I attended Lambda when it was first starting out. I think I was in the third or fourth cohort. At the time, the sell was that you didn't have to pay anything unless you got a job using the skills you learned from them. I was pretty naïve, I guess.
Things seemed fine in the beginning. The instructors were good, and I liked that there were actual live classes. Things degraded very quickly. They kept changing the format and the curriculum ("iterating"). They doubled the length of the program that I was in, which made it impossible for me to even finish it. I was working in a tech support job where we had to do shift bids and no shift was guaranteed. I enrolled in a plan that fit the shift I was working, and the expected end date, and when they changed the program length and format, I couldn't complete it.
They promised career guidance, including having a career councilor, but I never got one. They kept telling my cohort we would get our councilors after this or that milestone, but when we got there they would move the goalpost again. The closest we got was a resume course that was not relevant to tech at all and a resume review by another student.
When I had to drop out of the program, I tried to get them to cancel the ISA or reduce it, but they said I had completed "most" of the curriculum and thus was on the hook for all of the ISA.
They then started billing me for it because I was working in tech, in the job I had for 6 years before I ever even started their program.
I went to a lawyer and was told it wasn't worth suing, because they required arbitration in NYC, which would cost more than I would save.
Please contact the CFPB, it is worth your trouble. Everyone's blood should be boiling reading TFA, such as:
> Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.
Here is an HN thread I had with him [0]. He claimed that 90% of those who were job seeking got placed. The key point was the definition of “job seeking”, of course. I'm happy to hear that authorities took action.
I know dozens of students who attended and turned their lives around because of the program.
I see Lambda Alumni on every page of LinkedIn job boards.
I'm sure some people had a bad time, but all of the ISA issues GP stated are clearly stated in the contract, and these calls for "jail time" are absurd. People clearly know almost nothing about the program, or its success rate.
Don't forget that Student Loans still make this look like charity by comparison in virtually every way.
If 90% of students have a good experience but the 10% of students have a similar experiences to the poster there, then I still think Lambda is another ethical disaster of a start-up.
"It's better than a typical USA student loan" is a very low bar.
Between smarts, motivation, and time most people cannot "simply self-teach". There's a reason education is such a massive industry, and entire professions exist around it.
> No, but you can expect none of them to have been lied to.
The CFPB report really doesn't make this obvious. All I've seen in this thread and in the CFPB statement are claims with nothing to back them up. The worst I've seen is "100% cohort", which doesn't seem to condemn the whole program.
> The defense is he's a fraudster, but incompetent?
The defense is I'm having a difficult time finding actual evidence of fraud.
If 90% of students aren't _scammed_, but 10% are _scammed_, there is an ethical disaster. But at this point it's clear you either have some actual financial incentive/relationship with Lambda School, or you just don't want to be wrong. Either way, I don't think engaging any further will be fruitful.
Shutting down discussion of a topic that otherwise has merits because you got offended by the idea is how we got here.
If you don’t like it you’re not forced to offer a valid rebuttal. You have the option to disagree or not. But taking the easy way out by shutting down the conversation just makes the situation worse for everybody. Nobody was on a high horse until you went there.
I'm not sure all the ISA issues are clearly stated in the contract, or whether they were clearly stated in all the contacts, before they started to get into trouble.
But they clearly lied about much of this stuff in the headline publicity. Lying prominently and 'clarifying' the lies in the small print is obviously still fraud.
Doing fraud and saying 'but the majority of the people we defrauded still had an overall positive experience' is not a defense.
Jail time for consumer credit fraud is a perfectly normal outcome. Don't lend consumers money if you don't want to be in a regulatory environment where fraud is taken very seriously.
Can you point out the lies? I'm genuinely trying to find them, and the CFPB article does not provide any evidence other than a few marketing quotes.
I'm very sure all the ISA issues are clearly stated in the contract. Everything is very clear about the fact that you will pay a minimum of $17-18k, and a max of $30k as a percentage of your monthly income. It was very clear that missing a payment would incur the entire loan being owed immediately (presumably it would go to collections).
The "hidden $4000 finance charge" I don't really understand, given that it is apparently built into the loan. It's not like you get charged an extra $4000 on top of the $30k (assuming you pay that).
I'd still choose this route over 4 years plus college tuition for a CS degree.
Everything I had seen said you’d only pay if they helped you land a programming job. It looks like more than a few people were surprised when the actual terms allowed them to collect a percentage of income from unrelated employment. I never went through the program, but I’ve seen more than enough marketing and promotion from it; these revelations are quite surprising to me.
The CFPB statements outline where BloomTech was misleading at best. You can’t dress up a loan as some other name and skirt regulations, no matter how much small print you use.
It seems like you are implying that lies in "marketing quotes" are not real lies? I don't think that this is the case.
In the rest of your comment you repeat the claim that I was responding to, that all the correct information was in the contract. You seem to have ignored the two key caveats I made: that their contracts might be compliant now, but they probably weren't before they were first investigated. And secondly that they have demonstrably lied extensively outside of the contracts themselves. Lying to convince someone to sign a contract which of itself is truthful, is definitely fraud.
Perhaps you don't understand "the hidden finance charge" because you don't understand regulation of consumer credit. When you buy a car, the dealer has to show you numbers breaking down what the cash price of the car is, and how much you will pay in interest. This stops them tricking people by eg raising the sticker price and telling you that the credit is cheaper than it is. This isn't a guideline, it's a law. And the numbers have to be presented in a way which is not obscure or misleading. Scott Tucker got 16 years for this.
Thanks for being honest about your experience. All of the Lambda grads I’ve talked to in person have similar negative stories about how their experience felt like it was being made up on the fly.
It’s difficult to speak out about problems with your educational institutions because your own reputation is partially attached, at least in early career. I see a couple people in my Twitter and LinkedIn feeds defending BloomTech publicly today despite having previously complained about their experience in private. It must be difficult to see your educational experience being exposed as being poor, which probably prevents a lot of people from speaking out. The Lambda/BloomTech grads I know are actually smart people, but they had to self-teach their way there. Lambda lured a lot of smart people in by proximity to Paul Graham and all of the positive press they received online when they started out.
I am high level member of a volunteer based org that does online workshops in the tech space, and does dozens of workshops in dozens of countries every year. I fail to understand how you can mess up basic things like having a predecided curriculum, good teachers, a fixed schedule, or providing quality outside class support. We do all of this on a shoestring budget.
The stories I have heard about Lambda/BloomTech seem to show almost a willful attempt to not get the basics right. I understand the financial component might have been difficult, but the education is straightforward. To fail it with millions of dollars of funding is outstanding.
I think if your focus is on actually educating people, and you're willing to invest your resources in those people, you can do quite well. If your focus is on scaling and creating an appealing image to investors, the education part isn't so easy.
There's probably something to who you're attracting as well. If your pitch is "come work hard with us and we'll help you learn", you draw people who are ready to learn. If your pitch is "come take out a [loan we won't call a loan] with us and we'll make you a bunch of money", you draw a different set of people.
That's not even saying anything against the students of Lambda school. I believe one issue has been people joining to improve their economic outlook, while working a different job to continue paying bills. You have to be pretty thoughtful about how you work with people who have a tight schedule. You can't just throw your curriculum and your expectations up in the air any time you want, and expect all those people to "pivot" with you. But the focus always seemed to be more on the "success" of Lambda school than on the actual success of every student.
From all the stories that come out of Lambda school, it really feels like the classic predatory view of students. They're not so much learners as they are potential sources of money.
They simply happened to be at the right place at the right time, ie a time where “software was eating the world” and also the iPhone/Android took over.
Finally, the success of the actual smart people in Tech (Google, Apple, Amazon, FB) who are largely pre-iPhone companies, meant that there was a lot of venture money flowing around, when the VCs discovered the Uber model. Spend a ton of money to establish monopolies (and break a bunch of laws along the way, which you could get away with because Tech still had a good reputation thanks again to the pre-iPhone pre Web 2.0 companies) and walk away with the money while exploiting customers, clients, governments and employees.
I wouldn’t call most of those Amazon, FB, YouTube etc, people the actual smart people either. They’re mostly just lucky. What made Facebook or YouTube successful over any other competitor? Just luck that their design turned out to be the one people like more?
They mistakenly think their success is due to how skilled or smart they are they think they’re hot shit and their thoughts are gold. But most of them are just like Elon Musk: average intelligence people who got lucky enough to climb to the top of the pile.
The same is true for most software people. We think we’re super smart because we have logical thinking and understand a complicated thing that most people don’t, but then you can always get a good laugh reading the HN crowd try to talk smart on other subjects like physics / quantum mechanics.
A ton of skill, talent, adaptability, and mountains of hard work are still prerequisites for "getting lucky" in that way though. Just because luck plays a big role doesn't make it the only factor.
> The same is true for most software people. We think we’re super smart because we have logical thinking and understand a complicated thing that most people don’t, but then you can always get a good laugh reading the HN crowd try to talk smart on other subjects like physics / quantum mechanics.
Talking out your ass about subjects you don’t understand isn’t limit to software people. It’s funny you mentioned physics because really smart physicists would frequently spew all kinds of stupidity about software when I was in grad school.
Not all physicists. Some are pretty chill. In fact a physicist I worked with was the one who clued me in to the whole "lots of physicists think they know everything" joke/not-a-joke thing, he thought the whole situation was very funny.
He didn't need insights about education. Just needed to hire 5-10 profs with significant industry experience and ask them to create a curriculum. But from the stories it seemed like a bunch of amateurs were playing the move-fast-break-things game.
This doesn’t seem limited to that particular boot camp, sadly.
I’ve instructed at two boot camps (one in North America and one in Europe). It seems to be standard practice in the industry: inflating placement numbers, very low quality material/curriculum and course material, a kind of omertà where students fear speaking up, admitting students who clearly don’t have the skills and will drown in the course, stringing you along “it’ll get better you’ll see” until you pass the number of days where you can’t drop out without losing a significant chunk of money, counting the graduates cum instructors towards your graduate placement rate…
From my experience, boot camps are mostly scams. Maybe they will be a reckoning, it really sucks that the business model basically revolves around deception and taking thousands from people who want a career change.
It’s really sad. My good experience at a boot camp seems the exception.
We had a curriculum designed by people with a background in education, externally audited placement rates, an exceptional alumni network, instructors and mentors with industry experience. Most importantly, it was a non profit.
It seems like there is something to be said for intensive vocational education. It’s a shame that there are so many people taking advantage of students.
I'm surprised bootcamps are still around; I hear so little about them today. I figured they'd mostly closed shop considering the glut of layoffs, LLM fears, end of ZIRP etc.
> They promised career guidance, including having a career councilor, but I never got one. They kept telling my cohort we would get our councilors after this or that milestone, but when we got there they would move the goalpost again. The closest we got was a resume course that was not relevant to tech at all and a resume review by another student.
> They then started billing me for it because I was working in tech, in the job I had for 6 years before I ever even started their program.
This is similar to the bootcamp I saw up close. They promised placement help, making it sound as if they had a strong incentive to help students succeed, but in the end all they did was have someone comment on their resume.
Eventually the student got a low-paying job based on their previous education and the company took a big chunk of the income. The job was unrelated to the useless and poorly executed instruction, yet they still got the money, because they had a signed contract.
This is no better than the guys that make money on phishing attacks. Just a different form of scam.
We were constantly sold this idea "we don't succeed unless you succeed." It eventually became clear that they had no commitment to individual success at all. They went from having 8-10 people in a cohort to have 30+ people, and starting new cohorts every week. It also turned out that Lambda was bundling ISAs and selling them off, so they didn't have any specific investment in actual students.
This is pretty messed up - I liked the idea of incentive aligned ISAs (and actually teaching a skill that universities mostly don't), but it still requires someone of good character making decisions ultimately.
The problem is that incentives are definitely not aligned. Once the student signs the ISA, they can put significant resources into helping the student get the best possible job, or they can put nothing into it and take a big share of the income the student would have otherwise earned. Incentives are only aligned if the ISA is based on the additional income from going through the program, and there's no way to measure that.
I think what we've learned is that this can only work if there's an outside regulator, such as an accreditation body, preventing bootcamps from taking the parasitic approach.
That's how it was sold to us. Literally, the recruiter's exact words were "we don't succeed unless you succeed." In reality, they just kept taking in more and more students. When you have your students doing peer reviews and self-reviews, there not a lot of added cost for having more students. So cohorts went from 8 - 10 students to 30+ students. They also bundled ISAs and sold them off without telling the students they were doing it. So "we don't succeed unless you succeed" was patently false. They were getting their money up front regardless.
Yes. The ISA was a good idea. It aligned the incentives of the company with the vocational success of the students. There are several clones of this in India. I assumed that the rest of the details (like curriculum etc.) would fall into place and the thing would be atleast a moderate sustainable success.
I think that's it's the pressure to grow and become a "unicorn" that seems to encourage these kinds of ugly compromises and behaviour. That kind of thing can be just annoying if the company was some kind of social media thing but when you get involved in something as important as education which can have a huge impact on a persons life, you have to be responsible about it. But that doesn't really help the valuations.
I'll have to look into it more now. I had contacted a non-profit that represents defrauded students, but they had stopped pursuing it after a judge threw out their case.
Not a surprise. Allred was basically a marketing shill with no educational background before lambda / bloomtech. Not a surprise then, the claims they make will be borderline fraud.
Thank you for speaking up. This made me recall an interaction[1] I had with Austen Allred, the CEO, on HN way back in Lambda School’s early days. I was skeptical of his claims that experiences like yours were the outlier. His response was that they had a dedicated “student success” team. I didn’t quite believe his claims at the time, but I was willing to wait and see. I guess my instincts were right and that all of the things he’s said on HN very much stretched the truth.
> They then started billing me for it because I was working in tech, in the job I had for 6 years before I ever even started their program.
That's damning. While I get that ISAs are controversial, I didn't expect this kind of nonsense - I wonder how common it was that enrollees were charged for "landing" their old job?
In any case, sorry this happened to you, hopefully this recent ruling will give you some recourse.
Serious question: why not? What out of SV and VC in the past 20 years has shown they have any intention of doing anything the expensive but "good/right" way rather than cut any corner, oversell, overpromise, underdeliver, and literally commit crime to get their paycheck?
> I went to a lawyer and was told it wasn't worth suing, because they required arbitration in NYC, which would cost more than I would save
Could you do me a favour and look if they had conflicts? (Also, who was the arbitrator, AAA or JAMS? Because it shouldn't be more than $5k, and that's an extreme. Also, in most arbitration agreements, the company drafting the agreement pays the filing fees, which could knock off $100 to $3,500.)
I really don't understand this. Surely you can't arbitrate away statutory rights like this? Sorry, I'm not from the US, and this legal feature baffles me a bit.
Things seemed fine in the beginning. The instructors were good, and I liked that there were actual live classes. Things degraded very quickly. They kept changing the format and the curriculum ("iterating"). They doubled the length of the program that I was in, which made it impossible for me to even finish it. I was working in a tech support job where we had to do shift bids and no shift was guaranteed. I enrolled in a plan that fit the shift I was working, and the expected end date, and when they changed the program length and format, I couldn't complete it.
They promised career guidance, including having a career councilor, but I never got one. They kept telling my cohort we would get our councilors after this or that milestone, but when we got there they would move the goalpost again. The closest we got was a resume course that was not relevant to tech at all and a resume review by another student.
When I had to drop out of the program, I tried to get them to cancel the ISA or reduce it, but they said I had completed "most" of the curriculum and thus was on the hook for all of the ISA.
They then started billing me for it because I was working in tech, in the job I had for 6 years before I ever even started their program.
I went to a lawyer and was told it wasn't worth suing, because they required arbitration in NYC, which would cost more than I would save.