Lambda School claims 86% of grads get jobs paying over $50,000 a year. In a new report, Lambda’s founder admits the real number is much lower. Additionally, internal documents show Lambda can be profitable if even 1 in 4 grads get a job. Lambda plans to enroll 10,000 students in 2020. From the report: The point of a coding boot camp, obviously, is to help you get a better job. Lambda’s claim, reproduced on its website, that “86% of Lambda School graduates are hired within 6 months and make over $50k a year” is an understandably attractive proposition for students — and a key pillar of Lambda’s marketing. Students I talked to confirmed that the feeling that it was likely that they would be able to land high-paying jobs was a key part of deciding to attend. However, a May 2019 Lambda School investment memo — entitled “Human Capital: The Last Unoptimized Asset Class” — written for Y Combinator and obtained by Intelligencer, tells a very different story. In a section warning that student-debt collections may prove too low, it matter-of-factly states that, “We’re at roughly 50% placement for cohorts that are 6 months graduated.” A recent interviewee for work at Lambda School also confirmed to me that the company’s own internal numbers, which the interviewee was provided as part of their interview process, seem to indicate a roughly 50 percent or lower placement rate.

So where does that 86 percent figure come from? Lambda has reported graduate-outcome statistics at the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), a voluntary trade organization of coding boot camps whose purpose is to ensure that participating schools publish truthful information about student outcomes. Lambda School founder Austen Allred has often used this report to defend his company online. But where other boot camps have multiple reports spanning many student cohorts, Lambda has only reported statistics for its first 71 graduates — 86 percent of who, the school claims, found jobs. Sheree Speakman, the CEO of CIRR, told me that Lambda has not undergone the standard independent auditing for the sole report it has submitted, and that her communications to Lambda School regarding further reporting and auditing have gone unanswered. Lambda’s former director of career readiness, Sabrina Baez, told me that placing Lambda’s first batch of students was extremely difficult, largely owing to how underdeveloped the curriculum was at the time. When asked about Lambda’s claim that 86 percent of its first graduates were placed within six months, she told me, “I would say out of that 71 students, within six months of them graduating it was probably a 50-60 percent placement rate,” and added that Allred sometimes exaggerated student-placement progress on Twitter — recalling, as an example, an instance in which she told Allred that a student might receive an offer soon, only to find out later that he had tweeted that the student had already received an offer. Further reading: The High Cost of a Free Coding Bootcamp.

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Source:: Slashdot