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Comment by nabnob | Hacker News Reader

It's a scammy, for-profit, private school that charges $30k+ for online classes.

Edit: 20k up front, versus 30k if taken out of your salary over 2 years. That's around 20% interest. They mention that payments are 17% of your income, but this is calculated pre-tax and paid after taxes.

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That seems exceptionally unfair. They’re very up front about what they charge, how they charge it, and whether or not you even pay anything at all. I got a lot out of my overall college experience and so I probably wouldn’t opt for it, but if one of my kids was only interested in software development, I would suggest they attend Lambda School with no reservations whatsoever.

People who don't like the idea of capitalism in general tend to not be huge fans of Lambda School.

But we only get paid $30k in the case where you get a software engineering job after Lambda School that pays $85k+. Everyone else pays less, and absolutely no one pays more than $30k.

Our upfront tuition for the nine-month, full-time course is $20k if paid upfront.

This is distasteful coming from the founder of this institution.

I'm pretty sure he dug through my history before making that comment and is downvoting any comments that are negative.

> I'm pretty sure he dug through my history before making that comment

yes

> and is downvoting any comments that are negative.

There are likely many people down voting based on the content of your comments here. Specifically, calling a school "scammy" and being generally negative about it, without providing much reason. For context, 30k is about 1/4 what I paid for my B.S., and mine did not come with a guarantee of employment. Is there some other reason you consider Lambda School to be a scam?

Not OP, but there is a myriad of reasons: https://twitter.com/KeziyahL/status/1155154616281178114

I don't read his comment as intended to be demeaning, but more a statement of fact. And it reads true to me. I have no skin in the game, but I follow a lot of the bootcamp-related discussions online, and what he said sounds exactly right to me. There are a ton of people who hear the idea of an ISA and say "so we're bringing back slavery?? thanks SV geniuses!!", and they seem to disproportionately come from the late stage capitalism crowd.

I didn’t mean for it to be distasteful but can see how it came off that way.

I read through the poster’s comments and it became clear we’re not going to agree based on general economic frame of reference.

85k? I thought it was 50k.

It’s 17% of income for two years.

So if you’re making $50k you actually pay less than the upfront tuition amount ($17k).

You have to be making $85k or more to pay the full $30k.

I can't speak for Lambda, but this is also how AppAcademy in NYC operates. I used to work for a consulting company that hired multiple AppAcademy graduates and paid them $90-100k starting salary. Before that, they were making half that money, and we never would have hired them without the skills they learned at AppAcademy. The skills they acquired were worth vastly more than the tuition. They didn't have to go into debt to get the education. And had they failed to score a higher-paying job with a company like ours, they wouldn't have had to pay anything. This is a win across the board for them, and it's a pretty typical result.

I have no horse in this race, but AFAIK Lambda School courses are live and not online.

Lambda School is both live and online

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