Kenzie Academy positions itself as a faster, more affordable way to prepare first-generation students in the U.S. heartland for technology jobs.
The list of investor-funded college “alternatives” that have crashed and burned in the last few years — or just withered on the vine — runs more than a few lines long. While some college leaders have celebrated the failures — particularly of those boot camps and other providers that openly trashed traditional institutions — others recognize the need to pay attention to a marketplace that keeps trying to find faster, cheaper pathways to jobs.
The latest supernova to cross the postsecondary education and training horizon, Kenzie Academy, uses some of the “college alternative” language that tends to rub higher education partisans the wrong way.
Its chief executive officer and co-founder, Chok Ooi, criticizes “traditional” higher education institutions for “celebrat[ing] having a 0.0001 percent acceptance rate” for students and leaving many graduates “buried in debt and without a job,” as he put it in a news release this week about a $100 million investment designed to extend the computer academy’s reach to thousands of Americans in the country’s nonurban areas.
But Ooi softens his rhetoric when asked whether Kenzie is designed to supplant going to college for the first-generation and otherwise underrepresented Americans in its target population.