Why we started Masai School?
When our Founder — Prateek was studying at IIT, he worked as a fellow with Teach for India, and during this time as a teacher he was completely immersed in the experience of helping students learn.
During this time he was fascinated with the potential India holds when it comes to our youth population.
With over 50% of our population below the age of 25, we have 500 million people who deserve an opportunity to fulfil their dreams and not be failed by our Education System!
Birth of Masai — The Problem statement
Technology has accelerated growth and opened up new opportunities and introduced a lot jobs in IT and Software. Unfortunately, our education system isn’t equipped enough to produce qualified individuals to fill this void between Job openings and seekers.
With Prateek’s experiences in teaching, and the passion for bringing about a positive change in the education system, was born the idea of a school which enables the youth of our country to learn programming without paying any up-front fee, and enabling them to find a good job that pays well, and most importantly gives them an avenue to showcase their potential, discover and add value.
Why the name, Masai?
After quitting his job, Prateek was on a trip to Tanzania, and Kenya, where he met people from a tribe called — “Maasai Mara”, and upon interacting with their Chieftain, he learned that the tribe doesn’t have access to formal education, yet their people are very skilled and take pride in their skill sets.
Right from their childhood, the kids are raised to be skilled farmers, builders, technicians, cultivators, etc., and their principal focus on Skill Building helps their community stay sustainable and robust.
The tribe of Maasai focuses on Skilling, and that’s when Prateek decided the name — “Masai School” to help realize India’s potential, and place our youth at reputable technical jobs.
Problems with the current Education System
The Indian Education Industry is recession-proof, and even a world Pandemic like Corona hasn’t affected it. Sadly, our institutions produce students who are “credible” because they have a degree, but unfortunately, most are unemployable.
On average, a company spends 6 months training their recruits, before they are ready to start contributing to the company and their projects.
There is a substantial monetary risk involved in educating a child, and training them to be a graduate, and with this, the problem of student loans is only rising. A lot of graduates aren’t employed, and hence unable to pay back their education loans.
Why make this gamble at all? What if you could have a system that doesn’t render you broke? What if you could pay only when you find a good job?
What if the educational institution’s shared the monetary risk with their students?
We need to align the incentives of the school with the motivations of the student. And if we’re not willing to do that, if we’re not ready to share that risk, what does that say about the current state of our educational system?
Masai School is an attempt to heal our broken Education system, and help people who yearn to find jobs by enabling them to learn and then Earn.
The only eligibility system that we have is — “You should have cleared High School, and you should have the drive to work hard for your dreams.”
Masai accepts students even if they have no knowledge of programming, and help them find jobs at tech companies like Samsung, Sharechat, UrbanClap, Instamojo, Propelld, Vyapar, RevvSales, Lendingkart, Nobroker, Smallcase, PayTm Money, etc
Who are we? What do we do?
Masai School provides structured bootcamps where students with 0 coding experience can sign up to learn for free, with a signed ISA(Income Sharing Agreement), where they are entitled to pay us only when they get a job above 5 LPA.
The amount they pay is 15% of their monthly salary for three years, which is capped at a maximum of 2.5 Lakh rupees & 3 Lakh rupees (depending on the choice of course).
Students cannot only enter without taking out expensive loans, but they can enrol, knowing that they won’t owe us if the school doesn’t work for them, i.e helps them find a job that pays a minimum of 5LPA+.
This brings in a dramatic shift that changes everything we do as an institution. We’ve found that this has opened up an incredible amount of possibilities.
Let’s explore how it works -
- We’ve reverse-engineered our coursework to teach our students the skills employers are looking for in today’s engineering and developed environments.
- We’re a military-style coding school, based on the 9–9–6 intensive training i.e., 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. This holistic program includes 1000 hours of hands-on coding, 100 hours of soft skills instruction, and 100 hours on building mathematical skills, all focused on creating a job-ready workforce.
- We never push our students to finish things on time; having a backlog is a new normal in Masai School. Our entire focus is that students should do the program at their own pace because we believe that every student has a different learning curve.
- We want to make the entire education system transparent. That’s why our full curriculum- notes, assignments, student’s daily submissions are open source, and anyone can see what is happening in Masai school at any point in time. This is a huge confidence builder for our partner companies.
Our selection process is based only on talent and motivation, and not based on educational degree, or programming experience.
Our first batch started in June 2019 with 12 students, and to date, three batches have graduated so far, and three are ongoing with a net total of 250 students.
90% of our students are placed above the ISA threshold, with an average package of 6.6 LPA.
At Masai, our mission is to help students realize their potential, and match it with the requirements of our tech sector, and ultimately contribute towards a #BetterIndia, and help position India as a leader in the world.
