Lambda School is Silicon Valley's big bet on reinventing education and making student debt obsolete. But students say it's a 'cult' and they would have been better off learning on their own.

Lambda School

Austen Allred, CEO and co-founder of Lambda School

Erica Thompson has always had an interest in technology. Her father, a municipal transit operator, taught her the basics of programming, which she practiced while he built computers in his free time.

She initially studied music education, but after her father had a heart attack, she decided that it might be time to pursue a career in programming. She had just wrapped up a software development course at a local college in Los Angeles when she saw a Facebook ad for Lambda School - an online coding bootcamp that requires no upfront tuition.

She decided to take a chance to hone her skills and make herself more competitive in the job market, without paying out of pocket.

It's that very sales pitch that's driven Lambda School, based in San Francisco, to a position of prominence in Silicon Valley. A graduate of the famed Y Combinator startup incubator program (previous graduates include Airbnb and Dropbox), it's gone on to raise over $48 million from investors like GV (formerly Google Ventures), Stripe, and even Ashton Kutcher. The school boasts that there are nearly 3,000 students currently enrolled.

What makes it unique from other coding schools is its income sharing agreement (ISA) model. Students sign a contract, agreeing to pay 17% of their income for two years when they get a job paying at least $50,000 a year, with a maximum payout of $30,000. It also offers a less-popular choice to pay a flat $20,000 in tuition, instead.

To many, Lambda School represents a better way of thinking about higher education and vocational training, as Wired put it in an August headline: "Lambda School's For-Profit Plan to Solve Student Debt." And because students attend Lambda School remotely for eight hours a day, it's theoretically open to anybody, anywhere. The model has proven so appealing, other startups are following suit with their own ISA-based business models.

Lambda School boasts of its successes, saying that graduates of the 9-month program go on to work for companies like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. According to the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting, 60.9% of Lambda School students were employed 90 days after graduation, going up to 85.9% within 180 days. Graduates earn a median annual base salary of $60,000, according to that same study - although a Lambda School spokesperson puts that figure at $70,000, and notes that many graduates are in rural areas where average pay is lower.

What Thompson found, however, was that Lambda School was very different than what she hoped it would be. She says that she was brushed off by staff when she reported racist harassment from two of her classmates.

Not long after, Thompson says she was told that she was in danger of being removed from the program if she didn't hit certain goals. She says that she ultimately was kicked out of Lambda School, towards the end of the program, just days after raising her concerns directly with CEO and cofounder Austen Allred.

"It seems that if anyone speaks up and is too critical of the program in any of the channels, they react as if the student is the problem, though they mandate feedback daily," Thompson told Business Insider.

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