No we did not.
We've been over this again and again, and I know you understand that this isn't true. The misconception comes form comparing two different measures: one that is (hired students making more than $50k/enrolled students), which we share with investors because that indicates how much we get paid vs. how much we spend. The other is (hired students/graduated students), which we share with prospective students because that's what they want to understand and what every school shares.
Those were both called "placement" in different contexts to different people, but the numbers that we report externally are always hired students/graduated students (and even that isn't simple, as there are many different definitions of "hired," and different cohorts of students who are job searching or not, and various time lags around when we learn a student is hired or not), but this is not unique to us as a school. (Though an ISA incentivizing people to _not_ tell us when they are hired until tax returns are do perhaps is a little bit unique to us.)
* They dodged California regulators then lied to students about it. This invalidated every ISA in California before 2020.
Neither of those things are true. Our counsel told us we didn't need to register with the BPPE because we didn't operate physical classrooms (this was a somewhat novel concept in 2017). They reasoned that if the BPPE were going to claim that online schools would need to register in every state there was a student, that the claim would be if you have a single student who attends online classes from a state you have to register as a school in that state. Correspondingly, teaching anything on the Internet would require you to register separately and abide by varying regulations with every state educational body in the United States. The BPPE said they were going to regulate online schools, and sent us a letter with a threat to fine us. We immediately submitted our registration, and the registration approval process took just over a year, and the BPPE reduced the fine to a minimum level. There was never any attempt to flaunt or "dodge" regulators, and this never affected the experience any student had in any way.
Now we have a very large legal team, and are regulated separately and uniquely in every state in the US, often using laws that don't contemplate virtual classrooms or online learning in any way, and that's just to exist as a school in the first place. It's a complete nightmare that needs reform, and the vast, vast majority of schools are simply below the radar enough that they don't get fined, but it's incredibly difficult and expensive in the United States simply to be in compliance with each state where you might have as few as one or two students.
Beyond that fact, entirely online school where students don't pay unless/until they're hired is a round peg that doesn't fit into the square holes of existing financial regulation either.
* They launched an unpaid intern program, which created backlash int he tech community.
Again, not true. We launched a program called "fellows" where companies didn't pay, but we paid the students, and if the company afterwards hired the student they would pay us back. It was successful and operates to this day.
* They told students they couldn't discharge their debt, which was a lie that got them into even more legal trouble
This is another misconception, but we were actually in the wrong here. Because an ISA isn't a traditional student loan, if a student doesn't get a job the ISA immediately goes away after a five year deferment period. We had some language in the ISA to try to describe that mechanism as not requiring bankruptcy, but the DFPI in California said we should remove that clause. We happily did so, but that clause didn't harm anyone.