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The Turing School of Software & Design is a 501(c)3 non-profit school located in Denver, Colorado. Our primary program focuses on Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript across four six-week semesters for a total engagement of 27 weeks.

In March of 2015 we joined with a collective of other training providers to form the New Economy Skills Training Association (NESTA). That organization put together a list of outcomes data points that member organizations would publish in the future.

This is the 2015 Outcomes Report for Turing. The following data represents the 1406, 1407, 1409, 1410, 1412, 1502, 1503, and 1505 cohorts of the Turing School, who graduated between December 2014 and December 2015.

Completion Rates

  • Total students who could have graduated: 136
  • Number of students who are still enrolled: 4 (due to repeated modules / breaks)
  • Number of students no longer enrolled: 136 - 4 = 132
  • Number of graduates (strict): 101 (76.5%)
  • Number of satisfactory outcomes: 110 (83.3%) (represents number of graduates + persons employed before graduation)

Academic Success

Each of our four modules is pass/fail. How did graduates do? Among 94 respondents:

  • Graduated with no repeats: 86 (91.5%)
  • Graduated after repeating one module: 4 (4.3%)
  • Graduated after repeating more than one module: 4 (4.3%)

Non-Graduates

Why did people not graduate? Of the 29 non-graduates:

  • Left before graduation due to employment: 9 (31.0% of non-grads, 6.8% of students)
  • Academic drop out: 14 (48.2% of non-grads, 10.6% of students)
  • Early drop / bad fit: 4 (13.8% of non-grads, 3.0% of students)
  • Elective drop out: 2 (6.9% of non-grads, 1.5% of students)

Here's what those categories mean:

  • Left before graduation due to employment: students start job hunting between 3rd and 4th quarters. If their job hunt is immediately successful then they'll sometimes leave before fourth quarter ends or go into "audit" mode. Either way they didn't officially graduate. This is not considered a problem.
  • Academic drop out: the biggest bucket is students who left under academic distress. This unfortunately lumps together both students who were not academically successful based on their own aptitude/work and students who had outside circumstances (health, family, finances) impact their learning. Turing is a demanding program and this category should be the main reason people leave. In 2016 I believe we'll see this trend down towards 6-8% of enrollments.
  • Early drop / bad fit: A small number of students arrive at Turing and drop out within three weeks, often in the first week. Of the four, three expressed that the workload was too heavy and one expressed that there was too little instruction. This is a category that we can work to eliminate.
  • Elective drop out: Students who chose to leave while academically successful. One left to begin an MBA program, one left to begin a job hunt/contracting.

Demographic Disaggregation

Each category is broken down by total students and graduates

  • women: 38 enrolled (27.9% of enrollees), 27 graduated (26.7% of graduates)
  • non-white: 32 enrolled (23.5% of enrollees), 28 graduated (27.7% of graduates)
  • military veterans: 6 enrolled (4.4% of enrollees), 4 graduated (4.2% of graduates)
  • students without a 4-year degree: 22 enrolled (20.9% of enrollees), 19 graduated (20.4% of graduates)

The most interesting thing to note here is that none of these groups show a negative correlation between membership in the group and likelihood of graduating. The only implications that stands out is that people of color appear more likely to graduate than their peers.

Job Placement

"Job Placement" is the most complicated category to accurately measure. For this section we'll consider just the 101 students who graduated in the time period.

Non-Job-Seeking / Exemptions

Anomalies in the process can cause anomalies in the salary and job-hunt-length data. The following graduates have been exempted/removed from the aggregations:

  • 1 student left the country for personal reasons (still found a job)
  • 1 student is exempt due to lack of a US work visa (still found a job)
  • 1 student is exempt due to a criminal record (still found a job)
  • 1 student temporarily abandoned their job hunt (currently job hunting)
  • 2 students had tuition refunded after prolonged job hunts (one now employed as a developer, one has an apprenticeship)

Therefore 95 students are tracked below.

Job Hunt Length

  • signed before graduation: 23 (24.2%)
  • full-time employment within 30 days: 46 (48.4%)
  • full-time employment within 60 days: 61 (64.2%)
  • full-time employment within 90 days: 80 (84.2%)
  • full-time employment in 90+ days: 94 (95.8%)
  • under 90 days without an offer: 2 (2.1%)
  • over 90 days without an offer: 2 (2.1%)

In addition, 9 students signed a job offer before graduation but did not graduate (and are thus not reflected above). If counted in both the available pool (95+9 = 104) and in the pre-grad jobs, the numbers become:

  • signed before graduation: 32 (30.77%)
  • full-time employment within 30 days: 55 (52.9%)
  • full-time employment within 60 days: 70 (67.3%)
  • full-time employment within 90 days: 89 (85.6%)
  • full-time employment in 90+ days: 109 (96.15%)
  • currently under 90 days without an offer: 2 (1.9%)
  • currently over 90 days without an offer: 2 (1.9%)

We regret not having a range of 90-120 days in the original student survey. Of the 20 students in the 90+ category, the vast majority were in the 90-120 range and a good chunk of those were not job hunting the entire time (vacations, weddings, etc).

Job Type

Reported Job Titles

Job titles in the industry are a mess. Here are the 86 job titles reported by employed alumni:

["assistant instructor", "assistant instructor", "assistant instructor", "associate engineer", "associate software engineer", "associate software engineer", "developer", "developer", "developer", "developer", "developer", "developer", "developer", "developer", "devops engineer", "devops engineer", "front-end engineer", "frontend engineer", "frontend software developer", "full stack developer", "full stack software developer", "jr. full stack developer", "junior application developer", "junior dev (web and mobile)", "junior developer", "junior developer", "junior developer", "junior rails developer", "junior rubyist", "junior software developer", "junior software developer", "junior software developer", "junior software developer", "junior software engineer", "partner", "product developer", "qa engineer", "qa engineer", "qa engineer", "research associate", "resident apprentice", "senior agile developer", "site content engineer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer", "software developer ii", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer", "software engineer/senior architect", "solution developer", "teaching assistant ", "team lead/full-stack developer", "web developer", "web developer"] 
  • total non-exempt graduates: 95
  • full-time developers: 77
  • in time-limited apprenticeships: 1
  • quality assurance: 3
  • contractors/self-employed: 1
  • total of technical roles: 82
  • employed by Turing: 4
  • unemployed: 4
  • non-reporting: 5

Of the four students employed by Turing, two are permanent long-term staff and two are in temporary roles while they wait for work visas. All four are responsible for technical instruction and are among the finest developers we've graduated.

Of the five employed alumni who did not report job titles, four are known to be in full-time technical roles (1 devops, 3 developers).

Salary

  • average salary of employed graduates: $74,447
  • average change of yearly salary compared with previous job: $33,195

In addition, we looked at the salary change for persons who previously earned less than $60,000/year before attending Turing. There are 64 of those employed graduates and their average salary delta is $44,729.

Tuition

Our standard Tuition is $17,500. Students who have a recent Macbook Pro can decline the included laptop and pay a reduced tuition of $16,300. Some students get an additional discount based on their referral pipeline or a diversity scholarship.

All together the average tuition paid by graduates is $16,800.

The Real Cost of Turing

We encourage students to calculate the real cost of Turing. For those persons earning under $60,000, the average previous salary is conservatively (high) $45,000. The average job hunt lasts about 2 months. A single person can get by on about $1500/month in Denver. The real cost of Turing is thus:

  • Tuition: $17,500
  • 9-months of not working: 45000 * 9/12 = $33750
  • 9-months of cost-of-living: 1500 * 9 = $13,500
  • Real Cost = 17500 + 33750 + 13500 = $64,750

Then what is the timeline to payoff that investment? With an average salary delta of $44,729, those students pay off their investment in 17 months.

Data & Methodology

Where did the data come from?

  • Graduation data was pulled from our internal records
  • Employment outcomes were reported by students in a survey conducted in February 2016

Was the data modified?

Yes. The data was modified/sanitized in the following ways:

  • Many salary numbers were expanded from abbreviations (like 68k to 68000)
  • Salaries stated in an hourly rate (mostly from pre-Turing jobs) were extrapolated to a similar annual salary
  • A few anomalies were simplified such as a job title of some corporate BS became developer when I knew the details of their job
  • Non-graduates and exempted job hunters were at times excluded as described in the relevant sections above

Were the data/calculations audited?

No. As a small non-profit, honestly, I can't argue why it benefits students to spend money on a meaningless audit. If we were motivated to cheat we could omit data or sneak changes past the best auditors. Instead I hope the depth and clarity of the above calculations and discussion demonstrate our commitment to transparency.

That being said, if an appropriate entity is so motivated as to donate auditing services, we're happy to share student contact information under sufficient guards to maintain their privacy.

So what if we're making this all up? Or doctoring the data? First, our admissions are strong, jobs are strong, and we don't have much to gain by presenting phoney data. Second, we're a 501(c)3 non-profit so there's not a whole lot of benefit to be had from gaming the market / public perception.

We don't believe in hiding skeletons in the closet. Many of the numbers above are below what other programs will claim. We work hard on recruiting and selecting a diverse, capable group of students. We cram as much learning as possible into their seven months. Then we help them find great jobs and launch fantastic careers. We iterate on those processes constantly, do the best we can, and these are the results. Whatever the data says we're ok with it.

If you'd like to hear is straight from the students, read reviews on CourseReport.

Raw Data

The data used in this study along with the calculation results can be found here:

I regret that limitations of Google Spreadsheets prevent us from easily sharing the one public-ready sheet without exposing the sheets with private information.

Changes, Errors, Corrections, and Questions

As new data comes in from students, errors are found in the calculations, or other data questions arise this report may be edited and updated. Questions or corrections can be sent to contact@turing.io

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