Biggest red flag for me is Austen has basically become a full time right wing reactionary on X/Twitter
CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
21–30 of 384 posts
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#22[flagged]
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Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#23Unreal: > 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.
Technically, the statement is still valid. It's just that the confidence interval will be wide. :-)
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#24Unreal: > 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.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#25Am I crazy, or do fines never come close to matching damages? Or jailtime? I'm constantly seeing rulings or indictments where an article says "defendant faces $1500 in fines or two years jail time", as if those are in any way equivalent. Were all the fine quantities written up in 1875 and just never got updated? In this case, defendants are accused of conning "at least 11,000 income share loans" "carrying an average…
Those articles you are reading are just poorly worded. For any criminal case, it is a matter of fines AND jail time. You could be sentenced to jail time and no fines, or fines and no jail time (though this is rare), but the majority of the time you get fines and jail time. Generally, for criminal issues, the punishment is really in the jail time, the fine is just extra.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#26These fines seem incredibly low to me - they're slaps on the wrist!
Putting these together:
"permanently bans BloomTech from all consumer-lending activities and bans Allred from any student-lending activities for ten years"
"ordering BloomTech and Allred to cease collecting payments on income share loans for graduates who did not have a qualifying job, eliminate finance changes for certain agreements, and allow students the option to withdraw without penalty"
This order seems like a death sentence. If ISAs are defined as consumer-lending, which the CFPB clearly says they are, BloomTech cannot recruit new customers. And they cannot collect on 50% of their outstanding loans (if the quoted internal placement rate is true).
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#27Are 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 income based repayment plans for federal student loans are not that different (but without most of the sketchy practices).
The fact that those are an option for accredited schools means I think it would be hard to make it work in a program like this. Especially if there is any sort of venture interest expecting actual returns. Actually educating people well is not cheap and I have not seen any of these programs that actually do anything innovative either.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#28Unreal: > 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.
From what I’ve read about his career before this he was basically a growth marketer/hacker
Like the only thing he knows how to do is fudge things with dark patterns to achieve growth at any cost
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#29It's disappointing that California's Bureau for Private and Post-Secondary Education (BPPE) continued to approve this boot camp. I thought the rationale for creating the bureau was to discourage scams in job training.
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 service those debts. The victims are usually low-income, so they lack the resources to lawyer up. If they do lawyer up, they end up being forced into arbitration due to an arbitration clause in their student agreements.
So in the end, it does feel like the BPPE is a half-measure that doesn't fully tackle predatory companies.
Re: CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
#30This is the boot camp school formerly known as Lambda School, that came under a lot of fire in the past for these types of practices, and other issues. Previous trouble they've been in: https://dfpi.ca.gov/2021/04/26/lambda-school-reaches-settlem... https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/13/lambda-school-lawsuits/
This is one of those situations lending support to the corporate death penalty. Allowing name changes like Worldcom, Spectrum, and so on to write off some liabilities while operating as if nothing happened.
Their name change was unrelated to this. Somebody else owned a trademark for Lambda and sued them over it, so they were forced to change their name.