| | Thomas | These reviews are always a tricky thing and quite frankly I always take them with a grain of salt. If you go through the learning process and aren't faced with challenges, halted by obstacles, driven to frustration, but in the end coming away with more answers than questions, you didn’t try hard enough. I was proud to of hit all of those metrics in my experience. To quote a mentor and founding father of it all:
"Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it."- Vint Cerf
So why the rating levels?
To be clear this is not a "it didn’t work, woe is me review". By RefactorU standards I'm statistically a success story of their program. Most of it had to do with the expectations going into the camp. Most of those expectations are set by the marketing used by RefactorU. Marketing sets both tone and expectations of the customer segment you’re marketing to, in my case they failed on an egregious and costly level. VETERANS and GI BILL APPLICANTS LISTEN UP
EXPECTATIONS OF OVERALL EXPERIENCE:
- 1 star (Job Placement) This one I wasn't really to concerned about going in, I wasn't banking on RefactorU for the "%96 job placement in 12 weeks" but it certainly gave me a warm and fuzzy. Especially considering I was coming from the east coast. My expectation was that I had pretty good odds on getting a job in new area if I so desired to stay in Colorado. But there’s something I take issue with in their statistical reporting and it's in the fine print under the pie chart in the link above. For integrity sake it is displayed as of the date of this review:
The sample size of that %96 percent is based on
*Population size: N = 122
122 graduates as of the year 2015. Great, so we're talking roughly 117 people getting jobs within 3 months right? Wrong!
*Sample size: n = 49 (40% response rate)
40 percent!? Yeah, let that sink in for a minute. How does %40 of 122 graduates equate to %96 percent? At best what you can state accurately is
*of 122 graduates for year 2015 49 responded with employment inside 12 weeks
* %40 of graduates respond with job placement in 12 weeks
I'm not going to comb through all the stats but the numbers simply don't add up even when factoring percentage of the 82 graduates listed on LInkedin that include 2016 grads, or those that went on to start their own firms. I get that RefactorU is at the end of the day a for profit business so marketing has to err on the side of value proposition. But again the expectation from my experience was set months prior to me stepping in the classroom. Sure I saw the website, and maybe those numbers in fine print were there but it isn’t very clear even during the blatant sales funnel that is the pre student screening process either. For a point of comparison on transparency in graduate reporting of coding boot camps, here is a pretty good example from a not for profit code school in the Denver area. There is a lot more I can say about the red flags in this category during my time at RefactorU, including but not limited to the current ratio of employed grad from my cohort almost 12 weeks later (hint: not %96), the cohort prior to mine (18 weeks after graduation) or the number of graduates I met from cohorts as far back as 2015 at Job fairs, Boulder Startup week, meetups, tech conferences, or corporate open house. At the end of the day the issue I take with this is that this is a very risky game that RefactorU is playing with. If you market such an expectation and predicate your business on this standard, then by definition your business is offering a service that fails customers roughly %60 of the time. Even on this site where less than %15 percent of RefactorU graduates reporting, results are still markedly and numerically biased from a third party.
---------------------------------VETERANS MUST READ----------------------------------
-2 star (RefactorU accepts GIBill) This hurt the most. As I said earlier on the day of graduation I had no regret. Two weeks later however, I did and it had everything to do with RefactorU's handling of the GIBill. But let’s take a step back. I know how frustrating the GiBill and VA benefit process can be for so many, civilian, dependent, and veteran alike. For the GIBill there are some misconceptions that need to be cleared because they directly impact how you use them with institutions like RefactorU or codes schools in general.
Myth - The GI Bill is given to all veterans of the us Armed Forces.
This is false and if you are of this mindset you are part of the problem. Chapters 30 and 33 of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 are known as the Montgomery and Post 9/11 GI Bill respectively. They are a voluntary financial investment asset requiring a termed payment of approximately 1 year of military pay with an optional "kicker" bonus payment after said term for US service men and women to invest. This investment asset is backed by the US Government. Rate of return is guaranteed to equal a set number of disbursements over the course of 36 months of educational training after several years of investment maturity. Meaning even after a veteran must pay into the asset it can’t be touched for several years until service members are qualified to access the benefits on its rate of return. Very much like a college 509 savings plan, or loosely based you can think of it as 401k for education but with a higher ROI. Point is, I paid an investment over time, it sits, I received a matured return on my investment that is still owned by me but controlled by the VA. I mention this to make the point that when I say I paid the insane amount I did for RefactorU it was not the amount agreed to with RefactorU. As a veteran I was not the only one victimized.
How does this apply to RefactorU's 2-month training course that they so graciously offer a %20 military discount totaling an alleged cost of $10,800?
It gets tricky but stay with me. RefactorU is not an accredited degree granting institution. As a result, disbursements are disproportional to the typical cost of semester based training. This allows, for profit, vocational institutions to file as "non traditional" Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL) with the VA. In the case of RefactorU I sent my COE paperwork in early March asking what their filing status with the VA was since they were not listed on the VA WEAMS List of Institutions as of 02/16. My goal, like most VA students who file ahead of class start date, was to have my Post/911 Chapter 33 paperwork cleared prior to April 2nd start date so that disbursement would coincide with the class/training schedule. Coming from out of state I needed to rent a place to stay and that monthly stipend for living expenses was the expected offset.
In gathering my paperwork I realized that RefactorU's %20 discount as an IHL qualifies them very clearly as a candidate for the GI Bill Yellow Ribbon Program. Again RefactorU would not disclose if they were an IHL at the time and only responded by saying "we do guarantee acceptance of the GI Bill and we are listed and registered with the Colorado Department of Higher Education" this was a red flag from the start. I pressed forward in the assumption that they would be operating as an IHL considering the CDHE registration and the dubious "U" of RefactorU.
Furthermore, I noticed that RefactorU was not listed as a Colorado Yellow Ribbon Participant (a provision within the Post 9/11 Gi Bill) ironically hurting their bottom line by doing so. To participate schools need to fill out VA Form 22-0839 and submit to VA electronically. I sent this form with the instructions, corresponding information, and volunteered to file it with the VA myself on behalf of the school in my early March email. Unfortunately, it went without response.
Upon arrival of day 1 and meeting the other veterans in my cohort (%30 of our class were vets), we all realized the school had yet to file with the VA. Anybody who deals with the VA knows the wait times. So all of us expecting that $1,800 housing stipend scheduled on the 1st of each month during training realized it wasn’t coming and we would be lucky to receive it all during the course of the 10-week training. According to the schools VA cost calculator there is clear distinction in cost between Montgomery and Post 9/11 benefits. After several joint phone calls to the VA we realized the school had not submitted the documentation to the VA until week 2 of class! As a result, we didn’t receive our benefits until 7 weeks into our 10 week class. Leaving many of us to rely on out of pocket expenses and credit during unemployment to cover living expenses. Of course this only adds to the stress of the class but it was unnecessary and easily avoidable. When it was all said and done, I later learned that not only I but the other vets in the class were charged for 8 months ($14,056) of our annual $21,085 entitlement for a 2 month class that should, even with military discount, be $10,800. Clearly there is a problem here and quite frankly it's not entirely RefactorU's fault, this is also systemically erroneous on the part of the VA, however RefacorU chose to wing it in an area they clearly weren’t qualified or experienced to handle. Most schools have a trained POC for VA administration. The fact that RefacorU decided against that and filed, while misrepresenting their status as an institution of higher learning with the VA is negligence. When your marketing roughly 8 cohorts a year with an average class size of 20-30 students which should be 200 but let’s just stick with the 122 documented as graduates at a rate of roughly $13k per student, as business you have well over 1.5 million in annual revenue to invest in a certifying official with experience in the VA but RefactorU doesn’t and I would call that Gross Negligence!
So what is the cost of RefactorU to veterans under the Post 9/11 GiBill?
Over $14,056. dollars. Or roughly 8 months of your 12 month $21,085 annual allotment. This for a course that is 2 months at marketed cost of $10,500 to veterans.
How does a 2 month course marketed at a cost of $10,800 to veterans cost more than the actual $13,500.00 price of admission to regular students?
This comes down to the fact that after graduation in June it was later listed and disclosed that RefactorU was registered as a "non college degree" program vs. IHL or even Trade School on the Job Vocational. Which was expected and known there was a lack of college degree but not all IHL's offer college degrees under the GI Bill and RefactorU marketed themselves as such.
The take away here is that veterans using the GI Bill pay a "premium" above the $13,500 cost to attend RefactorU.
This is ultimately why schools like ITT Tech, University of Phoenix and the several other for profit "institutions of higher learning" get mired in scandal. A result of negligent financial practices that are predatory to government backed student financial assets. Schools like RefactorU do not take the due diligence to understand the VA system and only recognize it as "guaranteed money" to the school without disclosing impact and true cost to the students.
Your best bet as a vet is to take the %20 discount and finance that through a third party which RefactorU does offer. Do not use your GI Bill with RefactorU. Or better yet, as one of the vets in our class did after realizing RefactorU was not meeting his expectations, enroll at Flatiron Community College and get a certificate from them over the course of one semester at a cost less than %60 what RefactorU charges. Except where he went to apply his Gi Bill benefit in that program the VA informed he had no more money left because RefactorU cost depleted his money unexpectedly.
EXPERIENCE OF INSTRUCTORS
-1 star (world class instructors): To be honest, I liked everyone of their instructors as people. I respect their skills as developers and they are without question brilliant folks. However, when I interviewed with schools in most cases I spoke directly with the instructor designated for the class I would be in. In almost all case they had decades of experience, multiple advanced degrees and even in the case of Iron Yard my instructor to be was former VP of Google's product development. RefactorU is growing so more talent is added to the team every day but again this is a review of my experience that exposed me to 3 instructors. The two leads, who I absolutely appreciated and respected are not world class developer or instructors for that matter. They both have, on paper, less than 5 years of documented experience as devs and are both RefactorU alumni. A company that started in 2013. So assuming they had years of experience prior to attending RefactorU, which seems prohibitive, they are by definition in any other technical trade “journeyman” level developers. Not craftsmen level, let alone master level, certainly not world class compared to other code schools. I would have been fine with this except that again in the marketing when you say you have word class instructors (and it seems to be redacted now) you set an expectation. In comparison to other code schools and my own experience in the IT sector world class actually means something I was looking forward to at least a published SME, or even CIS major who 1 of the 3 actually was. But he was mostly leading another cohort in generally unavailable.
-2 stars (classroom management and availability) As a former instructor in the military and corporate trainer I know something about classroom management. Ask any college educator or public school teacher for that matter and they will explain to you what this entails. The facilities RefactorU is housed, in combination with the lack of instructor (I’m not saying developer in this case but their experience as "instructors") ability made classroom management difficult and presented distractions throughout the 10 weeks. They recognized, attempted to fix it, but failed, as advertised, as they were learning on the job.
Availability was an issue because not only were instructors limited to about 1.5-3 hours at most of lecture in an 8-hour day, the other 5 hours of the day were generally spent playing video games or going to off-site lunches and corporate stand-up meetings during designated student hours. Again swell folks all around but not up to my expectations as advertised "world class". Even by Gladwell logic of 10k hours to achieve mastery these folks have only been "instructors" (again referencing experience as developers) for a couple years at best in a non-accredited institution that adopts zero VARK style learning modalities or education standards. Coding Coaches I think would be great marketing term. The TA's on the other hand I would argue are world class developers with some having 20+ years of experience but again they aren't the instructors. Huge discredit is done by underutilizing the TA's who are some of the most brilliant minds in the building.
EXPERIENCE OF CURRICULUM
-4 stars
Most of curriculum was cut and paste from free open sourced learning platforms such as codecademy, udemy, audacity, codeschool, hackerank, and various other platforms I explored prior to arrival. At a cost of several thousand dollars I was expecting more proprietary and unique to RefactorU
Clear lack of continuity between cohorts. You do and are encouraged to learn and collaborate with the other cohorts while you are there. Something that was very clear was that all of the cohorts I spoke with had varying coverage of topics. Nothing was standardized even by RefactorU's staff. You have one instructor teaching from a set IDE in one class on day 1 and the another in our class starting with a different one. Differences in using Immediately Invoked Functions, or how to setup routing in an express server should be standardized in house. Sure you're all free to choose what tools you prefer but when following along with instructors in lecture it is much easier to use the tools and practices they demo on and thusly vary the learning experience.
Not covering all technologies advertised seems petty but look my class never covered templating or spoke about Gulp even when asked it was simply a "here’s the website with the documentation". I didn’t pay $14,500+ to be given a hyperlink. Its advertised on the front of the website and when you do learn Gulp it takes your development abilities to the next level.
Lack of standards or best practices was disappointing to me. Full disclosure, I tested for my CISSP in Feb and of the 8 domains I tested, I failed by 50 points in the area of application security. I knew this was because of my coding abilities and the primary driver behind choosing a code school. Secure Set was where I felt I should have been but they didn’t offer GI Bill, and I only needed to review application development, not the other 7 domains I tested fine in. In week 8 when we did start to cover authentication, even cryptography down to the use of MD5 hashing. The total subject was discussed in class for a total of 2 hours. These are not topics you blaze through lightly. I even pulled out very basic and commonly used industry best practices such as NIST SP 800 guides. As a former NIST Guest Researcher and consultant who helped fortune 500, federal, and private sector dev teams meet these standards I think RefactorU is doing a huge disservice to themselves by not raising the bar and saying that graduates are versed in these because I was very briefly exposed to them even in RefactorU. But their world class instructors are not familiar such best practices and even when shown to them couldn’t decipher them.
EXPERIENCE OF JOB ASSISTANCE
- 1 star My liaison for recruiting and career counseling was often late for scheduled meetings. Things happen I get that but it can be a hindrance to balance coding time and assignment deadlines like finals when switching gears. The other red flag was when reviewing my resume, the liaison explained that mine was "to technical" in verbiage despite applying for technical roles. Top it all off with the fact the liaison was switched half way through the course and again after graduation.
-1 star This partly ties back to the statistic of %96 but also includes the sheer volume of previous cohort members I even had to compete against for jobs I applied to. In many cases I felt bad for that they had gone so long without employment and simply looked elsewhere but often found Refactor grads from several months prior out there being proactive but struggling to find work. This directly impacted my level of competiveness in the local labor pool.
WHAT WENT WELL?
The community manager Pattie Kettle is by far the hardest working person in that building and will bend over backwards, at times to her own sacrifice, to make sure your experience is successful.
Shirrone went out of her way to assist with lodging prior to my arrival since the of the 4 bedrooms in housing they offer for a marketed class size of 20-30 people you have about a %15 chance to get in there. Regardless Shirrone provided several well researched and viable alternatives. I respected that from RefactorU |
