Code bootcamp preys on minorities and tricks them into indentured servitude | Hacker News Reader

Code bootcamp preys on minorities and tricks them into indentured servitude

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14 pointsWillson504 comments

The real complaint here seems to be that the school didn't deliver on the type of education they promised (or seemingly any education at all). "Indentured servitude" is just a stupid way to describe the income-sharing agreement, the alternative to which is bearing all of the risk yourself in the form of student debt (or having education freely funded, but that's obviously not in the table for an individual).

There's plenty of basis for complaint here, and I hope it works out for her. But this title is clickbait nonsense about one bootcamp behaving badly in a way that has nothing to do with the ISA fee structure.

The title is clickbait, but should an educational program automatically be entitled to an income share agreement even if the educational program failed to teach anything and the person got a job despite the program? That seems to be the issue here.

Yea, I thought the same thing when reading the article, and have thought so previously about ISAs. At some level it's just pragmatism, since consistent attribution of income is difficult. The only defense is an informed applicant doing their research and determining that the expected value of the school's impact to their career is worth it.

But more importantly, these problems don't actually have anything to do with ISAs! Any educational institution holds you responsible for tuition, regardless of how well they improve your earning ability. Why is an ISA somehow more exploitative than going into debt to get a humanities degree from a liberal-arts college with a consistently poor ROI? This is precisely backwards; ISAs are dramatically _less_ exploitative, as the size of the student-debt millstone is insensitive to your degree of financial failure and the school has no direct incentive to actually improve your earning capacity.

Which brings me back to my initial point: The problem is bad schools with misleading messaging about their ROI, not a mood-affiliation-driven kneejerk reaction to a method of payment that's generally _less_ exploitative of students (in that it smooths out the risk, disproportionately sparing the worst off).

I agree, indentured servitude is completely incorrect here. This would be more like sharecropping.

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