Thread about Holberton School and the bootcamp warning signs
twitter.com
twitter.com
Imagine what would happen if someone went after... any school you've ever attended with such an approach. Think they could find a half dozen students to rant and rave about how the school was awful? Certainly.
Of course, I'm biased - she has another thread about Lambda School (where I'm CEO), and reading the criticisms I know exactly who the students are. It says something that of the 6,000+ Lambda School students of all-time I can pick out the 3 or 4 complaining from the complaints, and if you dug into those students' complaints you would find there's much more at play than what is mentioned.
While I was initially supportive of these institutions, I'm now a lot more skeptical. I just don't see the value-add. The incentives don't seem to be aligned and the fact that these institutions are backed by VCs makes me especially suspicious since the VC model requires rapid growth or else dissolution.
That financial model makes absolutely no sense for an educational institution. If you're getting an education you want the institution to be around for a while. Whereas if you're a VC you could care less if it dies if it doesn't deliver 10X returns.
I don't see a positive ending for these types of institutions unless something really radical changes in their business models.
I appreciate your willingness to participate in these threads, be transparent, and show how hands-on you are with your school/students. However, I’m going to put you on the spotlight for a bit if that is ok.
Right now, Lambda School is young enough that the amount of collected outlier feedback can be easily remembered. Doubly so since you can still interact with this outlier population at the scale you operate at. However...
1. Instead of the bottom 0.1%, what about the bottom 1% or 10%? Will you be able to remember/account for all of these students as you grow in scale over a long period of time? What’s your strategy for this?
2. There will come a point where one person cannot handle all of the outliers. There will also come a point where your priorities are pushed elsewhere. Do you feel that it’s more important for you to be central in handling these issues or will this responsibility be handed off? How will quality be ensured?
I agree that you should not extrapolate from such a small sample size. However, I believe that to take ownership after a spotlight has been shone upon the worst instances would be to not discredit the feedback. Instead, offer up the insights on what actual patterns emerged from larger population findings, own any that correlated, and show how these were/are planned to be addressed.
Individual teachers have to deal with this all the time. Sometimes with additional metrics evaluating their every move. It would be nice to see someone at a higher institutional level be an example of how negative outliers are handled, not only from the bottom up, but from the top down.
Lastly, while Lambda School might be an exception, that doesn’t mean all bootcamps operate the same.
That's why it's odd to me that I know who all of those students are. I shouldn't. There's no way I should be able to identify them that easily, and if it were the 1% of 10% of students complaining there's no way I'd be able to map back from the complaints to individual students.
The criticism students have is not that we want the school to be ruined or shut down. The reason why a lot of students don't want to speak up is because they're still looking for jobs in the industry and are afraid of backlash or just "tainting" themselves before getting their foot in the door. Maybe it's irrational, but it's a real fear coming from someone just starting out in the industry.
The purpose is that we want them to be better, to be held accountable for the experiences that they're offering to students who pay that $85k. Everyone coming in to the program is aware of the peer-learning, ISA, etc. However, it's gotten this far because there were promises made that weren't fulfilled, and despite all effort to speak to staff and even the co-founders about the problems, none of them ever listen or do anything about it. One of the former students suggested a "Suggestion Box" and was told she didn't belong in the school. It's extremely frustrating.
They've held Town Halls where students have suggested very real, actionable criticisms but it gets waved off. What's the point of having a Town Hall? Sure, there are students who are successful, but there are a ton of other students who come out struggling to find a job with little to no support from the school. They accept anyone and forget those that graduated and need help. They spend money on PR and ads and parties instead of hiring real staff with legitimate education experience. Instead, they hire former students to build out the curriculum. The second year curriculum's all made by former students and is buggy and not particularly great so no one's interested in taking the second year.
It doesn't have to be perfect, but for $85k, it needs to be better. Much better.
- Cost: $$$ (50-100K or more) - No job guarantee or any incentive for the school to help - Lots of out of date material - Faculty could care less (there to do research, teaching is a secondary job) - Little career support (over worked job offices with 1-2 staff for 100s) - Few connections in major tech hubs (typically)
I would claim these programs are more predatory than these accelerators. And that's saying something!
The fact is, if you want to transition to tech after doing a non-technical undergraduate degree, it is going to be hard and there's really no shortcuts. But who has money to do a second undergraduate degree?
Lambda School (YC S17) is a 9 month full-time (or 18 month part-time) school that packs in the equivalent of two academic years, including Computer Science core and costs nothing until you're hired and making $50k+ in the field you studied (US only -international terms are different).
Once you're hired you pay 17% of salary for two years, capped at a maximum of $30k.
If you don't get a job in the field after five years the agreement disappears and you don't owe anything.
We not only have a team of a dozen full-time career coaches, but another team of 12+ people whose only job it is to reach out to companies and actually line up interviews for you. A real enterprise sales team working in your behalf.
We (along with the review sites) will hold a raffle or offer swag to anyone who leaves a review (positive or negative).
One of our students last year won a gift card from the review site for leaving a review and tweeted “I just got a $50 Amazon gift card for leaving a review for Lambda School” and it turned into a whole thing. We literally weren’t involved in that in any way.
Trying to twist that into “Lambda School pays students to leave reviews” is 100% incorrect.
The thing is, reviews (in general) are usually biased towards the positive. Even more strongly so when you consider that (in the case of a coding bootcamp) you've just spent an enormous amount of time, money and energy there - nobody's going to want to trash it.
I think we'd agree that in the case where someone had a great experience with your school, they'd post a great review, and when someone had a truly terrible experience, they'd probably post a terrible review. But what about when someone has a merely "meh" experience? In that case, someone will likely (with a bit of a push towards the positive) write a simple, positive review. Maybe they thought they'd have learned faster by themselves... but there's a gift card? And my friends will see the review? Hmm... I'll just write something short and positive.
In general, I think there are a lot of things that are a careful balance, easy to tip in one way or another - politics, public opinion, social issues - and reviews are certainly one of these things.
But generally I think it's fair that you should not take code school reviews very seriously.
I think that's perhaps the wrong comparison. The whole idea of bootcamps is that they are directly comparable to a four-year CS Bachelor's as measured by employment results.
I can see that a mentored, fine tuned curriculum would be beneficial to someone not sure where to start but it feels crazy to charge someone more than a couple grand for what is essentially freely available information. I think this type of school is preying on people's conditioning to think a traditional college-like environment is more serious or worth it somehow.
I read through her criticisms of lambda as well, I've been keeping tabs on them and they seem legit. Again the only real complaint I've seen people have has been related to price. Not in a "I won't pay it" kind of way but in a "wish it was less" kind of way. To me that's just grumbling and not a real critique.
This was interesting to read as I attend a school called 42, which functions very similarly to Holberton but free. I've not been to Holberton but I'm about 80% sure that their and our initial curriculum was both based off the work done by Epita and Epitech. I should note that ours has changed as there are teams working on it and many of our students and former students create some as well (I myself made a suite of projects for swift that is about to be rolled out). So it would make sense if they changed theirs too.
The no teacher thing works a lot better than you would think, it teaches you to figure things out, to ask questions, to collaborate and usually when you teach others it helps to solidify your understanding. I actually think if anyone studied this way for a few months it would improve them more than any degree. I'm not advocating against degrees, but this being able to figure things out for yourself skillset often feels like a superpower.
None of these schools are without their problems, everything in life is a tradeoff after all. But I'm insulted that she would imply that everyone who writes about their school in a positive way would be paid. I genuinely believe in building up a community and in strengthening my network, so when I write an optimistic piece on medium or twitter or HN or wherever it's not because I don't believe in it or am being paid, but an effort to pay it forward.
I'm not willing to shift through her tweets to find out what she said about Lambda, I have friends doing that program, and have considered it myself, I follow Austen and some of their staff on twitter, they seem genuine, people that have graduated from it have only good things to say. The only real criticism I've heard is that it's fast paced, which isn't even necessarily a bad thing.
As someone who runs a school, all the review sites are so easily gamed it's not even a data point you should consider. I've literally seen schools ask, "Did you have a good experience?" If yes -> go leave a review, if no -> submit this feedback form. Like it's the app store.
Also, note that it's 17% of gross income, so before taxes and benefits...
The schools finance the ISAs. The same way a lending startup isn't lending out its VC dollars, it gets other dollars to finance the COGS.
Pretty basic finance, really, and shouldn't surprise anyone. Also doesn't change anything - if students don't get hired you go out of business.
Sounds like you'd learn more in a (non-ABET, even) community college for two years, at an absolute fraction of the cost, if you wanted to retool after undergrad.
How many do you think have a reputation that is widely known? 10%?