Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

IAMA Former founder @ Hack Reactor, one of the larger coding bootcamps. I left Hack Reactor some time after selling to Galvanize in 2018. I now run a clean energy startup and am commenting as a bystander (no insider knowledge @ Lambda). Here are some thoughts in no particular order. Feel free to AMA as well.

0) Bootcamps are extremely sensitive to complaints to their regulators. If you are eg. seeking a refund for monies paid and have a grievance, know that forms like this [https://www.bppe.ca.gov/forms_pubs/complaint.pdf] exist for your state, and know that bootcamps will be very motivated to reconcile the matter before you fill one out.

1) Many bystanders think the ISA business model is predatory. I've seen it compared to slavery. I've talked with hundreds of low-income, high-promise people, and ISAs are 1000% more attractive to that audience than more conventional debt-like instruments, even debt-like instruments with forgiveness protocols. When people talk about what's good for low-income students, and say it's not ISAs... I don't think these people have a cohesive theory of educational access??? I can't explain it.

2) There is a lot of skepticism about the practice of hiring recent grads as alums. I think it's a good idea for prospective bootcamp students to ask a) which specific individuals with work experience will teach me, b) what kind/how much access will I have, c) can I talk to them. I will also observe that recent grads do the bulk of of non-lecture/non-curriculum work in pretty much every educational context ever. I live next to UC Berkeley, which has more graduate TAs than all other instructional staff put together.

3) This looks bad for Lambda. I hope they course-correct and I hope prospective students look at all their options. PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS: You should write off Lambda because a) you have better options, or b) because you've talked to current students, not c) because of coverage like this. I can't speak to Lambda but I can say I've read coverage like this about places that might be the best option out there for some students (eg General Assembly). Anyone who likes coding and wants to make it their job should go to the best bootcamp they can get into. It's an incredible onramp into a world of prosperity, and "worst bootcamp" is a quality designation that is close to "median university CS program" in terms of return on investment IMO.

> The only people to who can afford to go to school to broaden their education without a clear job benefit are those born rich.

I respectfully disagree.

I've spent an enormous amount of time inside universities (as both a student and employed as an engineer). The vast majority of students have no clear job benefit at the end of their degree.

Most students are studying something with no obvious job correlation. The largest schools at most second/third rung universities in the western world are humanities (which I'm not knocking, but the employment rate for these degrees into related roles is abysmal).

Honestly, it's really sad to see. I've spoken with countless third year humanities/law students that are completely lost and have no idea what to do as graduation approaches (about 20% of law graduates at my last uni went on to practice law). Oh, and they're crippled with debt (in both Australia and the US).

In my experience, the worse off the student, the more likely they were to study something with poor career outcomes (one of the worst offenders was the bachelor of business, which was a popular choice for students hoping to escape the lower/middle class but had atrocious outcomes). I chalked this up to fewer educated role models when they were growing up.

HN is fairly skewed towards tech. The tech-related courses (CS, EE, etc) have great employment prospects, but they're the outlier.

these should be expert mode only features that have to be unlocked as opposed to default. So easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Kinda fun if you've been doing it for a while though.

Having worked in a similar space/company, there are a few fundamental flaws in the business model that make me very bearish on companies like Lambda:

1/ Taking VC money requires hyper growth. That’s fine if your product is software where the marginal product gets better over time. In their model, you get the early adopter students, who are talented/motivated and juice up the placement stats. But after some critical mass, the marginal student is not as talented or as motivated. It pushes the company to lower its bar and erodes the overall experience for everyone. Same thing happened to General Assembly.

2/ Iterating your business model and making tweaks to the product is fine when you’re dealing with software. It doesn’t go well when you’re dealing with students. People inherently don’t like change. They have feelings and don’t like being lied to. Sure, some people will drink the typical rah-rah startup Koolaid, but over time, most people will see right through it and will assume that management is either incompetent or lying (or both). It’s especially bad when companies use the “do things that don’t scale” PG motto. That’s fine in software but in education you die through death by a thousand cuts when your unit economics don’t work and you need to fix them in a way that deteriorates the student experience.

3/ ISA’s, like communism, sound nice in theory but don’t work at scale and in practice. They’re essentially unsecured student debt. Even student debt — which has long arms and can garnish wages for nonpayment has recently taken a hit from loan forgiveness. ISA’s have none of those protections. They’re also tied to a student’s performance and career luck — which has many factors outside the quality of education. Student debt doesn’t care how motivated you are or how unlucky you are — the security holder must get paid. In ISA’s the security holder is stuck with an IOU that may never get paid.

Education sorely needs reform but I don’t think Lambda is the way. Entrepreneurs also need to think about it a bit differently than how normal startups are built. The software model doesn’t translate well.

Not working for twenty years (in the prime time for earning money) is not "stumbling once".