Lambda School's Misleading Promises (nymag.com) 40
Lambda School claims 86% of grads get jobs paying over $50,000 a year. In a new report, Lambda's founder admits the real number is much lower. Additionally, internal documents show Lambda can be profitable if even 1 in 4 grads get a job. Lambda plans to enroll 10,000 students in 2020. From the report: The point of a coding boot camp, obviously, is to help you get a better job. Lambda's claim, reproduced on its website, that "86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year" is an understandably attractive proposition for students -- and a key pillar of Lambda's marketing. Students I talked to confirmed that the feeling that it was likely that they would be able to land high-paying jobs was a key part of deciding to attend. However, a May 2019 Lambda School investment memo -- entitled "Human Capital: The Last Unoptimized Asset Class" -- written for Y Combinator and obtained by Intelligencer, tells a very different story. In a section warning that student-debt collections may prove too low, it matter-of-factly states that, "We're at roughly 50% placement for cohorts that are 6 months graduated." A recent interviewee for work at Lambda School also confirmed to me that the company's own internal numbers, which the interviewee was provided as part of their interview process, seem to indicate a roughly 50 percent or lower placement rate.
So where does that 86 percent figure come from? Lambda has reported graduate-outcome statistics at the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), a voluntary trade organization of coding boot camps whose purpose is to ensure that participating schools publish truthful information about student outcomes. Lambda School founder Austen Allred has often used this report to defend his company online. But where other boot camps have multiple reports spanning many student cohorts, Lambda has only reported statistics for its first 71 graduates -- 86 percent of who, the school claims, found jobs. Sheree Speakman, the CEO of CIRR, told me that Lambda has not undergone the standard independent auditing for the sole report it has submitted, and that her communications to Lambda School regarding further reporting and auditing have gone unanswered. Lambda's former director of career readiness, Sabrina Baez, told me that placing Lambda's first batch of students was extremely difficult, largely owing to how underdeveloped the curriculum was at the time. When asked about Lambda's claim that 86 percent of its first graduates were placed within six months, she told me, "I would say out of that 71 students, within six months of them graduating it was probably a 50-60 percent placement rate," and added that Allred sometimes exaggerated student-placement progress on Twitter -- recalling, as an example, an instance in which she told Allred that a student might receive an offer soon, only to find out later that he had tweeted that the student had already received an offer. Further reading: The High Cost of a Free Coding Bootcamp.
So where does that 86 percent figure come from? Lambda has reported graduate-outcome statistics at the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), a voluntary trade organization of coding boot camps whose purpose is to ensure that participating schools publish truthful information about student outcomes. Lambda School founder Austen Allred has often used this report to defend his company online. But where other boot camps have multiple reports spanning many student cohorts, Lambda has only reported statistics for its first 71 graduates -- 86 percent of who, the school claims, found jobs. Sheree Speakman, the CEO of CIRR, told me that Lambda has not undergone the standard independent auditing for the sole report it has submitted, and that her communications to Lambda School regarding further reporting and auditing have gone unanswered. Lambda's former director of career readiness, Sabrina Baez, told me that placing Lambda's first batch of students was extremely difficult, largely owing to how underdeveloped the curriculum was at the time. When asked about Lambda's claim that 86 percent of its first graduates were placed within six months, she told me, "I would say out of that 71 students, within six months of them graduating it was probably a 50-60 percent placement rate," and added that Allred sometimes exaggerated student-placement progress on Twitter -- recalling, as an example, an instance in which she told Allred that a student might receive an offer soon, only to find out later that he had tweeted that the student had already received an offer. Further reading: The High Cost of a Free Coding Bootcamp.
The future looks bright (Score:3)
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Fifty-thou a year will buy a lot of beer.
In California, you'll be living in a dumpster, though.
Why not build a house out of empties?
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You mean something like this? [pinimg.com]
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Other than housing, California is not so expensive, and salaries are high.
When I moved to California, I lived in my van for the first two years and saved a fortune.
I had a gym membership where I could work out and shower.
I parked in the company lot, and even got a bonus for being on-call. If a server went down at 2 AM, I could be in the machine room in 5 minutes.
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I wanted to do something similar with an RV when I worked at Intel, but I figured my wife and kids would get kinda bitchy about it. ;)
But, for someone single, young, able to show some fiscal discipline, and willing to put up with a small bit of deprivation? It's an excellent way to save up enough in 3-5 years to buy a house with cash. Well, after moving the hell back out of California and getting a more local tech job back East or in the Midwest, but it'll put you head and shoulders above everyone in the to
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Cuz nothin' sounds quite as sexy as "Wanna come back to my van and hangout?"
That wasn't going to happen anyway. The male-female ratio for singles in SV is about 6-to-1 and I was working 80 hour weeks back then.
Re:The future looks bright (Score:4)
Fifty-thou a year will buy a lot of beer.
In California, you'll be living in a dumpster, though.
In Seattle you can't even get a dumpster for that...maybe a cardboard box in the median strip of Interstate 5.
Re:The future looks bright (Score:4, Funny)
...maybe a cardboard box in the median strip of Interstate 5.
Cardboard box? You were lucky.
My brother went to Hack Reactor (Score:1)
But he was not paid anything near 50k... after a year at his new coding job, he quit and went into sales.
At least its income share and not up front payment (Score:3)
Graduates from all boot camps struggle to fine work, this model ensures that those that can't make a career of it don't wind up with a lot of debt dragging them down.
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Graduates from all boot camps struggle to find work
Free advice: Don't list the boot camp on your resume. Just list the skills.
When I see one of these boot camps listed on a resume, it goes straight into the trash.
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What's the point of even doing the boot camp if you can't put it on your resume?
No idea. But signing up for one of these camps is an obvious sign of low IQ and lack of common sense.
They tend to interview poorly, with little ability to go "off-script".
We decided to save time and just toss any resume with a boot camp listed on it.
You might as well study on your own and not be obligated to anybody.
Duh.
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Because the entire thing is trying to teach you a huge field condensed into 6 months with no prior knowledge. Can't be done. What they can do is teach you a script- how to write the simplest possible thing that someone probably wants (a simple website). Knock them off that, even if they have the raw intelligence to do well they haven't had the time to play with it, internalize it, run into mistakes, etc. A traditional college student is far better off, he at least had 4 years to learn and experience.
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True indeed... and one would think that the lessons of the dot-bust (see also the once high and holy MCSE cert) would have at least enough staying power to sink in - if not to the kids, at least to their parents?
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If the students go through the program and can't get a job then they have only lost the time they have invested.
As we discussed last week, everyone kinda thought Lambda wound up footing the cost for that, except they were selling off the income sharing agreements to presumably unwary investors. So the students get sold a bill of goods, the investors likely did too, and the Lambda execs ran away giggling.
Sounds pretty shady. I think I'll avoid them like Wuhan flu.
Dangerous investment (Score:2)
IIRC, student loans are void if the job placement rates after graduation are lied about to students before they choose to attend. Either that or the school can be sued for the money back. I wouldn't want to be holding a bunch of their student loan debt.
Its a school not a job placement agency. (Score:2)
Unless schools also work as head hunting agencies, which train students to do the job that businesses are looking for there is going to be a mismatch.
Schools are for learning, they advertise that they are for future jobs, but they are not setup like that. I am OK with Schools being only for academic purposes, but please be honest about it.
Also other then boot camps, we need quality and modern vocational training. For many of today's jobs. While there is value in a college degree, there are a lot of good w
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That attitude works for colleges. This isn't a college. This is far less- its supposed to be an intensive training course for a particular career. It's not even to the level of a vocational school (which is a useful thing and the right answer for many people). This is just a scam.
Really? This is the third time for this... (Score:5, Informative)
Feb 15 [slashdot.org]
Feb 11 [slashdot.org]
"Human Capital: The Last Unoptimized Asset Class" (Score:3)
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The problem is what happens after that 1st gig (Score:2)
It no longer does any good to "get your food in the door". Without a proper degree as soon as you lose that first job Lambda helped to land you're right back where you started.
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This is why networking and schmoozing is important -- to bypass those idiot bot firewalls.
You can't really (Score:2)
Buddy of mine just applied for a job with people he knew _in_company_ and got turned down because the hiring manager was told they couldn't hire somebody without a degree. Period. And the best thing was it was a
Bootcamps prey on the uninformed (Score:3)
So, I feel like I just jumped back in the time machine and wound up in 1999 again. I remember "MCSE Bootcamps" that would take truck drivers off the street with no computer experience and force them through Microsoft certification. I think we're _still_ dealing with the fallout from that in the IT space.
Coder bootcamps are the same thing. It's become easy enough to glue together enough Legos to "build a web app" in JavaScriptFrameworkOfTheMonth. Startups need legions of JavaScript monkeys to keep up with the insane 200-deploys-a-day pace, especially in front end development. Regular no-experience people are starting to see that people are making money with this computer stuff. These 3 things are what cause the coder bootcamps to thrive.
We'll see how popular these are after the bubble pops. But one thing I'm not a fan of is that the bootcamps are encouraging newbies to not learn any of the basics, and they're certainly not getting an actual marketable degree. Almost all HR departments filter resumes first on $hasDegree = $true -- before a human even gets a chance to reject you. These bootcamp graduates won't be served well when it suddenly becomes an employer's market again, as happened in 2001.
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On the other hand, a Comp Sci degree is both overkill and inappropriate for most people who want to become professional coders.
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On the other hand, a Comp Sci degree is both overkill and inappropriate for most people who want to become professional coders.
Which parts? I can't think of anything that can be removed from a typical CS program... and I can think of a lot more that should ideally be added. In fact, I'm a member of the industry advisory board for my local university's CS department, and when the faculty ask what industry would like to see students learn that they don't, there's always a large list... far more than could possibly be fit into an already-overstuffed four-year degreee.
And it's not even that industry wants students that are trained
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Good. Because the college should not be teaching $TOOL_DU_JOUR, except as a means to learn the fundamentals below...
Example: when I was at UCSC, all the students wanted to learn VAX assembly, but those darned professors insisted on teaching the fundamentals (true story).
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Good. Because the college should not be teaching $TOOL_DU_JOUR, except as a means to learn the fundamentals below...
Agreed, and this is why I think coding bootcamps are a bad idea. They are all about $TOOL_DU_JOUR, with minimal -- if any -- attention paid to the fundamentals.
For that matter, I've had the, er, opportunity to work with a few people who were trained by IBM's internal CS training system (I don't know if it still exists), and while that included an excellent grounding in CS fundamentals, it covered nothing but CS. It's disconcerting to be talking to someone who clearly has a good MSCS-level education in t
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To be fair, it depends entirely on the curriculum. But I've known a lot of CompSci degree programs that are -heavily- theory-based, where you don't actually touch any useful programming language for the first year and a half, two years. (The first language may be some bullshit academic language that's -only- used for teaching compsci classes; in my case, it was something called Russian ML.) Instead, the focus is -entirely- upon the math. This approach is -fucking grueling- for people who want to learn b
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I disagree. Alt least a relevant BSc should be mandatory. Eventually that will happen, as the people without are just doing far too much damage in the long run. All other engineering disciplines have found it necessary for people doing more than just putting existing components together in predetermined ways. (If coding ever becomes putting existing components together in predetermined ways, it will not be "coders" doing that.) Hence there is absolutely no reason to expect it will go different for creating
Other half of the problem with easy student loans (Score:5, Interesting)
If you were tasked with designing a money laundering scheme, you couldn't have done it better. Responsibility for the tainted loan money remains with the students, while the school owner runs away with laundered cash. There have been attempts to audit and accredit schools accepting students paying with loans. But it's nowhere near enough to offset the amount of fraud going on. Remember that next time you hear about the $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. A good chunk of that is money which ended up in the pockets of scam artists, perfectly laundered so there's no way to claw it back or to file criminal charges against them.
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The second half disproportionately affects poorer people. A bunch of shady schools get set up solely to extract loan money from students.
This. This has been happening for decades with vocational schools. You are poor and want to learn HVAC or plumbing, you typically wind up with a for-profit vocational school that milks the shit out of you.
I've known people who had no way to gauge or know the quality of the "education" they were receiving, no guidance, no nothing. All they end up having was a big-ass student loan that they could not chapter-7 out of it.
This isn't new. Some of these bootcamps are good, but others, they are just a new rein
lan/wan professional school was / is more hidden a (Score:2)
lan/wan professional school was / is more hidden about the fees and it real cost.
If the claim is too good to be true (Score:2)
... then it usually is. A "boot camp" can at best give you a superficial taste of something. It cannot give you real skills. Hence, the 25% that actually get a job from this would very likely not have needed that boot-camp.
Incidentally, claims too good to be true are also a sure indicator of a scam.
You can get a 4 year CS degree for less. (Score:2)