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No Tuition, but You Pay a Percentage of Your Income (if You Find a Job) (nytimes.com)
What if there were a way to eliminate student debt? No, really. Student debt reached a new height last year -- a whopping $1.5 trillion. A typical student borrower will have $22,000 in debt by graduation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Now, Silicon Valley is backing a novel idea that proposes to rewrite the economics of getting an education.
From a report: The concept is deceptively simple: Instead of charging students tuition -- which often requires them to take out thousands of dollars in loans -- students go to school for free and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation, but only if they get a job with a good salary. The idea, known as an Income Share Agreement, or I.S.A., has been experimented with and talked about for years. But what's happening at Lambda School, an online learning start-up founded in 2017 with the backing of Y Combinator, has captivated venture capitalists.
On Tuesday, Lambda will receive $30 million in funding led by one of Peter Thiel's disciples, Geoff Lewis, the founder of Bedrock, along with additional funds from Google Ventures; GGV Capital; Vy Capital; Y Combinator; and the actor-investor Ashton Kutcher, among others. The new funding round values the school at $150 million. The investments will be used to turn Lambda, which has focused on subjects like coding and data science, into a multidisciplinary school offering half-year programs in professions where there is significant hiring demand, like nursing and cybersecurity. It's an expansion that could be a precursor to Lambda becoming a full-scale university.
On Tuesday, Lambda will receive $30 million in funding led by one of Peter Thiel's disciples, Geoff Lewis, the founder of Bedrock, along with additional funds from Google Ventures; GGV Capital; Vy Capital; Y Combinator; and the actor-investor Ashton Kutcher, among others. The new funding round values the school at $150 million. The investments will be used to turn Lambda, which has focused on subjects like coding and data science, into a multidisciplinary school offering half-year programs in professions where there is significant hiring demand, like nursing and cybersecurity. It's an expansion that could be a precursor to Lambda becoming a full-scale university.
So basically this is HECS (or whatever they call it now) in Australia....
Read the fine print.
1. They say you have to pay them 17-20% of your earnings for _ANY_ job, even if you didn't get that through what they taught you.
2. They do their own financing because they're not an accredited institution, so you can't even use that "degree" elsewhere.
3. They were forced to remove "University" and "Professor" from their language, as those terms were not being used correctly.
4. This is just a bootcamp that charges you $20,000 (up front) or $30,000 (through this scheme) for a 30 week MOOC.
5. Even though they have a $50,000 minimum salary before you have to start repaying (which is deferred for several years until you are at that point), they don't adjust for cost of living. Someone in California or New York (where they hold their schools) will make that and still be below the poverty line.
6. Their success stories are suspect. There was one guy who they claimed landed a full-stack developer position, without also pointing out he had a bachelor's degree, and he had participated in a year-long bootcamp before doing this one.
Oh wait, it looks EXACTLY LIKE THE METHOD THE UK USES for its student loans repayments. In the UK you're charged a max fee for tuition and the student loans company gives you a student loan to cover that and maintenance which is calculated so there are limits that people can get. You repay the student loan once you start earning over £480 and it is deducted from your pay at a rate of 9% of everything over the £480. After 30 years anything unpaid is written off.
More info here: https://www.gov.uk/repaying-yo...
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Because an educated society is a more functional society. And if you care for nothing in the world but $$$ and have zero moral scruples, an educated society leads to higher wages and profit on average. It'll cost you more in the long run to keep your neighbors in poverty than it would to educate them into productive taxpayers.
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Any country with government paid post-secondary education, and progressive taxation, also does essentially the same thing this article proposes. With progressive taxation, members of society who are most benefiting from their own education and/or the education of their fellow citizens (and employees) pay more of the cost of government. So in affect, they are paying a larger proportion of everyone's "free" post-secondary education.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke