Popular R&B artist Ne-Yo is drawing attention to the Holberton School, which trains full-stack software engineers. Ne-Yo participated in the school’s recent $2.3 million funding round. While coding bootcamps have become popular in recent years, Holberton offers a two-year program. It emphasizes diversity, and its current class is 40 percent female and 53 percent people of color. In a unique twist, Holberton students don’t pay any tuition until after they graduate and get a job. Then they owe Holberton 17 percent of their salaries for the first three years.
“Everybody knows that tech and all these things are the wave of the future,” Ne-Yo said. “I just love the fact of what they’re doing with the school — that they’re making it easier for underrepresented people in the world of tech. They’re giving them a platform and access to this knowledge that they probably wouldn’t get otherwise. I think that’s one of the coolest things about this whole situation.”