Guarantees may be a scary prospect for four-year colleges, but they are built into the business model of the new and rapidly growing for-profit coding boot camps, which depends on students seeing a solid return on their investment.

Udacity, a Silicon Valley-based online course provider last year launched a deal on a nano-credential—find a job in six months or get your tuition back. The program cost is between $2,000 and $3,000.

The Flatiron School, a coding boot camp in New York City, guarantees its students will receive a full-time job offer in the field within six months of graduation or they get their money back. The Learners Guild in Oakland pays each student $1,500 a month to take a 10-month coding course and only gets paid the $25,000 tuition once the student graduates and is employed in a tech job, making at least $50,000 a year.

Rick O’Donnell runs Skills Fund, which lends money to students attending coding boot camps. Baked into their business model is a mandate that schools put in escrow about 15% of every student’s tuition. If a student defaults, the school pays Skills Fund out of that cache.

“The impact is that schools care not just from a moral and reputational standpoint, they have real money at risk if their students graduate and can’t flourish,” said Mr. O’Donnell. “This aligns incentives between the quality of the school and the outcomes, the schools have real skin in the game.”