My wife was recently accepted into Lambda School. From my research, I think it'll be a good deal. Your two points are spot on IMO: better education due to incen

My wife was recently accepted into Lambda School. From my research, I think it'll be a good deal. Your two points are spot on IMO: better education due to incentive alignment at the cost of higher payment if it works. But I think I give more weight to the "better education" point and less weight to the "higher payment" point. For one, I think incentive alignment is extremely powerful. Austen Allred talks about it a bit here.[1] (Great interview). Although reducing risk for the students is a benefit, it seems that the effect it has on the quality of lambda's education is much more important. In fact I think that a good source of startup ideas is to simply find existing systems with misaligned incentives and then figure out how to align them--I'm planning to try something like that in the music industry myself. Also, I don't think profit sharing is a terrible financial decision. You're not just paying to reduce risk: you're paying to get a better education. You could take a normal pay-up-front bootcamp and slap an income share agreement on it, but that won't recreate lambda school. (Austen makes this point in the interview as well). As for self-directed learning: it also worked for me, but I do think a lot of people need extra support before they can do it effectively. I was fortunate in that I was introduced to programming as a kid and thus had lots of time to just mess around. It's harder once you've already entered the grind. [1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/a-cs-education-thats-free-until-you-get-a-job-austen-allred-of-lambda-school/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/a-cs-education-thats-free-until...