ehairston

Thank you so much for sharing!

Glad our service could resonate with you. Thanks for support!

Wow! You highlighted exactly what we've heard from sooo many students: OH being slammed during projects as a major pain point.

To avoid helping students cheat, we have all Edlyft mentors agree to an academic honesty policy, go through mentor training, and all are interviewed before they join Edlyft. We've also considered recording sessions as well, but haven't gone that route yet.

But more than that it's been fascinating to watch some of our mentor sessions. What we've seen happen is some students actually prefer to use Edlyft to become an "excellent" CS student and hone their understanding of concepts vs. getting hw done just for the grade. My hypothesis on this is that our mentor sessions are unlike traditional office hours where you may only get 10min of TA attention. So, when students are able to slow down and really grasp concepts, doing hw on their own gets easier.

Great question! We've built our model so that for every full price paying student, we can admit a need-based financial aid student.

Completely agree. CS departments deserve a ton of credit for having to adjust to insane levels of growth that are unlike any other department.

Also you're spot on about Cal. In fact, I too questioned whether or not it made sense for us to launch there at first, especially given that they have such a topnotch CS program with incredible resources. However when we spoke to 100s of students there before we launched, we quickly learned that the competitive environment still resulted in so many students slipping through the cracks. Moreover, we encourage Edlyft mentors to direct students to existing resources on campus as well. Edlyft should not be a replacement for these existing resources, but instead a supplemental option where students feel they can be a little more vulnerable.

Lastly, our characterization of the climate in schools comes directly from students' experiences and our own. Cal definitely has tons of resources that I only wished I had access to when I was in school. However many schools are still very far from getting there, leading to so much talent being overlooked. Edlyft should not have to exist and we're successful when it no longer needs to.

That's a great idea! Especially now that students are alone and off campus, the community aspect has become even more important.

Congrats on making it through and thank you for sharing! Your story resonates so much with me and so many of our students. Often the content isn't the most discouraging part, but instead the environment. So well said!

You're spot on; we were very intentional about starting niche in these intro weed out STEM courses because we recognized that there was a huge gap in the system and a "hair on fire" problem we could solve: 50% of STEM students switch majors & most who completed undergrad had no idea how much their major choice would impact their career. Dropping these intro classes often is the difference between graduating with a STEM degree & an in-demand job or struggling for a lot longer. This felt like a low-hanging fruit spot to make huge impact.

Some poster children for tutoring are: Chegg, Kaplan and Crimson Education. The way we avoid the "off network" issue (which I've definitely done myself before as well), is by offering group sessions. With this model, we're able to offer students way more help for much cheaper than paying an hourly 1:1 tutor fee. Edlyft Mentors also love tutoring for Edlyft because they are usually CS majors trying to build their resume and we are a YC-backed tech startup. To avoid "do my hw for me", we have all mentors agree to an academic honesty policy, go through mentor training, and all are interviewed before they join Edlyft.

Love the question on convincing YC! Our key insight was that 70% of coding bootcampers already have their bachelor's degree. This is way higher than most realize. Edlyft is tackling the Lambda School problem from a different angle that is much lower cost and higher margins, meaning we don't need to teach curriculum. Instead, we reach students when they are already in an environment for learning and have less responsibility (no kids or full time jobs usually). We give them the support they need to graduate the first time with the skills they would have paid an additional thousands of dollars for in the future.