Eight colleges will team up with companies that run computer coding boot camps or online courses for an experiment that lets students pay for nontraditional training programs with federal grants and loans, the Education Department said Tuesday.
Short-term courses, such as coding boot camps, have become a popular model for acquiring skills and credentials without spending years in school, yet they’ve only been available to people who can afford thousands of dollars for six-week classes. The objective of the experiment, dubbed the Educational Quality through Innovative Partnerships, is to provide people with modest means access to innovative education and to ensure that they receive quality training.
"While America has some of the best colleges and universities in the world, as a system, we’re still catching up to the needs of today’s college student … who may be a 24-year-old returning veteran, a 36-year-old single mother or a part-time student juggling work and college," Ted Mitchell, undersecretary of education, said on a call with reporters Tuesday. "The faces we picture as our college hopefuls can’t be limited by any factor, including inflexible or unaffordable higher education options."
Read more at The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/08/16/colleges-partner-with-training-bootcamps-and-online-course-providers-for-federal-experiment/