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

Lambda School wants to teach nursing

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 137 posts

Re: Lambda School wants to teach nursing

#61

Post by jlebar »

ngngngng wrote: post #11

I'm torn on Lambda. On one hand, it seems far superior to traditional higher education, since the schools success depends on the success of the students. At the same time, profit sharing is a terrible financial decision. When compared with other bootcamps, it's basically a bet against yourself. You're willing to risk tens of thousands of dollars more money for some risk insurance. I have such a hard time accepting th…

profit sharing is a terrible financial decision [...] it's basically a bet against yourself.

It's a hedge, which is different than a true bet against yourself (i.e. a short). Semantics aside, surely hedging against yourself is not always a terrible financial decision?

For example, insurance is a hedge. Taking out life/health/car insurance is not always a terrible financial decision.

Taking out a large student loan is tantamount to taking a "long position" on yourself. You are betting that you'll make lots of money in the future, enough to easily pay off the loan.

If that is a good bet for you, go for it. But surely some people want a less risky option, either because they have less risk tolerance or they have lower expectations for their future gains, or whatever.

As another way of thinking about it, profit sharing is selling equity in yourself. If we accept your premise that profit sharing is "always a terrible financial decision", then surely no rational corporation would ever sell equity in itself except as a last resort; they would be financed by debt whenever possible. But of course we can observe this is not how things work.

Re: Lambda School wants to teach nursing

#62

Post by azhenley »

jseliger wrote: post #60
azhenley wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because we go all day every day and don’t take breaks. If you enroll in 15 credit hours at a university, that means 15 hours in a classroom plus 15-30 hours of assignments and labs. (1 credit hour = 1 hour class + 1-2 hours outside class, on average, per week). That is full-time.

That is an interesting theory but it does not seem supported by data: https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/its-a... or https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/is-college-to... . CS may be somewhat different. Many schools are also only in session between half and three-quarters of the year.

Like you said, they didn't look at CS or engineering so your theory isn't supported by data either.

My universty/department's policy is to provide 2 hours of work per credit hour, and the students certainly claim to be spending even more than that! (The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.)

Good point about not being in session year round. It is fairly common to either take summer courses or to do an internship though, which I strongly encourage my students to do! Personally, I took summer courses every year of undergrad and did 5 internships in grad school.

Re: Lambda School wants to teach nursing

#63

Post by soneca »

geofft wrote: post #57
bitwize wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lambda School 9 no-upfront full-time months with close mentorship and teamwork, plus the alignment to help get me a job seems like a "too good to be true" option for me; Well, you know what they say about if something sounds too good to be true.

That's a heuristic, not an argument. The fact that you can get an entire Windows-competitive OS for free, and its source code , is too good to be true, too.

Exactly.

Re: Lambda School wants to teach nursing

#64

Post by jseliger »

phren0logy wrote: post #36
jseliger wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the big problems are 1. existing credentialing bodies and 2. the AMA, which wants to restrict entry into the profession and chiefly does so through the residency system. The physician shortage is a bug to the larger society but a feature to existing doctors, who wish to charge patients more and raise their own salaries. But see also https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/upshot/a-doctor-shortage-…

Hi, I'm a doc. Just wanted to add a few corrections: The AMA (American Medical Association) has nothing to do with residency slots. Residency slots are funded by CMS. I am in a shortage speciality, and we have been pushing for more residency slots for a long time. While there are probably some physicians who are self-interested enough to oppose this, I think it's unfair to characterize them as even a significant mino…

It's not clear the extent to which CMS funding, or high levels of CMS funding, is necessary: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/business/solving-the-shor...:

Dr. Wilensky says that most likely, hospitals lose money on residents in the first year, when the doctors just out of med school waste a lot of time and money on unnecessary tests and treatments. But residents’ value goes up rapidly because the learning curve is steep, while their salary increases are not.

In fact, one data point that suggests hospitals are currently making a lot of money on the more seasoned residents is the quantum leap in compensation on the day doctors convert their status from trainee to attending physician, under a new job contract. How can a doctor be worth paying only $60,000 on Friday and then at least twice that on Monday? Does the doctor’s marginal revenue product — that is, how profitable the doctor is for the employer — actually surge that much?

We don’t know exactly how profitable individual residents are for hospitals because the hospitals can’t or won’t do the complicated accounting to figure it out, at least not publicly. But we can guess, at least, where hospitals believe they make the most money, based on how they’ve allocated their residency slots (both those Medicare subsidizes, and the 17,000 additional jobs that health care organizations have managed to create through other funding in the last decade).

Hospitals are not eager to find out the truth—I wonder why? Certainly doubling or tripling one's salary upon graduation indicates that later-year residents are highly profitable.

Most simply, the match should end and hospitals should be allowed to bid competitively on residents, just like they do for every other job. Then the market will clear and we'll see how much they're actually worth. First-year resident salaries may decline but I bet third-year resident salaries increase.

It's not clear the extent to which less educated medical providers are a problem: https://www.upi.com/Study-finds-no-difference-in-care-betwee... or https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2716077/intermediate...

Re: Lambda School wants to teach nursing

#65

Post by _lx4l »

austenallred wrote: post #14
ngngngng wrote: post #11

I'm torn on Lambda. On one hand, it seems far superior to traditional higher education, since the schools success depends on the success of the students. At the same time, profit sharing is a terrible financial decision. When compared with other bootcamps, it's basically a bet against yourself. You're willing to risk tens of thousands of dollars more money for some risk insurance. I have such a hard time accepting th…

If people can self learn they will. I think doing so is much, much more difficult than others pretend like it is. Given that you could earn the entire cost of Lambda School (at the cap - the most expensive) in about three months of engineering time, it’s a rational decision even if you just speed up the process.

I appreciate the response. I really do have a lot of respect for what you guys are doing.

But I can't help but feel that it's like communism in China. Sure it's far better than what was there before. But is it the best option?

Re: Lambda School wants to teach nursing

#67

Post by austenallred »

username223 wrote: post #59
austenallred wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s actually not how it breaks down, I told the reporter I segment the company into three sections in my mind, he asked which is more important, and I said they all have to work.

Then the reporter seriously misled me about what you said, and I apologize. I'm curious about the real breakdown between marketing to students and hospitals, overhead and executive pay, and instructor pay, but I can understand if you don't want to reveal that.

Right now our marketing budget rounds to zero. We have a growth team that is mostly focused on making sure the admissions funnel runs smoothly, and get about 1,000 organic applications/week.

We have ~80 full-time employees and about 200 part-time. 40 of the full-time and all 200 part-time are dedicated to teaching/career coaching.

Re: Lambda School wants to teach nursing

#68

Post by MispelledToyota »

During my time at Lambda School, seeing people's quick arguments against it have drastically lowered my priors on how correct "hot takes" are likely to be in general. Sort of like reading a newspaper article about your area of expertise for the first time, and realizing how many inaccuracies all newspaper articles must have.

There are places for skepticism but the actual critiques made are shockingly wide of the mark in my opinion as someone who found the value proposition compelling.

Re: Lambda School wants to teach nursing

#69

Post by austenallred »

jseliger wrote: post #60
azhenley wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because we go all day every day and don’t take breaks. If you enroll in 15 credit hours at a university, that means 15 hours in a classroom plus 15-30 hours of assignments and labs. (1 credit hour = 1 hour class + 1-2 hours outside class, on average, per week). That is full-time.

That is an interesting theory but it does not seem supported by data: https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/its-a... or https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/is-college-to... . CS may be somewhat different. Many schools are also only in session between half and three-quarters of the year.

It also doesn’t include the full schedule. Break weeks, summers off, semester breaks, etc. - months of the year, all of which Lambda School doesn’t have.

Re: Lambda School wants to teach nursing

#70

Post by austenallred »

MispelledToyota wrote: post #68

During my time at Lambda School, seeing people's quick arguments against it have drastically lowered my priors on how correct "hot takes" are likely to be in general. Sort of like reading a newspaper article about your area of expertise for the first time, and realizing how many inaccuracies all newspaper articles must have. There are places for skepticism but the actual critiques made are shockingly wide of the mark…

How is Lambda School going for you?
Post reply on HN