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CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

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Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#61

Post by wredue »

kklisura wrote: post #48
magicmicah85 wrote: post #47

BloomTech about to get a name change. Honestly wonder what the true placement rate was. There seem to be some success stories I’m seeing on Twitter but this could have all been avoided had they just been up front. That $164,000 victim fund sounds pitiful but I do wonder how it is calculated.

> ...with inflated promises of job-placement rates as high as 86 percent, when the company’s internal metrics showed placement rates closer to 50 percent and in some cases as low as 30 percent. > BloomTech advertised on its website that 71 to 86 percent of students were placed in jobs within six months of graduation, when its non-public reporting to investors consistently showed placement rates closer to 50 percent.…

For the record, it’s actually far worse than this even, as many of your “teachers” are just people from the previous cohort.

After a slew of negative reviews came from a few people that verifiably took the early courses, lambda decided not to improve their course, but instead to do two things:

1) they gave students financial credit for posting positive reviews on social media

2) they paid review shops out of India and China to bombard the internet with fake positive experiences.

This school are scumbags. Frankly I am shocked that it still exists and people still go there.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#62

Post by natpalmer1776 »

shkkmo wrote: post #49
adrr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could just toss people in jail. This case is clearly wire fraud if the company knowing provided fraudulent hiring rates to get people to pay money for a service.

Why not both?

Because of diffusion of responsibility, wherein the person taking the fall was only one of perhaps three dozen individuals who collaborated to make the relevant business decisions.

If you to set the precedent of consolidating the consequences and doling them out to the relevant executive officer you’ll end up with c-suite executives around the country throwing their personal and corporate influence into getting that precedent neutralized.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#64

Post by kevinmchugh »

sandofsky wrote: post #24
saadatq wrote: post #8

Unreal: > Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.

When confronted about this on Hacker News, Austen defended himself with: > I did say the hiring rate of a cohort of one student was 100%. And in the same tweet I said, in all caps BUT VERY SMALL SAMPLE SIZE. Odd how that doesn’t make the article, don’t you think? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813371 Incidentally, it did make it into the article he's referring to, twice.

I've been in a lot of from arguments but never had one where I was later proven right by the federal government. That's quite the feather in your cap.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#65

Post by majormajor »

solardev wrote: post #10

Are there any legit income-sharing schools of this type, tech or otherwise? Done fairly, it sounds like an interesting alternative to upfront tuition. On the surface it doesn't seem like a bad model, but of course it could be twisted to evil ends. From the article: > The loans carry substantial risk, as a single missed payment triggers a default and the remainder of the $30,000 “cap” becomes due immediately. > Studen…

The math ends up wildly unfavorable unless you are EXTREMELY confident in your teaching/transformation abilities.

If you look good on paper before the school then you don't need it and won't be motivated to share your income. So the applicant pool reduces itself to those who on-paper don't have great chances. So you need to cause a really big delta in the ability of those people to make good money in the industry for you to be able to get your cut.

And you're gonna pull that off in 6 to 9 months? I'm a big believer in a lot more people having potential to learn than currently have easy opportunities, but that's a hell of a timeline.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#66

Post by imzadi »

I attended Lambda when it was first starting out. I think I was in the third or fourth cohort. At the time, the sell was that you didn't have to pay anything unless you got a job using the skills you learned from them. I was pretty naïve, I guess.

Things seemed fine in the beginning. The instructors were good, and I liked that there were actual live classes. Things degraded very quickly. They kept changing the format and the curriculum ("iterating"). They doubled the length of the program that I was in, which made it impossible for me to even finish it. I was working in a tech support job where we had to do shift bids and no shift was guaranteed. I enrolled in a plan that fit the shift I was working, and the expected end date, and when they changed the program length and format, I couldn't complete it.

They promised career guidance, including having a career councilor, but I never got one. They kept telling my cohort we would get our councilors after this or that milestone, but when we got there they would move the goalpost again. The closest we got was a resume course that was not relevant to tech at all and a resume review by another student.

When I had to drop out of the program, I tried to get them to cancel the ISA or reduce it, but they said I had completed "most" of the curriculum and thus was on the hook for all of the ISA.

They then started billing me for it because I was working in tech, in the job I had for 6 years before I ever even started their program.

I went to a lawyer and was told it wasn't worth suing, because they required arbitration in NYC, which would cost more than I would save.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#67

Post by vitalurk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38
sandofsky wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I found it weird that the BPPE can't discipline a company until it's registered and operating legally. So for the first few years, it couldn't do anything. The twist is that until the BPPE approves a school to operate, any student debt obligations up to that point are not valid. In theory, anyone in California who enrolled before August 2020 owes them nothing. The problem is that Lambda School still tries to…

> If they do lawyer up, they end up being forced into arbitration due to an arbitration clause in their student agreements You’re literally describing why arbitration works. Someone low income can just file for arbitration with minimal work by a lawyer. Contrast that with the tens of thousands they’d need to pay a litigator.

They split the students to take away their power. They kicked people off Slack, wiping the incriminating message history, and then re-adding students (woopsie), they allowed rampant racism to be posted in the channels. They did so many shady things with arbitration, it was absolutely harmful.

Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred

#70

Post by sailfast »

willcipriano wrote: post #7

[flagged]

Recently a number of actions by FTC and CFPB have been taken due to false claims of job placement or success, especially when tied to financing options. If a college makes a claim like this that is patently false it’s worth sending to them.
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