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

consumerfinance.gov

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

#211

Post by JumpCrisscross »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #203
adeon wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 90% of students have a good experience but the 10% of students have a similar experiences to the poster there, then I still think Lambda is another ethical disaster of a start-up. "It's better than a typical USA student loan" is a very low bar.

[flagged]

> You can't expect 100% of students to have a good time, and it's not obvious what an "ethical" success bar should be

No, but you can expect none of them to have been lied to.

> If Allred is an unscrupulous scammer, he forgot to do the greedy part. The guy is worth less than a lot (maybe most) FAANG SWEs

The defense is he's a fraudster, but incompetent?

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

#213

Post by alex_lav »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #203
adeon wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 90% of students have a good experience but the 10% of students have a similar experiences to the poster there, then I still think Lambda is another ethical disaster of a start-up. "It's better than a typical USA student loan" is a very low bar.

[flagged]

> You can't expect 100% of students to have a good time,

No one in this thread has suggested this.

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

#214

Post by JumpCrisscross »

imzadi wrote: post #66

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…

> 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

Could you do me a favour and look if they had conflicts? (Also, who was the arbitrator, AAA or JAMS? Because it shouldn't be more than $5k, and that's an extreme. Also, in most arbitration agreements, the company drafting the agreement pays the filing fees, which could knock off $100 to $3,500.)

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

#215

Post by Freedom2 »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #203
adeon wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 90% of students have a good experience but the 10% of students have a similar experiences to the poster there, then I still think Lambda is another ethical disaster of a start-up. "It's better than a typical USA student loan" is a very low bar.

[flagged]

> The guy is worth less than a lot (maybe most) FAANG SWEs.

This is quite a definitive claim by you. Do you happen to have the data for what FAANG SWE's are worth so we can compare?

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

#216

Post by outop »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #193
abnercoimbre wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please contact the CFPB, it is worth your trouble. Everyone's blood should be boiling reading TFA, such as: > 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.

This a sad amount of dog piling for HN. I know dozens of students who attended and turned their lives around because of the program. I see Lambda Alumni on every page of LinkedIn job boards. I'm sure some people had a bad time, but all of the ISA issues GP stated are clearly stated in the contract, and these calls for "jail time" are absurd. People clearly know almost nothing about the program, or its success rate. D…

I'm not sure all the ISA issues are clearly stated in the contract, or whether they were clearly stated in all the contacts, before they started to get into trouble.

But they clearly lied about much of this stuff in the headline publicity. Lying prominently and 'clarifying' the lies in the small print is obviously still fraud.

Doing fraud and saying 'but the majority of the people we defrauded still had an overall positive experience' is not a defense.

Jail time for consumer credit fraud is a perfectly normal outcome. Don't lend consumers money if you don't want to be in a regulatory environment where fraud is taken very seriously.

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

#217

Post by JumpCrisscross »

sandofsky wrote: post #92
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think they should have listed “draft an arbitration claim,” on their enrollment prerequisites? Unless you’re a total numpty, you can learn online how to draft an arb claim. And even if you are a numpty, you should be be to find—in a half-decent cohort—someone who can do this. The issue is rarely ability. It’s learned helplessness in the face of the legal system. The anxiety, not ability, is the limiting fact…

The company targeted the poor, single mothers, reformed convicts, and other disadvantaged groups. They tend to lack the free time or guidance to navigate these situations. If this work is trivial to you, I am happy to connect you with them to provide your services.

> If this work is trivial to you, I am happy to connect you with them to provide your services

It is. I won't because this isn't something I care deeply about. The question is whether they would have been better off without arbitration, and the answer is no.

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

#219

Post by JumpCrisscross »

eadler wrote: post #180
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are your thoughts on it given this new information available to you? Curious who that lawyer is. Because for financial arbitration, the win rates are ridiculously skewed in favour of borrowers and retail investors.

Do you have a source for that? I'd like to read it and add it to this list: https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/references/

That looks like a biased source, concluding in the first sentence of its introduction that "pre-Dispute Arbitration agreements force people into a form of ‘Rustic Justice’ whose primary purpose to evade meaningful accountability for violations of contract or statutory rights" [1].

That said, I do know bank lobbying group who want to outlaw arbitration for unaccredited investors. Will pass this along.

[1] https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/

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

#220

Post by choppaface »

debo_ wrote: post #153
sandofsky wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In January 2020, as news broke about Lambda School's scummy behavior, Graham gave Austen a pep talk which he later expanded into the essay, "Haters." It has aged like a fine milk. https://paulgraham.com/fh.html

From the footnotes: > There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds are usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken in by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you can usually assume y is not a fraud. I guess all those folks calling…

Same with FTX, VCs projected themselves as thought leaders buying into FTX and then it turned out they had never even thought
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