Keziyah

Let's switch gears for a sec and talk about Holberton School reviews. First, if you ever see Course Report, SwitchUp, or similar bootcamp reviews, ignore them. They look too good to be true. That's because they are.

Remember that the tech bootcamps pay other companies to promote their products. That's why you might see bootcamp promotions on review sites like Course Report and SwitchUp. That's how Career Karma exists. They get paid to refer students to a select few schools.

Several folks have told me that Holberton School gives students gift cards to write "honest" reviews on these review sites. A student sent me a screenshot of a Slack message, in which Holberton staff told students that they'd get a $50 Amazon gift card after writing reviews.

Students were asked to write reviews on Course Report, SwitchUp, Yelp, Facebook, and Google. To be fair, the Slack message did say that students should talk about both the good and bad about Holberton School. But they were getting paid, so...

Let's talk about admissions. A 2.58% acceptance rate is what they claim on their website. But according to one former student, let's call them Anon 1, "if you're breathing, they'll accept you...it's a numbers game to them."

Anon 1 is a success story by the way. They went through part of the program and now have a high paying tech job. Yet they reached out to me because they saw their fellow students struggling, and felt the need to warn others about what was really going on at Holberton.

Anon 1: "I don't want people to fall for this trap anymore." But it seems like Holberton School wants to make the trap as easy as possible to fall into. Admissions isn't selective at all. Anon 2 spoke to an intern, who "was told to accept anything that came to her."

Anon 2: "During my application process, my entry was instantly accepted when I submitted. There was not nearly enough time to look at anything I did..." They later found out there was no real system in place to review applications.

Let's get into Holberton's curriculum. As I said, students will pay up to $85k to teach themselves & each other. Anon 3 is another success story, from an earlier batch of HS. They work as an engineer in a tech hub. Anon 3: "We truly feel that the education was not worth 85k."

Anon 3: "Many of the students [from my early batch years ago] were used as their "success numbers", yet our curriculum was woefully underdeveloped" In fact, there was no Year 2 curriculum yet. I believe there *still* isn't a Year 2 curriculum.

My understanding is that though Holberton School is a 2 year program, the actual learning takes place over 9 months. Anon 2: "They do not make any effort to put anyone into the year 2 program unless they have totally given up on job hunting. The year 2 curriculum is a sham"

Ok, so there is a Year 2 curriculum, but it's bullshit. Anon 1 only did the 1st 9 months, and says those 9 months are "very general, stuff you can grab out of a book yourself. Don’t need some aging tech bro to do that for you."

For $85k per student, you'd think that Holberton School would hire an amazing education team to write the curriculum, right? Anon 1 says that a "co-founder shamelessly laughed about grabbing practice problems right from the book and charging people for it"

For the Year 2 specializations, you can supposedly learn things like machine learning, AR/VR, and low level programming. The curriculum for all of these specializations are being developed by junior engineers/former Holberton students.

Curriculum development is very hard. This is not work that you give to students with little experience. I swear these bootcamps have no respect for education at all.

Anon 1: "They’re really just betting that people won’t go back for the specialization and that’s why they have placeholder specialization that isn’t completely fleshed out." Though the Year 2 specialization is optional, the tuition isn't. Eighty five thousand American dollars.

Oh yeah, and the current head of curriculum at Holberton School? Also a former student. No apparent previous experience in education or curriculum design.

So it's no wonder that Anon 3 described the curriculum as "obviously thrown together." So we have newbie coders teaching themselves with a poor curriculum. Also, the program is advertised as full stack, but they only get one week of JavaScript. One week.

Let's talk about how students learn at Holberton School. Or how they don't. Anon 4, on peer learning at HS: "It’s no different from giving a bunch of kids car keys and manuals to go learn by doing...No one looks through our work, no one teaches us best practices."

Anon 4: "Technically yes I did learn how to learn. It just wasn’t in a controlled manner and included a ton of wasted time and effort that could have been avoided had someone guided me..."

Holberton Students have no guidance, except their peers. And this can be problematic if a fellow student gets something wrong. Anon 1: "In my group, it’s generally the loud confident white guy that spreads false [info] because their voice overshadows everyone else."

Anon 1 says that Holberton's solution was to pay student teachers who were a couple months ahead in the program $15 an hour to sit in group discussions about the material. But "these student teachers don’t know what they’re talking about sometimes."

My bootcamp had TAs as well. I'm not against TAs who were former students. While they were there to support us, we also had actual instructors. And you had to apply to become a TA and the interview wasn't easy (I know because I failed it lol).

Anon 6 left Holberton School for reasons that I'll get to later. They say that because students come into the program at very different levels, with some having no coding experience, but others knowing some CS, "things quickly become stratified. Ppl with resources at the top."

I'm sure many of the success stories come from people who already had experience, knowledge, or connections. It must be frustrating for someone who is a total newbie to coding, to feel left behind in class, without a way of getting help from an instructor.

I also wonder if this caused cliques to form. Maybe students banded together based on how much previous experience they had, or how well they were progressing. In a regulated classroom, there are ways to mix students up so this doesn't happen. But with no instructor...?

In fact, Anon 6 says: "Access to help is not equitable because you have to rely on peers to share knowledge (it's surprising how cliquey and protective ppl can get)."

Stay tuned for more on Holberton School and: - Racism - Emotionally unstable staff - Students kicked out - Possible illegal/unethical activity - The "Career Sprint" that is described as "torture" and "cruel and unusual" It's late and I'm going to bed. See you tomorrow.

Mentorship is supposed to be an important part of Holberton's curriculum. Anon 5 says that mentors were supposed to be resources for students, and should have also kept the curriculum up to date. But in reality, "mentors were barely engaged."