I don't disbelieve you, but the fact that this "holy shit amazing" job in a highly-skilled and in-demand field pays less than I was earning at McDonald's when I was 14 makes me extremely concerned about what Americans have been convinced is normal.

“Amazon Can Only Claim Their Jobs Are Decent Because American Work Has Gotten So Miserable

Amazon maims its workers and drives wages down, yet the company still attracts job applicants and claims to provide “good jobs.” Those claims were strong enough to play a role in the defeat of a union effort in Bessemer, Alabama — but that says less about Amazon than it does about the miserable state of the labor market.“

Source: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/04/amazon-bessemer-alabama-u...

So that would put it at roughly $15 * 48 hours * 48 weeks. For 35k. I agree, that's devastating.

US national holidays mean nothing in the context of employment. The US does not require private employers to close, pay extra, or provide paid time off for those holidays.

That e.g. personal health costs are included in there obviously, uh, muddies things.

https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Software-Engineer/Dublin-Ire...

I guess the 15$/h figure is the equilibrium point for that. It's probably a little bit below the costs to completely automate these jobs.

This is a new asset class, investors are going to dig deep and understand it. They will certainly have access to more data and analysis than the average student.

However, if the government were to start to guarantee the loans and the volume hit an impossible level, and people got used to minimal defaults for 20 years then that would lay the groundwork for the type of disaster you suggest.

(I am not affiliated with labda or any of its investors)

Instead of running the entire school on venture capital, which wouldn't make sense (VCs need a huge return per dollar), we use an advance from investors based on the future value of an ISA to offset the cost.

If we work with investors to say that an ISA will be worth $x, we can borrow $x minus interest the same way you would be able to for any other asset.

Of course, that amount needs to be repaid. So it's still completely risk-aligned.

This makes sense for liquidity, but ultimately the ISAs are what has to provide the funding (or it's not a viable business).

As the investment terms improve, the portion of the ISA payout spent on training has to go down.

You are correct that the ISAs need to pay out to be an interesting investment, but if you are pricing the ISA to what the investment market will pay instead of what the training costs, it's not exactly a better deal for the students.

The financing is all cashflow management behind the scenes that doesn’t really matter.

A Stanford grad doesn’t know what the marginal cost of their enrollment is.

Otherwise, how does a student that doesn't land a job and whose ISA will never repay fit into this model?

Also every student is quite expensive. We gain nothing and lose a lot by enrolling students who don’t get hired.

The article is wrong in many different ways, this is only one of them.

1 - Is Lambda going to train engineers already hired at Amazon and is just going to provide an onboarding bootcamp for new hires? Doesn't sound like a bad idea considering Amazon's scale and the amount of internal tooling they must have.

2 - Is Lambda going to supply bootcamp-grads programmers to Amazon?

3 - What do they mean by "Back-End"? Is it Software Engineering roles or back-end customer service/SRE they are training them for?

https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/lambda-school-launches-... https://lambdaschool.com/courses/backend-development

Ahh, so getting devs familiar with Amazon's product offerings.