Apollo took on the controlling interest of Iron Yard with a 62 percent stake in 2015, but just this February they were acquired by a private equity group for $1.1 billion to take the company private again. Iron Yard’s announcement is relatively vague, but they credit the closure to the current education environment for coding schools like their own: In a statement provided by Iron Yard Partner and CMO Eric Dodds, he mirrored the sentiment of the earlier blog post announcing their plans to shutter the business.
In considering the current environment, the board of The Iron Yard has made the difficult decision to cease operations at all campuses after teaching out remaining summer cohorts. We will finish out summer classes completely, including career support. While our journey is coming to an end, we will always take pride in the thousands of people our staff helped to launch new careers,” Dodds said. In response to the closure announcement, some are suggesting that Iron Yard is part of the impending coding school bubble that is bursting, others such as Course Report believe it’s a natural consolidation based on demand and growth. This comes just a week after California based Dev Bootcamp announced their plans to shutter their company due to unprofitability. Between the majority stake acquisition of Iron Yard, and then Apollo Group’s acquisition earlier this year, it would not be a stretch to assume they faced a similar fate as Dev Bootcamp. Regardless of the organizations halted future, former educators and students of the Iron Yard have been sharing their positive experiences with the program. According to Iron Yard’s site, tuition for their programs would range anywhere from $900 for a single course or up to a full time program at just under $14,000. One particular student, Andrew Poe, shared what led to him to quit a full time job to pursue Iron Yard’s full time program. At the completion of Iron Yard’s summer cohorts, the company plans to close all of their physical spaces and discontinue offering educational programming. The company plants to provide added services to summer cohort graduates such as trying to connect with local businesses to obtain a job.
