[cglee]

This is a smart comment because this is exactly what we run into (I operate a coding school that uses ISAs). Employers love our graduates, but if we charged employers, we'd have to play a cat and mouse game of "please don't contact our students directly" or "please don't apply to their website and go through me". By charging students, we can be at ease with making introductions or promoting employer/student activities without having to police their communication.

That said, I believe there's a lot more we can do to help ease the financial burden from students and I love the direction of trying to move the cost of education from students to employers. I'm working on that.

[s17n]

> This is a smart comment because this is exactly what we run into (I operate a coding school that uses ISAs). Employers love our graduates, but if we charged employers, we'd have to play a cat and mouse game of "please don't contact our students directly" or "please don't apply to their website and go through me". By charging students, we can be at ease with making introductions or promoting employer/student activities without having to police their communication.

Have you actually tried it? I'd be pretty surprised if the employers attempted to cut you out like that. They're already accustomed to paying recruiters, and the access / promotion that you can provide them is worth the money. You could also sue them, whereas if you try to sue your students for repayment of their ISAs you run a high risk of bad PR.

[cglee]

Since they're on the market looking for jobs, our graduates are pretty easy to find so any company can just contact them directly without partnering with us. There's no real way to prevent that. And, I don't want to prevent companies from reaching out to our graduates; I actually want the opposite.

Further, grads can (and should) apply to companies that aren't partnered with us. I don't want them to only apply to a limited set of partnered employers.

We've been operating for about a decade, so we've tried basically everything once :) Our current corporate partnership program is here if you're interested: https://launchschool.com/employers/placement