WorkingNation has partnered with Cognizant U.S. Foundation to explore solutions to the lack of diversity in the tech industry in a series of podcasts and articles. We’re sharing these stories every Friday through early March here on WorkingNation.com.

You don’t always need a four-year degree to become a software developer. You need the skills. And there are many ways to get them. For example, over the past six years, more than 1,200 people have learned to become software engineers through a seven-month, fully-immersive training program offered by the nonprofit Turing School in Denver. The good news: the majority of them have found jobs doing what they trained for.
“We started with the idea that there were a good number of people out there who had the potential to be software developers, but for one reason or another, never made it onto that traditional (higher ed) path,” explains Jeff Casimir, Turing School’s executive director.
A four-year degree can be costly, he says, and some people simply don’t want to spend another four years in school after graduating from high school. They’d prefer to be working or because of economic circumstances need to be working sooner than later.
It’s a Civil Rights Issue
Even in the midst of a severe economic downturn, there are thousands of open software engineering jobs across the country. But, for people looking to break into the field, it’s tough. Most companies want somebody with three-to-five years of experience and—more often than not—a college degree.
Turing School is turning that notion on its head. It’s giving its students the hands-on skills they need to do the work in a much shorter amount of time than a traditional four-year university. And its building a community around its students and alumni to help them on their career pathway.
In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, Casimir says at its heart, Turing School is about civil rights. His driving motivation: “change the game, change the definition of who belongs.”
The tech industry, despite efforts to diversify, still tends to be white and male. Turing actively encourages women and people of color to apply.
“It is blowing open the access doors to who is allowed to have these high-quality careers where you get to do interesting work, work that matters, and you get paid well for it. I think for the vast majority of the tech industry’s history, it’s been a tightly selected group who gets to play on that playground. And that’s just frankly not okay with me.”
Acquiring the Skills, Without the Massive Debt
Casimir says he feels for people that are burdened for a long period of time by massive student loan debts from undergrad and grad school. “The root of the problem, in my eyes, is not the size of the debt. It’s the value of the education. People are accumulating enormous student loan debts—$200,000—and the marginal difference to their salary is $10,000, $15,000. What have you? And so it takes 10 years to break even, 15 years to break even, maybe even never breaking even.”
The seven-month software engineering course from Turing costs about $20,000. Later this year, it will be adding an immersive data analytics class that will cost about $15,000 a year. When Turing started, the classes were held on-campus in Denver. Last year, they switched to remote teaching—still immersive—because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Casimir says the school is switching to fully remote, thus allowing more students to attend from all around the country.
He also says Turing graduates are getting a good retur...