CodePath.org

CODEPATH’S MISSION is to reprogram higher education to create the most diverse generation of engineers, CTOs, and founders. We deliver industry-vetted courses and career support centered on the needs of Black, Latino/a, Indigenous, and low-income students. Our students train with senior engineers, intern at top companies, and rise together to become the tech leaders of tomorrow.

With nearly 20,000 students and alumni from 500 colleges now working at 2,000 companies, we are reshaping the tech workforce and the industries of the future.

Our PRIMARY TARGET POPULATION is Black, Latino/a, and Indigenous computing college students because they are the most underrepresented in the field and have faced the most systemic barriers in education and the workforce. Reaching the majority of the 100K Black, Latino/a, Indigenous computing students is a priority for our university expansion and student enrollment. By serving our primary target population, we are also able to reach others who face barriers to careers in tech: our SECONDARY TARGET POPULATION includes students from low-income backgrounds and first-generation college-going students. Our students are often graduates of Title I high schools, have no prior programming background, don’t know anyone in the tech industry, are commuting to college, working part-time jobs, and often helping take care of younger siblings.

CODEPATH’S LONG-TERM VISION is to make the industry’s most competitive technical roles reflect the diversity of the population. We teach students in-demand specialties like cybersecurity and match them for interviews with tech companies. CodePath has the power to create systems-wide, enduring change within higher education and the workforce.

To accomplish this, we are scaling our programming to serve 10,000 students annually by 2024. Anticipated outcomes include:
~65% of CodePath sophomores/juniors (who are CS majors) who enroll in at least one CodePath course secure an internship within one year of completing a CodePath course
- 65% of CodePath seniors (who are CS majors) who enroll in at least one CodePath course secured full-time employment within 6 months of college graduation
- 60% of students placed in tech jobs will be in CodePath’s target populations

CodePath has the power to create systems-wide, enduring change within higher education and the workforce. By building a two-sided marketplace with students on one side and employers on the other, CodePath creates equitable access to high-skill, high-trajectory technical jobs that create wealth for marginalized communities, and helps employers diversify their workforce to improve representation among those building the technologies that power our everyday lives.

Given our transformative outcomes, the significant unmet demand from students, universities, and employers, and the COVID-19 crisis as a catalyst for change, we have a unique opportunity to drive systems change in computing education and employer hiring. In the next three years, CodePath will double our program impact, prove a sustainable economic model, and increase our evidence of effectiveness.

DOUBLING PROGRAM IMPACT: We already have a working playbook on how to grow the number of students we train and place. This playbook will allow us to grow from 50 to 90 universities by 2024. The universities on our target list graduate 47% of computing students within our target population. We will expand our playbook by expanding our direct work programs to enable our job placement capacity to grow with students’ served. We will grow our students trained from 2,600+ in 2020 to 10,000 by 2024, enabling us to launch the tech careers of 3,700 students in 2024 by maintaining our current placement outcomes.

PROVING A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC MODEL: Scaling revenues from employer partners represents our largest opportunity for mission-aligned economic sustainability. Companies contract with us to recruit interns through our career fairs; we have an opportunity to scale these annual contract values. In the next three years, we aim to grow from 50 to 325 companies to meet the number of employment partners to place our students with jobs and increase our revenue per student from $270 in 2020 to $520 in 2024 by launching a new recruiting + training product with an average annual contract value of $180k. The new product will put us on track to subsidize 50% of our direct program costs in 3 and 100% of direct program costs in 5 years.

INVESTING IN EVIDENCE OF EFFECTIVENESS: Our theory of change captures the effectiveness of our interventions with promising indicators of impact, but we must launch an experimental study to determine CodePath’s causal impact on employment and prove the efficacy of our model. The study will help us better understand how our impact can translate to a wide range of students and universities. This evidence-based work is critical to deepening our understanding of our impact and scaling student outcomes with confidence.

Over the next 20 years, 3 million new software engineers will enter the tech industry. In order to reflect the diversity of the population, 1 million Black, Latino/a, and Indigenous students must be launched into competitive technical careers, unlocking over $1.5 trillion in wealth creation.

By focusing on university expansion, strengthening internal measurement and evaluation capacity, and proving a sustainable economic model, we will achieve a viable pathway to impact towards this ambitious vision.

We believe in the life-changing power of tech careers because it is the lived experience of our founders: Michael Ellison, Nathan Esquenazi, and Tim Lee. They have a successful history founding tech startups: a first startup at age 14 that partnered with Apple; a startup that was Google Venture’s first seed investment; Women Who Code; and Segment, a Y-Combinator backed startup that was acquired for $3.2B. A career in tech can propel a family out of poverty and into wealth in a single generation. With their Silicon Valley insider knowledge, the founders wanted to create pathways into fulfilling tech careers for leaders who look like them: Black, Latino/a, and from low-income backgrounds.

Students are failing in computing majors because of a lack of confidence and belonging, a lack of relevant technical skills, and a lack of access to work opportunities. CodePath’s program model addresses those gaps of confidence, skills, and access through our classes, career center, and peer/mentor community. We already have promising outcomes, which we detail in the next section.

Our PROGRAM ROADMAP is anchored on the experience of historically marginalized communities. The roadmap guides students through a sequence of courses and career milestones that first builds their sense of confidence and belonging in tech, then teaches specialized industry skills, and concludes with technical interviewing courses and an Emerging Engineers Summit that includes a virtual hiring event where students are guaranteed multiple interviews with employer partners for internships and full-time offers.

To ensure students are well-prepared for this journey, all of our COURSEWORK is built by senior engineers from the world’s leading technology companies. With a clear roadmap in-hand, students can choose to take one CodePath class, or they can take them all, according to their personalized needs and track.

Through our CAREER CENTER, students gain industry access to thousands of software engineers through 1:1 mentoring, technical interview practice, resume support, and targeted career advising. Students learn about job opportunities and recruiting events with our employer partners. We longitudinally track employment outcomes – i.e. internships, types of roles – for all students who have taken a CodePath class.

The other component of our scalability is our CUSTOM LEARNING MANAGEMENT PLATFORM. Students access up-to-date curriculum through the platform, which manages attendance, submissions, grading, and assignment questions. This saves professors dozens of hours each semester and gives us visibility into each classroom, which is crucial for ongoing data collection, monitoring classroom quality, and ensuring consistent implementation.

In summary, our classroom delivery model was designed for scale from the outset. We are fully confident that we will continue to reach our target populations and serve 10,000 students annually by 2024.

Since its founding, CodePath has served 20,000 students across 500+ colleges, delivering 3 million hours of industry-aligned computing courses, mentorship from senior engineers, and paid industry experience inside top tech companies—all centered on the needs of Black, Latino/a, Indigenous and low-income students.

Today, CodePath is training nearly 10 percent of all Computer Science students nationwide. Our alumni are high-performing software engineers working across 2,000 companies. Black and Latino/a CodePath alumni are entering technical employment at more than double the rates of the national average, and CodePath alumni are 8x more likely to secure job placement in a Fortune 500 technology company than their peers.

With catalytic support from our longstanding partners, CodePath is poised to scale its programming, services and impact to drive systems change across the country’s largest employers and institutions of higher education.

In 2024, CodePath will train 10,000 students annually, 60% of whom are Black, Latino/a, Indigenous, or from low-income backgrounds. As we scale, we are centering on the needs of our target populations, to eliminate inequities in college CS programs and diversify the nation’s most competitive entry-level technical roles.

To deliver on this, CodePath is transforming the CS education system, working alongside college presidents, provosts, and professors at every level. It’s investing in its technology platform, unlocking personalized education at scale. And it’s leveraging its deep network of senior engineers serving as trainers, mentors, and champions, including 20,000 alumni to create community and belonging in every classroom.

To realize this opportunity, CodePath is making key investments across four pillars of strategic growth:
1. Reach every student at every school
2. Go deep in communities and deliver at scale
3. Close the internship gap for Black, Latino/a, and Indigenous students
4. Expand industry-aligned curriculum pathways

With early support from Comcast, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, Knight Foundation, Andreeseen Horowitz, Blue Meridian Partners, New Profit Foundation, Salesforce, and Walmart, CodePath is poised to launch its next phase of growth in 2023. We are reprogramming higher education, reshaping the tech workforce and industries of the future, and unlocking economic opportunity for all.