Lambda School wants to teach nursing
I am skeptical that these income sharing agreements are so great. Especially in software.<p>Lambda School has a 9 month program that takes a 17% cut of your salary for the first 24 months of employment with a cap at $30,000. Which many students in software will hit, especially in high COL areas.<p>It&#x27;s worth noting that this is <i>more expensive</i> than many&#x2F;most universities, which charge less than $30,000 per year (9 months of instruction) even at the sticker price (which no one actually pays).<p>In fact, I wonder whether bootcamps are even cheaper than the full cost of university. The average student loan debt upon graduation for all US university students is $29,400 (again, for four years of college education with access to both applied and fundamental courses across many different majors vs. a 9 month boot camp focused on a particular skill set).<p>To be concrete: by taking out a loan for what lambda school costs, you could double major in both nursing <i>and</i> CS at a state U for about the same amount of post-graduation debt as you would have at bootcamps. Or CS and Econ. Or CS and Accounting. Or CS and Mechanical Engineering. In states that still invest in higher ed, you&#x27;ll end up paying less (even with interest) than you&#x27;d pay lambda school.<p>There&#x27;s a natural experiment on this question at Purdue, where there&#x27;s an apples-for-apples comparison and loans are almost always cheaper than the income sharing agreement.<p>To me, these income sharing agreements and bootcamps seem like not great deals when you look at instruction time per dollar. And also when you look at the longitudinal durability of the skill-set that&#x27;s being taught. They have a place in the market for sure, but they aren&#x27;t the panacea to expensive education. They&#x27;re not even cost-competitive.<p>They&#x27;re just a different point in the design space of educational programs that extract as much of the added value of their product as possible.