Launch HN: Lambda School (YC S17) – CS education that's free until you get a job

We're Lambda School (https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science). We train people to become software engineers, and we charge nothing until a student gets a software job that pays more than $50k/yr. At that point we take 17% of income for two years (capped at a maximum of $30k total).

There are so many people held back from a high quality education simply because they can't afford the cost and/or risk. Even if you can get student loans, four years and a potential six figures of student loans is a daunting proposition, especially if you come from a lower-income background. New alternatives, such as code bootcamps, either require expensive loans or tens of thousands of dollars in cash up front, which most people don't have, and they vary widely in quality. This leaves a lot of very smart people working for not much money.

We're different. We're an educational institution that owns the risk: if you don't get a good job, we don't get paid. We do everything in small, interactive, online classes with world-class instructors (currently from Stanford, Berkeley, Hack Reactor, etc.). Our curriculum goes a lot deeper than code bootcamps as well; we use C++ and spend a lot of time with lower-level algorithms, data structures, architecture, scaling, etc.

The full curriculum is here: https://github.com/LambdaSchool/LambdaCSA-Syllabus. Happy to answer any questions and looking forward to hearing feedback!

Great question. In addition to our income share agreement, each student submits a form to the IRS that will essentially copy us on their taxes. We have annual reconciliation based on those numbers to see if they match a student's self-reported numbers.

> You're essentially giving your students a loan and then having them repay it once they start earning money.

Eh, kind of. The biggest difference is if they don't get a job that pays $50k+ they don't pay us. Also, if you ever lose a job, your payments stop until you're back on your feet.

It's an equity instrument, and we think it's much better and more forgiving than loans as a result of that.

> How do you know that your graduates are or aren't making more than 50k? How do you know that you're getting your 17%?

you can ask students to fill out and sign, as a condition of admission, forms authorizing the IRS to hand over their tax returns, in advance. it wouldn't be very hard to contract with a law firm to take the results and check to see if they had more than 50k of income, while ignoring/discarding all other information.

or just have them sign a thing saying they'll do X. if they lie, they're probably committing fraud. most folks don't run around committing high dollar fraud.

> Aside from that, you're essentially giving your students a loan and then having them repay it once they start earning money. How is this any different than a regular student loan (but with way more risk on your end)?

the point of this model is to lower risk for the student, and hope that the value you're providing is sufficient to offset the additional risk you're accepting.