Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> The school, known as BloomTech for short, offers students the option to pay up-front tuition, or to pay no up-front tuition fees and instead pay back their tuition through an income-share agreement, meaning that when a student lands a job paying $50,000 or more, they must pay back 14% of their income for four years or until they hit a cap of $40,000.

One of the saddest parts of this whole debacle is that a lot of bootcamp students are unaware that most normal colleges have sliding scale tuition.

They see the “sticker price” of private college tuition being $50-$60K per year and think that a $40K boot camp is a bargain. What they don’t know is that $40K could actually be more than what they’d have to pay for a lot of universities, given their financial situations. There’s an argument that a 1-year boot camp could get someone into industry faster, but given all of the terrible anecdotes coming out of this particular bootcamp it’s hard to argue that it’s anything other than a terrible deal for students.

And they could drop out in 2 years and owe $30k and have no job prospects at a regular university.

For some students if they do a year at a bootcamp and then manage to get a $100k job, paying back $40k isn't hard and better than 4 year university.

I don’t get your point. They can also not get a job. You know, bootcamp is not typically considered something good.

According to who? For those that have successfully retrained from school teachers and shop technicians and into software devs, more than doubling their pay, I think they would consider it quite good. That they're working in the industry, despite whatever aspersions get cast their way, they're still working there and bringing home the bacon. The monetary specifics of the deal may be sour to some, even the successful ones, as the linked article talks about ($40k is a lot of money, even if you're making $100k!), but $100k is nothing to sneeze at if you were making $50k before.

> more than doubling their pay

What percentage of the attendants are able to do so?

This is highly unlikely in today's environment, if it was even possible before: The jobs that paid 100k to retrained school teachers and shop technicians are gone and not coming back.

When you say “is not typically considered something good” are you making an appeal to bourgeois norms or is there some other interpretation that isn’t about looking down on the kind of people who don’t go to university?

Well I recently read about this so-called „Lambda School“ which was kinda fraud(ish), apparently? But I guess truth is a liberal, sorry: bourgeois, concept.

How is truth a bourgeois concept? I can see how sneering at the kind of people who go to either a military or a software development boot camp is bourgeois; there’s the fear of being confused with people of adjacent but inferior class position. I don’t see how truth is bourgeois. Could you explain?

The point is you injected a loaded political term into a thread that is literally about boot camps having little value.

I think his point is that an ISA prevents you from owing money if the program didn’t benefit you. Traditional tuition must be paid whether or not you use the education in a new job. So for a person who isn’t confident they’ll get a better job, owing traditional tuition can be risky.

I’m just explaining, not advocating for the point of view.

Plus, you can lower your tuition with community college credit transfers (at least for some states' public uni's)

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