(2017-08-07) Lambda School Aims To Cash In By Upskilling Untapped Talent

Lambda School aims to cash in by upskilling untapped talent. Access to the expensive education typically needed to stand a chance of obtaining one of the jobs of the future. Y Combinator backed Lambda School is hoping to change this, with a model for funding higher education that aims to shoulder the risk burden on behalf of talented students, absorbing tuition fees until each person is in a position to pay — and thereby investing in “underrepresented human potential”, as co-founder Austen Allred puts it.

“The ‘careers of the future’ is our original niche. And then we’ll expand out from there,” he says.

I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley especially underestimate how big of a risk it is to go to school for four years, and put it all on student loans, and hope that it all works out on the other side

if you’re a Coding bootcamp and you charge people $10,000 up front, $20,000 up front, that’s a lot of money and the vast, vast majority of people just can’t afford that.

Allred says it’s reducing risk by being selective about the students it accepts onto the program. Indeed, that’s what he describes as key to the model. Although he also accepts that trying to judge who might be a good student (and worker) vs who might not is “not a hard science by any means”.

“If we were going based on sheer credentials it’s almost an inverse performance that we’ve seen so far,” he says

On top of a generic application, he says the team has developed “logic queries

The computer science program runs 9am to 6pm PT, though Allred notes a lot of students also spend the night doing some extra study — “so it’s pretty much a full time plus a little bit commitment for six months”. (Which does mean students still have to find a way to fund their own living costs for a full six months.)