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> We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true, but don't care. The misconception comes form comparing two different mea

> We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true, but don't care. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), the other (hired students/graduated students) Your website, September 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190930144525/https://lambdaschool.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190930144525/https://lambdasch... "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year." Let's run the math on current outcomes, which I believe you've called, "the best they've ever been." 994 students graduated and 453 got a job making $50k or more. We're already at 45%, and that's before narrowing it down to, "within six months." You may try to argue, "Not all of those 994 students count as 'job seeking,'" as if it's totally normal that 32% of graduates give up looking for jobs. That's moot. There was no fine print. Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs? > There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way. They told you to cease operation. You didn't. After the BPPE news came to light, you told students that no school has ever been shut down for continuing to operate. One point of the lawsuits are the students who felt they should have been told about the whole BPPE situation before signing up. I get why you didn't want them to know, because according to the law, the ISAs issued before you were in compliance are invalid. Yet you're still trying to collect, which I'd say very much impacts students. > Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day. When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid." https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1329116385629245440 https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1329116385629245440 Within hours of the tech community calling you out on this, you apologized. Then you deleted the apology. I find it amazing that your strategy is to just pretend none of that happened. > We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause. Your contract said: "this extension of credit is a qualified educational loan and is subject to the limitations on dischargeability in bankruptcy contained in Section 523(a)(8) of the United States Bankruptcy Code." It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable. https://dfpi.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/337/2021/04/CFPL-Lambda-School-consent-order.pdf https://dfpi.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/337/2021/04/CFP... After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive. https://dfpi.ca.gov/2021/04/26/lambda-school-reaches-settlement-with-dfpi-agreeing-to-end-deceptive-educational-financing-practices/ https://dfpi.ca.gov/2021/04/26/lambda-school-reaches-settlem...

austenallred 4y ago
Oh boy, you keep taking all sorts of things out of context and comparing all sorts of things that don't make any sense to each other. A couple months ago I said our outcomes currently are the best they've ever been. That is a different set of students than those included in that outcomes report, and it is from a smaller subset than an entire years' worth of average placement. If you try to take a very specific comment and take it out of context to prove it false, it just gets very tiresome. I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense. > Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs? Our outcomes report includes zero students who signed NDAs, and there were zero students who signed NDAs of any kind in 2021. The number of students who have signed NDAs _ever_ is tiny, probably <5. I obviously can't share all of the details publicly, but in every instance where an NDA was involved was when a student unequivocally was going to owe us money but we tried to be overly generous and forgive that tuition without them encouraging swarms of other students to do so. That was probably a mistake, in retrospect. I think we tried to be overly generous here, and it bit us. > When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid." This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work. > It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable. Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement between the parties - we'll see how it shakes out. But again, there's no malintent here, simply our lawyers doing the best they can to fit into a regulatory regime where laws are unclear (and at times even directly conflict). > After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive. The DFPI isn't commenting on that clause in this, they're commenting on a sentence in our blog post (which our legal team thought they had agreed to) that said (i'm paraphrasing) we fixed the ISA to make it as the DFPI had requested. The DFPI wanted us to amend to say that they're not necessarily saying that _everything_ that is in the ISA is what they want, but that we did clear up the thing that they asked us to clear up. I think the important point here is that you're trying to spin this as malice and evil committed by an evil company, when in fact this is actually clarifying fine print of legal documents between multiple regulatory bodies. OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing, and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good." I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge. You clearly think we're an evil company and are never going to cease attempting to connect whatever dots you can find to prove that, but just know that you're wrong, and we're nothing more than a whole bunch of people doing our absolute best to sustainably help folks improve their lives, and that we have _thousands_ of success stories of having done so. I think if you met the people who are working day in and day out at BloomTech you would see there's not a malicious bone in the body of anyone working there, and we're trying to do something really difficult and help millions of folks move into tech and change their lives in very ambiguous regulatory waters. We're not yet successful in reaching millions, but there are many thousands of success stories, and I think our rates of success and what we charge are incredibly fair in any scenario. If you went around trying your hardest to find good things to say about the work that we do you would find just as much (if not more) to point to.

austenallred 4y ago

Oh boy, you keep taking all sorts of things out of context and comparing all sorts of things that don't make any sense to each other. A couple months ago I said our outcomes currently are the best they've ever been. That is a different set of students than those included in that outcomes report, and it is from a smaller subset than an entire years' worth of average placement. If you try to take a very specific comment and take it out of context to prove it false, it just gets very tiresome. I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but you continually, over and over, take two numbers that are not the same thing whatsoever and compare them or multiply them or whatever else and it simply makes no sense. > Would you mind sharing whether or not your outcomes report includes the upset students you pressured into signing NDAs? Our outcomes report includes zero students who signed NDAs, and there were zero students who signed NDAs of any kind in 2021. The number of students who have signed NDAs _ever_ is tiny, probably <5. I obviously can't share all of the details publicly, but in every instance where an NDA was involved was when a student unequivocally was going to owe us money but we tried to be overly generous and forgive that tuition without them encouraging swarms of other students to do so. That was probably a mistake, in retrospect. I think we tried to be overly generous here, and it bit us. > When you unveiled the program, it was unpaid. It was right there in the FAQ: "This program is part of Lambda School for the Fellow and as such, is not paid." This is fair - there were students who just wanted experience even if unpaid, and the initial intent was to build it into the school itself literally with no pay. I changed my mind on that one after conversations with a few students, and we changed the design as you pointed out, but no student ever did any unpaid work, so it's also not accurate to say that we had a bunch of students doing unpaid work. > It was not a qualified educational loan. Section 523(a)(8) is all about how student loans are not dischargeable. Ironically other regulatory bodies disagree with the DFPI on this one, and part of the issue of ISAs is everyone wants to regulate it differently but there's no agreement between the parties - we'll see how it shakes out. But again, there's no malintent here, simply our lawyers doing the best they can to fit into a regulatory regime where laws are unclear (and at times even directly conflict). > After you tried to spin that settlement, the DFPI called out your blog post as deceptive. The DFPI isn't commenting on that clause in this, they're commenting on a sentence in our blog post (which our legal team thought they had agreed to) that said (i'm paraphrasing) we fixed the ISA to make it as the DFPI had requested. The DFPI wanted us to amend to say that they're not necessarily saying that _everything_ that is in the ISA is what they want, but that we did clear up the thing that they asked us to clear up. I think the important point here is that you're trying to spin this as malice and evil committed by an evil company, when in fact this is actually clarifying fine print of legal documents between multiple regulatory bodies. OK, I really am spending too much time here now. I remember distinctly when you told The Verge that our iOS curriculum didn't include things that would get a student through a phone screen, I offered a bounty to your favorite charity for you to point out any single thing that we were missing, and you backtracked and said, "Well some of your students' code on github wasn't very good." I don't know why this has become such a personal grudge. You clearly think we're an evil company and are never going to cease attempting to connect whatever dots you can find to prove that, but just know that you're wrong, and we're nothing more than a whole bunch of people doing our absolute best to sustainably help folks improve their lives, and that we have _thousands_ of success stories of having done so. I think if you met the people who are working day in and day out at BloomTech you would see there's not a malicious bone in the body of anyone working there, and we're trying to do something really difficult and help millions of folks move into tech and change their lives in very ambiguous regulatory waters. We're not yet successful in reaching millions, but there are many thousands of success stories, and I think our rates of success and what we charge are incredibly fair in any scenario. If you went around trying your hardest to find good things to say about the work that we do you would find just as much (if not more) to point to.