9 ms·

Gee, $40k per year? But with huge return on investment in education? Why don't we give people loans, and tie them to their future income? I smell a business op

Gee, $40k per year? But with huge return on investment in education? Why don't we give people loans, and tie them to their future income? I smell a business opportunity.

austenallred 9y ago
Haha. Yeah I'm the founder of https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science - a computer science academy that's free up-front and takes a percentage of salary for two years after you get a job. The side benefit of this model instead of a loan is that if, by chance, you don't get a job in software engineering, you never pay anything. It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be. Also we're online, so you don't need to move anywhere (but still live instruction and world-class instructors).
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  but then one has to be affluent enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to do a mountain of pre-work and then get educated or re-educated, or for many in the USA, re-re-educated, and then one has to then afford to remain unemployed (bootcamps tend to go light on this part when recruiting) while looking for a place that wants to hire a bootcamp graduate.(hint: tough for diversity candidates here) These places are hard to find for many, even many who previously attended and paid for! an ivy school in a dying field. If this were such a wonderful model, and if we actually had a skills gap that needed filling, why aren't these hundreds of desperate and honorable tech employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves? If there were such a clamour for those with basic tech skills, why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months and months? Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students?
  - austenallred 9y ago
    We're not a bootcamp, but your points are well-founded. > But then one has to be $$ enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to get educated or re-educated You're right: Not everyone can afford to not work for six+ months. We don't have a perfect solution for everyone yet. But it's much easier for most Americans to find a way to stay alive for 6 months than it is for them to find $10,000 lying around. Basic subsistence, especially with a tiny bit of help from a safety net of some sort is generally close to within reach, and if it's not we don't have a way to help yet. For example, we had a student last week that has been living with a friend, and we learned she was so poor she couldn't afford a computer to code with, and had been using an old Android tablet and a cloud editor. We shipped her one, but for many "enough to stay alive" is much, much easier to find than some amount of cash. > If we actually had a skills gap that needed filling why aren't these employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves? Well, some do. Others have ridiculous recruiters' fees that are enough to pay for student tuitions. This is true not just of alternatives to higher ed, but of colleges. Why doesn't Google also become Stanford? Probably because that's a lot of work and what we have is close enough. To be clear, with regard to SWE, I don't think there's that big of a skills gap. It's not like there's a desperate shortage for junior rails semi-devs out there. But employers definitely hire folks and they definitely pay big recruiting fees and there's definitely demand. > Why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months? Other than the requisite time to get your first job (which is generally 3-6 months regardless), I haven't seen that any from tier one bootcamps struggling to find work for months. Probably three months on average, but that's pretty normal. Maybe we have a different understanding of "tier 1." > Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students? Because crappy bootcamps want to lie and make money. I mean look, there's ITT Tech, which is a complete rip-off for the vast majority of people, but that doesn't mean college in general is a bad thing for everyone. Somehow, though, that's how non-university programming academies get lumped together - one bad bootcamp? This entire idea must be horrible! As with everything, there are shades of grey.
    - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
      I appreciate your taking the time to speak to these issues honestly. This fact alone sets you very much apart. While I do think your model is better, even lots better, the tuition deferment model can be very misleading to those who don't get the tax/rent burden in SF or NYC (not saying you or your school is misleading students as I don't know it or you... I'll read up). As far as tier 1 bootcamps, I'm pretty sure you and I know who we are speaking of. I do think students should question these schools and their supposed outcomes with a critical mind. The facts aren't reaching these recruits because their desperation for employment is clouding their view, and because many who stand to profit from this desperation are actually in a state of desperation themselves. I'm not saying you are in particular. I am saying that we need to be more responsible and act like a supportive community.
- aninhumer 9y ago
  Hmm, I was under the impression that these kind of salary percentage schemes weren't legal? (Mostly just because I've never seen one before.)
  - austenallred 9y ago
    Nope, just new. Purdue University uses one as well.
- ultra-jeremyx 9y ago
  Is your program appropriate for students who are high school seniors/graduates as a alternative, or lead-in to college? What level of programming experience is required?
  - austenallred 9y ago
    Yes. You'll want to know intermediate JavaScript coming in. We have courses that prepare you for that free, so apply and we'll figure it out.
- drewmol 9y ago
  >It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be. I love this idea, thank you for starting this! I think this something there should be more of. I just looked at your site, and noticed the 3% acceptance rate for the $0 upfront cost tier. Just curious how that's changed over time as your exposure has increased. I assume you are trying to maintain some instructor/student ratio, etc? Are you willing to share what limits you from accepting more students at the $0 upfront tier? If so I'd love hear more, lmk.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    We've grown almost in line with the increase in applications in number of instructors. We haven't raised real money or anything, so we're limited by the number of instructors and cash we can pay them, but we're growing as quickly as we can without sacrificing quality. We see hundreds of new applications per day and can only service a small fraction of them. Hopefully we can change that to some degree soon.
sylvainkalache 9y ago
We are doing this at Holberton since we announced in 2015. It's a 2-year program based in San Francisco, no upfront tuition but a percentage of students salary when they get a job. The program is also quite different from regular education, we have no formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by working on projects and by collaborating with their classmates. Check us out https://www.holbertonschool.com/ https://www.holbertonschool.com/ It's indeed a "business opportunity" but I also believe that this the tuition model that post-secondary education should adopt if we consider that its main role is to train students to get a job after graduation. The success of schools should be proportional to students success.
- busterarm 9y ago
  Who can afford to live in San Fran without working for 2 years (9 months)?
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    And who can afford to have $15,000 taken off the top of their salary between $51,000 and $100,000? I hope this graduate can find remote work and live in a tent in a national park campground nearby a major tech employment city with a killer public transportation system that reaches its public park campgrounds. There are actual bears on Bear Mountain by the way.
    - busterarm 9y ago
      I made it work... Also that's cheaper than what it costs to live in SF for 2 years, even assuming your rent in that situation is free.
    - michaelt 9y ago
      And who can afford to have $15,000 taken off the top of their salary between $51,000 and $100,000? Anyone who's BATNA is making $46,000 or less, i.e. the median working 25+ year old with an associate's degree or lower in the United States [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#By_educational_attainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
phillc73 9y ago
That's how undergraduate University education works in Australia (at least it did when I attended. Perhaps someone younger than me can comment if things have changed in the last 20 years). Effectively the government pays your undergraduate university fees. There is then an additional tax applied against your salary, after it reaches a certain threshold. This of course results in jokes that Arts graduates may as well be enjoying free tertiary education. I think this is a much fairer system than being asked to pay upfront and perhaps taking out a student loan in order to pay fees. The Australian system allows any student with the ability and desire to attend University (it's not completely perfect, but it is much better). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Aus...
- learc83 9y ago
  That's effectively how it works in the US as well for most people. Federal loans (90% of all loans) come with income based repayment plans that charge 10% of your disposable income and are cancelled after 20 years if you don't pay it off.
  - phillc73 9y ago
    I did not know that. So why all the noise about how expensive tertiary education is in the US?
    - Larrikin 9y ago
      Large student loans affect your credit and there is no threshold for your salary for when you have to start paying back.
      - learc83 9y ago
        >there is no threshold for your salary for when you have to start paying back. There is. You pay back 10% of your disposable income. Disposable income is income above 1.5x the Federal poverty level. If you make less than that, you pay $0.
phyller 9y ago
That's how App Academy works already. Put a deposit down, go through the program, then pay them a percentage of your first years wages from your new job. I did it, and rich people at the golf club where I worked were telling me it was a bad idea, sounded illegal, etc. In my opinion I got an awesome job in an awesome career for super cheap. I had no money, someone was finally willing to give me a chance based on my ability to work through problems in the application. It was the hardest thing I ever did but well worth it.
- austenallred 9y ago
  Ya, we're kinda like App Academy except not a bootcamp (a longer, more exhaustive CS program), online (so you don't have to move to San Francisco), and with no down-payment (because most of our students just don't have $4k, even for a down-payment).
  - Danihan 9y ago
    Please add a Java based web development option (ideally with JSF), I'd join in a heartbeat. The web dev is too javascript / front-end centric, and the CS (I'd assume) is too math-centric. Java / JSF / MyFaces is the best of both worlds, imo. No need to write most front-end javascript, 80% of dev time can be spent on business logic.
    - austenallred 9y ago
      The CS Academy does teach Java. It's our main tool for understanding a lot of the lower-level stuff such as architecture, scaling, etc. We use JavaScript as the front-end web language, for reasons that are likely obvious (as well as React/Redux), and also use JS learn a lot of the data structures/algorithms portion, but Java is our main compiled language.
      - Danihan 9y ago
        Does it cover JSF?
altotrees 9y ago
If education loans and repayment plans were tied to future income, I feel like we would have a much healthier higher education system in the U.S. As it stands now, it seems to be one of the bleaker spots in our overall current situation (I know, I know there are a few bleak spots right now and no one is forcing people to take out these loans).
- austenallred 9y ago
  That's exactly it. Right now, barring government action, so long as I can keep students coming to my door there's no incentive to perform. Schools like ITT Tech have shown, in my mind difinitively, that if you're willing to pay enough for student acquisition you can have absolutely terrible outcomes, still saddle up students with tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, fail to get them jobs, and for some inexplicable reason they'll still keep coming.

Gee, $40k per year? But with huge return on investment in education? Why don't we give people loans, and tie them to their future income? I smell a business opportunity.

austenallred 9y ago

Haha. Yeah I'm the founder of https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science - a computer science academy that's free up-front and takes a percentage of salary for two years after you get a job. The side benefit of this model instead of a loan is that if, by chance, you don't get a job in software engineering, you never pay anything. It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be. Also we're online, so you don't need to move anywhere (but still live instruction and world-class instructors).

brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
but then one has to be affluent enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to do a mountain of pre-work and then get educated or re-educated, or for many in the USA, re-re-educated, and then one has to then afford to remain unemployed (bootcamps tend to go light on this part when recruiting) while looking for a place that wants to hire a bootcamp graduate.(hint: tough for diversity candidates here) These places are hard to find for many, even many who previously attended and paid for! an ivy school in a dying field. If this were such a wonderful model, and if we actually had a skills gap that needed filling, why aren't these hundreds of desperate and honorable tech employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves? If there were such a clamour for those with basic tech skills, why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months and months? Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students?
- austenallred 9y ago
  We're not a bootcamp, but your points are well-founded. > But then one has to be $$ enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to get educated or re-educated You're right: Not everyone can afford to not work for six+ months. We don't have a perfect solution for everyone yet. But it's much easier for most Americans to find a way to stay alive for 6 months than it is for them to find $10,000 lying around. Basic subsistence, especially with a tiny bit of help from a safety net of some sort is generally close to within reach, and if it's not we don't have a way to help yet. For example, we had a student last week that has been living with a friend, and we learned she was so poor she couldn't afford a computer to code with, and had been using an old Android tablet and a cloud editor. We shipped her one, but for many "enough to stay alive" is much, much easier to find than some amount of cash. > If we actually had a skills gap that needed filling why aren't these employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves? Well, some do. Others have ridiculous recruiters' fees that are enough to pay for student tuitions. This is true not just of alternatives to higher ed, but of colleges. Why doesn't Google also become Stanford? Probably because that's a lot of work and what we have is close enough. To be clear, with regard to SWE, I don't think there's that big of a skills gap. It's not like there's a desperate shortage for junior rails semi-devs out there. But employers definitely hire folks and they definitely pay big recruiting fees and there's definitely demand. > Why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months? Other than the requisite time to get your first job (which is generally 3-6 months regardless), I haven't seen that any from tier one bootcamps struggling to find work for months. Probably three months on average, but that's pretty normal. Maybe we have a different understanding of "tier 1." > Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students? Because crappy bootcamps want to lie and make money. I mean look, there's ITT Tech, which is a complete rip-off for the vast majority of people, but that doesn't mean college in general is a bad thing for everyone. Somehow, though, that's how non-university programming academies get lumped together - one bad bootcamp? This entire idea must be horrible! As with everything, there are shades of grey.
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    I appreciate your taking the time to speak to these issues honestly. This fact alone sets you very much apart. While I do think your model is better, even lots better, the tuition deferment model can be very misleading to those who don't get the tax/rent burden in SF or NYC (not saying you or your school is misleading students as I don't know it or you... I'll read up). As far as tier 1 bootcamps, I'm pretty sure you and I know who we are speaking of. I do think students should question these schools and their supposed outcomes with a critical mind. The facts aren't reaching these recruits because their desperation for employment is clouding their view, and because many who stand to profit from this desperation are actually in a state of desperation themselves. I'm not saying you are in particular. I am saying that we need to be more responsible and act like a supportive community.
aninhumer 9y ago
Hmm, I was under the impression that these kind of salary percentage schemes weren't legal? (Mostly just because I've never seen one before.)
- austenallred 9y ago
  Nope, just new. Purdue University uses one as well.
ultra-jeremyx 9y ago
Is your program appropriate for students who are high school seniors/graduates as a alternative, or lead-in to college? What level of programming experience is required?
- austenallred 9y ago
  Yes. You'll want to know intermediate JavaScript coming in. We have courses that prepare you for that free, so apply and we'll figure it out.
drewmol 9y ago
>It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be. I love this idea, thank you for starting this! I think this something there should be more of. I just looked at your site, and noticed the 3% acceptance rate for the $0 upfront cost tier. Just curious how that's changed over time as your exposure has increased. I assume you are trying to maintain some instructor/student ratio, etc? Are you willing to share what limits you from accepting more students at the $0 upfront tier? If so I'd love hear more, lmk.
- austenallred 9y ago
  We've grown almost in line with the increase in applications in number of instructors. We haven't raised real money or anything, so we're limited by the number of instructors and cash we can pay them, but we're growing as quickly as we can without sacrificing quality. We see hundreds of new applications per day and can only service a small fraction of them. Hopefully we can change that to some degree soon.

sylvainkalache 9y ago

We are doing this at Holberton since we announced in 2015. It's a 2-year program based in San Francisco, no upfront tuition but a percentage of students salary when they get a job. The program is also quite different from regular education, we have no formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by working on projects and by collaborating with their classmates. Check us out https://www.holbertonschool.com/ https://www.holbertonschool.com/ It's indeed a "business opportunity" but I also believe that this the tuition model that post-secondary education should adopt if we consider that its main role is to train students to get a job after graduation. The success of schools should be proportional to students success.

busterarm 9y ago
Who can afford to live in San Fran without working for 2 years (9 months)?
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  And who can afford to have $15,000 taken off the top of their salary between $51,000 and $100,000? I hope this graduate can find remote work and live in a tent in a national park campground nearby a major tech employment city with a killer public transportation system that reaches its public park campgrounds. There are actual bears on Bear Mountain by the way.
  - busterarm 9y ago
    I made it work... Also that's cheaper than what it costs to live in SF for 2 years, even assuming your rent in that situation is free.
  - michaelt 9y ago
    And who can afford to have $15,000 taken off the top of their salary between $51,000 and $100,000? Anyone who's BATNA is making $46,000 or less, i.e. the median working 25+ year old with an associate's degree or lower in the United States [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#By_educational_attainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

phillc73 9y ago

That's how undergraduate University education works in Australia (at least it did when I attended. Perhaps someone younger than me can comment if things have changed in the last 20 years). Effectively the government pays your undergraduate university fees. There is then an additional tax applied against your salary, after it reaches a certain threshold. This of course results in jokes that Arts graduates may as well be enjoying free tertiary education. I think this is a much fairer system than being asked to pay upfront and perhaps taking out a student loan in order to pay fees. The Australian system allows any student with the ability and desire to attend University (it's not completely perfect, but it is much better). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Aus...

learc83 9y ago
That's effectively how it works in the US as well for most people. Federal loans (90% of all loans) come with income based repayment plans that charge 10% of your disposable income and are cancelled after 20 years if you don't pay it off.
- phillc73 9y ago
  I did not know that. So why all the noise about how expensive tertiary education is in the US?
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    Large student loans affect your credit and there is no threshold for your salary for when you have to start paying back.
    - learc83 9y ago
      >there is no threshold for your salary for when you have to start paying back. There is. You pay back 10% of your disposable income. Disposable income is income above 1.5x the Federal poverty level. If you make less than that, you pay $0.

phyller 9y ago

That's how App Academy works already. Put a deposit down, go through the program, then pay them a percentage of your first years wages from your new job. I did it, and rich people at the golf club where I worked were telling me it was a bad idea, sounded illegal, etc. In my opinion I got an awesome job in an awesome career for super cheap. I had no money, someone was finally willing to give me a chance based on my ability to work through problems in the application. It was the hardest thing I ever did but well worth it.

austenallred 9y ago
Ya, we're kinda like App Academy except not a bootcamp (a longer, more exhaustive CS program), online (so you don't have to move to San Francisco), and with no down-payment (because most of our students just don't have $4k, even for a down-payment).
- Danihan 9y ago
  Please add a Java based web development option (ideally with JSF), I'd join in a heartbeat. The web dev is too javascript / front-end centric, and the CS (I'd assume) is too math-centric. Java / JSF / MyFaces is the best of both worlds, imo. No need to write most front-end javascript, 80% of dev time can be spent on business logic.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    The CS Academy does teach Java. It's our main tool for understanding a lot of the lower-level stuff such as architecture, scaling, etc. We use JavaScript as the front-end web language, for reasons that are likely obvious (as well as React/Redux), and also use JS learn a lot of the data structures/algorithms portion, but Java is our main compiled language.
    - Danihan 9y ago
      Does it cover JSF?

altotrees 9y ago

If education loans and repayment plans were tied to future income, I feel like we would have a much healthier higher education system in the U.S. As it stands now, it seems to be one of the bleaker spots in our overall current situation (I know, I know there are a few bleak spots right now and no one is forcing people to take out these loans).

austenallred 9y ago
That's exactly it. Right now, barring government action, so long as I can keep students coming to my door there's no incentive to perform. Schools like ITT Tech have shown, in my mind difinitively, that if you're willing to pay enough for student acquisition you can have absolutely terrible outcomes, still saddle up students with tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, fail to get them jobs, and for some inexplicable reason they'll still keep coming.