Promineo Tech, founded by Nick Suwyn in June of 2018, is a technology school with a social mission–to make education in software development and related technologies affordable, accessible, and low-risk.
Their unique, Outcome Based Agreements (OBAs) allows students to pay for their education only after acquiring gainful employment.Promineo means to stand out, which is exactly what Promineo Tech does.
The rise of coding boot camps in 2012-2013 looked to lessen the technical skills gap prevalent in the industry and provide students a quicker, hands-on opportunity, as an alternative to traditional degrees, to break into tech careers. This model skyrocketed over the next half-decade; however, the results were mixed.
Some students experienced success and landed great jobs in software development, while many students found themselves making payments on high-interest loans and being no closer to finding tech careers. Nick set out to solve this problem.
As a software engineer and educator, Nick realized that the current, service-based model of higher education needed to be shifted to an outcome-based model to ensure a school’s primary focus was their student’s success.
While Income Share Agreements (ISAs) came into existence a couple of years ago, these were only a step in the right direction. ISAs allowed students to pay no tuition upfront in return for agreeing to pay a percentage of their salary for a few years after landing a job.
These agreements helped lower the financial risk to attend school but ended up with students paying significantly more than the average boot camp’s tuition in the long run.
After a lot of research and deliberating, Nick came up with something called an Outcome-Based Agreement (OBA), which, like an ISA, allowed students to repay their tuition only once they found employment. However, the tuition repayment for an OBA was the same, flat rate for all students, and they knew exactly how much they’d pay once they landed a job.
With this model, Promineo Tech launched its first cohort in June of 2018 and has been helping students become software developers since.
Their original OBAs have driven unique, internal quality, and student focus that has led to the success of many students landing jobs as software developers they couldn’t have dreamed up 18 weeks earlier (the length of their programs).
Because of their students’ success, they’ve been able to white label their content and offer their programs, in partnership with other institutes, across a rapidly growing, national market. Giving many more students access to the high-demand technology education they need to enter the industry, without crippling financial burdens accumulated through traditional education pathways.