“We say to people who want these jobs, they’re open to you,” McKelvey said last September at the public roundtable discussion with Biden.

LaunchCode since its founding in 2013 says it has placed more than 700 people in apprenticeships nationwide and about 81 percent of their apprentices get full-time jobs. But a few thousand more who went to LaunchCode for education or job placement have either been turned away or eventually dropped out of its programs.

McKelvey said only one-third of people who turn to LaunchCode will get a programming job, but he claims demographics have no bearing on who succeeds.

“The dirty little secret about LaunchCode is we can only do that with about a third of the population,” McKelvey told attendees at a business conference Wednesday hosted by Washington University. “The good news about LaunchCode is one-third of the population seems to be completely unaffected by age, gender, race or any other demographic.”

Fourteen percent of LaunchCode’s apprentices are black or Latino, according to numbers provided by LaunchCode. Twenty-four percent of LaunchCode’s apprentices are women.