Raising the Bar
Schools that produce real results for students aren’t afraid of transparency.
Membership in CIRR requires following six standards:
Advertising and disclosing honestly. CIRR schools follow a set of truth in advertising rules that prohibit misleading outcomes claims.
Collecting students' intent. No later than the first day of class, CIRR schools survey students as to their intent after graduating. This information, along with a list of all enrolled students, is submitted to auditors immediately. Surveying intent by the first day of class and submitting to an auditor prevents schools from manipulating their results later.
Tracking enrollment and graduation. For every enrolled student, CIRR schools track their on-time and late graduation rates as part of their outcomes reports.
Tracking job outcomes. After students graduate, CIRR schools follow up with job-seeking students to track what jobs they find and when.
Reporting students' outcomes. Every six months, CIRR schools release standardized reports of student outcomes.
Auditing outcomes data. Once a year, CIRR schools have their outcomes report reviewed by an approved third party that checks to make sure there is evidence for the outcomes the school claims.
CIRR Standards
“Before attending a bootcamp to transition into software, I worked for a decade in grad-level education, where I always pressed my students to understand employment outcomes before they funneled tuition into a graduate or professional school. Unfortunately, plenty of types of schools would inflate their employment outcomes by reporting ‘creative’ stats; the entire law school industry went down for this practice. I really believe that the faster-moving entities in the education space—for-profit programs and bootcamps, especially—will help overhaul our dinosaur academic system by upholding the highest standards in employment results and reporting.
For my part, I ended up deciding on my software engineering program in large part because of its employment outcomes and strong brand in the employer community. Now, as an alum, it’s even more important to me that the program retain transparency.”
Historical Standards
CIRR keeps historical versions of its standards below.
Minor changes to the standards may be published throughout the year; for any given year, the most recent version should be referenced.
Standards may be updated the year following the time period of the reports they govern, since reports are released the year after students graduate. For example, students who graduated in 2016 are reported on in 2017, so the 2016 standards have minor changes in 2017.