The methodology they use to calculate the placement rate is clearly misleading, and given that methodology, the 2019 placement numbers are rather mediocre. They shouldn’t be tricking students into making major life decisions based on misleading statistics.
On the other hand, some of the arguments in the article are silly. Tech companies drastically cut back on entry level hiring in 2020, and when this happens the non conventional pipelines tend to be the first to go. I wouldn’t extrapolate out this decline as a permanent issue beyond the pandemic. Additionally, the article expresses skepticism that expanding student enrollment at the expense of placement would hamper profitability - common sense is that there will be some variable costs that scale proportionally with student enrollment, and as such the path to profitability would be to improve placement rates. Perhaps most egregiously, the article talks about the high opportunity cost for students investing 9-12 months in lambda school and the immediately after that switches to attacking lambda school for shortening its class lengths. A curious juxtaposition. Frankly, this is a good example of incentive alignment.
Finally, there is the ridiculousness of the graduate at the end who doesn’t want to find a designer job because that would entail making income share payments. Not only is that cutting off your nose to spite your face, but it’s rather odd to feel you didn’t get your money’s worth from a service operating at a significant loss. I guess taxpayer funded K-12 and community college education has made a lot of people accustomed to being insulated from the true cost of education.
On the other hand, some of the arguments in the article are silly. Tech companies drastically cut back on entry level hiring in 2020, and when this happens the non conventional pipelines tend to be the first to go. I wouldn’t extrapolate out this decline as a permanent issue beyond the pandemic. Additionally, the article expresses skepticism that expanding student enrollment at the expense of placement would hamper profitability - common sense is that there will be some variable costs that scale proportionally with student enrollment, and as such the path to profitability would be to improve placement rates. Perhaps most egregiously, the article talks about the high opportunity cost for students investing 9-12 months in lambda school and the immediately after that switches to attacking lambda school for shortening its class lengths. A curious juxtaposition. Frankly, this is a good example of incentive alignment.
Finally, there is the ridiculousness of the graduate at the end who doesn’t want to find a designer job because that would entail making income share payments. Not only is that cutting off your nose to spite your face, but it’s rather odd to feel you didn’t get your money’s worth from a service operating at a significant loss. I guess taxpayer funded K-12 and community college education has made a lot of people accustomed to being insulated from the true cost of education.