FOCUS
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FORTUNE.COM // APR.1.19
BACK IN OCTOBER 2016, James Aylor was scraping by,
delivering pizza in Kansas City, having dropped out of
college, abandoning his dream of teaching viola. “The voice in my
head said, ‘You have no career. No future,’ ” he says.
Then a friend mentioned he had heard about a new, tuition-free
coding school 1,800 miles away in Fremont, Calif. Named 42, it
required no computer skills or even a high school diploma, and
dorm rooms were free. “I said, ‘Yeah, whatever, ha ha, free,’ ” recalls
Aylor, now 30. Still, he decided he had “absolutely nothing to lose.”
He sold his car and bought a plane ticket west.
When I meet Aylor a little more than two
years later, he is in northern Paris, strolling
through the lobby of the original 42 school,
of which Fremont is an offshoot. The radical
educational experiment is geared to solving the
tech industry’s chronic shortage of skilled pro-
grammers. With his pizza gig a distant memo-
ry, Aylor says he is now juggling potential jobs,
weighing whether to join a company when he
graduates this summer or launch a startup.
VENTURE
Inside 42’s Paris campus,
where students must
endure a four-week-long
admissions process.
IS 42 THE ANSWER?
A billionaire disrupter of the French telecom market had a radical idea: Build a computer programming school
that has no books, no teachers, and no classes. Oh, and make it free. Six years in, has it worked? By Vivienne Walt
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