A look at online coding program Lambda School, which lets students defer tuition payments until they have jobs, but that many say is costly and under-delivers
Students at Lambda School say the program hasn't delivered on its promise — Bethany Surber was sleeping on friends' couches … Tweets: @dhh , @dhh , @_danilo , @knguyen , @dhh , @dhh , and @dhh Tweets: @dhh : Thinking of these ISA contracts, could you imagine if, behind the scenes, they were essentially securitized as well? Bootcamps serving as subprime mortgage originators. Packing students into tranches and selling them off. (That probably sound like some FIN-EDU-TECH dream ☠️). @dhh : “From the beginning, however, the online class wasn't what Surber or her classmates had expected. The instructors changed week to week and often seemed to have no idea what the students had already covered”, peak behind Lambda School's marketing spiel 😮 https://www.theverge.com/... Frisco Uplink / @_danilo : For-profit, mass-produced career education is always going to end up being a scam. The incentives are just so broken. Students become numbers to be juiced. People's futures are on the line and these businesses reduce them to numbers in a spreadsheet. https://twitter.com/... Kevin Nguyen / @knguyen : Turns out constantly iterating and pivoting is not a very good way to... run a school https://twitter.com/... @dhh : For something like Lambda to become the unicorn it was funded to be will require mass exploitation. Minimizing cost spent per student, maximizing take. Maybe some times that ends up with student alignment? But if so, it's only as a product of a failing US higher education system. @dhh : The underlying issue with bootcamps charging $30,000 for a 9-month curriculum patched together from free online sources and delivered by inexperienced instructors is just how dystopian “the opportunity” really is. It's capitalizing on a failed state approach to higher education. @dhh : And that even dismisses the fundamental questions around whether we should be training a legion of new tech workers purely on an intensive 9-month “tech” program, when we more than ever need ethics and broad perspectives.