Lambda School wants to teach nursing

If only. We all know the majority of what we learned in school was not useful.

We should be striving to cut out the wasteful education that only serves as a signaling arms race https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c...

Given that you could earn the entire cost of Lambda School (at the cap - the most expensive) in about three months of engineering time, it’s a rational decision even if you just speed up the process.

Lambda School has a 9 month program that takes a 17% cut of your salary for the first 24 months of employment with a cap at $30,000. Which many students in software will hit, especially in high COL areas.

It's worth noting that this is more expensive than many/most universities, which charge less than $30,000 per year (9 months of instruction) even at the sticker price (which no one actually pays).

In fact, I wonder whether bootcamps are even cheaper than the full cost of university. The average student loan debt upon graduation for all US university students is $29,400 (again, for four years of college education with access to both applied and fundamental courses across many different majors vs. a 9 month boot camp focused on a particular skill set).

To be concrete: by taking out a loan for what lambda school costs, you could double major in both nursing and CS at a state U for about the same amount of post-graduation debt as you would have at bootcamps. Or CS and Econ. Or CS and Accounting. Or CS and Mechanical Engineering. In states that still invest in higher ed, you'll end up paying less (even with interest) than you'd pay lambda school.

There's a natural experiment on this question at Purdue, where there's an apples-for-apples comparison and loans are almost always cheaper than the income sharing agreement.

To me, these income sharing agreements and bootcamps seem like not great deals when you look at instruction time per dollar. And also when you look at the longitudinal durability of the skill-set that's being taught. They have a place in the market for sure, but they aren't the panacea to expensive education. They're not even cost-competitive.

They're just a different point in the design space of educational programs that extract as much of the added value of their product as possible.

A student will have spent about 2,000 hours in Lambda School by graduation - the equivalent of ~4 university semesters, because we go all day every day and don’t take breaks.

And comparing the amount of debt vs the total possible cost doesn’t make for an accurate comparison either.

Also note that by the time a Lambda School student is at year four, if we want to factor in the opportunity cost of time, a Lambda School student has paid Lambda School back and has three years of earnings/work experience.

If you’re using time as the comparison: Would you rather have a degree and $24k in debt or three years of Lambda School, have paid the school off, and have earned an additional $250k?

It's apples to apples wrt income sharing agreements as an alternative to loans. You're of course right that there are significant curricular differences.

> A student will have spent about 2,000 hours in Lambda School by graduation - the equivalent of ~4 university semesters, because we go all day every day and don’t take breaks.

University students should be going every day and not taking breaks.

> And comparing the amount of debt vs the total possible cost doesn’t make for an accurate comparison either.

I agree that this isn't the best possible comparison, but I couldn't even find the data to make a better one. Does Lambda School publish average paybacks?

> Also note that by the time a Lambda School student is at year four, if we want to factor in the opportunity cost of time, a Lambda School student has paid Lambda School back and has three years of earnings/work experience.

On the other hand, a 4 year degree with 2+ majors is much more robust to shifts in labor market demand. Which does shift from under you feet.

In fact, that very dynamism is regularly referenced in Lambda School's marketing...

> ...and have earned an additional $250k?

So, do lambda grads not on average max out the payout, or do they on average make way less than $250k over 2 years? You can't have it both ways ;-)

To answer your question: I lived through dotcom, '08, and lots of shifts in tech stacks that corresponded with layoffs of folks who didn't have foundation skills to keep up (Java/C/mainframe programming grads from community colleges who never could "grok" the web). So I have one answer about this versatility/robustness vs. maximizing short term returns question.

But I'm sure people who have never seen a down cycle or major shift in tech have a different one.