[cglee]

For the past 6 years, I've operated a software engineering school[1] that uses ISAs and I have some thoughts about them. There are two main stated benefits to using ISAs (there are others, but those seem overblown):

  a) commission based pricing (aka, incentive alignment pricing)
  b) deferred payment

Of the two, imo the second is by far the most important thing for students. To the first bullet, I don't personally find commission based pricing to be all that incentive aligning. For example, it's not uncommon for me to advise someone to take a much lower offer because it seemed like a better long-term opportunity. This is in line with Sean's observation that quality education outcomes is difficult to reduce to salary numbers alone.

To the second bullet, the major problem of deferring all payments, however, is that you attract a lot of people looking for a shortcut. This is exactly the opposite attribute top employers are looking for. This is the "adverse selection problem" Sean mentioned.

Ultimately, the solution here is in selecting for the right type of students into the ISA-based program. Sean mentions that credit scores track with the type of students they're looking for. Other ISA-based programs have stated that they've found a secret sauce other than credit scores for detecting the right students.

We've found a different selection criteria:

We ask students to do a lot of work before we engage them with an ISA. I'm calling this model the ISA-later model, just so we can contrast this with an ISA-first model, which is what Sean and everyone else is doing.

An ISA-later program solves nearly all the problems associated with an ISA-first approach:

  - adverse selection is mitigated since you have a long track record of student behavior and performance
  - can still be egalitarian, without relying on credit scores or degrees or any socioeconomic markers
  - still possible to defer all payments, without the lock-in of an ISA-frst approach

There are many other student-friendly benefits of an ISA-later model, but I'll stop here as this comment is getting long.

[1] launchschool.com

[nyanpasu64]

https://launchschool.com/deferred#cite-note-3

> Once students graduate from Capstone, they are expected to spend 40 hours a week Monday through Friday searching for a software engineering career. Weekly check ins are mandatory.

I don't think I could handle a 9-5 job, let alone 8 hours a day applying to jobs under penalty of unspecified legal consequences.

[cglee]

It's rarely 8 hours a day "applying to jobs". This is similar to an employer saying "you should work 40 hours/week". In that 40 hours are lots of varied activity, including breaks and lunch and any other activity that will allow you to succeed.

The idea is that we want to set expectation that people should focus on searching for a job and not, say, go on vacation. The wording here also is far more severe than reality only because we want serious participants.

[adamisom]

Huh—I did this program (I didn’t know the founder posted here, just browsing) and I had no idea weekly check-ins were mandatory. For serious (but not fanatic) participants it is, of course, a no-brainer to check in at least that often. Just found that line interesting and wanted to share.