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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

The incentives for the bootcamp model are just so completely broken. You suck in people with promises of a career, have them pay $10k each, and if they don't get a job it's somehow their fault. It's really hard for word of mouth and reputation to kill a bootcamp because the demand outstrips supply right now. You could really suck, buy users with advertising, and make a killing for a looooong time.

I truly hope the future of education is something in which the incentives of the school are aligned with the students, and if the student fails the school doesn't get paid.

<shameless plug> We've been trying to do that at https://lambdaschool.com. We're a 6 month CS or Machine Learning/AI education, and instead of students paying up front we give them an education for free and take a portion of future earnings if they get a job in their field that pays >$50k/yr. If they don't get a job in their field it's 100% free.</shameless plug>

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At the course I did the model was the education is completely free, if you then get a job afterwards you're expected to let the bootcamp try to get a recruiter fee from the company that hires you.

Or you stick around, freelance out the space on the projects they help you find and then give them a 10% contribution of those earnings and also teach the next cohort how to code.

Seemed to work pretty well.

That model works as well, but then the school is disincentivized from getting you work at most companies that don't pay a recruiting fee. If we get a recruiting fee we deduct that from the total owed.

Interesting idea. Looking at your website " $0 up-front + 17% of salary for 2 yrs (or $20,000 up-front) "

is 17% before or after tax? Also does location/country matter?

Before tax, $30,000 maximum, and currently only available in the US for a variety of reasons.

It's an interesting idea, but according to software engineering average salaries, seems like that "cap" will most of the time be met, making the cost of your bootcamp way higher than most.

I don't really get the "it's costly argument" since it is still education, and most education (at least in the US) and usually way more expensive than that.

I paid 10k upfront for 3 month bootcamp and got a job in a few weeks. Because I got the job through the referral system of the bootcamp, I got 5k back on my tuition. This seems like a good deal to me. The bootcamp was aligned with my success because they make more money through the referral also.

The program you're looking at isn't a bootcamp, it's closest to (but not equivalent to) a CS degree. Our bootcamp is $3k up-front, though we'll likely phase it out as there's a lot you simply can't teach in three months that good software engineers need to know.

And 10k up front isn't a big deal for me, and it may not be for you, but a lot of our students were making <$20k/yr before they joined, so the risk is enormous, especially when you look at the failure rate for bootcamps. Glad it worked out for you.

I'm going to second what the parent said just to reinforce it. $10k is a crazy amount of money for most Americans to drop for a purchase with that much uncertainty.

At Lambda you charge 17% of the first two years of salary (down from 3 years previously).

At a salary of $80,000 that's 27 thousand of tuition. That seems extremely expensive for a non-accredited education.

The pricing was never three years. And built into that is expensive instructors (hailing from Stanford, Berkeley, NASA), small class sizes, potential default, and the ability to attend all other LambdaSchool classes in perpetuity.

So for about the price of 1 semester of private tuition (or about 50% more than the top bootcamps), it's not unreasonable, especially when attached to a guarantee you'll be paid $90k/yr while you're paying for it. It's capped at $30k so that's the maximum payback.

Not sure what the pricing will be long-term.

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