Hacker News Reader

Comment by lwb | Hacker News Reader

> My issue is the incentive that would create to enroll students you in admissions know would likely not complete the program, and then still collect 40% of the value of the ISA.

They only collect money if the student is employed in a tech field, which means they're more incentivized to get you into one of those.

View on HN

If someone dropped out after completing 14% of a program and later did another program or self-study to land a job without Lambda’s help why should Lambda get 40% of the ISA value?

If this scenario never happens to dropouts (you’re assuming they have no other path or desire to work in tech after dropping out) then Lambda would either change the percent owed to something proportional to time spent or increase the number of weeks you spend at Lambda before owing anything.

A simple answer could be opportunity costs. Lambda is oversubscribed and places are limited, so by accepting a place and then dropping out, Lambda is stuck with nearly all of the same costs as if you had completed the course, which they could easily have filled with someone else.

I don’t think they really have limited capacity. There’s minimal additional cost to adding a student participating in a massive Zoom call.

As someone currently seven weeks in to one of their classes, this isn't entirely accurate - the full class I'm in is about 50 students plus a dozen assorted staff. At that size, there's room for a fair amount of student-lecturer participation (comparable to 300+ level college classes), and I am at least familiar with most of my classmates. We also break off into 7- or 8-person groups in the afternoons, which are led by paid team leads (prior students), which would also somewhat limit capacity.

Thus far, I've seen that most of the people who dropped out did so in the first couple weeks - IIRC, there have been two people who left since week four, but I don't know if they dropped out or got "flexed" (pushed back to the class that started a month after mine).

That being said, I do agree that 40% after the first month is steep, though the limiting of the applicability of the ISA to tech jobs helps. I'll be interested to see how it plays out, and if more people drop out over time. I certainly hope it works out well for me, but I'll have to see how the rest of the program plays out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com