An anonymous reader shares a report: Leaked documents from company all-hands meetings in the summer of 2020 and January and February of this year, led by the school’s now former chief operating officer, Molly Graham, who resigned earlier this month, and others led by its chief business officer, Matt Wyndowe, showed that Lambda School placed only 30% of its 2020 graduates in qualifying jobs during the first half of 2020. This figure is in stark contrast to the 74% placement rate it advertised for its 2019 graduates, the latest figure the school has made publicly available. In a tweet, Graham wrote that her mission was to “get the company through a pivotal phase” and position it to “operate well without me.” These documents, given to Insider by a person familiar with the meetings, alongside over a dozen interviews with former Lambda School students and instructors, suggest that Graham is leaving with that mission far from accomplished.
Cofounded in 2017 by the tech entrepreneurs Austen Allred and Ben Nelson, with help from the startup accelerator Y Combinator, Lambda School offered a nontraditional path for those seeking careers in computer science. In lieu of a four-year degree, students could take a crash course in programming while paying no tuition up front; an income-share agreement allowed students to pay the school a portion of their salary after being hired in a tech job with an annual salary of at least $50,000. Blog posts advertised it as “incentive-aligned” education. With the global edtech industry worth more than $106 billion as of this year, schools have popped up across North America promising to teach students using a similar business model. Lambda School itself has raised a total of $122 million from venture capital. Lambda School enrolls thousands of students a year and has indicated it plans on growing many times over to give investors profitable returns on the investments they’ve made.
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Source:: Slashdot