What happens when regulators start cracking down on these practices and what makes you think Lambda will be successful when most bootcamps have failed or been acquired.
What makes Lambda School different than other code schools is a few things:
1. Our incentives are entirely aligned with the student. We don’t get paid unless they get hired so juicing revenue numbers with weak students just isn’t interesting, in fact it’s fatal.
2. We put an insane amount of time, money, effort and energy into instructional design. Lambda School is nine months long, and includes a computer science curriculum most bootcamp grads need (and lack).
Regulators love us - they’re sick of for profit schools promising a lot and delivering little except debt. We’re the antidote to that. That’s why there’s so much hype.
What do you think regulators need to address at Lambda School?
If you’d like you can attend classes on a trial basis and check it out!
How big of a problem is that for your student-to-job conversion rate when the criteria has to become less stringent to scale?
We’re seeing over 1,000 applications/week. Top of funnel is not our issue.
But really it's just that things take time. Two years ago we didn't exist. Now we have over 1,000 concurrent students, 60+ full-time employees, and 120+ contract technical mentors. And mostly we think about product and how to make everything better as quickly as we can.
We want to continue improving everything as we 10x the number of students and open up opportunities to more people, all while improving our outcomes (https://lambdaschool.com/outcomes). It's just hard to do.
Right now they can cherry pick the most promising. And learning something is different than doing it as a career. I personally know 2 bootcamp (not Lambda) grads who subsequently left software altogether since it wasn’t as much fun as they thought. Learning new stuff in a fun, hip, environment is great! Debugging some 5 year old production code while the customer is howling on Christmas Eve...not so much.
Overall though I’m a fan of non-traditional education so I think there is a place for this. I am also an employer and am in favor of increasing talent supply and reducing wage pressures.
We helped a 45-year-old get hired recently!
First part: Makes perfect sense
Second part: How do you assess this beyond prior school/work history or how quickly they finish the prep course? I could see it being much more difficult to assess with older students/parents/people who struggled in school etc.
Third part: As a non-programmer, any examples of one of these steep curves?
I wasn't meaning to imply the demand isn't there, was just trying to picture LS at scale in 3-5 years (say 25k-100K students a year). Do you think that 75%+ placement is possible at scale -- I'd assume abandonment/failing students etc would increase greatly similar to other "open enrollment" coding bootcamps.
Regardless, it clearly is a +EV decision for any student who is able to get in. Congrats on creating a great product.
The major universities in my city all advertise in really over-the-top, emotive, glowing language.