Why don’t ISA-powered schools partner with existing social and religious institutions?<p>Taking a church denomination as an example, if you’re a member, the church can subsidize tuition, and then once you graduate, they can hook you up with tech industry workers that are also members of the church. Because the church subsidizes tuition, you give up less of your income once you graduate. This arrangement would reduce the “dead weight loss” of people going through the boot camp and ending up underemployed because of low social capital/discovery. As the alumni network of Lambda + church grows, a larger number of people will want to pay it forward by helping the next generation. The church would facilitate this process formally.
Maybe ISAs wouldn't be a bad thing if these "schools" actually provided some value. But they mostly look to me like improvised garage schools providing the same knowledge that could be easily found online for free or for small fixed price + a sloppy support system that doesn't even remotely replicate the educational support system of traditional schools.<p>If they really want to disrupt education don't start by attempting to create some sort of novel pseudo-loan just to claim that they are tackling the student loans problem.<p>Start by creating an educational experience that can compete with top established schools by leveraging technology to cut costs and improve the learning of the students. Doing this would actually make the ISAs valuable, but you got to start by providing real quality.
I've made a MUCH more comprehensive list <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Wiuf6EXWJrtd9NWF9w7a7O6JJXbDX1qigLl4mJzSUVE/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Wiuf6EXWJrtd9NWF9w7a...</a>
The branding of schools using ISA's as "modern" and "tuition-free" (and the implied message of "better") is not going to do any favors to the reputation that these schools get for deceiving their students.
ISA == Income Share Agreement.<p>via <a href="https://lambdaschool.com/isa" rel="nofollow">https://lambdaschool.com/isa</a>
Strange that App Academy was left out, considering it was one of the earliest (if not the first?) ISA bootcamps. Full disclosure: I attended in 2015, as did multiple friends in a +/- 1 year window around then. All of us had good experiences and were able to launch our careers as software engineers directly out of App Academy.