Photo: Make School entrance / Credit: Make School
Make School is a San Francisco-based company that is building the replacement for the computer science degree. Essentially Make School offers a unique pay-for-performance college experience where students only make tuition payments if their income exceeds $60,000 after graduation.
This model has been validated again as Make School recently announced a $15 million Series B round of funding led by Venrock. Learn Capital and Kapor Capital also participated in this round. Make School previously raised about $10 million in funding a couple of years ago. Including the recent round, Make School has raised nearly $28 million total. With this round funding, Make School is going to fuel its expansion into New York in the coming years.
“We’re rethinking what it means to be an elite institution — rooted in the progressive value system that inspires the diverse community of learners and makers we serve,” said Make School co-founder Ashu Desai in a statement. “To realize that vision, we’ve designed an inclusive admissions process eschewing SAT scores and traditional metrics, we’ve ensured every student can afford to attend, and we’ve built an education that has enabled our students to outcompete their peers at schools like Stanford and Berkeley for careers at top tech companies.”
How does the model work? Make School launched a coding boot camp for high school and university students. And then it launched a two-year bachelor’s degree in computer science last year in partnership with Dominican University. And through an incubation policy offered by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (the body that oversees institutions in North California), Make School instructors teach courses for Dominican students with the goal of helping the university launch a new computer science minor. And Make School students enroll in Dominican’s liberal arts courses in return, according to VentureBeat.
Students can pay tuition up-front — which costs $70,000. Or they can pay back 20% of their salary for 60 months after completing the degree program. In the next several years, Make School is planning to spin off its own accredited college and launch new degree programs.
“Make School is tackling the three big issues in higher education: cost, relevance, and equity,” added Tom Willerer of Venrock. “It’s obliterating the historic distinction between in-demand technical skills and the value of a degree. By de-risking a student’s investment in a rigorous, computer science education, they’re also expanding access in ways that have profound potential to close equity gaps for tech employers.”
