Lambda School's Job-placement Rate May Be Far Worse Than Advertised 31
An anonymous reader shares a report: Leaked documents from company all-hands meetings in the summer of 2020 and January and February of this year, led by the school's now former chief operating officer, Molly Graham, who resigned earlier this month, and others led by its chief business officer, Matt Wyndowe, showed that Lambda School placed only 30% of its 2020 graduates in qualifying jobs during the first half of 2020. This figure is in stark contrast to the 74% placement rate it advertised for its 2019 graduates, the latest figure the school has made publicly available. In a tweet, Graham wrote that her mission was to "get the company through a pivotal phase" and position it to "operate well without me." These documents, given to Insider by a person familiar with the meetings, alongside over a dozen interviews with former Lambda School students and instructors, suggest that Graham is leaving with that mission far from accomplished.
Cofounded in 2017 by the tech entrepreneurs Austen Allred and Ben Nelson, with help from the startup accelerator Y Combinator, Lambda School offered a nontraditional path for those seeking careers in computer science. In lieu of a four-year degree, students could take a crash course in programming while paying no tuition up front; an income-share agreement allowed students to pay the school a portion of their salary after being hired in a tech job with an annual salary of at least $50,000. Blog posts advertised it as "incentive-aligned" education. With the global edtech industry worth more than $106 billion as of this year, schools have popped up across North America promising to teach students using a similar business model. Lambda School itself has raised a total of $122 million from venture capital. Lambda School enrolls thousands of students a year and has indicated it plans on growing many times over to give investors profitable returns on the investments they've made.
Cofounded in 2017 by the tech entrepreneurs Austen Allred and Ben Nelson, with help from the startup accelerator Y Combinator, Lambda School offered a nontraditional path for those seeking careers in computer science. In lieu of a four-year degree, students could take a crash course in programming while paying no tuition up front; an income-share agreement allowed students to pay the school a portion of their salary after being hired in a tech job with an annual salary of at least $50,000. Blog posts advertised it as "incentive-aligned" education. With the global edtech industry worth more than $106 billion as of this year, schools have popped up across North America promising to teach students using a similar business model. Lambda School itself has raised a total of $122 million from venture capital. Lambda School enrolls thousands of students a year and has indicated it plans on growing many times over to give investors profitable returns on the investments they've made.
Color me surprised (Score:3)
Private school whose business model consists in selling futures tied to their former students' income lies about the performances of its former students on the job marketplace. Why gee, I'm almost flabbergasted.
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It's more simple than that: there was no demand for functional programming in the industry! ;)
Re: Color me surprised (Score:2)
There's no tuition if students don't get a job? So how does lying benefit them?
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The first half of 2020 (Score:3)
Better than loans (Score:2)
One of my co-workers came from Lambda (Score:5, Interesting)
And all-in-all he was a good hire. He had a great attitude, worked hard and extremely well. Was he a comp sci major? No, and he'll never pass a google style algo interview with just Lambda (and I'd argue almost no one could this without prep). Anyway, he was strongly motivated, a self-starter, all the stuff you want in a jr. role and after about 18 months he has now moved on to another role at his dream job for even more money. I don't have a problem with bootcamps, unlike so many elitist others (let's face it: you don't need a computer science degree for 90% of the work out there. You just need to be a good plumber), even though I myself have a computer science degree. The incentive based tuition is rather novel and would be hard to swallow, but not having to fork out cash on the front end or go into debt is a strong selling point, especially if you're currently an $18/hour retail or food service worker looking to get out of the grind and your first tech job will pay multiples of that. And for the school itself, it's a strong motivator to provide a solid education since they don't get paid unless they can get you a job. It's disappointing to see they only have a 30% placement rate, but our guy was solid. I can't speak for the others, though.
18$/hr? lol, wut? (Score:1)
especially if you're currently an $18/hour retail or food service worker looking to get out of the grind and your first tech job will pay multiples of that
I think you might be mixed up. 15$/hr isn't even the minimum wage yet in 95% of states.
Who is making 18/hr at a burger sling? lol, wut?
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Employees at the locations that don't still have a sign in the window. I don't know where you've been the last few weeks....
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In the Seattle area, starting pay for some fast food locations is $19/hr. Many others are $18/hr and the minimum wage in Seattle/King county is $15. Dick's Drive-In [mynorthwest.com]
Assuming full time of 2080 hours a year, that's almost 40k to sling burgers.
and your cost of living is 2.5x the avg. (Score:2)
But go on about how 15/hr, 20/hr$, hell, 25$/hr, is a livable wage anymore circa 2000.
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Nobody's ever claimed that working at a fast food establishment is supposed to pay a livable wage for a family. Flipping burgers and running a cash register is normally targeted at high school and college students. If you're trying to live off of the wages from McDonalds or Wendys, you might want to examine your career choices. $40k is a great wage for working while in school.
Re: One of my co-workers came from Lambda (Score:5, Insightful)
Both my parents went to "coding bootcamp" back in the 90s when it was less cool and operating under the more prosaic name of "night classes."
My dad was a construction materials scientist back in the old country, and my mom was a lit major who bounced around clerical jobs. Now they've been coding for over 25 years and it ain't all yachts and champagne and caviar but it kept a good roof over our heads and good food on our plates and let us do something fun as a treat every once in a while when I was growing up.
And yeah getting a job with night classes and no experience was tough even back then. They did what they had to. They kept sending resumes, they played up their experience in other lines of work, perhaps they embellished a class project into something a little bigger than a class project, but they kept working their low-skill immigrant jobs until they got their software jobs at places you've never heard of and they've spent many decades in the quiet dignity of unglamorous but moderately remunerative employment.
Why landing a high-profile job immediately out of bootcamp is the only performance metric that counts is beyond me. How many of these people who didn't land a job in silly valley right away ended up (or will end up) coding for a living doing unsexy backend stuff for an obscure chain of tire dealerships in flyover country at some point in the next 5 years? That counts too.
Re: One of my co-workers came from Lambda (Score:5, Insightful)
But that wont grab any ad revenue whatsoever, and certainly wont provide 50 billion in startup valuation, so it goes entirely under the radar in silicon valley. With a few top-tier exceptions, post-high-school for-profit schools are super bad deals. Its one of the few things that capitalism has completely, utterly, dismally failed at. Education should be public or non-profit, with very few exceptions.
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That's my real worry with bootcamps and alternative education. I don't doubt that you can learn a skill at these camps. Hell, you could learn a skill by picking up a textbook and just teaching yourself in your free time. I've honestly considered quitting my job and hitting a bootcamp to change careers.
But my question is, am I going to get hired with just a bootcamp on my resume? Is this a problem with the inadequate alternative schools? Or is this a case of strict hiring practices that won't hire trainable
Trades Unions have stuff like this now tech / IT c (Score:2)
Trades Unions have stuff like this now tech / IT can really use them as well.
Where students can learn real job skills and not be stuck with 100K+ loans and loads of theory
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Many colleges advertise their job placement rates and many students look at these rates to gauge the marketability of their degree in the surrounding area and the perceived value of that college's program.
Colleges with the best job placement rates [admissionsly.com]
A friend of mine went through Lambda School (Score:3)
A friend of mine went through the program in 2020. She was a stripper, but during the pandemic, she had the time and the savings to make a programming crash course appealing.
After she finished, she interviewed for a bunch of contract programming gigs, but pay tended to be mildly insulting, like $16 - 20/hour. She never wound up taking a programming job at all and has since returned to wearing a thong and living on the kindness of strangers.
She's fully capable of doing non-trivial work and she's since taken up game programming as a passion project, but I'm kind of infuriated on her behalf. She did exactly the thing that should've gotten her some kind of safe job, only to find that the jobs were not there for her.
Re:A friend of mine went through Lambda School (Score:5, Interesting)
Well a lot of people seem to have used the pandemic the same way - which is good but yes its going to depress wages. You now at least the media wants us to believe we have all these newly skilled workers like your friend who don't want to go back to their construction, cleaning, and burger flipping gigs because they are ready for white-collar work.
Maybe its even true. The trouble is they crowed the one part of the market segment there was never any labor shortage in the bottom rungs of white collar work be it in software or any other field are easily filled, always have been, really does not take much talent to do most of Jr. level stuff. It has always been about learning the business specifics rather than the generalities of academia and giving hire ups the opportunity to spot talent that can move on to less 'trivial' things.
It does not surprise me that given the opportunity a bunch of labor studied up and decided they'd be happier in the white-collar farm leagues than clean down toilet bowls, running dishes around a the floor all night - even if it will never go anywhere beyond "entry level" for them. However it is going to push entry level wages lower, and pull labor wages higher (unless a certain party succeeds in importing enough immigrants to under cut that).
What that will mean of course is college for most folks will take even longer to pay for itself. Making it a tougher and tougher sell, and probably actually nerfing a lot of potentially good talent that could have been developed. This will be even more true if "free community college" for everyone becomes a thing. It will be harder and harder for new grads to ever earn enough to get ahead. Meanwhile the gated-community class that can afford to pay for their kids to go to private four year schools and on to grad schools will continue to do so. Those people will 'network' increasingly and go thru the side door. We will see a bigger wealth gap spread rather than a smaller one.
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People in the hospitality industry moved to other industries because they found the working conditions were better. You don't have to deal with shitty people, or give up your evenings for a call you might not get, and your hours are unstable.
Instead, they went to other industrie
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Dear god. What sort of monstrousl employer would have the nerve to offer 20/hour for a starter job to a candidate with zero relevant experience? I mean, that's 20/hour times 2000 hours per year? Who the hell would want to work for 40k per year. I mean, that's solidly lower middle class as a starter job, with a near-guarantee of making twice that in
I would be cautious of hiring (Score:2)
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That would be a useful comparison if a student out of a 4-year degree could perform a half-competent job without a lot of on-the-job training.
Odd that you're comparing this to people who likely went through apprenticeship - which is just an entry-level job in the tech world.
I wonder what is its hurdle rate? (Score:2)
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The only way they lose is if a large percentage of students don't get a job or make under 50K a year. That seems to be what is happening.
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You would need to make 88K per year to pay the full 30K. But even if you only made 50K the school would still wind up with 17K which is more than most boot camps charge for a similar program.
Correct. I meant to say $80K plus change.
The only way they lose is if a large percentage of students don't get a job or make under 50K a year. That seems to be what is happening.
A smart student would defer compensation above 50K to pay the minimum for 24 months and then cash in.
Yeah right they got jobs and didnt tell (Score:1)