Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

dfpi.ca.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 306 posts

Re: Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

#101

Post by maximilianroos »

sicromoft wrote: post #40

See also Lambda School’s Misleading Promises: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

TBH this article makes me more confident that Lambda is overall Good. They found a single program that was substantially deficient, some disorganized operations, and some exaggerated marketing claims.

It's starting a new form of education! There are going to be operational headaches and a few misses! While the referenced cases aren't good, we can assess Lambda on their overall contribution, not their mistakes alone.

Re: Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

#102

Post by jamiequint »

aerosmile wrote: post #97
minimaxir wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their profile says "Now: Investing/Consulting" which implies salesmanship for income.

Ok, they didn't Google their name, but instead clicked on their profile and researched them "only within the HN web domain." Still feels personal and unnecessary. Edit: nevermind, they did Google him.

Haha, I just updated my profile after I read that comment, so they definitely Googled my name.

Re: Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

sandofsky wrote: post #53
austenallred wrote: post #29

Hey everyone, Pretty excited to reach settlement on this one. The DFPI is a new regulatory agency in California that was tasked with reviewing Lambda School’s new incentive-aligned tuition ( https://lambdaschool.com/tuition/tuition-options ) in California. They came back requesting that we update a bankruptcy provision in the agreement to clarify that these agreements are dischargeable in bankruptcy, and to do a revi…

This is a bizarre response. You were caught putting deceptive language in your contracts. You now have to hire a third-party to ensure all of your contracts comply with the law, and 90 days to review all of your previous marketing material and certify it wasn't dishonest. You're on probation. This is nothing to be excited about. This is similar to when you fought with the BPPE for a year because they insisted you can…

> This is a bizarre response.

Really, its standard corporate spin when accepting a settlement, “We’re super happy to work with regulators to make things better.” When, of course, if the company had any interest in making things better the regulator would never have needed to get involved in the first place.

Obviously, its deceptive, but its not bizarre, its just making PR lemonade out of PR lemons.

Re: Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

#104

Post by dsr_ »

jamiequint wrote: post #60
lupire wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that non-anonymous people, who rely on their salesmanship for income, are comfortable publicly embarrassing themselves like this.

Generally people who build interesting things don't enjoy shitting on other people's attempts to change the world for the better. I give less than zero shits if people who adopt this type of attitude don't want to work with me. They're not worth working with to begin with. Go look at the HN launch posts for Dropbox or Coinbase, or the struggles of other companies trying to do something new and make a difference and l…

Go look at all the other YCombinator investments, and then look up survivorship bias.

I, too, can identify winners in the past. It's identifying them in the future that's hard.

Re: Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

#105

Post by minimaxir »

maximilianroos wrote: post #101
sicromoft wrote: post #40

See also Lambda School’s Misleading Promises: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...

TBH this article makes me more confident that Lambda is overall Good. They found a single program that was substantially deficient, some disorganized operations, and some exaggerated marketing claims. It's starting a new form of education! There are going to be operational headaches and a few misses! While the referenced cases aren't good, we can assess Lambda on their overall contribution, not their mistakes alone.

Lambda School took off PR-wise because their promises made sense on paper.

The reality however is more important, especially when humans are adversely impacted if the promises are broken.

Re: Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

#106

Post by judge2020 »

tedivm wrote: post #24
nrmitchi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth (I learned this recently and was equally surprised by it) student loans were not non-dischargable until 2005. Ie, for all time before 2005, a student could do what you describe, and as far as I know it wasn't a widespread practice. It is a relatively new thing that really only came in to existance coincidentally around the same time that education became so expensive that going through the effort…

Bankruptcies have to get approved by a judge, and often debt is restructured instead of being discharged. The scenario where someone takes on a bunch of debt then declares bankruptcy on graduation is a joke because judges wouldn't allow it. They may get their loan deferred or restructured to help buy time to get a job, but they wouldn't just discharge it like that. These kind of made up "what if" scenarios to justify…

Neither of us are lawyers (based on your profile), but there are two modern forms of bankruptcy in the U.S: Chapter 7, liquidation which does discharge your debts, or Chapter 13, which is restructuring. In a chapter 7 bankruptcy, you have to pass the means test, which checks if your household income is below the median income of your state:

> The means test looks at the gross income of everyone in your household during the six months before you file. If your household income is below the median income in your state, you’ll qualify to file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

If it isn't, then the courts can force your chapter 7 case be converted to a chapter 13. But if someone, say, lives alone and still works at their minimum-wage job from college, I don't see anything else that would prevent a chapter 7 from proceeding.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/chapter-7-bankruptcy....

Re: Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

#107

Post by threatofrain »

jamiequint wrote: post #60
lupire wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that non-anonymous people, who rely on their salesmanship for income, are comfortable publicly embarrassing themselves like this.

Generally people who build interesting things don't enjoy shitting on other people's attempts to change the world for the better. I give less than zero shits if people who adopt this type of attitude don't want to work with me. They're not worth working with to begin with. Go look at the HN launch posts for Dropbox or Coinbase, or the struggles of other companies trying to do something new and make a difference and l…

I didn't realize that lying to customers was so important to ethical building.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190703224616/https://news.ycom...

https://soundcloud.com/vwoo/interview-with-austen-allred

Re: Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

#108

Post by pepy »

minimaxir wrote: post #61
anchpop wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you prefer he say nothing? As long as he’s not misleading people I don’t see what the harm of commenting is.

Spinning a negative as a positive is misleading at best.

you say misleading? how surprising

Re: Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

#109

Post by mbesto »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #41
pradn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your bizarre cheeriness in the face of "Agreeing to End Deceptive Educational Financing Practices" is offputting, especially when coupled with the way college financing has led to generational deadweight, anxiety, and hopelessness.

I'd agree with you except that in this case it seems like the "deception" was actually working against Lambda school. Previously -> if you go bankrupt you still owe us. Now -> if you go bankrupt you don't owe us. On the face of it this seems like it would make Lambda school _more_ attractive than less. Note, the clause in question is "qualified educational loan…subject to the limitations on dischargeability contained…

> On the face of it this seems like it would make Lambda school _more_ attractive than less.

Technically sure. On the face it tells me something about their branding - that their offering may be more deceptive than I might realize. Especially since its a new economic model for education, the customer probably hasn't thought through everything, so trust is important here.

Re: Lambda School agrees to end deceptive educational financing practices

#110

Post by samatman »

dragonwriter wrote: post #103
sandofsky wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bizarre response. You were caught putting deceptive language in your contracts. You now have to hire a third-party to ensure all of your contracts comply with the law, and 90 days to review all of your previous marketing material and certify it wasn't dishonest. You're on probation. This is nothing to be excited about. This is similar to when you fought with the BPPE for a year because they insisted you can…

> This is a bizarre response. Really, its standard corporate spin when accepting a settlement, “We’re super happy to work with regulators to make things better.” When, of course, if the company had any interest in making things better the regulator would never have needed to get involved in the first place. Obviously, its deceptive, but its not bizarre, its just making PR lemonade out of PR lemons.

You can't seriously believe that regulators have completely clean motives and actions.

I'm still getting up to date on what happened here, but corporate malfeasance isn't incompatible with aggressive and even corrupt regulation. In fact my starting place is that both are likely.

What I reject is the claim that the State only steps in and takes action if the party they're investigating has done something wrong. That's absurd.

Post reply on HN