back to students, and cancel about $27 million of outstanding agreements.

Career Step, 2024. The Federal Trade Commission settled over deceptive job-placement claims aimed at military families and veterans. The settlement was worth $43.5 million in cancelled debt and cash. Eight months later the Commission paid out $15.5 million, to 42,794 people.

Hold that last pair of numbers next to each other. The settlement headline was $43.5 million. The money that reached people was $15.5 million, and it arrived in March 2025. A settlement is not the same as a refund. Neither one returns the years those students spent.

Income share agreements

An income share agreement is a deal where you pay a share of your future income instead of paying tuition now.

Sellers describe it as risk-free, and the argument sounds fair. If you do not earn, you do not pay. So the school only wins when you win.

Read the BloomTech finding again before you accept that. The regulator found those agreements were loans. It found they carried a real cost in money. It found the income level that started repayment was low enough to catch ordinary outcomes, not only good ones.

Check three things in any such contract, before you sign anything.

The Federal Trade Commission’s standing advice on this is one sentence. Do not pay for the promise of a job. It says that anyone who asks you to is a scammer.

Any offer built on a job guarantee deserves that sentence read twice. Chapter 16 sets out what a parent should refuse outright.

Certificates are not courses

A certificate is a different product, and it fails in different ways.

A course sells you teaching. A certificate sells you a test. The test either passes or it does not, so a certificate cannot lie about its own outcome. What it can do is oversell what that outcome is worth.

Some certificates are cheap, stackable and honest about their place. A stackable certificate is one that counts towards the next one up. CompTIA publishes such a ladder: A+, then Network+, then Security+, then a specialist one. Each higher certificate renews the ones below it, so the cost of staying current falls as you climb.

That whole entry ladder costs a few thousand dollars and takes months. A bootcamp costs three to five times as much. This does not make one better than the other. It makes them different bets, and Chapter 15 compares them properly.

The honest limit is this. A certificate proves you passed a test. It does not prove you can do the work, and employers know that. Chapter 31 sorts the certificates that move you into a different tier of job from the ones that only break a tie.

One number that cuts against the whole industry

In the 2024 Stack Overflow developer survey, 82% of working developers said they learn using online resources. Only 49% said they learn in school. And 66% of them hold a university degree.

Read all three together. Most working developers taught themselves something from free material. Most of them also have a degree. Both facts are true at once, and no course advertisement will show you both.

That survey has a hole in it, and it is a large one. People answer it because they already work in software. It cannot tell you anything about the people who paid, studied, and never got in. Nobody measures those people. That is exactly why a placement rate matters so much, and exactly why the bottom of the fraction matters more than the top.

Checking a degree is a different job

Everything above assumes a private provider. A university is not the same problem, and the difference is worth knowing, because it runs the opposite way to what most people expect.

For bootcamps there is almost no independent outcome data. For degrees, in several countries, there is a lot of it, and it is grade 1.

Some governments match graduate records against tax and employment records. They then publish what people from a named course at a named university actually earned, one year later and five years later. That is not a survey. It is not self-reported. It is tax data.

Where that exists, it beats every other source in this chapter. It has no survey response problem, because nobody opts out of tax. It counts everyone who finished, so the bottom of the fraction is fixed for you.

So the first question about a degree is not “is this university good?”. It is: does my country publish course-level graduate earnings, and what does it say about this course? Appendix G answers the first half for you, country by country.

Two warnings about those figures.

They measure the students who went in, not only the teaching. A course that admits only the highest-scoring applicants will report high earnings whether or not it taught anyone anything. The number tells you where graduates end up. It does not tell you why.

They are also old by the time you read them. A five-year figure describes people who started eight or nine years ago. Chapter 4 makes this point about dates in general, and it applies here with force.

The strongest evidence is not where the readers are

Now the part of this chapter that took longest to establish and is the least comfortable to write.

Eleven publishers were confirmed against their own primary source. The United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and France. Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and New Zealand. Chile and Colombia. And the shared register systems of Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

Then look at where none was found. Nigeria. Pakistan. Bangladesh. Indonesia. Vietnam. The Philippines. Egypt. Kenya. Ukraine. Turkey. Argentina. South Africa.

Five more have something close and not the same thing. Mexico publishes graduate outcomes that are not matched to tax records. Brazil has a national employment register, and whether it can be read by course was not established. Australia and Singapore run graduate surveys, which leave out everyone who did not answer. India’s institutions report their own placement medians, which is exactly the self-reported figure this chapter warns you about.

Read those lists together. The strongest evidence about the value of a degree exists mostly in rich countries. It is largely absent from the countries sending the most people into computing, and from most of the countries this book is written for.

That is not a small inconvenience. It means two readers of this chapter, doing everything right, end up with different qualities of answer. One opens a government file and reads what people from their exact course actually earned. The other has the university’s own placement figures, self-reported by the institution being judged, so the honest instruction differs by where you live.

If your country is on the first list, use it. It outranks everything else in this chapter and it takes twenty minutes.

If it is not, do not substitute a salary website, because that is worse than having nothing and believing nothing. Lean instead on what your country does publish. Entrance-exam data. The questions in this chapter, put to the institution in writing. The employer-side evidence in Book B. Chapter 8 shows you how to find your own country’s primary sources.

One caution about that second list. Absence of a finding is not proof of absence. Those searches ran in English, and a dataset published only in a national language could have been missed. What the book claims is that it did not find one, which is a statement about this edition rather than about your country. If you find one, Chapter 20 explains how to send it back.

Buy the thing that produces evidence

One more test, and it cuts across every kind of training.

In HackerRank’s 2025 survey of 13,732 developers, managers and recruiters, 77% said that most assessments do not match the skills the role needs. Two thirds said they prefer practical challenges to abstract coding problems.

Read that as a buying instruction. Hiring is moving towards asking people to do job-like work. So the training worth paying for is the training that leaves you holding job-like work.

At the end of the course, what do you have? If the answer is a certificate and nothing else, you have bought a claim. If the answer is three finished things you built, that a stranger can look at and test, you have bought evidence.

Note who published that survey. HackerRank sells technical assessments. A finding that current assessments are wrong is useful to them. The sample and the method are both stated, so it stays at grade 2, but read the conclusion with the seller in mind. Chapter 5 taught you to do that, and it applies to sources this book likes as much as to ones it does not.

Five questions to ask any provider

Ask these before you pay. Ask them in writing.

  1. Percent of what? Give me the number who enrolled, the number who finished, the number who looked for work, and the number who found it.
  2. Who checked it? Does an outside body audit your outcomes? Which one?
  3. Show me the contract now. Not after a deposit. Now.
  4. What happens if I stop? Halfway through. After finishing, if I do not find work.
  5. Name five people who finished last year. Where do they work now? May I contact two of them?

A provider that answers all five plainly may still be wrong for you. A provider that will not answer them has already told you what you need to know.

What this chapter does not know

Three honest limits.

All three cases above come from the United States, and that is no longer the whole picture. Appendix G lists a consumer regulator with power over training providers in seventeen other countries.

In eleven of them, something has happened to a provider. Only eight of those were fines. One national body punished thirty-one coaching institutes over what they claimed about selection and placement.

In five countries no action was found at all. In one more, the regulator looked and found nothing wrong.

Do not read that as proof that providers there behave better. Several of those regulators publish almost nothing in English, and settle most complaints by talking to both sides. That leaves no record for anyone to find. The regulator, the law and the complaint route all exist anyway, and Appendix G lists them.

What regulators do also changes over time, and with governments. These cases say what happened once. They do not promise that the same scheme would be stopped today, in any country. What protects you is the method in this chapter. Do not wait for a regulator to arrive.

One more limit. No primary source told me how many schools currently submit to an outside audit. So this chapter does not tell you a number. It tells you to ask the school, which works whatever the number is.