> Someone here commenting on this story said that Lambda counted their student TAs in their employment stats, for example, but to the best of my knowledge this never happened. There were a handful (like three or four that I know of) that we did hire as full-time staff doing real jobs, and I'm pretty sure we counted them as employed, but not the student TAs.
That's true. A source of confusion is that the school did hire at least one bootcamp graduate as an instructor, though he graduated from a different bootcamp. And it's worth pointing out that the marketing material promised world class instruction, and a fresh bootcamp grad with zero industry experience is the very opposite of that. For that matter, the head of the data science program was the CEO's brother, whose only industry experience was from a no-name company in Utah.
> With respect to this ruling...
It's a waste of time to argue the semantics of income share agreements at this point. They always operated in a gray area, which is why Lambda School hired lobbiests to try to make them officially legal. That effort failed, and the law has decided they're just another form of loans with convoluted hoops to jump through.
I imagine that they got that $4,000 number from all the people who attended the program, received zero practical skills to get jobs, went on to further training (another bootcamp or even an associates degree) and still had to pay back the company because the terms of the ISAs lasted anywhere from five to eight years.
> Still others complain about the selling of the ISAs to investors, and say that that means that Lambda would still make money no matter how well their students performed. However, this would be a very short-sighted strategy as no investors would buy the ISAs if the students weren't performing.
Given the ISAs disappeared from the marketplaces that resold them to hedge funds, that sounds like exactly what happened. The issue is that it fooled prospective students into thinking, "Hey, if this company is able to run off ISAs, the program must work!" In fact the company made money by leaving hedge funds as bag holders.
> My point is, there's a lot of information out there by a lot of people who aren't sure about what they're talking about. And it can be tough to know what's real and what's not.
The same is probably true of Bernie Madoff, Charles Ponzi, and Sam Bankman-Fried. When someone acts like a sociopath for long enough, people start to assume that everything they do is unethical. There is a long list of crimes that the company committed which have been verified from multiple sources. A few people on the internet getting the details wrong doesn't invalidate that.
> As part of my layoff agreement, I had to sign a non-disparagement clause to get my severance.
They did the same thing to students who scrounge together the money to hire a lawyer to get out of their ISAs. These students had to any reference to Lambda School from their LinkedIn profile and tell nobody about what happened. While you did it to make money, imagine how it would feel sign away your right to free speech for fear of a $30,000 debt.