Last year, President Obama was in St. Louis where he announced an ambitious government program called Tech Higher. The goal was to help local communities train more people for jobs and technology. At the time when we all leave digital lives, anybody who has the drive and the will to get into this field should have a way to do so, a pathway to do so. So my administration is committed to this initiation, and he introduced a woman called Lashawna Lewis.
The President says she's exactly the kind of person who deserves a chance. Now. The reason Leshada's story is so relevant is Lashanna grew up in East St. Louis. She had a passion for computers, but because of circumstances constraints, she wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth, um she wasn't able to get a college degree, and because she didn't have a college degree, she couldn't and get an interview for a touch job despite her coding skills.
But Lashanna got some help from launch Code, which teaches coding and helps place people in related jobs in St. Louis, and today she's a system engineer a master card. This was a real success story at a time when teaching high level computing skills to students has never mattered more. The U S Government expects almost two thousand new software developer jobs over the next ten years. There are tons of coding schools, boot camps here in the Bay Area
and all over the country. They all want to produce more success stories like Lishanna, Summer for profit, Summer nonprofits. I feel like I hear about a new one every week. One of these schools is especially interesting. It was started in Paris by a French billionaire named Xavier Neil, and about three years after the launch of that first school, he decided to open another branch right here in Silica
On Valley, the mecca of technology. The school's called a called count or School forty two in English, and the new branch in the U S is in a town called Fremont, the same place where Tesla builds its cars. It stands out not because its founder, Xavier or'neil, is
one of the richest guys in France. Yeah, he's kind of like a cross between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and not because he's a ponytail wearing geek who dropped out of school, or even because he first got rich by starting a sex chat service and went on to build a giant internet and phone company called Iliad. Well, all those things are interesting, but the school stands out because it offers a rigorous three year education and the most highly demanded skill in the modern economy, all for
the absolutely low price of nothing. Hi, I'm brad Stone, and then Sarah McBride, and this week on Decrypted will tell you about an education experiment aimed at addressing one of the tech industry's most intractable problems by offering the program for free. The goal is to extend opportunities to people who have been shut out of high paying, secure jobs and technology. We'll also hear the rub how starting a free coding school in the US brings a special
set of challenges that never came up in France. I found that out drawing visits to the Silicon Valley branch at the school, which just opened in September. You'll also hear from me. I'm Marie Moab and I'm our tech reporter in Paris. I visited the original branch of school for the two and I spoke to its billionaire founder Xavian You. So, Marie, let's start with that Xavier Neil and why he decided to open the school. Well, Zevinel says he wanted to solve two problems. First, businesses need
more coders. That's a huge challenge here in the US, where the tech industry is going faster than almost any other sector. The people who make great coders just start getting a chance, like people from rough backgrounds or youngsters with criminal records. Here's what Davinel told me about why he decided to start to school. In our company, we we saw that we did not find enough people, enough talent,
enough people who knew how to cut. And in this mind we had we had, we had, and we have very good school teaching call inference, but never enough people who know how to And at the same time, if we were in outside of Peris, in a lot of suburbs, you have a lot of people who are very poor. And in fact, in France, when you are when you were born, when you were born, in your in the perfectly at the end, you cannot go to school and you stay and your women, you women poor generation after generation.
And the idea it was to mix these two things and to try to have these people coming from the poor superbs going to a coding school. I cot aboot that and meal on the top floor of the Paris headquarters of the Iliad in front of a panoramic view of the city. Neil came in wearing a turtleneck, thick frame glasses, his usual slicked back, longish hair, and he's a friendly type, smiling and he gets quite passionate when
he talks about forty two. And we should probably explain to anyone not the steeped in geekie science fiction where the name of the school comes from. It's a reference from the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and it's actually the answer to life's biggest but never explicitly stated question forty two. And by the way, when I visited the school, I realized it's full of nerdy references like that. So Sarah tell me more, what's what's unusual
about forty two. Well, it's a three year program and it's free, but it's not accredited. There's a curriculum and tests you have to pass, but no teachers. The students teach themselves. When School forty two first opened in France, thousands of people applied. Davinil picked an up and coming neighborhood in the north of Paris called Kishi. It's basically being rebuilt from the ground up. It looks like a construction site in what used to be a neglected rundown area.
It's school of cranes and jackhammers all over the sidewalk, but it's slowly shaping into a modern district around the skyscraper building for Paris's biggest courthouse, and Sarah tell us about the school here in the U s well, it's pretty much opposite to the school in France. Here it's in an office park mere Fremat, a suburban kind of place on the southeastern side of Silicon Valley, about forty
miles from San Francisco. It's in an office park by a freeway, past a bunch of strip halls, and at first I couldn't even tell if I was in the right spot because the parking lot looked so empty. It's in a big office building that used to belong to another college school. Forty two bought the building, but it's hard to tell. It still says de Vry University and giant letters on the front. You have to head around to the back of the building to find the school.
Forty two Entrance exactly, and Yell said he founded both schools for similar reasons when something struck him about software engineers and we don't have a lot of usity influence in this kind of job. It's really really white people coming from more or less switch families because in the US you have exacts same issue and the same problem. So exactly, Neil decided to open a branch of his French school in the Bay Area, and a lot of tech industry people who knew about the school got super excited.
School forty two put up a video of them on its website. Here's Stuart Butterfield, who found it slack. I love the concept of forty I like the idea of here learning. And Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter and Square. It's really unique. Again, I haven't seen anything else like it in the world. And Evan Spiegel, who found its Snapchat. I'm excited that it's coming to the US. That was my one big complaint when I visited. I was like, why is this not in the United States? And they
were like, well, actually, I think San Francisco. Here's what the school in France and the school in the US share. They're both open seven they only take students under thirty and all work gets done in giant computer labs. In the US, the school has exactly one thousand, twenty four Mac computers. It's another one of those nerdy references we mentioned, because that's how many bites are in a kilobite. Sometimes. Okay, but Marie, I'm having a hard time getting my mind
around one fact we mentioned earlier. There are no teachers at the school. Zero teachers. There's no need for them because the students teach themselves. Really, of course, they learned from a curriculum compiled by the school and they have to pass tests to move to the next level. Okay, what does it take to get in? First? You have to pass a logic test online, It's almost like playing a game, and if you pass that, you can come
to campus for another set of tests during lapicin. Now, that's yet another of those inside jokes at the school. Pisin is the French word for swimming pool, and when you talk to the students, they'll tell you definitely get thrown in at the deep end. If you make it through the piecine, then you can come join the program. It's three years and it's free and in the US, there's a free dorm too, but you still need to pay living expenses. And how does that compare to the
deal offered by other coding schools. Well, in the US, coding schools may cost around fifteen thousand dollars for about three months, So coding school's pricey here, but it's short. On the other hand, school forty two takes three years, so in times spend, it's almost like going to college, and you learn a lot more than in a twelve week boot camp. But that's three years when you could be holding down a job and earning a salary. So Sarah's avior, Neil isn't making any money on tuition. Is
this purely a philanthropic endeavor? Yeah, purely philanthropic. He gets a little boost to his personal brand from it, but he's not getting any money. He came from a rough background himself. I think he just wants to give a little back. Okay, So the big question is it working?
Of course, because Neil likes to boast about how some outrageous numbers something like twenty thousand companies have offered internships for equal forty two students before they even graduated, and when the school launched one consulting firm said it will hire everyone who graduates. Now the first crop of graduates are actually out and so far it is looking pretty good for them. Some of landed jobs at Uber and at banks Associate Janal for example, and of course because
Neil himself is looking to hire at Iliad Marie. What are the students like? They really look like your average teenager. They're in their early twenties, one in ten or women, so when you walk into the school you mostly just see a bunch of guys and T shirts and hoodies with their headphones on, their eyes glued to their computer screen. School forty two doesn't track statistics about family incomes, so
it's hard to tell. But when you talk to the students, many will tell you about tough backgrounds and previous jobs delivering pizza for example. Generally university was out of the question and most never even graduated from high school. That's way different to School forty two and Fremat they're the students are a couple of years older than in France.
There are more women, and when you talk to them you hear that many of college degrees, Lots of them were well along in different careers before switching gears and trying coding. So where were you working before here? I was working for Macy's as a as a merchandiser. It's a dramatic shift. Yeah. I went to the University of Cincinnati. I was there for three years. I was trying to get a pharmacy degree, but I never actually went to pharmacy school. I was just in uh pre pharmacy. And
then there's this student, Sonia chib. She was formerly an investment banker. I'm going to attact from sub university and a starting asset management field and I'll move to investment banking. When I was as he stunts in the money market short money market, and after that I was in charge of control the position and derivative Sasania is smart and eager, but she's not the profile of the typical student you'd
imagine would benefit from a free coding school. And she's not really the kind exacting you says he'd most like to attract. Here's the kind of person, he says, he wants people coming from the diversity, poor people. If this is a kind of people who are looking for but Tosnia, her presence is desirable, maybe even vital. It's not just give a chance two people who don't who can't come in the traditional school. No, it's to to to to
mix people. I'm here to meet other people and to try to uh to exchange my idea with them, and maybe something's good will happen with there's people. I'm not here to stay in my corner alone. No, and when you put it like that, actually exactly nearly agrees with her. If you are coming from the witch famili and your your parents is even your parents have not to pay you a great school? Were the po that the great idea? It's twenty it's to try to mix people into having
these school. People who can have thought to have to to go to in the big university. And it's at the same time people who cannot have thought to go any well, and to mix them. Of course, this is a hard problem at all kinds of universities and workplaces that work to recruit diverse groups. The different groups don't always interact as much as hope for, and to be fair to Sonia, she's not exactly stealing places from hordes
of underprivileged applicants. School forty two says it's been a challenge getting word out to the people they want to reach. Brittany Beer is the chief operating officer of school forty two and Freemont. I definitely think that there could be something that is going on right now that some communities don't necessarily know that this opportunity is out there, or that it's actually available to them. This is actually a
big problem in the US. A lot of universities say they have a tough time finding the diverse group of students they want. Critics, of course, say they aren't trying hard enough, or they should start earlier when students are younger. Brittany said forty two relied a lot on media to get the word out and also online discussions places like Reddit. I asked a bunch of the students how they found out about the school. I learned about forty two through
a Reddit post that I followed to the application. I found it on Facebook and it was interesting, So I talked a good about my parents and they I am um. Actually, one day I was reading on Forbes magazine and I actually saw an ad for forty two and figured that, Hey, this looks interesting. I should give this a shot, so I did. The problem is the people who most benefit from forty two might not be reading those articles or
checking those websites. So is forty two doing anything to reach out to community groups to try to get more candidates from less privileged backgrounds to apply. They are, They're talking to a number of community groups, and Brittany thinks things will improve naturally over time as more people learn about the school and spread the word. So far, there's a definite contrast though. In France, when the school announced it was opening, it drew seventy thousand initial applicants, whereas
in the US it was just a few thousand. And that's partly because because you knew the founder doesn't have quite the reputation in the US that he does in France. Here's Brittany again. In France, when you say examunion, everybody knows him because he's the one that's making your cell phone plans, who's much cheaper than other individuals. So everybody has heard of, uh, this individual and knows also of
forty two of the school. Yeah, I would say that he could be a version of Mark Zuckerberg in front. Zavin Neale is definitely a household name in France for a lot of youngsters. He's a symbol of how one guy can go from total outsider to lunching with the president and running a ten billion dollar company. But he's also a geek who can talk about coding, and that's helped him stand out from your average businessman. But Sarah, is it just that nobody has heard of Xavier Neil
in the US or are there other challenges? Yeah, there are a few challenges. For example, the school here isn't accredited, so students can't get student loans or even deferrals on loans they already have. And that's important because a lot of US students have already been to at least some college. I met a woman called Kimberly Arvin. She chopped out of an annas thesiology program in southern California to go to school forty two, but not before she racked up
some pretty big bucks in student loans. She won't be able to start paying them off until she gets a paid internship next year, so whatever collection notices come, you'll just ignore until you have a little bit of an income. I would say forty two is worth it at this current moment. Yeah. One thing she said makes it worthwhile the free tuition at forty two, and another student, Devin McLaughlin, told me that because of the free dorm, he's been
able to keep expenses to a minimum. It's very strange to revisit dorm life much later down the line, but it's it's fairly easy because you don't have to pay for living space, the price of food is managed, and anything else is not optional exactly, but minimal. When you ask Vino though, the founder of forty two, he'll tell you free education isn't always a selling point. In the US. We have a special particular in shoeing z in you guys, which is that when it's sweet, when you have notation people,
the things you have always something behind it. We didn't have this thing in France, but in the US. Okay, well you have a tweak. What's what's behind and there's nothing behind it? Brittany Beer, the CEO in the US, said the same thing. Is it really free? What's the catch? Is? Quite often what I always hear, uh and is this for real? Most individuals think that this is actually a scam.
We had one student he showed up and we found him wandering around in the parking lot with a suitcase, and we asked him what he was doing, and he said, well, I just got off a plane from Florida. I wasn't quite sure that the building was actually even going to even exist. I thought this was kind of a scam, but I figured, hey, what's a plane ticket. Might as well find out and see what it's like. That student,
Adam Rivo says, that's pretty much exactly what happened. I was very skeptical and did not think it was legitimate, And part of his suspicion was the price tag. You see free education, and people of course judged that being very poor. There's actually mixed evidence on that point. Unlike parts of Europe, free higher education in the US is rare. What comes closest to it in the US has community colleges, which are usually less expensive, right, but those aren't exactly
considered prestigious. President Obama has suggested making community colleges completely free, but some of the people critical of the plan said it would devalue the education they were providing. Still, the students at School forty two say that free definitely doesn't mean easy or low quality. Here's Adam again, I've never been a part of something that works so incredibly well. That's despite getting hit by some pretty tough standards. Adam found that out on the first test, I didn't do
so hot. There's a lot of work to do and I just didn't prepare myself properly. So the next one too much better. So we can't blame the teacher because at School forty two there are no teachers. The policy stems from researcher dating back decades on something called peer learning. Pure learning shows that students learn much better when they
have to explain the material themselves. Lots of universities use it here and there, so does another coding school in San Francisco that in weighs a similar to forty two, called the Whole Burden School, but School forty two takes the idea to extremes. Yeah, I saw them doing that. The students have to do all their work sitting together in the computer lab. They hold study sessions before tests,
but sometimes that doesn't go so well. At one study session, a student gave a long, complicated solution to a problem and another student was complaining, was waving his phone around showing his screen, and what he said was a much more elegant answer. Nothing's perfect. Nothing's perfect, that's Mason young who helped organize the study session. All we can do is h examine it, learn from the mistakes, let it go, and move on. You could say the same about the
school itself. It will be interesting to watch what happens to the people coming out of this program. Will they get those coveted engineering jobs with the top Internet companies. One challenge is that many of the big Silicon Valley companies where forty two students say they'd like to work Facebook, Google, those companies generally won't hire out of coding schools. Yes, they're very traditional. They still like good old fashioned college
grads or engineers with lots of experience. We'll get to find out in a few months because those companies will have their first chance to actually test the chops of the students at the school. In the spring of two thousand seventeen, the first group of US students starts applying for internships. So, Sarah, if this podcasting thing doesn't work out for us, would you ever consider going to a coding school or even a school late school forty two? You know what I actually thought about that took the
test and realized I personally have zero actions. How do you do in the test. I don't know, but I could tell things were not going well. I still haven't done part two of the test, which is when i'd get my results. But uh, given what I know now, if I really wanted to be a coder, I would still go to coding school. It's just a lot more work than I'd realized before I started doing the reporting for this story. I talked to one guy who sent
out resumes before he got a job. It's not just going to this school, it's all the work afterwards, And what you're really getting is just a little taste for coding. You still have to do a ton of work to land a job and be able to not get fired in that job. Well, as you point out in the accompanying print story on coding schools which people should check out on Bloomberg dot com, slash tech, the jury is
still out on some of these programs, right. I mean, uh, companies, the big companies in Slicon Valley don't always quite know. They're not quite confident in in in the kind of graduates they're getting. Here's the problem. When they first came out, everyone wanted to hire coders, and I think quite a few people did get hired out of boot camps. In fact, I spoke to people who went in kind of the two thousand and thirteen timeframe, and was pretty easy for
those people to get jobs. So then they got a reputation as, oh, yeah, I'll go to this school and you'll be able to get a job. But then when people started realizing that twelve weeks in boot camp actually is not enough to learn coding, that maybe it makes sense to hire somebody who went to college and studied computer science and spent four years on it, the backlash happened. So, yeah, a lot of these schools are not doing so well
when it comes to placing their rats. School forty two is more like a college course because it's three years long and you have to do internships with companies before you can finish their program, so they might have a little bit more of a shot at successfully placing students faster. Marie Mawad and Paris would you ever consider going to free coding school? Step one would be to update from my HTML coding from twenty years ago. I'd have some work to do, let's say that. So, Brad, would you
ever leave the highly lucrative field of journalism for coding schools. Well, you know, I've always had an interest in programming. I did a little bit, uh when I was young. Um. But I have to say your your story, UM, was illuminating, and I think that participants are right to ask some
hard questions about these boot camps and coding schools. You know, they're very new, and they don't have long academic records or or records or statistics really placing graduates in, you know, in professional jobs that we can look to with confidence. So I think, you know, I think probably for you, for for me, or for anyone, it's probably worthwhile looking at some of these programs with just a little bit
of caution. My my coding, I'll stopped in about the eighth grade when I made a video game that ended as soon as you fire a laser. And that's it for this week's Deck Krypto. Thanks for listening. If you have an iPhone, please subscribe to the show on your native podcast app and leave us a rating and review
there that helps more listeners discover the show. You can also rade and review us on iTunes, and we're on a bunch of other platforms like SoundCloud, pocket Cast, and Stitcher and tell Us what you thought of today's show. I'm on Twitter at at brad Stone, Sarah's at at McBride SG, and Marie is at at Marie Underscore A Underscore Paris. This episode was produced by Pia Gutkari Akito,
Magnus Hendrickson, and Liz Smith. Emily Bus edited our accompanying print story, which you can find on bloomberg dot com slash Technology. Aaron Black assisted in recording. Alec McCabe, head of Bloomberg Podcasts, We'll see you next week. M