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Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

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Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#81

Post by the_watcher »

raiyu wrote: post #63
hundt wrote: post #19

> Whether or not this counts as “selling” strikes me as a meaningless semantic distinction: Either way, the school receives some money up front and an investor shoulders some of the risk of the ISA not paying out. And either way, Lambda School students don’t know that the school isn’t as incentive-aligned with them as the school’s marketing indicates. It is certainly not meaningless! Selling an ISA means that Lambda…

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.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#82

Post by the_watcher »

akanet wrote: post #58
intherdfield wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you mentioned that the student doesn't have to pay back Lambda after 60 months of deferred payments. That seems important. From the Lambda site: "The income share agreement has no interest. It's a flat percentage that goes away once you've reached the $30k payment cap, you've made 24 payments, or after 60 months of deferred payments (even if you haven't paid us anything)." But you wrote in the article:…

Yeah, got cut for brevity, but students definitely experience serious anxiety about even the five year horizon.

It's a pretty important point though. Compare with a student loan, which never goes away. Failing to mention that seems in pretty clear bad faith.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#83

Post by cheshireoctopus »

songzme wrote: post #39
cheshireoctopus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really inspiring. Thank you for sharing. Few questions if you do not mind: 1. How did you broadcast your Meetup to your students? 2. It looks like you have students pull lessons from a repo. Do you find it challenging to manage a handful of students who are all at different places in your lessons? 3. How do you avoid burnout? 4. Do you plan on open sourcing your lessons?

Thanks for asking! 1. I simply created the meetup group. Showed up, people came. It was empty the first week couple of days, I just made it a point to show up. When there were no people, I simply just read hn or did some work. When the first student came, I made sure to be nice so he feels inspired to come back. The library took note, wanted to make it official with their library program and give us a dedicated room…

Appreciate you taking the time to answer.

I am really into what you are building here - are you looking for volunteers to help?

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#84

Post by hundt »

raiyu wrote: post #80
hundt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think that this "loan" that the investor makes to Lambda School only has to be paid back when the ISAs pay out, and if they never pay out then Lambda School's debt is just forgiven. That would indeed be similar to just selling the ISAs to the investors, but I don't think that's what is described in the article (as Lambda School's current practice). Rather the article says that Lambda School gets a "loan t…

Secured by the is the part I focused on. When a loan is secured by something, the underlying asset is what the loan originating company retains after you fail to pay for the loan. So if I take out a mortgage, and fail to pay for it, the bank gets the house, I am not still obligated to pay the remaining loan amount. Sure there are a few other items that occur in that process, but ultimately the loan is forgiven, of co…

Ah, I think you have a misunderstanding about what collateral is. Collateral is not generally a limitation on the lender's ability to collect the debt. In some specific cases (like certain home loans in certain states) the law adds this limitation but generally collateral is just something the lender can take in the event of default.

To bring up the car loan example you mentioned earlier, if you decide after a year that you don't want your car anymore you can't just drive it to your bank and drop it off instead of paying off the rest of the loan. If you stop paying it they can repossess it but you will still owe whatever is left on your loan balance after they auction it.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#85

Post by pembrook »

raiyu wrote: post #76
pembrook wrote: post #40

While I find Lambda’s incessant twitter evangelizing as annoying as the next guy, I’m not sure any article I’ve seen is painting a realistic picture about Lambda. Media outlets have incentives to either paint you as the second coming of Christ or as Satan. It appears Lambda, for a while, actually succeeded at convincing journalists they were the former. After a while, people get bored with that though. The incentives…

There are always two sides to every story, but when you have outright fraudulent claims I don't think you can say that the article is simply painting the school as "Satan" If you stated that you have an 86% placement record and in reality it is 50%, that is a pretty large discrepancy. If the original 86% placement was from the first 70-ish students and now you are over 2500 students, that seems a bit fraudulent. If p…

Cherry picking a strong cohort and using it to create a narrative is the same thing as cherry picking a weak cohort and doing the opposite.

This is my point. Journalists are picking a narrative first, then seeking out facts to justify that position.

When they thought lambda was going to fix education they were more than happy to report the 86% number without any research. Now that lambda is “evil” they look for the lowest number they can find.

I’m sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#86

Post by hintymad »

raiyu wrote: post #73

I've had a fair amount of experience with coding boot camps having have helped several friends and coworkers apply, get accepted, attend, and complete bootcamps across various cities and institutions. The idea of bootcamps is fantastic, they allow people that may have not been exposed to computer science to get up to speed on technology and transition careers. However, there are several problems. First and foremost,…

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 quicksort nor do they cover discrete probability or classic complexity analysis extensively, but they do teach (and practice!) asymptotic complexity and why vanilla quick-sort may perform badly. They don't teach students how to prove the boundary conditions of ODE, but they do teach intuition and how to solve and apply a wide variety of ODEs. The examples can go on. They also hire teachers from industry to teach courses on data processing, frontend engineering, and etc.

With the belief that education is all about laying solid foundation for life-long learning, for job or not, I don't really see any need for coding camps. I'm not denying there are success stories, but I don't see coding camps make statistical sense.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#88

Post by conanbatt »

codegeek wrote: post #30

I could be wrong but isn't Lamdba School a perfect example of destroying a noble idea due to the venture capitalish returns expected from the company ? If there wasn't so much pressure to grow that fast, perhaps they would have done a better job focussing on the quality and outcomes instead of growth at any cost ?

Without VC money Lambda would have had at best 10 students and you wouldn't have heard of it.

There are real beefs Lambda will have to sort out on how it runs things, but running with VC money isn't one of them. Also, weird to have that opinion in HN, made by an incubator that sells startups to VCs.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#89

Post by conanbatt »

heedlessly3 wrote: post #53

There's no point to doing coding bootcamps. I know plenty of individuals who were non-CS majors, not even STEM, switch to software developers after self-study and building up a portfolio. if you decide you want an accredited university degree, then you can get FAFSA to fund community college, then transfer an online university such as Florida

Strongly disagree with this. I know 50 people that think they can learn to do Data or something with an Udemy class and end up doing nothing.

I think the negative picture painted by the author masks that the company is placing 50% of graduates which mostly paid nothing for the education they received. Lambda is not high quality education, but its super cheap and higher quality than just reading a Knuth Book, or Skenna's algo book which has no completion rate.

Re: Lambda School’s Misleading Promises

#90

Post by raiyu »

pembrook wrote: post #85
raiyu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are always two sides to every story, but when you have outright fraudulent claims I don't think you can say that the article is simply painting the school as "Satan" If you stated that you have an 86% placement record and in reality it is 50%, that is a pretty large discrepancy. If the original 86% placement was from the first 70-ish students and now you are over 2500 students, that seems a bit fraudulent. If p…

Cherry picking a strong cohort and using it to create a narrative is the same thing as cherry picking a weak cohort and doing the opposite. This is my point. Journalists are picking a narrative first, then seeking out facts to justify that position. When they thought lambda was going to fix education they were more than happy to report the 86% number without any research. Now that lambda is “evil” they look for the l…

The other wasn't a weak cohort. It was the most recent data.

Also if you were an institution interested in disclosing information fairly you would simply list all cohorts and let the consumer decide.

But they aren't doing that and instead claim a single number.

By the way, having had recent experiences with a number of bootcamps through friends I would say that the 50% number anecdotally is accurate. That's also not taking in to account the drop out rate. If you look at people starting the bootcamp to placement it would be even lower.

If you have 465,000 customers and you want to round that up to 500k - ok, not exactly true, but whether you have 465k or 500k isn't going to change my decision about using your product.

Telling me you place 80% of your students and actually placing 50% is a big deal. 80% means I have a 4 out of 5 chance of being successful. 50% means I have a 1 out of 2 chance of being successful. Those odds are very different and certainly part of the marketing push to get people to sign up.

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