CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred
consumerfinance.gov
consumerfinance.gov
Things seemed fine in the beginning. The instructors were good, and I liked that there were actual live classes. Things degraded very quickly. They kept changing the format and the curriculum ("iterating"). They doubled the length of the program that I was in, which made it impossible for me to even finish it. I was working in a tech support job where we had to do shift bids and no shift was guaranteed. I enrolled in a plan that fit the shift I was working, and the expected end date, and when they changed the program length and format, I couldn't complete it.
They promised career guidance, including having a career councilor, but I never got one. They kept telling my cohort we would get our councilors after this or that milestone, but when we got there they would move the goalpost again. The closest we got was a resume course that was not relevant to tech at all and a resume review by another student.
When I had to drop out of the program, I tried to get them to cancel the ISA or reduce it, but they said I had completed "most" of the curriculum and thus was on the hook for all of the ISA.
They then started billing me for it because I was working in tech, in the job I had for 6 years before I ever even started their program.
I went to a lawyer and was told it wasn't worth suing, because they required arbitration in NYC, which would cost more than I would save.
> Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.
I know dozens of students who attended and turned their lives around because of the program.
I see Lambda Alumni on every page of LinkedIn job boards.
I'm sure some people had a bad time, but all of the ISA issues GP stated are clearly stated in the contract, and these calls for "jail time" are absurd. People clearly know almost nothing about the program, or its success rate.
Don't forget that Student Loans still make this look like charity by comparison in virtually every way.
"It's better than a typical USA student loan" is a very low bar.
But that the literal alternative, so feels pretty fair to compare.
You can simply self-teach.
A bootcamp isn't a CS degree.
Not everything can be for everybody.
But they clearly lied about much of this stuff in the headline publicity. Lying prominently and 'clarifying' the lies in the small print is obviously still fraud.
Doing fraud and saying 'but the majority of the people we defrauded still had an overall positive experience' is not a defense.
Jail time for consumer credit fraud is a perfectly normal outcome. Don't lend consumers money if you don't want to be in a regulatory environment where fraud is taken very seriously.
I'm very sure all the ISA issues are clearly stated in the contract. Everything is very clear about the fact that you will pay a minimum of $17-18k, and a max of $30k as a percentage of your monthly income. It was very clear that missing a payment would incur the entire loan being owed immediately (presumably it would go to collections).
The "hidden $4000 finance charge" I don't really understand, given that it is apparently built into the loan. It's not like you get charged an extra $4000 on top of the $30k (assuming you pay that).
I'd still choose this route over 4 years plus college tuition for a CS degree.
In the rest of your comment you repeat the claim that I was responding to, that all the correct information was in the contract. You seem to have ignored the two key caveats I made: that their contracts might be compliant now, but they probably weren't before they were first investigated. And secondly that they have demonstrably lied extensively outside of the contracts themselves. Lying to convince someone to sign a contract which of itself is truthful, is definitely fraud.
Perhaps you don't understand "the hidden finance charge" because you don't understand regulation of consumer credit. When you buy a car, the dealer has to show you numbers breaking down what the cash price of the car is, and how much you will pay in interest. This stops them tricking people by eg raising the sticker price and telling you that the credit is cheaper than it is. This isn't a guideline, it's a law. And the numbers have to be presented in a way which is not obscure or misleading. Scott Tucker got 16 years for this.
The CFPB statements outline where BloomTech was misleading at best. You can’t dress up a loan as some other name and skirt regulations, no matter how much small print you use.
I think that's it's the pressure to grow and become a "unicorn" that seems to encourage these kinds of ugly compromises and behaviour. That kind of thing can be just annoying if the company was some kind of social media thing but when you get involved in something as important as education which can have a huge impact on a persons life, you have to be responsible about it. But that doesn't really help the valuations.
The problem is that incentives are definitely not aligned. Once the student signs the ISA, they can put significant resources into helping the student get the best possible job, or they can put nothing into it and take a big share of the income the student would have otherwise earned. Incentives are only aligned if the ISA is based on the additional income from going through the program, and there's no way to measure that.
I think what we've learned is that this can only work if there's an outside regulator, such as an accreditation body, preventing bootcamps from taking the parasitic approach.
The stories I have heard about Lambda/BloomTech seem to show almost a willful attempt to not get the basics right. I understand the financial component might have been difficult, but the education is straightforward. To fail it with millions of dollars of funding is outstanding.
There's probably something to who you're attracting as well. If your pitch is "come work hard with us and we'll help you learn", you draw people who are ready to learn. If your pitch is "come take out a [loan we won't call a loan] with us and we'll make you a bunch of money", you draw a different set of people.
That's not even saying anything against the students of Lambda school. I believe one issue has been people joining to improve their economic outlook, while working a different job to continue paying bills. You have to be pretty thoughtful about how you work with people who have a tight schedule. You can't just throw your curriculum and your expectations up in the air any time you want, and expect all those people to "pivot" with you. But the focus always seemed to be more on the "success" of Lambda school than on the actual success of every student.
From all the stories that come out of Lambda school, it really feels like the classic predatory view of students. They're not so much learners as they are potential sources of money.
Much of the crowd here isn’t very smart.
They simply happened to be at the right place at the right time, ie a time where “software was eating the world” and also the iPhone/Android took over.
Finally, the success of the actual smart people in Tech (Google, Apple, Amazon, FB) who are largely pre-iPhone companies, meant that there was a lot of venture money flowing around, when the VCs discovered the Uber model. Spend a ton of money to establish monopolies (and break a bunch of laws along the way, which you could get away with because Tech still had a good reputation thanks again to the pre-iPhone pre Web 2.0 companies) and walk away with the money while exploiting customers, clients, governments and employees.
They mistakenly think their success is due to how skilled or smart they are they think they’re hot shit and their thoughts are gold. But most of them are just like Elon Musk: average intelligence people who got lucky enough to climb to the top of the pile.
The same is true for most software people. We think we’re super smart because we have logical thinking and understand a complicated thing that most people don’t, but then you can always get a good laugh reading the HN crowd try to talk smart on other subjects like physics / quantum mechanics.
Talking out your ass about subjects you don’t understand isn’t limit to software people. It’s funny you mentioned physics because really smart physicists would frequently spew all kinds of stupidity about software when I was in grad school.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/793/
Not all physicists. Some are pretty chill. In fact a physicist I worked with was the one who clued me in to the whole "lots of physicists think they know everything" joke/not-a-joke thing, he thought the whole situation was very funny.
Hiring people who have experience and know what they're doing isn't very revolutionary or disruptive.
Plus it can be hard to evaluate competence in a field you don't know that well yourself.
Could you do me a favour and look if they had conflicts? (Also, who was the arbitrator, AAA or JAMS? Because it shouldn't be more than $5k, and that's an extreme. Also, in most arbitration agreements, the company drafting the agreement pays the filing fees, which could knock off $100 to $3,500.)
You can’t, but the cost of enforcement can vary. In this case, it sounds like there was a bad counsel-case fit. (OP needed cheaper or better counsel.)
I’ve instructed at two boot camps (one in North America and one in Europe). It seems to be standard practice in the industry: inflating placement numbers, very low quality material/curriculum and course material, a kind of omertà where students fear speaking up, admitting students who clearly don’t have the skills and will drown in the course, stringing you along “it’ll get better you’ll see” until you pass the number of days where you can’t drop out without losing a significant chunk of money, counting the graduates cum instructors towards your graduate placement rate…
From my experience, boot camps are mostly scams. Maybe they will be a reckoning, it really sucks that the business model basically revolves around deception and taking thousands from people who want a career change.
We had a curriculum designed by people with a background in education, externally audited placement rates, an exceptional alumni network, instructors and mentors with industry experience. Most importantly, it was a non profit.
It seems like there is something to be said for intensive vocational education. It’s a shame that there are so many people taking advantage of students.
> They then started billing me for it because I was working in tech, in the job I had for 6 years before I ever even started their program.
This is similar to the bootcamp I saw up close. They promised placement help, making it sound as if they had a strong incentive to help students succeed, but in the end all they did was have someone comment on their resume.
Eventually the student got a low-paying job based on their previous education and the company took a big chunk of the income. The job was unrelated to the useless and poorly executed instruction, yet they still got the money, because they had a signed contract.
This is no better than the guys that make money on phishing attacks. Just a different form of scam.
That's damning. While I get that ISAs are controversial, I didn't expect this kind of nonsense - I wonder how common it was that enrollees were charged for "landing" their old job?
In any case, sorry this happened to you, hopefully this recent ruling will give you some recourse.
Serious question: why not? What out of SV and VC in the past 20 years has shown they have any intention of doing anything the expensive but "good/right" way rather than cut any corner, oversell, overpromise, underdeliver, and literally commit crime to get their paycheck?
It’s difficult to speak out about problems with your educational institutions because your own reputation is partially attached, at least in early career. I see a couple people in my Twitter and LinkedIn feeds defending BloomTech publicly today despite having previously complained about their experience in private. It must be difficult to see your educational experience being exposed as being poor, which probably prevents a lot of people from speaking out. The Lambda/BloomTech grads I know are actually smart people, but they had to self-teach their way there. Lambda lured a lot of smart people in by proximity to Paul Graham and all of the positive press they received online when they started out.
Previous trouble they've been in:
https://dfpi.ca.gov/2021/04/26/lambda-school-reaches-settlem...
What's the problem you see here?
This is a silly idea lobbyists love because it sidesteps the actual corporate-destruction mechanism: liquidation to pay massive fines, license revocation and/or personal liability for senior management.
Consider even the penalties here, which effectively ban Allred and Lambda from doing business. If you corporate death’d them, the contracts and assets would still exist. Allred would be unpunished. Everything would go back to shareholders who were presumably fine with the status quo, and would be fine putting them into a new entity that Allred could manage. Okay, so you cancel the contracts. Now the janitor who hasn’t been paid in two months is screwed. Okay, so you exempt employees. Allred’s an employee! Exempt him? What do you even pay the janitor with? Okay, exempt some assets. How many? How do you choose who must keep paying versus who is let off? Maybe pro rata? Who will administer all this? Et cetera, et cetera.
Contrast that to a massive fine. Company goes Chapter 7 and into a deep body of law that has experience dealing with the above. (Ideally paired with a license revocation from any lending for Allred and the entity, in case they try to Chapter 11.) Shareholders are wiped and free to pursue Allred. Allred and Lambda are neutralised.
The difference between this and a big fine:
* Lots of big fines aren't big enough to actually kill companies that deserve it,
* Fines tend to go to the government, while companies that deserve a "death penalty" often have victims who could use that money,
* Bankruptcy doesn't prevent people from starting another company, or board members who failed at oversight to join another board.
Just do damages.
> Lots of big fines aren't big enough to actually kill companies that deserve it
Neither is a corporate death penalty. You’re just shuffling around assets and making work for lawyers.
> companies that deserve a "death penalty" often have victims who could use that money
Why the extra steps?
The closest we have to a death penalty is license revocation, e.g. Arthur Anderson [1]. Victims got screwed. Taking it further and the death penalty analogy seems appropriate--death penalties aren't about restitution. They’re an instrument of retribution.
> Bankruptcy doesn't prevent people from starting another company, or board members who failed at oversight to join another board
Neither does a corporate death penalty. That’s what bans are for.
Corporate death penalty is a gift to corporate America. It sets activists running in circles over a stupid idea that represents simpler, precedents punishments with the ambiguous baggage of extra steps.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen_LLP_v._United_...
This is wrong for a variety of reasons:
(1) The corporate death penalty is proposed as an additional remedy, not an alternative remedy, to personal liability for officers, etc. (in fact, many corporate death penalty proposals would make additional personal penalties for corporate officers available as a part of that on top of any that would be available independently of the corporate death penalty for their actions, e.g., in one proposal for a federal charter revocation law, “The statute should specify that, for a period of five to ten years, the directors of the condemned corporation could serve on the same corporate board together only when they are a minority, ensuring that that set of directors would not form a majority of the board of another corporation. Similarly, key senior officers should be prohibited from working together for five to ten years. In addition, no director or officer could serve on the board or work for any corporation affiliated with the parent corporation of the convicted corporation. Courts must be empowered to issue injunctions to enforce these rules, preventing reconstitution of substantially the same corporation under another name.” [0])
(2) Corporate death penalty proposals tend to include proposals for how dissolved corporations are to be wound down that address the concerns you address (like a bankruptcy, these would be generally be administered by courts, probably most normally the court issuing the penalty.) From the same proposal, “The dissolution of the corporation should impose the harshest penalty on the corporate entity itself, directors, and officers, while only damaging shareholders-who have less control over corporate misconduct-to the extent necessary to incentivize them to take an interest in the corporation’s criminal misconduct. […] the penalty should dissolve the corporation with as little impact on innocent parties–employees, consumers, suppliers, and the larger economy-as possible.” [1] The proposal goes on to propose that an corporation subject to the corporate death penalty should have a court appointed “czar” take over management of its assets (similar, in a way, to a bankruptcy trustee), operating them and preparing and organizing them for sale (by default, by auction, but by other means where appropriate), with a specified distribution of the proceeds: “The statute should specify that revenues from the sale of the corporation’s assets first pay court costs and the costs of the czar’s operation during dissolution. Next, nonmanagement employees of the corporation that have clearly suffered harm due to the dissolution, such as being rendered unemployed, should be compensated through a one-time stipend. Finally, the balance should be distributed among the shareholders. In this way, the affairs of the corporation could be wrapped up in an orderly and just way that would protect innocent parties while only causing minimal harm to shareholders.” [2]
(3) As with personal sanctions, the corporate death penalty is proposed in addition to, not in replacement for, criminal fines and restitution, and civil damages that may be available. The key difference between corporate death penalty and bankruptcy is that the corporate death penalty can punish directors and officers, and it de-institutionalizes the firm in much the same way as bankruptcy, but it does so even if the amount of the monetary penalties would not render the corporation insolvent.
[0] https://www.gwlr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/80-Geo.-Wash..., pp. 621-622
[1] id., pp. 628-629
[2] id., p. 630
"The Bureau’s order permanently bans BloomTech from all consumer-lending activities and bans Allred from any student-lending activities for ten years" [1].
[1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/enforcement/actions/bloomtec...
Corporal death penalties aren't an additional remedy--they're the ultimate remedy. The branding sucks.
> to personal liability for officers
Just do this. Why the extra steps?
> Corporate death penalty proposals tend to include proposals for how dissolved corporations are to be wound down that address the concerns you address
So does bankruptcy, a precedented mechanism.
> the penalty should dissolve the corporation with as little impact on innocent parties–employees, consumers, suppliers, and the larger economy-as possible
How? You're putting their employer, vendor, customer and taxpayer out of business. (If not, what are we talking about?)
> but it does so even if the amount of the monetary penalties would not render the corporation insolvent
Increase the fine.
More pointedly: if you can't justify a fine or penalty more than the company is worth, maybe--on the net--they shouldn't be poofed?
Criminal companies should take every opportunity to shift debate around fines, penalties, license revocation and personal responsibility to one about a corproate death penalties. You get the baggage of the corporal death penalty for free with a heaping spoonful of ambiguity. While everyone debates what common punishments this Rude Goldberg replaces, you can slink away. Worst case: if they do enact it, it's so novel and convoluted you can probably buy a decade of appeals before you have to give up the assets.
Fines are money. Charters paperwork. We're currently seeing a charter revocation example in the Trump fraud trials [1]. It is by far the least meaningful part of the penalty. Could Trump trade the fine for the revocation, he would take it--anyone would.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-fraud-ruling-corporate...
> to personal liability for officers
If you to set the precedent of consolidating the consequences and doling them out to the relevant executive officer you’ll end up with c-suite executives around the country throwing their personal and corporate influence into getting that precedent neutralized.
Yeah, rich CEOs and investors are opposed to taking any responsibility for their actions, but that doesn't we shouldn't try to hold them responsible.
A CEO will green light high level strategic direction, but the crimes described here could easily emerge from the implementation of that directive at lower levels of the company. “Plausible deniability”
The buck stops at the top.
As far as my cursory glance at wikipedia has informed me, the act itself works around the “plausible deniability” by requiring certain disclosures containing factual information be signed off by key executive staff rendering it impossible for them to say “I didn’t know!” with regards to specific material information.
The blanket concept of holding executive staff accountable for the wrongdoings of the company would mean a lot more disclosures, forms, sign offs, etc. for “any” eventuality that would render the position pointless as they wouldn’t have any time to actually do anything useful.
Because at the end of the day how do you prove that joe schmoe CEO actually fostered a culture that resulted in criminal acts? This isn’t even mentioning the individuals who were actually involved and directly culpable.
Shockingly it worked. Some companies that would have never worked with "oldCompanyName" were happy clients of "newCompanyName".
The sub continued to deny a connection to the school, but I still don’t believe it.
> Lambda School will go on growing and transform education. Few will remember having been part of the jeering mob.
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apaulg%20lambda&src=typed...
the correct question is who funded coinbase
https://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html
He also seems to give some credit to Jessica for choosing to back the Reddit founders:
we thought that we were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt bad about it. Jessica was sad that we'd rejected [them].
PG, for example, didn’t realize that discriminating against people who have children might not be great until he himself had kids.
He’s a mid dude with gross feet who came up with a wildly profitable business model (6% equity in as many promising founders as possible).
Does he sell feet pics :) ?
> There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds are usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken in by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you can usually assume y is not a fraud.
I guess all those folks calling these guys "frauds" weren't "thoughtful" enough.
As someone who was a low-ranking insider at Lambda some years back, it was my perception that the people calling Lambda out presented a mixed bag in terms of veracity.
Someone here commenting on this story said that Lambda counted their student TAs in their employment stats, for example, but to the best of my knowledge this never happened. There were a handful (like three or four that I know of) that we did hire as full-time staff doing real jobs, and I'm pretty sure we counted them as employed, but not the student TAs.
With respect to this ruling, it says that students were subjected to up to $4,000 finance charges. I hadn't heard of that at all. Reading the details, it turns out that's the difference between the published upfront cost of paying Lambda versus using an ISA. The upfront cost wasn't hidden; it was published right next to the ISA cost. But because they weren't the same value, and it was probably more expensive to use the ISA, they called the difference a finance charge. Which is fine, but if Lambda had simply not allowed people to pay upfront, there wouldn't have been a "finance charge" to complain about. In other words the finance charge was already published in the rules for how the ISA would be repaid. So, factually accurate, but a strange thing to complain about, like complaining that the upfront cost of a house is lower than the mortgage cost.
Still others complain about the selling of the ISAs to investors, and say that that means that Lambda would still make money no matter how well their students performed. However, this would be a very short-sighted strategy as no investors would buy the ISAs if the students weren't performing. So selling them didn't really remove any of Lambda's impetus to place students in jobs. (It did improve the cash flow situation, however, which is why it happened.) From what I saw, the goal of placing students was ever-present regardless of whether or not Lambda was currently selling ISAs.
My point is, there's a lot of information out there by a lot of people who aren't sure about what they're talking about. And it can be tough to know what's real and what's not.
One thing I can say with certainty is that all the instructors who worked there back in the day were absolutely fucking passionate about getting students into jobs and changing the world, in that naive startup way. Some of the success stories from those early cohorts are the things I'm most proud of in my entire tech and teaching career.
As part of my layoff agreement, I had to sign a non-disparagement clause to get my severance.
That's true. A source of confusion is that the school did hire at least one bootcamp graduate as an instructor, though he graduated from a different bootcamp. And it's worth pointing out that the marketing material promised world class instruction, and a fresh bootcamp grad with zero industry experience is the very opposite of that. For that matter, the head of the data science program was the CEO's brother, whose only industry experience was from a no-name company in Utah.
> With respect to this ruling...
It's a waste of time to argue the semantics of income share agreements at this point. They always operated in a gray area, which is why Lambda School hired lobbiests to try to make them officially legal. That effort failed, and the law has decided they're just another form of loans with convoluted hoops to jump through.
I imagine that they got that $4,000 number from all the people who attended the program, received zero practical skills to get jobs, went on to further training (another bootcamp or even an associates degree) and still had to pay back the company because the terms of the ISAs lasted anywhere from five to eight years.
> Still others complain about the selling of the ISAs to investors, and say that that means that Lambda would still make money no matter how well their students performed. However, this would be a very short-sighted strategy as no investors would buy the ISAs if the students weren't performing.
Given the ISAs disappeared from the marketplaces that resold them to hedge funds, that sounds like exactly what happened. The issue is that it fooled prospective students into thinking, "Hey, if this company is able to run off ISAs, the program must work!" In fact the company made money by leaving hedge funds as bag holders.
> My point is, there's a lot of information out there by a lot of people who aren't sure about what they're talking about. And it can be tough to know what's real and what's not.
The same is probably true of Bernie Madoff, Charles Ponzi, and Sam Bankman-Fried. When someone acts like a sociopath for long enough, people start to assume that everything they do is unethical. There is a long list of crimes that the company committed which have been verified from multiple sources. A few people on the internet getting the details wrong doesn't invalidate that.
> As part of my layoff agreement, I had to sign a non-disparagement clause to get my severance.
They did the same thing to students who scrounge together the money to hire a lawyer to get out of their ISAs. These students had to any reference to Lambda School from their LinkedIn profile and tell nobody about what happened. While you did it to make money, imagine how it would feel sign away your right to free speech for fear of a $30,000 debt.
But to be clear, that's not where they said they got the $4000 number. It would be one of those things that'd be nice to correctly know. Do ISAs come with a hidden $4000 fee? The answer: no. Did they have to pay $4000 more because of additional training? No. Did the ISAs last 8 years? No. (At least not for any of the years I was there.)
> Given the ISAs disappeared from the marketplaces that resold them to hedge funds, that sounds like exactly what happened.
I have no knowledge of their final disposition, whether or not the purchasers realized gains on the ISAs.
I know other companies like App Academy and Launch School have had successes with ISAs. For me, this is the real pisser of all this. I think done right it's a workable, useful model, but it got dragged through the mud here, and now we're left with the same old bullshit loans that are fucking the country over. I don't care about Lambda, but I really wish ISAs had been worked on to greater effect globally and hadn't gotten this tarnished image.
> A few people on the internet getting the details wrong doesn't invalidate that.
Of course not. But it also doesn't make the wrong details right, or something you should believe, which is what this subthread is all about.
How can we be expected to make any learned decisions about these sorts of financing instruments if we're throwing bad information in with the good?
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30782967
- https://x.com/cglee/status/1232512904953335808
I think you're dead on with that first link. I've heard of some schools that did not apply an effective filter up front, despite instructor pleas, and suffered for it greatly with lowered job placement, ultimately failing with the ISA model.
I feel there's a class of students for whom ISAs are perfect, and, just like you said, a class of students for whom they are ineffective. The ones where the ISA works and standard school is out of reach have incredible success stories.
I found something similar when I taught a nearly free C++ class. I put a really simple test on the front with a refundable $20 fee (if you took the course). Everyone who ultimately took the class was really motivated. $20 was all it took to filter. $5 might have even worked since I speculate the effect is psychological, not economical.
The second link is good food for thought, some stuff I hadn't considered. If the ISAs are sold cheaply enough, you really don't need much student success to get a return.
IIRC, in Lambda's case, the ISA sales were stopped while the company was still young (having gotten another round) [caveat: I didn't have much visibility into this side of things], and anecdotally I think they had some of their biggest successes early on, but I agree with your points on this.
One thing that really impressed me about Lambda was how diverse in every respect the student body was, people from just every walk of life. Waaay more so than I'd seen at any university. I credit the ISA for making this possible.
One of my missions in life is to enable people to get the training they want to get. ISAs were wonderful in that regard.
Education has a couple of unique attributes that makes it difficult to assess:
1. the value cannot be perceived until much later after the service is rendered
2. alternatives are mutually exclusive; eg, people usually just attend one university or coding bootcamp, not all of them (or even two of them)
Those two attributes make it very easy to lead with hype and marketing and vulnerable people are particularly susceptible to it. imo it's not appropriate to deploy the standard startup playbook in edu, especially if you find yourself attracting vulnerable students.
Ok, now combine that with ISAs, which has some positive qualities but are not as incentive aligning as marketed. And then if you sell the ISA in bundles, then it becomes even less incentive aligning. Well, I guess it's now aligning with investors and loan brokers. But it's certainly not aligning more with student outcomes.
It all makes for a very delicate situation where you have vulnerable students biting on the ISA bait.
I know it seems like I'm just complaining but I've been thinking about these problems for a long time and I come with solutions. Or, particularly, a solution: imo the best thing an edu institution can do is allow students to leave easily.
Why do we never think of restaurants as predatory? The idea is ludicrous to even consider. There are of course terrible restaurants but we can just not dine there again and eat elsewhere. There are lots of restaurants around.
And here's the issue: there are also lots of edu institutions around but every single one of them deploy the marketing->entrapment playbook.[3]
How does marketing work when you have a bad school? Because of the time-lapse between value received and service rendered. The ISA is easily abused in this environment because it's both the marketing and the trap.
Anyway, I'm just riffing here... btw, huge fan of your books and work! Despite what I wrote above, I knew Lambda was making an honest attempt at their curriculum when they hired you.
[1] https://failstatemovie.com/
[2] imo, edu institutions need to be judged on how they treat their most vulnerable students, unlike startups who are judged on their best wins (https://twitter.com/cglee/status/1781129096250179640)
[3] https://medium.com/launch-school/educational-entrapment-f5cc0472051eI've often thought that anyone can be a dev--if they want it. Meaning, it has to be someone who likes the material enough to put in the effort. It doesn't matter if you're smart enough; it only matters if you're going to put in the time. There's a reason I'm not a CPA. I'm absolutely smart enough, but eff that!
And lots of times schools do advertise "we guarantee you a position in a high paying job if you just put your ass in that seat for 6 months". Who wouldn't want that? But they leave off the "you gotta want it" part. And then people get trapped.
Related to "easy to leave", we fought to filter the front-end heavily for people who "wanted it". And we fought to allow students to attend for as long as possible with no obligation. The goal was to allow them to discover if they wanted it. However, this was not realized while I was there. So much more I could say here about how that didn't happen, but I'd wager you have a pretty good guess.
Hand-in-hand with wanting it (IMHO) is having a comprehensive, heavy-hitting curriculum. The guy who hired me left Lambda ages ago, but he and I came up with a list of things people should learn to be decent devs... and that was one helluva list. Needless to say, not all of it got covered, and as time went on, less and less of it did.
I love that California community colleges are now free. Easy to leave!
I really appreciate the conversation, btw. I also like geeking out about this topic, and it sounds like I could learn a lot from the ground you've already covered. I'll check out the reading after I finish prepping for class next week. (0-1 Knapsack and dynamic programming. Phew.)
Agree that ISAs can be useful. But it's a tool that can be used to harm or help. Elevating it beyond a financial tool to some sort of educational breakthrough was a disservice, imo.
We agree on the value of community colleges. I wish they were better funded and more people worked to drive CC graduates to six-figure jobs.
100%
The fundamental concept had merit, but the business had a very very low probability of succeeding financially. Once the financials flipped, the original mission went out the window.
I’m proud of the work I did there and I know we gave many students great opportunities. It was sad, but not surprising to see it go so wrong. But for a time, for many students, good things happened.
Such great company he keeps.
That was one of the dumbest fucking startup ideas most people had seen in awhile. Many just sort of said the obvious out loud, which is that it made no fucking sense as a business, and then all these rich supposed geniuses tried to shout them down.
Even by the usual standards of the genre that one was a head scratcher.
PG stepped away from YC 10 years ago to raise his kids in the English countryside. I don't see what seems to indicate he has a great thumb on the pulse of Silicon Valley startups in 2024.
Mighty always sounded like a bad idea. But when I saw PG really making a big deal about it I followed Suhail on twitter because I just had to see what PG was going on about. From what was posted online it sounded like the company was super successful and growing, and I still didn't get it. And then it went under, without any fanfare. Just poof.
But that was Suhail, totally sure in his lie, smart enough to change the future, but dumb enough to not see his business sucked.
I don’t think it’s right to be hard on PG or Suhail. People fail and Suhail was very smart, smart enough to hold a fracturing vision together much longer than anyone thought. He looked like a guy trying really hard and probably was.
As a society we should work tirelessly to hold them accountable and break up their concentrated power when it develops.
What do you see being disappointing about tweets on Israel? I've mostly seen him care about Palestine civilian deaths but I can't say I've read and remember 100% of his tweets.
In this case, defendants are accused of conning "at least 11,000 income share loans" "carrying an average finance charge of around $4,000", but their fine is $164,000? A fraud of $44M just for the financing charges produces a fine of $164K? As I missing something?
There are almost never company-killing fines. There are almost never consent decrees with stipulations that change the company's behavior. There are almost never instances of piercing the corporate veil and going after executives or shareholders. It's a total joke.
Whereas, settling meets the company's incentives (eliminating uncertainty), meets the regulator's incentives (bad behavior is stopped locally). The moral hazard created by making fraud seem less risky (because the punishments aren't that bad) is born by the public.
The solution here would be to limit the possible legal shenanigans that companies can use to increase the cost of taking a case to trial.
In this case, the 'stick' is that CFPB is preventing the company from issuing new loans, de facto forcing them to cease operation. (Or I guess charge regular tuition, like a normal school?) That's a pretty big deal.
And to make matters even more depressing the CEO just tweeted [1] that it's no biggie for him:
> BloomTech continues to focus on its core mission: improving the lives of students and enabling them to fulfill their economic potential. While it’s been frustrating, we’re glad to put this behind us.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133577/lambda-school-bl...
Fines aren’t intended to replace damages. If they are criminal fines, criminal restitution is also available through the same process. Even where criminal restitution isn’t available or, for whatever reason, pursued, or where the fines are civil, civil damages for those harmed are not precluded by the fines, they are on top of the fines. Fines are punishment, not compensation.
I was involved deeply in tech career volunteering several years back when this was called Lambda school.
Writing was on the wall about Lambda even then based on student feedback from a 100+ student multi year sample size in the orgs I helped.
Consistently students raised: ISAs coming to much larger payments than advertised. Constantly changing curriculum. The classic one for bootcamps - blind leading the blind with former students teaching the always changing curriculum, and juicing graduation employment stats. If I recall I even broke out the ol’ discounted cash flow math with students to actually sort out what the rate lambda was getting on these ISAs, and ya it was payday loans basically.
But, we saw justification after illogical justification about this setup. Former students employed by lambda getting aggressive. otherwise pretty well-meaning groups who had vendorized tech career support partnering with Lambda, despite seeing the same feedback as I did bc the company leads were in the same groups as I was.
Takeaways from all this if you or people you care about are trying to use these conduits to build a tech career and are evaluating options like Lambda vs a degree and so on:
- market can stay illogical, and same with its supporters, longer than when good, clear as day data about fraudulent (or more politely “very obscure and novel pedagogy approaches”) practices surfaces to counteract that narrative.
- people and orgs who have staked their future on that illogical/fraudulent market will roast their reputations in face of that evidence for much longer than you think or respect
- the feedback that matters should be the primary sources: the students that since 2019 or so started pointing out all these practices in bulk.
It is now 5 years later and who knows how many students who shredded their career goals by depending on schools like this.
We decided to settle the matter because it was clear that ongoing litigation would be extremely time consuming, incredibly expensive, and distract us from our core mission.
We do so without agreeing to or denying any of the allegations in the consent order.
https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1780770303406403701
Weird to read further down the thread, where he acknowledges the wording of the press release is legal bullshit, and then employs an entirely different set of weasel words. I can't even sum this up.
As is the intent with most serial liars, no? Twist you up so bad that it quite literally jams up your reasoning ability, making you more susceptible to the con.
Lambda School is more of an attempt to train the average guy who wants to increase his earning ability. He doesn't have the time or patience to "work on cool things" in the hope of "learning a lot" which is loosely correlated to finding a good job.
They cater to different crowds and solve somewhat different problems.
I highly, highly recommend it to anyone considering going there. Some of the kindest and smartest people you'll meet.
On the surface it doesn't seem like a bad model, but of course it could be twisted to evil ends. From the article:
> The loans carry substantial risk, as a single missed payment triggers a default and the remainder of the $30,000 “cap” becomes due immediately.
> Students were therefore deprived of rights they should have had when their “income share” loan was sold to an investor [without the required Holder Rule provisions transferring legal responsibilities to the new owners].
The fact that those are an option for accredited schools means I think it would be hard to make it work in a program like this. Especially if there is any sort of venture interest expecting actual returns. Actually educating people well is not cheap and I have not seen any of these programs that actually do anything innovative either.
Ah, I didn't realize that was a thing. That makes sense, thank you!
That dream hasn't been realized, and certainly wasn't by Lambda, but I still hold out hope.
If you look good on paper before the school then you don't need it and won't be motivated to share your income. So the applicant pool reduces itself to those who on-paper don't have great chances. So you need to cause a really big delta in the ability of those people to make good money in the industry for you to be able to get your cut.
And you're gonna pull that off in 6 to 9 months? I'm a big believer in a lot more people having potential to learn than currently have easy opportunities, but that's a hell of a timeline.
But you're right, $30k (in the worst case) is a lot of money to pay for less than a year of bootcamp.
That includes room and board in an expensive dorm (it was part of the honors program I was in) and a meal plan with the school.
I think the problem they’ve run into is that there are only so many of those types to go around, and you have to stay small or really tackle the problem of transforming someone in 12 weeks eventually. That’s a different and much harder ask.
They literally ensured their success by filtering for people who would already succeed no matter what. I don't have any misgivings about it because the curriculum did help me focus on some gaps in my understanding and build up a profile/portfolio that could land jobs.
It's still expensive and had that curriculum been open at the time I could have done the whole thing on my own and saved some money.
The social aspects of the program didn't end up really benefiting my career at all. The vast majority of my cohort had STEM degrees from prestigious places or were people who were programming since an early age like me. I had already had a long career in IT before I attended. 100% did get jobs, but 2 of the guys in our cohort struggled for a while -- though I think that was to get out of paying the ISA.
Eventually the majority of those folks who were going to make the switch... Did. Then the average bootcamp graduate became someone who bought into the hype that anyone could learn to code. A lot of truck drivers, CS reps, and teachers applied. There nothing stopping those people from becoming great engineers. But they are going to have a more difficult time on average than the person who dabbled in coding for ten years while working as an engineer in another field and just needs a crash course to be proficient in web development.
Placement rates dropped significantly around that time.
In that world, the school only has to get the students to do a "hello world" in python and apply for the right jobs. Such a school is very cheap to run, and very lucrative as long as a decent proportion of students fit into the desirable categories.
The students themselves usually aren't aware how desirable their application is - and therefore believe the school is their route in rather than a few youtube tutorials and a direct application.
Is there any wonder that Google and other (not exclusive to tech) companies desire this?
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...
Write a convincing report saying "Companies with a Z in the name do better", and you'd see the same result.
(I have worked with 2 such recruitment teams).
Large companies especially conglomerates do this by hiring freshers and investing in their learning and benefit by paying a bit lesser than the market over the years .
Apprenticeship has also been successful economically at even a scale of one master/sole proprietor for centuries.
The key is to derive value while they learn, not split the learning and earning parts completely
investing in startups is kindof like betting on the future potential of founders, though it's tied to a business idea.
Upstart started as a personal loan for students and expanded to other financial services, it went public recently. They innovated by doing the regular thing (student loans) better than the competition, rather than trying to be both the lender and the school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart_Holdings
> but of course it could be twisted to evil ends.
My speculation is that this was a 'road to {} paved with good intentions.' Just like most startup products face challenges in the real world, it sounds like the Lambda School tried everything they could to get high job placement rates, but weren't able to deliver at scale.
Then, as their early placement % dropped, they just didn't change the numbers in their marketing materials. After a certain point their early hopes and reality diverged enough to constitute fraud in the eyes of the CFPB
Anecdotally, we get a lot of applications for any software job posting, and I discard most of the resumes of recent bootcamp graduates. It's nothing against bootcamps, it's just a signal that the person is a junior engineer. And in the cases we have hired people with less work experience for junior roles, we've had a much higher signal-to-noise ratio in our interview process talking to people who completed traditional education (even if it was not directly a CS program) and have enough of those applicants as-is.
This isn’t formalized into a loan, though. Which is better for the student.
https://www.lni.wa.gov/licensing-permits/apprenticeship/beco...
As I recall, some critiques were that it was only deemed viable for a small range of STEM majors, and narrows the mission of the institution toward building earning power vs. providing a well-rounded education, being an intellectual/research hub for the community, etc.
[0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/06/23/purdue-pauses...
They're often referred to as "public schools", and ISAs are often called "taxes".
Many bootcamps require full-time attendance, and many universities have part-time options. Further, community colleges are an option if the only goal is skill acquisition. Those programs take less time and are cheaper.
0 - John Oliver is not the primary driver of my thinking, but he did an interesting and engaging segment if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN2_0WC7UfU
Austen Allred quote-tweeted me to his gazillion followers and caused a big pile-on about how awful and wrong and anti-progress I was.
Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Before BloomTech, Austen was a develop for a payday loans company. His cofounder, Ben Nelson, worked as a software instructor, and left BloomTech in 2021. So maybe it's less surprising that the innovation here was in the financing, not the teaching.
A master of deception with statistics!
Honestly wonder what the true placement rate was. There seem to be some success stories I’m seeing on Twitter but this could have all been avoided had they just been up front.
That $164,000 victim fund sounds pitiful but I do wonder how it is calculated.
> BloomTech advertised on its website that 71 to 86 percent of students were placed in jobs within six months of graduation, when its non-public reporting to investors consistently showed placement rates closer to 50 percent. Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.
After a slew of negative reviews came from a few people that verifiably took the early courses, lambda decided not to improve their course, but instead to do two things:
1) they gave students financial credit for posting positive reviews on social media
2) they paid review shops out of India and China to bombard the internet with fake positive experiences.
This school are scumbags. Frankly I am shocked that it still exists and people still go there.
It's shameful YC was still shilling Lambda one year ago[2] even though there's been a mountain of evidence about its deceptive practices for many years.
2. https://www.ycombinator.com/library/5N-on-starting-and-scali...
If the outcomes are good for the students, there won't be an issue with making them be straightforward about it.
A big thing that rule breaking and deceptive marketing due is cover up that the student outcomes are not good.
Making people whole is what civil lawsuits are for. Which, if I understand correctly, will be much easier with this order and findings in place. That will be some serious financial punishment on top of the ban.
Also I knew of him and his early employees from his involvement in a bootcamp called DevMountain in Provo. Interesting concepts were applied there and their practices were very distasteful in my opinion such as having a previous cohort student teaching the upcoming cohort and inflating LinkedIn recommendations with the current classmates to land jobs.
Like it isn’t wrong to do, but it isn’t right either. Following Lambda over the years showed all of these patterns to larger extents.
I’m surprised they survived their first brush with the law. Can they possibly survive this? Looks like the persona is still active and in denial.
From the announcement: "BloomTech and Allred lured prospective enrollees with inflated promises of job-placement rates as high as 86 percent, when the company’s internal metrics showed placement rates closer to 50 percent and in some cases as low as 30 percent."
Bravo Vincent!
[1] https://twitter.com/fulligin/status/1230152732809392133
[2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...
"permanently bans BloomTech from all consumer-lending activities and bans Allred from any student-lending activities for ten years"
"ordering BloomTech and Allred to cease collecting payments on income share loans for graduates who did not have a qualifying job, eliminate finance changes for certain agreements, and allow students the option to withdraw without penalty"
This order seems like a death sentence. If ISAs are defined as consumer-lending, which the CFPB clearly says they are, BloomTech cannot recruit new customers. And they cannot collect on 50% of their outstanding loans (if the quoted internal placement rate is true).
Corporations aren’t people. Ordering a scammer to knock it off isn’t even close to being a serious penalty. Allred should be in prison.
The CFPB, like every federal regulatory agency, has only direct civil enforcement powers.
They refer criminal matters to the Department of Justice, which usually takes significantly longer before handing down charges, and does not usually disclose the existence of an open investigation until and unless it issues an indictment.
Absurd.
I kept looking at the numbers, and couldn't find a way to make this be ... profitable. The time it would take for competent professionals to spend adequate time with folks wasn't something most people could really afford. So... either get them to take out loans, or do an ISA. Neither of those seemed to make sense for the types of students who might most need this, and... it just left a bad taste in my mouth. I enjoyed the teaching part, but couldn't find a way to make it a good business.
Then years later I started seeing all these bootcamps charging thousands and thousands for what seemed to be garbage (mostly). Left another bad taste in my mouth.
Colleges have worked in the past because the outcomes were more or less guaranteed (i.e. if you got good grades and graduated, you would very likely land a job), but even that is no longer valid (outside of regulated domains like medicine, law, etc.).
I predict we will see many, many more pay-to-learn companies, institutions fall in the coming years. ("fall" could also mean become irrelevant, and catering only to those that don't understand how the world has changed and still incorrectly think that such programs will prepare them well).
BloomTech, in order to survive, had no choice but to try and play the games they did, and mislead. It's a byproduct of not having a business that is viable.
Your local community college could have the best program ever, but they won't beat Ivy League grads, purely because of the inputs.
Not just the education, but the selection process too.
If the higher-quality inputs are abundant, then the overly-exclusive selection process is somewhat deleveraging of overall potential.
If the higher-quality inputs are scarce, they are outnumbered by others having average-to-below-average potential, who often seek the exclusive membership more so than any actual high-quality performance.
Once again a large percentage of the highest-quality inputs can be systematically excluded in a disadvantageous way.
With good fortune at least a good number of high-quality inputs do gain entrance and it can set a good example, sometimes realistic, sometimes not.
Either way the higher-quality inputs are best identified beforehand, not the result of an overly exclusive selection process.
But it's this type selection process that contributes so much to some institutions' perceptions of quality, when they could be doing so much more.
From the least-prestigious programs all the way up to the most-prestigious, it seems like there is always going to be some temptation to blur the distinction among peers and tiers in a way that's confusing to students, and it's just a matter of integrity whether that is taken a bit too far.
Honestly, there’s nothing really that screams dishonesty than this tweet. Saying that your outcomes are stronger than ever when every tech company was laying off and headcount was frozen just doesn’t pass the smell test.
I was puzzled for bit, but I think you may have accidentally a word.
Reasons to eliminate a student from your outcomes report: 1. Didnt finish the program 2. Didnt complete "career commitments" aka xx number of applications per week, x number of meetings with career counselors per week, responding to all emails from bootcamp within x days - for 6 months to 1+ year 3. Didnt pay tuition or missed a tuition payment 4. Had too many absences during the bootcamp 5. Received a job offer but turned it down 6. Accepted a job offer that wasnt tech related 7. Graduate just doesnt respond to outreach from bootcamp
The 30%-50% actual placement rate is pretty realistic. I later went through the same bootcamp I worked for and my graduating cohort was probably 30% to 40%.
I had thought that debt is when you have to pay back at least the "principal" no matter what, and equity is when the financier shares the risk of you failing. Maybe that's not correct, though?
Does the definition of a "loan" include any sort of financing, even if the amount that needs to be "paid back" to the "lender" can be arbitrarily small or large? That would make equity financing a special case of debt.
When push comes to shove, the substance of a thing matters much more than the attempt to relabel the thing.
I was thinking the same thing. "Can you have a loan without principal?"
But reading through the documentation on this case, it seems like the legal answer is that you can.
> Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.
So many people like to do fake work instead of real work, including people who scoff at fake work.
I attended a bootcamp myself (hack reactor). My experience overall was very good and I owe my (6 figure) income and current career to it - the students and instructors were both impressive. I was in a dead end career and now I have a new world opportunity opened up to me.
But that being said...
I think a couple of things killed the bootcamp model:
- Saturation. Insatiable student demand + no acceptance criteria (anyone can get in) means there is robust market for bootcamps. Hack Reactor (and a few others, like Fullstack Academy and App Academy) mitigated this somewhat bc you needed to pass a (difficult) interview to get accepted.
- Fraud. Bc there is no "accreditation" so anyone could star a bootcamp, including scumbags.
So I have mixed feelings.
Hopefully, the (terrible) job market will flush out some of the shit down the toilette, but I hate that innocents, people just trying to improve themselves, got caught up in the blast radius.
Bout damn time.
The problem is that Lambda School still tries to service those debts. The victims are usually low-income, so they lack the resources to lawyer up. If they do lawyer up, they end up being forced into arbitration due to an arbitration clause in their student agreements.
So in the end, it does feel like the BPPE is a half-measure that doesn't fully tackle predatory companies.
You’re literally describing why arbitration works. Someone low income can just file for arbitration with minimal work by a lawyer. Contrast that with the tens of thousands they’d need to pay a litigator.
Someone angling to go into coding should be able to do the research to draft an arbitration claim on their own. In most cases that isn’t a fair assumption to make, but given the cohort, they should be able to collaborate on a draft.
The gating part isn’t doing the work. It’s knowing you have the option to.
Unless you’re a total numpty, you can learn online how to draft an arb claim. And even if you are a numpty, you should be be to find—in a half-decent cohort—someone who can do this.
The issue is rarely ability. It’s learned helplessness in the face of the legal system. The anxiety, not ability, is the limiting factor.
It is. I won't because this isn't something I care deeply about. The question is whether they would have been better off without arbitration, and the answer is no.
I honestly can't think of a clearer example of arbitration agreements screwing people over.
This is also an area I care deeply about. And have read north of 2000 pages of cases, analysis, and position papers on the topic.
I also have a list of about 90 more documents to read. Slow but steady progress.
> I went to a lawyer and was told it wasn't worth suing, because they required arbitration in NYC, which would cost more than I would save.
It sounds like arbitration does not work, according to people who had their lawyer look into it for this exact case. What are your thoughts on it given this new information available to you?
Curious who that lawyer is. Because for financial arbitration, the win rates are ridiculously skewed in favour of borrowers and retail investors.
I'd like to read it and add it to this list: https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/references/
That said, I do know bank lobbying group who want to outlaw arbitration for unaccredited investors. Will pass this along.
To the extent possible id like to strongman arbitration but need to find sources.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-c...
normal name - normal spelling - ok weird name - normal spelling - ok weird name - weird spelling - ok normal name - weird spelling - no go
I don't want to hear some Jane Austen excuse either.
It doesn't matter what your political leanings are or what you think about the matter at hand. No agency should have the much power to be the judge jury and executioner. Oh and also to just write laws at a whim.
This is really not cool. I have no idea how anybody who calls them selves an American can be cool with this.
> The investment is largely coming from Gigafund, the VC started by ex-Founders Fund partners in 2017 originally to put more money into SpaceX, with Tandem Fund and Y Combinator (where Lambda School was incubated) also participating. Its list of other backers include GV, GGV, and Stripe. (Tommy Collison, the head of business development at Lambda, is the younger brother of the two Collison brothers who co-founded Stripe.)
https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/21/lambda-school-raises-74m-f...
Paul Graham, 2022: "Of 1277 students who graduated from Lambda School in 2020 and sought jobs, 950 got them, for a placement rate of 74.8%.
(Lambda's weirdly dedicated haters will be happy to hear that these numbers were audited by an accounting firm.)" [2]
Need to know number of people who started program and number of people who got jobs at the end.
> Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.
I wish I was kidding.
"For a few months in 2013, Allred camped out of his car while in Silicon Valley, and frequently describes this period as having been homeless. However, a deleted post on his blog titled 'Voluntarily Homeless in Silicon Valley' explains that he lived out of a car by choice."
Uhh, when people talk of living out of a vehicle in the context of homelessness, they're talking about people parked in the back corner of a Walmart lot with their laundry and many earthly possessions beside them, not social media creators making YouTube videos for "#vanlife".
> I did say the hiring rate of a cohort of one student was 100%. And in the same tweet I said, in all caps BUT VERY SMALL SAMPLE SIZE. Odd how that doesn’t make the article, don’t you think?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813371
Incidentally, it did make it into the article he's referring to, twice.
Like the only thing he knows how to do is fudge things with dark patterns to achieve growth at any cost
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-takes...
I recently met a liberal arts student from an Ivy League university who has been under-employed for twenty years. She still has unpaid student loans and she graduated in 2007! She has had to work in retail positions from time to time. And she's considering retraining via a vocational school to be an electrician because that's what her father and brothers do and they make 300K+ a year via the family business.