As the saying goes, the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. Also not evenly distributed: 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.
Both he and his co-founder had wanted to study computer science at college but ended up dropping out because of the expense, he says. This experience gave them the idea to restructure tuition fees for remote learning — starting with a computer science program but with the ambition of expanding out to teach “anything and everything” in future.
A second course, in machine learning and AI, is in the works. After that they’ll launch a program teaching mobile development and one focused on bioinformatics. “The ‘careers of the future’ is our original niche. And then we’ll expand out from there,” he says.
Allred describes the startup as “as much as a fintech play as an education play” — with “as much finance and psychology” underpinning it as technology.
“Both my co-founder and I come from very conservative financial backgrounds. So were on our own to pay for college,” he tells TechCrunch. “We come from a really small town and we see a lot of people who are very talented and kind of underemployed just because they’ve never had the opportunity. And 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.”
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.
The school currently offers students a six-month intensive course in computer science, with all its lectures and classes delivered online but live and interactive (rather than pre-recorded and self-paced) — for which they’re asking students to pay as little as nothing up front.
If students choose to pay nothing up front, payment comes later — but only once they have a job earning more than $50,000. Then they pay 17 per cent of their income for two years (up to a maximum of $30k).
“Our main mission is just giving access to people for higher education and to get really high paying jobs,” says Allred. “The problem that we’ve found — that we thought would be the case but it was even more so the case than we had originally assumed — was if you’re a code 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.
“And that doesn’t mean they’re any less capable or any less talented, that just means that for one reason or another they come from a situation where they don’t have $20,000 in cash when they’re trying to start a new career which makes a lot of sense because they don’t have a career yet.”
Another difference he claims the program offers vs a coding bootcamp is being able to offer a “deeper” grounding in the subject matter — describing the current program as “closer to a CS degree than we are a bootcamp”.
Though there’s also, evidently, a strong focus on employability and teaching skills that are being demanded by employers now, rather than teaching theory for theory’s sake. Plus students won’t get any formal qualification on graduating from the program — rather the pledge is they’ll have the skills employers are looking to hire for.
And while there are some entirely free higher education courses available online, such as via MOOCS programs, the general difference of Lambda’s proposition is to offer a more guided and intense teaching experience, with an explicit focus on employability.
“We’re really looking to efficiently move people from unskilled to skilled and highly valuable,” is how Allred sums it up. “Because we are investing in people instead of having them pay up front we can go a lot deeper and have a much longer program [than a bootcamp] and that is going to show when our students go get jobs.
“It all comes down…