Alternative STEM education: free, short-term programs offer non-college path to tech jobs

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Almost two years ago, Isaiah Hickerson woke up in the middle of the night from a dream that he was a coder .

The dream was totally random; he didn’t know a thing about coding. He had a job answering phones in the grooming department at a PetSmart in Miami. After hours, he was trying to figure out what to do with his life.  At 23, he’d taken some community college classes in business and biology. He was lukewarm on both.

“I just felt empty,” Hickerson said. “I wanted to do something different, but I just didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have a passion for anything. And I didn’t know what passion felt like.”

He knows it sounds far-fetched, but the dream changed him. Moments after he woke up, he was online trying to grasp what it meant.

“I literally got up right from there, 2 in the morning, probably 2:05,” he said. “I remember the whole entire timeline because this is what shifted — my dream is what brought me here.”

By “here,” Hickerson means The Marcy Lab School in Brooklyn, New York, where he’s nearly finished with a one-year software engineering fellowship program. It’s not a college or a pricey tech boot camp, but a nonprofit, tuition-free program designed to help students from historically underrepresented communities — like Hickerson, who is Black — get high-paying jobs in tech.

Across the country, colleges and universities offer scores of programs to help students from underrepresented groups succeed in STEM education . Far less common are independent nonprofits that focus on students who don’t have the resources to go to college, don’t want to go to college or don’t believe they can succeed in a STEM program. These nonprofits offer short-term training programs, for free, and help with job placement .

Two prominent examples, on opposite coasts, are the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood , in Oakland, California. Hack the Hood conducts 12-week data science-training programs and has recently partnered with Laney College, a community college in Oakland, to offer students a certificate of achievement in data science.

Data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics shows that Black and Latino people earn science and engineering bachelor’s degrees at a disproportionately low rate , are underrepresented in the STEM workforce , and earn lower salaries in those jobs than their white and Asian peers.

Achieving better representation means finding students the academic and financial assistance they need. The financial resources needed to pursue a four-year STEM degree — or even a two-year degree — can be prohibitive. Opening up shorter avenues that are free or less expensive than for-profit boot camps can help. Programs designed for these students give them the training needed to have a shot at competing for STEM jobs with salaries that can lead to economic and social mobility. Both the Marcy Lab School and Hack the Hood are nonprofits funded by donations from philanthropic groups.

These programs have value if they allow people to get just one step further than they would have gotten without the training, said Weverton Ataide Pinheiro, an assistant professor in the College of Education at Texas Tech University.  “We know that they will only be able to compete if they have certain training, and they might not be able to pay [for it],” he said.

Reuben Ogbonna, one of the Marcy Lab School’s co-founders, said his team has established partnerships with tech companies to get software engineering job opportunities for Marcy students when they finish the program, and to consider them even for roles that would typically require a bachelor’s degree.

Since the school opened in 2019, roughly 200 students have completed the program. In the first three years, about 80% graduated, and about 90% of those who graduated landed jobs in STEM with an average salary of $105,000 per year, according to Ogbonna. But in the past two years, during what Ogbonna called a tech recession, it’s been more difficult to get jobs; this year, six months after graduating, about 60 % of graduates had jobs, he said.

But by pursuing an education at Marcy rather than a four-year college, students get three extra years to earn money, build their savings, and accrue wealth, Ogbonna said. And they won’t have loans to pay off.

“We’re trying to reverse a really big problem that’s been around for a long time,” he said. “If we can get wealth in the hands of our students earlier, it can come out exponentially [later] for the communities that we’re serving.”

Hack the Hood serves students between the ages of 16 and 25 and, in addition to the technical curriculum, teaches about racial equity and social justice issues, said Samia Zuber, its executive director. These parts of the program help prepare students to confront issues such as imposter syndrome when they enter the workplace, she said, and to think critically about the work they are doing. For example, they teach students about racial bias in facial recognition software and the implications it can have.

“It really opens your eyes and makes you want to change it,” student Lizbet Roblero Arreola said about the misuse of facial recognition data. “For me personally, I want to be somebody in those companies that doesn’t let that happen.”

Going to college was never a given for Roblero Arreola, a 24-year-old first-generation Mexican American. When she became pregnant with her first child shortly after graduating from high school, she decided to keep working, in customer service jobs. Last year, after the birth of her second child, she saw a friend post online about Hack the Hood. She’d been thinking about going back to school, and it seemed Hack the Hood might ease her transition.

Roblero Arreola said the Hack the Hood team helped her with the steps needed to enroll at Laney College, including how to apply for financial aid. After she finishes her associate degree in computer programming at Laney, she hopes to transfer to a four-year college and earn a bachelor’s degree. Eventually, she’d like to build a career in the cybersecurity field.

These programs also serve students like Nicole Blanchette, an 18-year-old from a rural community in Connecticut, who chose Marcy Lab School over a traditional college experience.

Blanchette’s father has an associate degree, and her mother, who is Filipino, didn’t pursue postsecondary education. During her senior year of high school, Blanchette became intrigued by a career in tech, but hesitated, she said, because “the stereotypical computer science student does not look like me.”

But an ad for Marcy Lab made her think a career in tech was possible. She did the math and found that one year of living in New York would be cheaper than attending any of the colleges she’d gotten into, even with financial aid. She convinced her parents to spend the money they’d saved for her education on her living expenses while she attends Marcy.

Ogbonna and Marcy Lab’s other co-founder, Maya Bhattacharjee-Marcantonio, both started out as teachers and recruited the first class of Marcy students from their personal networks and local community organizations. Now, about 30% to 40% of Marcy Lab’s students come straight out of high school.

For Hickerson, who first thought about coding after having that vivid dream, the idea that he didn’t know what passion felt like is a distant memory. Now, when he talks about what he’s learning and the career he hopes to build in software engineering, he doesn’t ever seem to stop smiling.

This story about STEM education programs was produced by The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Alternative STEM education: free, short-term programs offer non-college path to tech jobs