Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years
This article takes the angle that Lambda&#x27;s profitability efforts may hurt its students:<p>&gt; the school can still reach profitability by enrolling 2,000 students a month while only placing less than half of its graduates in qualifying jobs.<p>&gt;Class sizes are like 150 students to one instructor — I&#x27;ve only heard that number going up<p>I don&#x27;t see what the problem is here. For students, the only cost associated with Lambda is the opportunity cost. The incentives are still aligned here -- the school wants people to get placed. It can&#x27;t &quot;scam&quot; students with higher teacher:student ratios or bad curriculums without hurting its bottom line. If it&#x27;s failing at teaching students, that&#x27;s incompetence, not a drive for profitability. If only 40% of students get placed -- that&#x27;s still 40% more than would have been placed without Lambda, right?<p>&gt;&quot;Those students that are in the bottom 10%, why would they invest resources into helping those students succeed? Just let them fail out after six months&quot;<p>...exactly? You are going to school for free. The school is not obligated to waste resources on students falling behind, because those students aren&#x27;t paying anything.<p>If you think 6 months of wasted time is a bad deal, just wait until I tell you about this other educational program that lasts 4 years, costs over $100,000, and has a much lower placement rate: Your local university&#x27;s liberal arts degrees.<p>Still, it&#x27;s unfortunate to hear that Lambda is playing the same placement-rate games as bootcamps. I&#x27;m surprised they have to do this at all; if I was running admissions, I would be extremely selective, only accepting extremely bright students that I feel the university system had &quot;missed,&quot; to get placement rates as high as possible. Maybe they try to do this, and this is just a sad sign of the state of non-college education opportunities?