In fact, if your starting salary is 80k, this is ten thousand dollars MORE THAN the average college debt! And no opportunities to branch out of software engineering. Your starting salary would have to be around 55-60k for you to take on less debt than a typical four year degree, even accounting for subsidized interest rates.

edit for downvotes: here's the math: Average college debt is 27ish k. Bump it up to 30k for interest.

    80000 * .25 * 2 = 40k.
    60000 * .25 * 2 = 30k.

Is there something I'm missing?

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You could argue that there's a two year opportunity cost here. I'm not so sure:

1) If your only goal is to become a web dev and you don't want any other background knowledge (that is, knowledge otuside of computer science), then you can do that in two years at most universities. What I mean by this is that the CS major portion of a degree is a little more than half your courseload most places.

2) But IMHO it's silly to major in CS without picking up a secondary major/minor in an interesting application area. So I it's at least debatable that there's a real opportunity cost benefit here.

Finally, to be fair, they seem well-connected. The YC etc. connections might help offset the comparatively high price.

it'd be interesting to read the fine print

it'd be interesting to know the tax implications of that 25% (is it pre tax/post tax)

it appears to be risk free, as in, what happens if you flake out and move to India, or develop a debillitation illness, or simply decide that programming isn't for you

which is substantially different than the non-dischargeable debt that you might take on to attend college