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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

> How do you know that your graduates are or aren't making more than 50k?

Great question. In addition to our income share agreement, each student submits a form to the IRS that will essentially copy us on their taxes. We have annual reconciliation based on those numbers to see if they match a student's self-reported numbers.

> You're essentially giving your students a loan and then having them repay it once they start earning money.

Eh, kind of. The biggest difference is if they don't get a job that pays $50k+ they don't pay us. Also, if you ever lose a job, your payments stop until you're back on your feet.

It's an equity instrument, and we think it's much better and more forgiving than loans as a result of that.

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It's fing brilliant. You guys are heros, don't let anyone say anything different. This sort of thing really changes the world when your goals are aligned like this. Just.. wow.

> ... if they don't get a job that pays $50k+ they don't pay us. Also, if you ever lose a job, your payments stop until you're back on your feet.

This is how it works in the UK and Australia with normal student debt. It's deferred until you're earning enough money and then is taken directly out of your pay cheque. Collection of the debt is also held off until you're earning a certain amount (in any field.)

> ... each student submits a form to the IRS that will essentially copy us on their taxes.

So it's not a truly universal online training environment, then? As a British citizen living in Australia, I can't file a form with the IRS, nor would I give the IRS my details for obvious reasons.

We're still figuring out the details outside of the US.

Thanks.

Honestly as someone who never went to university (I never finished school), is self-taught in C, assembly, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Go, and so on, and is now a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, I think your product is excellent. I was even considering asking to see what jobs you have on, but I don't have a degree, so yeah.

Keep up the good work. I hope you're successful.

You might find the value proposition a bit different where governments pay for student tuition.

While that's generally true, the proposition of 6 months vs 4 years is also valid.

> It's an equity instrument, and we think it's much better and more forgiving than loans as a result of that.

I wonder whether this type of financing is more acceptable to Muslim students. Do most Muslims in the US avoid traditional student loans which charge interest?

If that's a step function, then people would be happy earning $49,999 than $60k (and may even try to negotiate with the employer to reduce the salary)

I suppose that's a risk we have to take, though being willing to forgo $10k of income for two years ($20k) in order to avoid paying $20k seems a little silly; all you'd gain are the taxes, but you'd also have a hard time getting a raise, etc.

Unless they form a contract with their employers saying they will take 49,999 for 2 years with a guaranteed raise to 60k at the end. Employer saves money, employee saves money, school gets screwed...

If that's how you want to optimize your life, congratulations. You cheated the school that gave you a chance out of a few thousand dollars.

Might be smarter to just get paid more :)

The way I read it you collect 17% once they start earning $50k+. Do you really collect nothing if their first two years are below?

If they make <$50k we wait until they're making more, for up to five years. We will keep trying to get them a high paying job the entire time.

But then the student is caped at $49k for life, when they should be able to double or triple that salary over 20 years, which will easily pay off the loan.

Came across your site the other day. I was wondering is the 17% from their base salary before taxes? So they (if in say California) pay federal, state, & you guys off the top? Great idea either way!

Before taxes.

I applaud your effort and am interested in how you're working out the tax implications. $17,000 doesn't come of the top in reality, for the marginal $50k person you'd be taking nearly 1/2 of their take home pay. Seems like a longer repayment would be more fair. Also if you forgive the $30,000 that's still a taxable event for the student; they'd owe the IRS as through you'd given them the money, might cost the student $10,000 or more depending on the person's situation.

Note: 17%, not 17,000. So $8,500 for a person making $50k. But 17% does seem a bit high to me, pre-tax.

What is a student decides not to pursue software engineering? Do you still take your cut? In my experience, the market is oversaturated with code bootcamp grads; many of them decide to go back to their previous profession.

We only take a percentage if you get a career in software engineering, so we have built that kind of risk into our model.

Is there a time limit after which the debt is forgiven?

What prevents someone with no intention of finding a job of signing up for the free education?

EDIT: I'm entirely serious about part two. I know quite a few people that would love to learn programming but, AFAIK, have no intention of working in the tech world. I could see them taking advantage of something like this. Most of them work in non-tech functions in an office environment. So learning programming would be useful to them but it's not their actual job.

The income share is forgiven after five years. Hopefully we can weed those types out in application process.

You know me? I'am considering taking CS as a part-time education, but I have no intention of becoming a software engineer.

Exactly. There's tons of people like that. Not sure how they'd filter them from the rest. There's a lot of careers where it'd be incredibly useful too. Even just basic data munching with awk/sed puts a person light years ahead of people stuck with Excel copy pasta.

I'll say this if it's just for "fun" for someone I don't think it would work that well. I took the first PT bootcamp (I paid) and that was a HUGE undertaking. They are only going FT in the near future until they can figure the other options time wise, so if that person has a day job that would make it tough and if they didn't have a day job I would imagine "most" people aren't going to complete the whole thing anyways. I'm sure a couple of people will squeak through but I don't see that being a huge issue with the course work being on the more difficult side of things especially for someone coming from a non programming background.

They still need a job to pay the bills, don't they? As long as that job pays over $50k, I'd assume they'd have to pay the commission.

Ah cool! I was curious about the income thing, thanks for sharing!

What about married people that are jointly filing taxes, will you take only the income of the person attending the school into account?

Yes, that's exactly what we do.

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