Second part: How do you assess this beyond prior school/work history or how quickly they finish the prep course? I could see it being much more difficult to assess with older students/parents/people who struggled in school etc.
Third part: As a non-programmer, any examples of one of these steep curves?
I wasn't meaning to imply the demand isn't there, was just trying to picture LS at scale in 3-5 years (say 25k-100K students a year).
Do you think that 75%+ placement is possible at scale -- I'd assume abandonment/failing students etc would increase greatly similar to other "open enrollment" coding bootcamps.
Regardless, it clearly is a +EV decision for any student who is able to get in. Congrats on creating a great product.
We don't have any "issues" in the sense of things that will kill us immediately, with the possible exception of an out of the blue regulation, so I try to spend time on Capitol Hill from time to time to make sure they know the good we're doing.
But really it's just that things take time. Two years ago we didn't exist. Now we have over 1,000 concurrent students, 60+ full-time employees, and 120+ contract technical mentors. And mostly we think about product and how to make everything better as quickly as we can.
We want to continue improving everything as we 10x the number of students and open up opportunities to more people, all while improving our outcomes (https://lambdaschool.com/outcomes). It's just hard to do.
My guess is as the number of participants goes up, the quality of the student will decline and many will never get to payback employment levels. But it just has to work enough to make good margin.
Right now they can cherry pick the most promising. And learning something is different than doing it as a career. I personally know 2 bootcamp (not Lambda) grads who subsequently left software altogether since it wasn’t as much fun as they thought. Learning new stuff in a fun, hip, environment is great! Debugging some 5 year old production code while the customer is howling on Christmas Eve...not so much.
Overall though I’m a fan of non-traditional education so I think there is a place for this. I am also an employer and am in favor of increasing talent supply and reducing wage pressures.
We’re seeing over 1,000 applications/week. Top of funnel is not our issue.