I smell a business opportunity.
The side benefit of this model instead of a loan is that if, by chance, you don't get a job in software engineering, you never pay anything. It shifts the risk from the students to the school, which is IMO how it should be.
Also we're online, so you don't need to move anywhere (but still live instruction and world-class instructors).
> But then one has to be $$ enough to afford to not work for the time it takes to get educated or re-educated
You're right: Not everyone can afford to not work for six+ months. We don't have a perfect solution for everyone yet. But it's much easier for most Americans to find a way to stay alive for 6 months than it is for them to find $10,000 lying around. Basic subsistence, especially with a tiny bit of help from a safety net of some sort is generally close to within reach, and if it's not we don't have a way to help yet.
For example, we had a student last week that has been living with a friend, and we learned she was so poor she couldn't afford a computer to code with, and had been using an old Android tablet and a cloud editor. We shipped her one, but for many "enough to stay alive" is much, much easier to find than some amount of cash.
> If we actually had a skills gap that needed filling why aren't these employers who are faced with such a gaping skills gap hiring people and training them themselves?
Well, some do. Others have ridiculous recruiters' fees that are enough to pay for student tuitions. This is true not just of alternatives to higher ed, but of colleges. Why doesn't Google also become Stanford? Probably because that's a lot of work and what we have is close enough.
To be clear, with regard to SWE, I don't think there's that big of a skills gap. It's not like there's a desperate shortage for junior rails semi-devs out there. But employers definitely hire folks and they definitely pay big recruiting fees and there's definitely demand.
> Why are bootcamp graduates from tier 1 camps struggling to find actual work in their field for months?
Other than the requisite time to get your first job (which is generally 3-6 months regardless), I haven't seen that any from tier one bootcamps struggling to find work for months. Probably three months on average, but that's pretty normal. Maybe we have a different understanding of "tier 1."
> Why are these camps reporting inaccurate or highly embroidered outcomes to potential students?
Because crappy bootcamps want to lie and make money.
I mean look, there's ITT Tech, which is a complete rip-off for the vast majority of people, but that doesn't mean college in general is a bad thing for everyone. Somehow, though, that's how non-university programming academies get lumped together - one bad bootcamp? This entire idea must be horrible! As with everything, there are shades of grey.
I love this idea, thank you for starting this! I think this something there should be more of. I just looked at your site, and noticed the 3% acceptance rate for the $0 upfront cost tier. Just curious how that's changed over time as your exposure has increased. I assume you are trying to maintain some instructor/student ratio, etc? Are you willing to share what limits you from accepting more students at the $0 upfront tier? If so I'd love hear more, lmk.
We see hundreds of new applications per day and can only service a small fraction of them. Hopefully we can change that to some degree soon.
You'll want to know intermediate JavaScript coming in. We have courses that prepare you for that free, so apply and we'll figure it out.
The program is also quite different from regular education, we have no formal teachers, no lectures, students learn by working on projects and by collaborating with their classmates. Check us out https://www.holbertonschool.com/
It's indeed a "business opportunity" but I also believe that this the tuition model that post-secondary education should adopt if we consider that its main role is to train students to get a job after graduation. The success of schools should be proportional to students success.
The original document is called an income share agreement (ISA). It's not a debt instrument or a loan, but is actually a legally binding "equity" stake in a student's future income under specific circumstances for a specific amount of time. Lambda, for example, takes a percentage of income for two years, only if they're working in a software-related field, and only if they're making above $50k/yr. We also cap the amount paid over the two years at $30k, regardless of how much a student is making. So, yes, if they don't get a good job, we never get paid. That only seems fair.
As for how it works practically:
In conjunction with the ISA, each student signs a 4506-T or 4506T-EZ (or any successor form) with the IRS, which effectively copies us on their taxes.
Students self-report their salary, and we adjust payments according to their reports, until year-end reconciliation, which happens around tax time. We get their taxes and double check that their self-reporting has been accurate, and adjust accordingly.
Should a student default, we have the same remedies that any other private lender would - we reserve the right to report to credit bureaus, we can sell the agreements to collections, etc.
-How do you track students once program completes?
We are working with http://vemo.com/, they are specialized in Income Share Agreements (ISA) and the goto in the industry if you want to do ISA. Purdue University is also using them. Vemo request access to students tax return so that we can see their income.
- How does the legal binding works?
Students are supposed to let us know about their employment situation so that we can adjust the payment. The deal is that they pay 17% of their income if they make $50k/year or more. At the end of the year tax time, we do a reconciliation where we compare the amount received against the student income, where the student or the school might owe money to the other part.
What is great about this model is that: -Student only contributes back to the school if they are employed. -Student contribution is proportional to their "financial success". -Holberton can only thrive if its graduates thrive, no bs.
Effectively the government pays your undergraduate university fees. There is then an additional tax applied against your salary, after it reaches a certain threshold. This of course results in jokes that Arts graduates may as well be enjoying free tertiary education.
I think this is a much fairer system than being asked to pay upfront and perhaps taking out a student loan in order to pay fees. The Australian system allows any student with the ability and desire to attend University (it's not completely perfect, but it is much better).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Aus...
Federal loans (90% of all loans) come with income based repayment plans that charge 10% of your disposable income and are cancelled after 20 years if you don't pay it off.
If there is a new exception, please let me know. My wife has some.
Java / JSF / MyFaces is the best of both worlds, imo. No need to write most front-end javascript, 80% of dev time can be spent on business logic.
Schools like ITT Tech have shown, in my mind difinitively, that if you're willing to pay enough for student acquisition you can have absolutely terrible outcomes, still saddle up students with tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, fail to get them jobs, and for some inexplicable reason they'll still keep coming.
