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.