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Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

lambdaschool.com

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Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#161

Post by wikibob »

incompatible wrote: post #31
austenallred wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking for a job is built into the curriculum itself. Of course, you could just turn job offers down and never get paid a high salary, but most people aren’t optimizing like that.

Interesting, is the job market in the US so good that even new graduates without work experience can expect to find well-paying jobs? I'm in Australia, where things seem a bit different.

Yes.

In major tech cities (NYC, Seattle, Silicon Valley) the starting salaries are over $100,000, plus $20-40,000 in Restricted Stock Units, and $20-40,000 in yearly bonus.

Importantly, RSUs from public companies are directly convertible to cash once they vest (usually 12 months). Startup options lottery tickets are a different story.

See http://comp.fyi

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#162

Post by isaacaderogba »

WA wrote: post #150
austenallred wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the US, something like Lambda school seems to be a great alternative. For Europeans, it’s way too expensive at $30k max. You should tell that to our rapidly growing number of German and European students :)

How long does this "pay 17% of your salary" apply? What if my first job pays less and then I switch jobs, or I get a raise that goes over the $50K but only after a couple years? Maybe an explanation is: CS students usually don't get entry-level jobs that pay more than 50K EUR, often probably less. So maybe they hope that they never have to pay back. Or they don't care and are happy to have a good education after all.…

The EU has a lower salary threshold - €27,500 I think, though it isn't explicitly listed on the site (https://lambdaschool.com/eu/)

EDIT: Not sure if you were referring to US or EU, since you mixed around the $ and € sign a little!

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#163

Post by barry-cotter »

WA wrote: post #150
austenallred wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the US, something like Lambda school seems to be a great alternative. For Europeans, it’s way too expensive at $30k max. You should tell that to our rapidly growing number of German and European students :)

How long does this "pay 17% of your salary" apply? What if my first job pays less and then I switch jobs, or I get a raise that goes over the $50K but only after a couple years? Maybe an explanation is: CS students usually don't get entry-level jobs that pay more than 50K EUR, often probably less. So maybe they hope that they never have to pay back. Or they don't care and are happy to have a good education after all.…

https://lambdaschool.com/eu/

TUITION OPTIONS - 0 up-front + 10% of salary for four years (£25k GBP / €27.5k EUR maximum total payment)

- £16k GBP or €18k EUR up-front + no income-based repayment

PAYMENT CAP £25k GBP / €27.5k EUR maximum

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#164

Post by WA »

barry-cotter wrote: post #163
WA wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long does this "pay 17% of your salary" apply? What if my first job pays less and then I switch jobs, or I get a raise that goes over the $50K but only after a couple years? Maybe an explanation is: CS students usually don't get entry-level jobs that pay more than 50K EUR, often probably less. So maybe they hope that they never have to pay back. Or they don't care and are happy to have a good education after all.…

https://lambdaschool.com/eu/ TUITION OPTIONS - 0 up-front + 10% of salary for four years (£25k GBP / €27.5k EUR maximum total payment) - £16k GBP or €18k EUR up-front + no income-based repayment PAYMENT CAP £25k GBP / €27.5k EUR maximum

Thanks, but this doesn't answer the question on whether or not the four years start right after "graduation" or when I start my first job. So can I reduce my tuition by slacking around for a couple years?

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#165

Post by IdiocyInAction »

stale2002 wrote: post #89
opportune wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a waste of time to teach. It takes maybe a few hours to learn almost everything there is to know about branching or merge conflicts. You should learn the hard things in school, not the minutiae or trivia you would learn in your first month of any job. When I was in school I'm glad I went out of my way to take all the math-heavy and theoretical classes I could, and no classes like "modern web design" or…

> That would be a waste of time to teach. It takes maybe a few hours to learn almost everything there is to know You are thinking about this wrong. If it is so easy and quick to teach people how to use git, then why aren't colleges doing it!?!? Learning how to use common software engineer tools is a low effort, high reward situation. All they have to do is spend a day on it, and they have now made their students sign…

> If it is so easy and quick to teach people how to use git, then why aren't colleges doing it!??!

Some of them actually do.

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#167

Post by ryan_j_naughton »

austenallred wrote: post #46
vikp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're only getting repaid when someone is employed and making over 50k, which seems to be the case from your website ("Upon completion of the program, students will pay 10% of their [pre-tax] salary for a five year period once they're making at least $50,000 per year"), then the "repayment floor" for Lambda school is 25k (with probably a close-to-50k "repayment average"). I'm assuming that if someone loses a job,…

The repayment floor is $0. You’re assuming that everyone will quickly start making over $50k, which isn’t the case. Given that we outlay ~$30k in stipends and training and the cost of that capital is non trivial there’s no way a loan term would come close to this.

"Rates for PLUS loans, which are for graduate students and parents, rose to 7.60%" [1]

7.6% interest for 5 years on a $30k loan is $43,269.57.

However that is: - a government loan where default rates don't directly drive the interest rates - effectively subsidized by the govt

In your situation you must have much higher costs of capital from capital markets than the government's t-bill rates of 2.5% [2]. Especially given that your product is effectively equivalent to a unsecured loan in the eyes of wall street.

Then compound that some percentage of students don't make the $50k income requirement in the first year or two after the program and others who are even further delayed. We can equate this to a traditional default rate except the are no negative consequences to your student for delaying (in comparison to traditional default which hurts their credit), all the while your cost of that original capital keeps growing.

Given that your upper bound repayment is 50k and most students won't make more then $100k their first couple years out, then that is an effective interest rate of 11% if the 50k is paid over 5 years.

All in, you guys have a tricky problem. That is unless you can get as good as Sofi at picking which people to finance, i.e. Those that will immediately many >100k and with a quicky increasing salary. But Sofi has it easier bc they just cherrypick all the Stanford MBA grads who already have high paying jobs and first refinance their Debt. You on the other hand have to forecast accurately who will be successful.

Total capital cost isn't that much though. 1k students at $30k is $30M. You can easily raise VC to cover that (actually already raised $48m [3]) and don't need traditional capital markets / wall street to prove the idea. Only when you begin to have 20k+ students would you need traditional debt facilities. Thus, isn't your cost of capital just giving the VC ownership in the company instead of a repayment cost of capital (for now at least)?

[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/student-loans/student-...

[2] https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/i...

[3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lambda-school

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#168

Post by bluedino »

austenallred wrote: post #65
anonymousJim12 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't that surprising for someone that has a lot of experience in something like project management or academia and/or is very good at negotiating. For instance the place I work just hired as a senior engineer a former math professor with a math PhD that hasn't written a line of production code in their life. If this person decided to go through a 9 month bootcamp before applying the outcome would have been the…

He was a recent college dropout and bodybuilder, but yeah it’s not an absolutely absurd result.

Bodybuilder sounds like an odd thing to mention.

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#169

Post by bluedino »

runT1ME wrote: post #38
austenallred wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then the risk to Lambda School is practically zero If only! We only get paid if a student is making $50k/yr or more and the agreement is time-bound (10 yrs). A student may teach those levels of salary without our involvement, but when our possible downside is $18k + the cost of training and our potential upside is somewhere between $0 and $50k any level of default or non-hiring destroys returns immediately.

Love what you're doing. Think the model could work for other well paying jobs such as the medical field or legal?

You would think medical jobs would have some kind of on-the-job training while they pay for your school

Re: Lambda School (YC S17) now pays eligible students $2k/month

#170

Post by calebhicks »

WA wrote: post #164
barry-cotter wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://lambdaschool.com/eu/ TUITION OPTIONS - 0 up-front + 10% of salary for four years (£25k GBP / €27.5k EUR maximum total payment) - £16k GBP or €18k EUR up-front + no income-based repayment PAYMENT CAP £25k GBP / €27.5k EUR maximum

Thanks, but this doesn't answer the question on whether or not the four years start right after "graduation" or when I start my first job. So can I reduce my tuition by slacking around for a couple years?

The payback period begins when you get paid at a qualifying job, and pauses if your work does. (ie. Lose your job, or decide to move and takes a month or two to land new gig, etc)

The five year payment window clock starts on graduation. So if you don’t get a qualifying job within 5 years of finishing class, you pay nothing.

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