Launch HN: Lambda School (YC S17) – CS education that's free until you get a job
We're Lambda School (https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science). We train people to become software engineers, and we charge nothing until a student gets a software job that pays more than $50k/yr. At that point we take 17% of income for two years (capped at a maximum of $30k total).
There are so many people held back from a high quality education simply because they can't afford the cost and/or risk. Even if you can get student loans, four years and a potential six figures of student loans is a daunting proposition, especially if you come from a lower-income background. New alternatives, such as code bootcamps, either require expensive loans or tens of thousands of dollars in cash up front, which most people don't have, and they vary widely in quality. This leaves a lot of very smart people working for not much money.
We're different. We're an educational institution that owns the risk: if you don't get a good job, we don't get paid. We do everything in small, interactive, online classes with world-class instructors (currently from Stanford, Berkeley, Hack Reactor, etc.). Our curriculum goes a lot deeper than code bootcamps as well; we use C++ and spend a lot of time with lower-level algorithms, data structures, architecture, scaling, etc.
The full curriculum is here: https://github.com/LambdaSchool/LambdaCSA-Syllabus. Happy to answer any questions and looking forward to hearing feedback!
274 comments
[ 0.38 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadAside from that, you're essentially giving your students a loan and then having them repay it once they start earning money. How is this any different than a regular student loan (but with way more risk on your end)?
Great question. In addition to our income share agreement, each student submits a form to the IRS that will essentially copy us on their taxes. We have annual reconciliation based on those numbers to see if they match a student's self-reported numbers.
> You're essentially giving your students a loan and then having them repay it once they start earning money.
Eh, kind of. The biggest difference is if they don't get a job that pays $50k+ they don't pay us. Also, if you ever lose a job, your payments stop until you're back on your feet.
It's an equity instrument, and we think it's much better and more forgiving than loans as a result of that.
Might be smarter to just get paid more :)
What prevents someone with no intention of finding a job of signing up for the free education?
EDIT: I'm entirely serious about part two. I know quite a few people that would love to learn programming but, AFAIK, have no intention of working in the tech world. I could see them taking advantage of something like this. Most of them work in non-tech functions in an office environment. So learning programming would be useful to them but it's not their actual job.
This is how it works in the UK and Australia with normal student debt. It's deferred until you're earning enough money and then is taken directly out of your pay cheque. Collection of the debt is also held off until you're earning a certain amount (in any field.)
> ... each student submits a form to the IRS that will essentially copy us on their taxes.
So it's not a truly universal online training environment, then? As a British citizen living in Australia, I can't file a form with the IRS, nor would I give the IRS my details for obvious reasons.
Honestly as someone who never went to university (I never finished school), is self-taught in C, assembly, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Go, and so on, and is now a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, I think your product is excellent. I was even considering asking to see what jobs you have on, but I don't have a degree, so yeah.
Keep up the good work. I hope you're successful.
I wonder whether this type of financing is more acceptable to Muslim students. Do most Muslims in the US avoid traditional student loans which charge interest?
> How do you know that your graduates are or aren't making more than 50k? How do you know that you're getting your 17%?
you can ask students to fill out and sign, as a condition of admission, forms authorizing the IRS to hand over their tax returns, in advance. it wouldn't be very hard to contract with a law firm to take the results and check to see if they had more than 50k of income, while ignoring/discarding all other information.
or just have them sign a thing saying they'll do X. if they lie, they're probably committing fraud. most folks don't run around committing high dollar fraud.
> Aside from that, you're essentially giving your students a loan and then having them repay it once they start earning money. How is this any different than a regular student loan (but with way more risk on your end)?
the point of this model is to lower risk for the student, and hope that the value you're providing is sufficient to offset the additional risk you're accepting.
Lambda School is six months long, online, and teaches CS fundamentals (computer architecture, operating systems, C++) in addition to full-stack web development and mobile development.
Lambda School also doesn't require a deposit.
1) Risk is pooled in the institution rather than distributed amongst the students, which is the textbook way to deal with uncorrelated risk.
2) The incentive of the university and the student are aligned as much as possible
3) By putting costs and benefits into a form with equal time horizons, disadvantaged students no longer need to rely on the generosity of governments or private lenders for upfront cash.
The only thing I'd always questioned was whether such a scheme as described above could pass legal muster, as it bears a resemblance to involuntary servitude, as well as requiring access to income statements. I've never heard of anyone but the govt placing liens on income. I'm hoping a workaround has been found, because from a strictly incentive based analogy, this model has the potential to do to modern education what patent law did to manufacturing
> The only thing I'd always questioned was whether such a scheme as described above could pass legal muster
Income share agreements are all-but blessed, at least in the US, and in Australia they pretty closely mirror how most student loans work.
> It bears a resemblance to involuntary servitude
The concerns of indentured servitude go away when you realize each student can live or work or do whatever they'd like, they willingly enter into the agreement, etc. We obviously want them to get a high-paying job, and it's in both of our best interests for them to do so.
I strongly disagree. Let universities be universities. The point of a university is to develop your mind, not train for a job. There's no reason we cannot have a parallel vocational system which teaches people practical skills. Let the market decide which one better serves students.
I think that's true in practice, but not in most university's marketing, or even the general cultural/social attitude towards going to university, which is in general viewed as the surest path to the best job.
> Let the market decide which one better serves students.
Most universities exist outside of the market in how they receive funding etc.
I did too, until I though about it a bit more. You'd end up with Universities cutting all of their "non-profitable" majors, but those things still have some value to society.
Perhaps a hybrid model, where the "profitable" majors are free but you pay afterwards, and the unprofitable ones you pay up front.
more likely (and IMO obviously, when you make this more concrete), educational institutions are overproducing the unprofitable degrees.
for instance, if some degree X is "unprofitable", do we really need to produce new PhDs in it at well above the replacement rate + population growth? that'd be maybe a handful of new PhDs per professor's _lifetime_. then maybe enough undergrads to ensure there's some competition for the PhD pipeline, and that should be about it.
Surely this is a typo, you mean voluntary servitude? But even so, if 17% can be considered servitude, then income tax would be involuntary servitude.
I also have questions about the quality of instruction. There are some big name institutions listed, but that doesn't necessarily indicate quality instruction. The best researchers are often emphatically not the best instructors, and for this venture instructors are much more important.
I sincerely hope this is successful; perhaps this can prompt traditional institutions to be more innovative (in delivery, instruction, finance, all of it).
This is very true. Most of our instructors are refugees from an academic world; they really just want to teach, and research for them was a necessary evil.
We have a pretty rigorous hiring process (and we're hiring now! careers@lambdaschool.com)
>I'd be interested to see more on the syllabus
What would you like to see?
Not OP, but I think your "syllabus" is seriously lacking in detail. For example, you have a week and a half of "operating systems" That is summarized as 4 bullet points. I would really expect to see at least a paragraph under each of the three sections describing exactly what a student should understand after completing each module. For the operating systems section, I would like to see something like this for the first half of week 19:
|Operating Systems II
|After completing this section, students should be able to describe the various levels of memory used by modern computers, including CPU caches, RAM and swap space. Students should understand how each of these levels of memory are used during program execution. Additionally, students should understand how memory is addressed, including physical and virtual addressing, how memory is managed and allocated by the operating system, and how memory may be shared by multiple processes on the same system.
It tells me:
• What grads know when they get out
• How they apply what they've learned
• How it applies to my workplace if I'm considering hiring them
Building the competencies? There could be a bit more information regarding that once the activities to build the competencies is run through.
If you're looking for more of that content to be posted publicly, that may be a separate question.
What these programs need most of all are cheap dormitories that offer room and board. (Close proximity to students can also help provide one another with a support network.)
That's also true, but it's much more easily for someone to find a place to crash for six months than to come up with $10k out-of-pocket.
Eventually we'll be able to provide a stipend for living expenses and/or dormitory style living as well, but for now it is what it is.
Right now, the people who need to learn to code need room and board, not yet another free coding school.
There are a lot of great resources, no doubt, but those don't really compare to an in-person experience with an instructor and a school incentivized to take you all the way to hired.
Plus in time a Lambda qualification may become more respected by employers than a Coursera degree.
Udacity's full stack developer nano degree was co-created by Amazon, Google, GitHub, and ATT. Lambda is light years behind.
There's actually a program called Make School that's pretty similar to this Lambda school, except they DO have student dorms and even offer a 2k/month living stipend in SF. Finding Make School on ProductHunt a few years ago was probably one of the highlights of my young adulthood.
https://www.makeschool.com/product-college https://www.producthunt.com/posts/makeschool-gap-year
Ask since I've looked at this model before and while I'm not able to find it, I recall court cases that ruled against this type of finical agreement.
We are working with VEMO http://vemo.com/ISAinitiative/ they are specialized in ISA - most schools are using them.
Back in the early 80's my dad ( a chess teacher from Odessa ) immigrated to NYC ( with just $150 ). My mom worked 3 jobs to put him through Yeshiva Uni where he learned Cobol, JCL, and Fortran.
He ended up getting hired right away by Lehman Bros, and realized he was sitting on a gold-mine. Tons of well-educated immigrants were coming onto the golden-paved shores, with 0 knowledge of computer programming.
So we upgraded our family 1.5 bdrm apt in Jackson Heights, Queens, to a modest 3 bedroom tower apt in Forest Hills, where he proceeded to lecture evening and weekend classes by the droves.. (all on 1 white board!) * my job ( i was 13 at the time ) was to serve everyone instant coffee and bagels.
One day I was curious and asked him “Dad, these folks can barely speak english.. how are they going to even pass their interviews?” — he looked up from his hand-drawn spreadsheet he kept a strict record of students..”Oh that part is easy… I already know all their future managers” — It was the perfect funnel.
best of luck fellas!
Alas running a digital studio, a startup, and being a father to a wild 5yr old boy has produced few disposable hours(sigh)
..however weekly Medium posts is something i've been meaning to do...especially as im living abroad.
thanks for the encouragement.
Your schedule is full day learning. So now I wonder: are you targeting people who are out of jobs? It seems a little confusing to understand your criteria of recruiting students (I have not paid too much attention yet).
For me personally, if there is a part time option (4 days a week even) this would be hugely attractive.
Our schedule is full-time just because we're looking for people that are dedicated. We're working on part-time, but have to be more careful with that, as it would be about a year long.
Let's say I think I am dedicated (I know you'll have your own criteria on identifying my dedication). Say that I am in high school. How do you expect me to study during your defined hours full time? The best I could think of is dedicating my full time hours during summer vacation (if I have to let go of my part time job, camps, or home-work - testing, AP etc).
The same would apply when I am in college trying to get a degree.
In addition, I also don't see how any full time working individual could find time to accommodate learning schedule during the day. Say that I may be looking to change career.
I get the dedication part but some people may have commitments that they can't avoid at all - childcare, for example. Having commitments shouldn't be confused with lacking dedication, IMO. For me, the biggest USP about a remote school, or any MOOC really, is the flexibility that it offers. Structured, yes, but 3-5 hours a day would be more manageable than 9-5 five days a week. That will probably add extra months to the course though - but that's OK, a Masters takes 1-2 years for comparison.
Of course Lambda instructors are world-class, but technically you can train yourself; there are very good guides signposting to free resources, and online communities for support. It might not be to the level of depth that the Lambda course offers, but is indepth knowledge really a key employability trait? (I'm not questioning the value of knowledge.) After all, many recruiters now emphasise on having a good portfolio over a certificate.
But hey this is more like a feedback than a criticism. I sincerely think that this concept is super and hope that the Academy succeeds :)
It feels like a very fine line between altruism and taking advantage of ignorance.
And what is your plan to prevent you from changing your terms later?
This is what I could get from their website.
https://lambdaschool.com/about
> Attending Lambda School is completely free up-front, and students pay back a portion of their income after they find a high-paying job.
> If, for some reason, a student is unable to find a job with a salary above the set threshold, they are not required to pay anything. The total amount of repayment is also capped at a pre-determined maximum amount.
How long is the statute of limitations before I no longer have to pay?
What if I am unable to get a job, and then later do a paid-for program that does land a job?
What if I get a job as in QA, Program/Product Management?
What will stop you from changing your terms mid-course and require me to accept new terms before finishing?
You sign an agreement at the beginning of the course, so we can't change terms on you.
I also noticed a mini web dev bootcamp, when will this be launched?
Thanks :)
It's vague, but what we really look for is dedication and a love for programming itself (as opposed to wanting to make more money), which exhibits itself in a variety of ways.
We hope to move to a model soon where as long as you complete code challenge x, you're enrolled, but we're not there.
We're online-only, focus on CS not building apps, 6 months long (vs 2 yrs), a bit less expensive, and generally speaking target different markets.
I don't have anything bad to say about Make School. Have never met them, but they seem like they're doing a fine job!
We have a 4 term sequence of CS courses that cover most if not all the topics listed on your curriculum page. These topics are also touched upon and put to practice in our mobile, web, and to some extent our data science courses.
It's only our Summer Academy which caters to students enrolled at others schools on summer vacation which focuses on app or VR development.
* What is the style for the actual lectures?
* Are you using any tools aside from screencasting and chat to supplement the lectures?
* Your courses are listed as full time, 9-6 affairs. What is the typical schedule over the course of the day?
* Is there any room in the course/syllabus for the instructors to help students with questions about related topics not included in the syllabus? For example, a quick glance shows that you cover React Native's ListView but I see no mention of the newer FlatList or SectionList.
* Related, do you discuss why certain tools are chosen to be taught over others? And how to choose a library to use when presented with several seemingly similar options? For example, XMLHttpRequest vs fetch vs SuperAgent vs etc. vs your choice of axios. Same with react-navigation over other libraries. People unfamiliar with the field will undoubtedly hear about these other libraries or even get asked about them, so I'm a bit concerned about recommending this to someone without any background in programming at all.
If you're ever stuck you jump onto our #help channel on Slack and there's instantly someone available to help out. Chances are they've seen that problem before.
Once you're finished with your challenge or project you'll submit it as a pull request (we use Github for everything) and you'll have a code review. Sometimes those are in person, sometimes they're just comments left on code.
We have frequent brown bag lectures (lectures with industry experts) and office hours with instructors to discuss, well, anything.
Hope that helps!
Also, I'm still unsure about what tools will be used as part of the lectures. If it's really just screencasting + chat, I can't believe that the material will be conveyed all that well. At least as evidenced by how prepared your instructors seemed in the Archive videos. Sorry if it's a bit harsh, but my expectations are a bit high since I'm coming from a background that includes 5 years of teaching ESL.
Would be curious to know what disappointed you in the archive videos. I have a guess, but that's just my assumption.