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Comment by LMYahooTFY | Hacker News Reader

This a sad amount of dog piling for HN.

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.

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If 90% of students have a good experience but the 10% of students have a similar experiences to the poster there, then I still think Lambda is another ethical disaster of a start-up.

"It's better than a typical USA student loan" is a very low bar.

> "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.

Not with learning programming.

You can simply self-teach.

A bootcamp isn't a CS degree.

Between smarts, motivation, and time most people cannot "simply self-teach". There's a reason education is such a massive industry, and entire professions exist around it.

I'm refuting the notion that your only choices are college degrees or bootcamps.

There are absolutely other choices. But those choices won't work for the vast majority of people.

There are also other careers with which you can make a good living.

Not everything can be for everybody.

I'm not sure all the ISA issues are clearly stated in the contract, or whether they were clearly stated in all the contacts, before they started to get into trouble.

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.

Can you point out the lies? I'm genuinely trying to find them, and the CFPB article does not provide any evidence other than a few marketing quotes.

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.

It seems like you are implying that lies in "marketing quotes" are not real lies? I don't think that this is the case.

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.

Everything I had seen said you’d only pay if they helped you land a programming job. It looks like more than a few people were surprised when the actual terms allowed them to collect a percentage of income from unrelated employment. I never went through the program, but I’ve seen more than enough marketing and promotion from it; these revelations are quite surprising to me.

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.

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