Nani Rios has a full-stack web development certificate of completion from Codeup and a $28,000 loan at 10% interest.
What she doesn’t have is access to the school’s placement program, nor its guaranteed tuition refund if she doesn’t find a job. Rios, 23, took out the loan to attend the for-profit bootcamp because she believed it was a low-risk proposition.
Her cohort was just a week and a half from completing its coursework when Codeup stunned students and remaining staff by closing abruptly on Dec. 28. That day, school officials sent an email that announced the school’s immediate closure, reversing course from a Dec. 8 communication that said Codeup was committed to allowing current students to complete their programs.
“They promised to help me find a job or I’d get my money back,” said Rios, who heard about Codeup from her husband, who is in the military. She knew that veterans could use their VA benefits for tuition, and that, too, made her feel comfortable. “The military trusted it.”
Rios, whose only previous work experience was in retail, was counting on Codeup’s placement services to help her find a web developer job. She said she’s been working on her résumé and updating her LinkedIn profile, “but I’m not receiving any of the guidance I was promised after graduation. I’m left with so much debt.”
“There’s tons of other boot camps, and this information is even available free in a lot of places,” said Brock Green, who financed roughly half of the $31,000 tuition and completed the program a month before Codeup closed. “For me, the value was not in the classroom, it was in this idea that the school had connections.”
Rios wasn’t the only student who considered Codeup’s placement services part of what she was paying for. A student who graduated with a data sciences certificate in November said he was swayed by the school’s emphasis on the relationships it had built with local companies to help Codeup students get hired.
Codeup, he said, “has not filled their end of the bargain.”
It’s unclear how many students were enrolled at the time of closure. Emails to students show several cohorts, which generally included anywhere from six to 15 students.
While some students took out loans to finance the courses, the vast majority of students at Codeup over the past several years were military veterans. Crystal Poenisch, a former Codeup student who later worked in the marketing department, said “veterans with VA benefits” were “our No. 1 target.”
‘Stuck and scrambling’
Poli Gonzalez is one of those veterans, and while he’s not facing debt like some non-veteran students, he was using a program for disabled vets that also included a housing allowance. That has now evaporated.
Gonzalez said he didn’t know anything was amiss until then-CEO and co-founder Jason Straughan emailed students on Dec. 8 to say Codeup would no longer accept new students but remained “committed to delivering a quality education to each of you.”
Gonzalez moved to San Antonio to attend the school, signed an eight-month lease, and started right about the time Codeup moved into new offices and quietly laid off roughly a quarter of its staff.
Three weeks later, he got the email notifying him of the school’s immediate closure. He immediately reached out to his counselor at the VA, who let him know his housing benefits would cease.
“They told me, ‘What you got last is what you got. There’s not going to be any more,’” said Gonzalez, who is trying to figure out how he’ll pay his rent and what to do next regarding his coursework. He said he plans on writing a letter to Congress to let them know that veterans like him are “stuck and scrambling.”
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