Holberton’s Response to the California BPPE Notice
On Saturday, we at Holberton School reviewed a notification of concerns raised by the Sacramento-based California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) regarding our San Francisco campus.
We created Holberton to take an innovative approach to engineering education. We believe that a world-class education should be accessible to everyone, regardless of educational background, gender, race or ability to pay. Forty-four million Americans are digging themselves out from nearly $1.6 trillion in student debt (as reported by CNBC). As the Editorial Board of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote last year, 3.8 million California residents alone owe $134.3 billion in student loan debt. Holberton has sought to create a different kind of school that promotes (rather than impedes) social mobility.
This massive debt burdening California residents seeking greater professional opportunities through education has made the technical post-secondary education market ripe for disruption for quite some time. We understand from the news that other first wave innovators in engineering education, like Lambda School, have also been subject to BPPE enforcement activity.
We respect and value the BPPE’s mission to protect students as consumers in California’s private postsecondary educational institutions. We have been working with the BPPE and responding to their questions throughout the licensing process over the last few years. We look forward to the opportunity to more fully explain our innovative program to them. We have historically had a collaborative relationship with regulators and are eager to fully cooperate with the BPPE so that we can allay their concerns and focus on our core mission of democratizing access to world-class engineering education.
Out of respect for the BPPE’s process, we are limiting our public comment on this matter as we focus on ensuring that Holberton is cooperating fully with the BPPE and continuing to serve the students who depend on us. We look forward to engaging in broader conversations around both innovation in education and financial inclusion.