After graduating 2,500 students over 11 years, enduring a pandemic switch to remote learning and a half-million-dollar lawsuit, the Turing School of Software and Design will close.
“We’ve been in a long period of struggle over the last two years,” said founder Jeff Casimir.
The nonprofit school told its 37 students and dozen staff this week that it will wind down operations between now and June. That means issuing refunds and aiding transfers.
“Tuition refunds are not that helpful when you’re trying to gain these skills and get into a good job. It’s a lot better for students to transfer to another program. We have some good friends in the industry who are going to take some students on,” Casimir said Tuesday.
Turing opened in 2014 at 15th and Blake streets before moving to the 12-story office building at 1331 17th St. It initially rented 17,500 square feet there but later expanded to 20,300. The building is owned by Los Angeles-based CIM Group, which paid $103 million for it in 2018.
Turing pivoted to online classes because of the pandemic but was under lease until 2024. It made rent payments into 2023, then got sued by CIM for the remainder. When it didn’t respond to the lawsuit, it was ordered to pay $456,196 in back rent and court costs. On April 8, it was instructed to pay an additional $44,175, to refund CIM for its attorney fees.
Casimir said the case was a factor in Turing’s closure, but far from the only one. He recalls thinking in January, well after the judgment came down, that the school may survive.
“And then the world started changing out from under us. Over the last couple weeks, with the disruption to the economy and where I think things are headed economically, both in the U.S. and globally, it started to become really questionable whether I could ask people to take a big risk. Coming to Turing has always been a pretty big risk, big reward,” he said.
The seven-month coding program requires students to study 60 hours a week, with the hope of a well-paying job at the end. But Casimir worries those jobs are now drying up.
“If you are a company in the spaces that we operate in and you look at the market right now, I don’t see how you make the argument, ‘Let’s go hire some people.’ You say, ‘Let’s just hold on to what we’ve got, see if we can weather the storm,’” he said. “That creates this big moral hazard for us: How do you recruit a student when you believe the job market isn’t going to be very good for them? That’s not an ethical thing to do. So, we’ve got to wrap this up.”
According to public tax filings, Turing’s peak revenue year came in 2021, when it brought in $10.3 million, nearly $1 million more than its expenses that year. In 2022, revenue fell to $8.4 million, while expenses stayed steady around $9.3 million. In 2023, the most recent year for which filings are available online, Turing lost $1.8 million on revenue of $7.9 million.
Casimir said he is trying not to dwell on what could have been done differently at Turing.
“This has been my life’s work, this has been the majority of my professional career, and it might be the biggest thing that I ever do. So, I’ve been working on trying to refocus and instead of just thinking about what isn’t there, focus on what has been done. We have 2,500 alumni. That is a lot of people’s lives that were changed, families that were changed,” he said Tuesday.
“The impact is all still there, even if we don’t get to keep doing what we’ve been doing.”
Story via BusinessDen
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