By | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED:

We often hear from various surveys, studies and anecdotal evidence about how highly regulated California is and how dismal is its business climate. Here is yet another example of why our state falls short in economic opportunity, job training and education.

In addition to the burdensome regulations they must face, businesses in California complain about the difficulty in finding skilled workers to fill their needs. Despite the fact that California has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, many jobs in the state go unfilled due to a lack of qualified applicants.

Entrepreneurs in the computer science industry have risen to fill this void in recent years by offering programming “boot camps” to train students for future jobs or internships in computer coding, software engineering, web development, data science and related fields. These are real-world skills that are in high demand, and which thus offer the prospect of good, high-paying jobs.

The camps typically run about 10 to 12 weeks and cost 15,000ドル to 18,000ドル. Some of the camp operators boast that 95 percent or more of their graduates find jobs within a few months, and earn average starting salaries of 90,000ドル to 120,000ドル a year.

The obvious success of such programs notwithstanding, or perhaps because of it, coding boot camps have incurred the wrath of the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, a division of the California Department of Consumer Affairs established in 2010 by the California Private Postsecondary Education Act of 2009 to regulate the state’s postsecondary and vocational schools. The BPPE insists that the coding camps are operating illegally because they are not licensed by the state, so in January it sent cease-and-desist letters to App Academy, Coding Dojo, Coding House, Dev Bootcamp, General Assembly, Hack Reactor, Hackbright Academy and Zipfian Academy.

According to VentureBeat, the companies face imminent closure and 50,000ドル fines if they do not begin the licensing process. This has prompted fears of bankruptcy amid a regulatory process that can take up to 18 months.

Sadly, such behavior by the government is par for the course in California. A 2007 Reason Foundation study found that California requires licenses for 177 different job categories, by far the most in the nation and nearly double the national average of 92. These laws generally do not provide any real public safety benefits, but they do succeed in reducing competition, choking off economic opportunity, driving up prices for consumers and diminishing job growth. Research by University of Minnesota public affairs professor Morris Kleiner reveals that, by restricting competition, licensing reduces the rate of job growth by 20 percent.

The experience of the coding boot camps is a microcosm of the California government’s poisonous attitude toward private business. Heaven forbid innovative businesses make a profit while satisfying a need as pressing as training people for high-paying jobs (a need that exists due to a failure of the public education system, it should be noted). Such private successes should be celebrated, not vilified and regulated out of existence.