
Show HN: Modern Schools – Database of tuition-free, ISA-powered, online schools - ishbaid
https://vrtlly.me/modern-schools
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keenmaster
Why don’t ISA-powered schools partner with existing social and religious
institutions?

Taking a church denomination as an example, if you’re a member, the church can
subsidize tuition, and then once you graduate, they can hook you up with tech
industry workers that are also members of the church. Because the church
subsidizes tuition, you give up less of your income once you graduate. This
arrangement would reduce the “dead weight loss” of people going through the
boot camp and ending up underemployed because of low social capital/discovery.
As the alumni network of Lambda + church grows, a larger number of people will
want to pay it forward by helping the next generation. The church would
facilitate this process formally.

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whoisjuan
Maybe ISAs wouldn't be a bad thing if these "schools" actually provided some
value. But they mostly look to me like improvised garage schools providing the
same knowledge that could be easily found online for free or for small fixed
price + a sloppy support system that doesn't even remotely replicate the
educational support system of traditional schools.

If they really want to disrupt education don't start by attempting to create
some sort of novel pseudo-loan just to claim that they are tackling the
student loans problem.

Start by creating an educational experience that can compete with top
established schools by leveraging technology to cut costs and improve the
learning of the students. Doing this would actually make the ISAs valuable,
but you got to start by providing real quality.

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ybalkind
I've made a MUCH more comprehensive list
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Wiuf6EXWJrtd9NWF9w7a...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Wiuf6EXWJrtd9NWF9w7a7O6JJXbDX1qigLl4mJzSUVE/edit?usp=sharing)

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ishbaid
This is awesome! What inspired you to do this?

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ybalkind
I'm looking into setting up an ISA fund in South Africa so I was researching
the ISA market globally to help me build the business case.

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femiagbabiaka
The branding of schools using ISA's as "modern" and "tuition-free" (and the
implied message of "better") is not going to do any favors to the reputation
that these schools get for deceiving their students.

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troelsSteegin
ISA == Income Share Agreement.

via [https://lambdaschool.com/isa](https://lambdaschool.com/isa)

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TheAdamist
Indentured Servitude Agreement also works, with how bad some of them are for
the students.

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MFLoon
Strange that App Academy was left out, considering it was one of the earliest
(if not the first?) ISA bootcamps. Full disclosure: I attended in 2015, as did
multiple friends in a +/\- 1 year window around then. All of us had good
experiences and were able to launch our careers as software engineers directly
out of App Academy.

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ishbaid
Adding it now! Thanks for the flag.

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arikr
What did you use to build the site on? Custom HTML/CSS from scratch or
something else? Looks nice

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ishbaid
I live and breathe React.js :)

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terrycody
Thanks!

This really helpful for me.

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ishbaid
Hey of course :) Thanks for checking it out.

