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

Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 251 posts

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#201

Post by BlueTemplar »

raiyu wrote: post #91
hintymad wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, what's wrong with a community college? It's cheap. It's flexible. Its admission rate is practically 100%. Its courses are not worse than a code camp's. My relative went to a CC, and I reviewed his course work. CCs does not spend much time teaching all the fundamentals, but they do teach some. In their data structure course, they don't teach student why two pivots are not better than a single pivot in qu…

I think community colleges are great, and if you can get one on one instruction anywhere it is fantastic. The challenge is that bootcamps are really designed for people who are changing careers. Which means they have already gone through college or actively working. So it becomes an issue because they are reliant on income to survive and they aren't living with their parents. Basically it's unplanned and so much hard…

One issue might be how complexity analysis (amongst other computer science concepts) already requires a not insignificant math background...

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#202

Post by tomhoward »

akanet wrote: post #170
intherdfield wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems really disingenuous. Can't you update the article with this important detail?

It's not disingenuous; I think an earlier draft had it. This came down from 4000 words. I'll try to ask my editor to add this as a correction but things are pretty hectic. It's a fairly minor omission in my opinion, but I understand disagreeing.

It's hardly a "fairly minor omission" in a country where the conventional tertiary education saddles the average student with a debt that is often far bigger than $30k, doesn't expire, and cannot be escaped even through bankruptcy, meaning that even retirement benefits can be garnished above a meagre $750/month.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#203

Post by BlueTemplar »

the_watcher wrote: post #81
raiyu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is selling, because the loan is backed by the ISA. Which means if Lambda can not repay the loan, the loaning company now owns the ISA and can use any sort of aggressive tactics to get the student to repay their ISA. Just like if you take out a mortgage on a house and fail to pay the loan back, then the bank owns the house. In this case since the ISA is used as collateral, the company that originated the loan now o…

> Just like if you take out a mortgage on a house and fail to pay the loan back, then the bank owns the house. I think most homeowners would disagree that when they bought the house, it was actually sold to the bank.

Sadly, in practice it often was?

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#204

Post by dx87 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #188
chrisseaton wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things,…

Why don't you think schools can scale? You need instructional material and the equivalent of professors/lecturers and TAs. Instructional material scales really well; that's what textbooks and MOOCs are. Professors scale well; otherwise 100 plus lectures wouldn't work at all. They obviously do. Intro classes in the huge majority of US universities are in the 100-600 range. I wouldn't be surprised if there are bigger.…

> So the only possible limiting factor that might not scale is TAs. You can render this irrelevant by having high enough standards for entry, like GA Tech's OMSCS, or you can work on scaling it.

They said bootcamps don't scale, not that education or schools as a whole doesn't scale. And your solution of raising the entry requirements so only people who can teach themselves can attend is proving their point. Someone who can teach themself isn't going to pay to go to a bootcamp, but people who want to switch careers and can't figure it out without help, will.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#207

Post by [deleted] »

chrisseaton wrote: post #182
songzme wrote: post #17

I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently…

> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things,…

[deleted]

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#208

Post by glenngillen »

chrisseaton wrote: post #182
songzme wrote: post #17

I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help. Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3 I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently…

> I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people This idea doesn't pass a common sense test to me - I'm sure bootcamps can be profitable, but the people running them are used to building things that scale. Bootcamps definitely don't scale. If these tech people were looking to get-rich-quick they surely wouldn't be running a school, of all things,…

I did some back-of-the-envelope numbers on the one I came into contact with previously (also keep in mind this was 6 years ago now too!):

20-30x students per cohort who paid ~$20K upfront for a 12 week program. 20% signing fee (based on 1st year comp) from employer on placement.

We definitely were not paying top of market as some of these students ended up at Uber and Facebook. That said the all in 1st year cost between base + signing bonus + equity wasn't much short of $200K. So:

30 * $20K + 28 * $200K * 20% = $1.72M/cohort

As for outgoings, all of the mentors were volunteers. As were most of the instructors. The content is mostly a one-time sunk cost to produce and is redelivered across cohorts. The largest overhead would have been a building lease. The biggest constraint on growth is how large you can make a cohort or how many cohorts you run (either multiple per year, or opening new locations).

Really felt like a bit of a racket that had found what was almost an arbitrage: between the inability of Bay Area companies to find local talent, the huge costs and risk associated trying to relocate people via H1B, and the desire for people to re-skill at any cost because tech jobs/salaries were distorting everything else in their city.

Sure it's not a $1B outcome. It's a pretty profitable and repeatable business, and especially given the limited downside risk (mostly carried by the students, who've already paid).

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#209

Post by zholito »

AlexandrB wrote: post #116
GreenJelloShot wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought they only had to pay if the students actually landed a decent paying job.

This is true. I suppose I was being a bit hyperbolic. Having said that, it still seems like a bad deal even for students who get jobs. If the curriculum is not up to par, it's likely that successful students would have also been successful with self-teaching or less-expensive online courses. There's also the opportunity cost of being out of work for 9 months. It seems unfair to treat your students as guinea pigs for…

Not about lambda, but I had the opportunity to read the full details of an ISA contract from other school and there might be some times when student will be mandated to payback even if they don't get a job. Related to this: someone in Reddit is trying to collect the docs..

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#210

Post by topherPedersen »

hprotagonist wrote: post #3

relatedly, it's so nice to see zed shaw tilting at a windmill that deserves it for once: https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069?lang=e...

I learned how to code by reading his book Learn Python the Hard Way 6 years ago! It cost me $0.
Post reply on HN