Skip to main content

Free Coding Bootcamp 'Lambda' Tries Selling Its Income-Sharing Agreements -- In Bundles

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: In December, online coding bootcamp Lambda School quietly partnered with Edly, a digital marketplace that helps schools sell income-sharing agreements (ISAs) to accredited investors. The arrangement allows Lambda to receive money from the ISAs upfront, rather than waiting for students to find jobs. But it also flies in the face of the values Lambda typically espouses: namely, that ISAs align its incentives with the goals and aspirations of the students...

Lambda's ISAs promise an alternative to traditional student loans by allowing students to defer tuition until they've landed a job that pays $50,000 a year or more. When that happens, they hand over 17 percent of their income until the $30,000 tuition is paid off. If students don't find work within five years of completing the program, the ISA is automatically dissolved. It's a business model that allows Lambda to brag about investing in students — which, in many ways, it still does. The school provides living stipends and even housing to some students who need it. But reselling ISAs muddies the narrative a bit since Lambda can make money long before students find jobs...

Shortly after the arrangement was called out on Twitter, following a report by The Verge about some students' disappointment with the curriculum, Edly began taking down pages that referenced the Lambda partnership. Edly did not immediately respond to a request for comment about why these pages were taken down, and Lambda declined to comment on the nature of the partnership at all.

"I wonder why Lambda isn't so keen on seeing discussions about how students are being packed into the same kind of CDOs that brought us the financial crisis," tweeted David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, who's been tweeting screenshots of Edly's past statements about their ambitions as well as links to Google's cache of Edly's pitches to investors.

Last year Wired reported that nearly half of Lambda's ISAs had at least partly been sold off to investors. They also note that in January of 2019, Lambda "received $30 million from investors including Google Ventures, Y Combinator, and Ashton Kutcher."


from Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters https://ift.tt/2wjkcXr
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

An anonymous reader shares a report: On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors' exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31 . BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan. Speed matters during an outbreak, and tight-lipped Chinese officials do not have a good track record of sharing information about diseases, air pollution, or natural disasters. But public health officials at WHO and the CDC have to rely on these very same health of...

4 Trends that are Transforming the Future of Healthcare

4 Trends that are Transforming the Future of Healthcare Yoav Vilner / AI , Health , ReadWrite From drinking one’s own urine as a cure for broken bones to blood-letting to sending electrical shocks through a person’s body as a cure for mental illness — healthcare has a somewhat jaded past. Fortunately, as technology has improved our ability to study human physiology, medical professionals have become increasingly adept at diagnosing and curing […] from ReadWrite - The Blog of Things https://ift.tt/37qWAxu via IFTTT

New Web Service Can Notify Companies When Their Employees Get Phished

Starting today, companies across the world have a new free web service at their disposal that will automatically send out email notifications if one of their employees gets phished . From a report: The service is named " I Got Phished " and is managed by Abuse.ch, a non-profit organization known for its malware and cyber-crime tracking operations. Just like all other Abuse.ch services, I Got Phished will be free to use. Any company can sign-up via the I Got Phished website. Signing up only takes a few seconds. Subscribing for email notifications is done on a domain name basis, and companies don't have to expose a list of their employee email addresses to a third-party service. Once a company's security staff has subscribed to the service, I Got Phished will check its internal database for email addresses for the company's email domain. This database contains logs from phishing operations, with emails for phished victims. from Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff tha...