The Hacker News post that changed the face of higher education
The idea of Income Share Agreements has been around since 1955, but they haven't seen mass adoption until recently.
This post covers the recent history of ISA's and how they helped kickstart the coding bootcamp revolution.
Kush Patel, Founder & CEO of App Academy, and I recently had an in-depth recorded conversation exploring this topic: https://bit.ly/2S0jiXR.
From what we could tell... the spark for the coding bootcamp revolution came from a single hacker news post. This one to be specific: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133
Back in 2011, Kush and his brother saw this post and decided to enroll.
After the program, Kush saw how quickly other students were able to land jobs and start their software engineering careers.
Seeing this firsthand is what lead him to start App Academy which became the first coding bootcamp to incorporate Income Share Agreements as a financing option.
Others would fast-follow.
Make School in 2014. Lambda School in 2017. Flockjay in 2018. And now, in 2020, hundreds of programs.
ISA's have had a few false starts, but for the first time, it looks as if they're off the races.
Software engineering education became the first killer use case for ISA's. And now, it's quickly seeing mass adoption.
It's so important that we start to see this idea spread now more than ever.
Over 10M Americans filed for the unemployment benefits in the month of March alone.
These individuals need job training and they need it now. Traditional higher education isn't going to cut it.
We need a new method of job training.
One that is accessible from anywhere, provides trade-specific knowledge, and is generally risk-free.
If there was ever a time for ISA's and career accelerators to thrive, it's now.
And it's all thanks to an innocent Hacker News post from 2011