Coding School Giant Iron Yard Closing All Of Its Campuses

An upstart software programming school is shuttering its 15 U.S. locations by summer's end.

The Iron Yard announced via its website that it planned to shutter all 15 of its campuses across the U.S. after finishing out summer classes “including career support,” officials stated.

“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,” officials stated on the website. “The industry as a whole is still young and its leaders face the challenge of a nascent market, as well as the demands facing all institutions in the higher education marketplace.”

The Iron Yard was founded by Peter Barth in 2012 in Greenville, South Carolina, as a startup accelerator program, but a year later, the organization began to teach computer programming for kids and adults. Its campuses exploded to stretch from Atlanta to Durham, Las Vegas, Indianapolis and Washington, D.C.

Calls to The Iron Yard were not returned as of press time and no other explanation was given for the sudden closure.

Barth gave no indication of problems in an interview last year with the Upstate Business Journal in Greenville, stating the company had created a regulatory department to work on getting approvals for expansion as well as a real estate team.

“We're on pace of something like 10 to 12 [new schools] a year, but we're probably working on 10 new cities in regulatory [department] right now,” Barth said. “There's lots of things in the works.”