Over the past few months, I've become completely fascinated by Income Share Agreements and how much of an impact they're having on higher education.<p>The idea of Income Share Agreements has been around since 1955, but they haven't seen mass adoption until recently.<p>This post covers the recent history of ISA's and how they helped kickstart the coding bootcamp revolution.<p>Kush Patel, Founder & CEO of App Academy, and I recently had an in-depth recorded conversation exploring this topic: https://bit.ly/2S0jiXR.<p>From what we could tell... the spark for the coding bootcamp revolution came from a single hacker news post. This one to be specific:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133<p>Back in 2011, Kush and his brother saw this post and decided to enroll.<p>After the program, Kush saw how quickly other students were able to land jobs and start their software engineering careers.<p>Seeing this firsthand is what lead him to start App Academy which became the first coding bootcamp to incorporate Income Share Agreements as a financing option.<p>Others would fast-follow.<p>Make School in 2014. Lambda School in 2017. Flockjay in 2018. And now, in 2020, hundreds of programs.<p>ISA's have had a few false starts, but for the first time, it looks as if they're off the races.<p>Software engineering education became the first killer use case for ISA's. And now, it's quickly seeing mass adoption.<p>It's so important that we start to see this idea spread now more than ever.<p>Over 10M Americans filed for the unemployment benefits in the month of March alone.<p>These individuals need job training and they need it now. Traditional higher education isn't going to cut it.<p>We need a new method of job training.<p>One that is accessible from anywhere, provides trade-specific knowledge, and is generally risk-free.<p>If there was ever a time for ISA's and career accelerators to thrive, it's now.<p>And it's all thanks to an innocent Hacker News post from 2011