from Hacker News

LambdaScam: A Loan by Any Other Name

by kevintb on 8/1/19, 3:20 AM with 1 comments

• by orangecat on 8/1/19, 4:01 AM

  This is unconvincing. He's obsessing over the "interest rate" when that's not a relevant metric. Unlike real interest, your total cost doesn't increase without bound; the most you'll ever pay is $30k (and that's if you get a high-paying job). The question is whether their service is worth up-to-$30k; it may or may not be, but dividing the maximum post-paid cost by the prepaid cost doesn't tell you anything useful. If Lambda made the prepaid cost $35k and the post-paid cost up to $40k, would it become a better deal?

  Some of the people who don’t get jobs immediately after Lambda School will attend other schools and bootcamps, take on more debt, and potentially get a job after that: despite Lambda school not being fully responsible they’ll still get paid.

  Good luck getting out of your student loans because you ended up getting a job that has nothing to do with what you studied.

  Tying interest rates to income means tying interest rates to factors like race, gender, and parental income. This is obviously discriminatory.

  In the same way that giving wealthier students less financial aid is discriminatory.

  For “riskier” students, the terms of the ISA would be different: maybe instead of a cap of $30,000 students would be asked to pay a maximum of $40,000.

  "I thought of a bad thing you might do in the future, and that makes you evil".