

Boot camps like Flockjay attract students by promising to demystify tech and get students high-paying jobs without having to take on the debt of attending a four-year college.īusiness has been booming. After all, it’s much harder to understand what tech employees do all day than it is to picture what happens in a car factory. But tech can also seem opaque to outsiders. In the turbulent economy of the pandemic era, few industries seem as attractive as the tech sector, where people can earn high salaries, work remotely, and feel with some degree of certainty that they’re in a growing field. “There were so many people who tried to get jobs after and could not.” Boot-camp boom “Their shtick was that it was about getting Black people into tech-but over the 10 weeks, they didn’t train us for any real-life situation,” says Johnson. Blair, the company that gave Johnson the money for her tuition, no longer works with Flockjay they have turned over her financial debt to Meratas. Her sales job, while technically in the technology industry, is basically telemarketing, she says: “This is literally the most soul-sucking job I’ve had in my entire life.”įlockjay was cited in October of 2020 by California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education for operating without approval, Johnson has since learned, and ordered to cease advertising to students and enrolling them.

She doesn’t make anywhere near the $75,000 salary the company mentioned in its promotions. She never mentioned Flockjay to her new employer. She finished the course, since the company had pledged to match her with hiring partners once she graduated, but after waiting for weeks to be connected with a company, she hustled and found her own job in sales. Now, a year after enrolling, Johnson is getting hounded by Meratas, the company responsible for collecting on her Flockjay tuition, despite the fact that Johnson says she did not receive the education Flockjay promised. Nor are these students eligible for any of the Biden Administration’s planned federal loan forgiveness programs, because ISAs are offered not by the U.S. They pitch these ISAs as a way to access education without taking out a loan, but students like Johnson soon find out that these agreements can leave them owing a lot of money without the good career prospects they were promised. Unaccredited schools have long flourished in the U.S., but this new wave of schools does something different: attracting students by offering a relatively new funding model called an income share agreement (ISA). Johnson had entered the lawless arena of tech boot camps These camps are among thousands of unaccredited schools that pitch their services to students through heavy marketing spends and often don’t deliver on the promises made in their advertising pitches. “They said, ‘You’re going to kill it you’re going to make so much money.’ ” When Johnson started an application and then abandoned it, a Flockjay sales rep called her and made it sound like the program was exclusive, she says, but that she had a good shot at getting in, because she’d worked in sales in the past.

Johnson assumed the scheme was fake until one day she saw on Twitter that Black celebrities like Serena Williams and Will Smith had invested in Flockjay-and that the Walnut, California–based startup pledged to help people from underrepresented backgrounds get into the tech industry. The ad for the boot camp specializing in tech sales followed her around social media: “This is the bullet train you don’t want to miss! It’s recession-proof even in the midst of a Global Pandemic.” Even better, according to the company’s promotional material, students didn’t have to pay a cent in tuition to Flockjay until they landed a job that paid at least $40,000 a year. The very idea that she, a Black person living in Alabama, could make $75,000 a year in the tech industry after just a 10-week boot camp is what drew Aaryn Johnson into Flockjay.
