Disclaimer - taught GA part-time courses (data science)
My heart goes out to those people, and I'm guessing Web Development Immersive students?
I always described GA's programs as a multiplier in that your outcome is going to be weighted by your experience going in. And for the most part I felt GA managed that expectation fairly well for most of its immersive programs - except Web Development.
In WDI I would see students who had no background in CS, design, etc. hoping to go from no experience to a full-stack developer position in 12 weeks. With a broad curriculum that iirc was starting with html/css fundamentals and working through Rails/Node/... maybe Angular? I felt it was giving them a base to start learning on their own, but not enough to immediately start working except for the very-top students (who likely had some sort of helpful background coming in).
I do believe GA is at its core a good organization that wants to see its students succeed (can't say enough good things about the career coaching / placement staff aka "outcomes"). But I can see how with a lot of competition in that space, the sell may have gotten stronger than what the product supports - and that's 100% on GA to address.
I just wanted to chime in and say that I am a graduate of Web Development Immersive program (London campus). In 2014 I was crazy enough to put all my trust in GA (I didn't know much about them, except that they taught Ruby on Rails, and it sounded cool, and I wanted to learn), and go there from a different country to get the training. Turned out to be one of the best things that happened to me, ever! True, I did not have particularly high career expectations, nothing like making $150k/yr or anything that lofty, but I did hope that it would give me enough of a foundation to help me change my career and become a software developer. Which it totally did.
I saw this equally across the UX, WebDev, and product management immersive graduates.
I don’t doubt that GA started with good intentions, but it seems clear that they got caught in the typical startup trap where they get ‘forced’ to prioritize investors over users as their target audience.
My heart goes out to those people, and I'm guessing Web Development Immersive students?
I always described GA's programs as a multiplier in that your outcome is going to be weighted by your experience going in. And for the most part I felt GA managed that expectation fairly well for most of its immersive programs - except Web Development.
In WDI I would see students who had no background in CS, design, etc. hoping to go from no experience to a full-stack developer position in 12 weeks. With a broad curriculum that iirc was starting with html/css fundamentals and working through Rails/Node/... maybe Angular? I felt it was giving them a base to start learning on their own, but not enough to immediately start working except for the very-top students (who likely had some sort of helpful background coming in).
I do believe GA is at its core a good organization that wants to see its students succeed (can't say enough good things about the career coaching / placement staff aka "outcomes"). But I can see how with a lot of competition in that space, the sell may have gotten stronger than what the product supports - and that's 100% on GA to address.