[shawndrost]

Cofounder of Hack Reactor here.

Austen is hella right about his thesis: bootcamps are not getting enough students across the finish line right now. They need higher admissions bars, more classroom hours, and/or other good ideas. Hack Reactor is (imo) one of the high-water marks of this line of thinking. Lambda and Holberton are others.

I think he's miscast the three variables though -- partly because he's got a bit of a dog in the race. (As I do -- "we're not a bootcamp" is something many bootcamp founders, yours truly included, have said.) Anyway here's another perspective on the matter:

#1 is mostly right -- bootcamps are limited in price, and this is a huge constraint. It's wrong in an important way: it should be "How much can I charge before a student picks another bootcamp". This problem gets easier, but doesn't go away, if a bootcamp uses a deferred-tuition model. Evidence for my formulation here: App Academy and Hack Reactor have the same kinds of student outcomes problems, because we're both facing the same demon, which is the low-cost bootcamp that prevents us from charging more and spending more on product quality.

Austen's #2 and #3 are both about specific ways to tweak the bootcamp's expense : quality ratio. This is an interesting topic that goes really deep, and I think Austen's reduction is (honestly) pretty heavy on the marketing content. If I were to boil it into two bullets it'd go like this.

#2 "Can you run a good program, online or offline, that isn't classroom-based." Here, by "classroom" I mean "15-40 students and teachers that know each other personally", and it can and does happen online. (Viking Code School, and Hack Reactor Remote, do online/classroom-based programs.) Classroom programs are very challenging to operate: they introduce discrete start dates, fill rate problems, etc. But it's hard to reproduce the quality of a classroom-based program in eg a mentor-driven or community-driven program. I think the answer here will be "kind of", and hybrid classroom-like programs will win.

#3 "Can you get students to pay $10k+ for an online program". Online can be better than offline -- Hack Reactor Remote is our top-performing campus right now. However, few people want to buy it, despite the fact that it doesn't involve moving to SF. Perhaps Lambda has figured something out here -- I don't know about their growth numbers. I hear Thinkful has. Generally, I think the bootcamp space will mostly become hybrid online/offline. I bet half of Lambda's students are in SF, they meet up in person already, and Lambda does or will facilitate/market this.

My #2 and #3 are also poor formulations of the fundamental challenge here -- the quality : cost ratio. For instance, my favorite recent innovation in the bootcamp space (evidenced by Holberton, and maybe Lambda?) is to offset tuition costs and increase grad expertise by bundling an internship and taking a bite of internship income. This doesn't pertain to my #2 or #3 (or Austen's) but it's a way to solve the top-line problem Austen mentioned.

Anyway, TLDR: another bootcamp founder agrees with Austen's thesis; quibbles on details in ways you might find interesting.

[austenallred]

You're wrong about many things but I don't want to correct you because then that would give away some aspects of why Lambda is working so well :)

Much respect!

[arielcamus]

I think you hit the nail on the head with this question:

> #2 "Can you run a good program, online or offline, that isn't classroom-based."

In my opinion, every learning experience that requires teachers and/or a physical space is highly limited by its margins, and, as you said, will be much more sensitive to price-based competition.

If you want to increase the quality of the output, you need to increase the number of teacher-hours and real-estate-hours. Considering that labor and real estate are two of the most expensive resources you can think of, that is quite limiting.

Can we really think of a scenario where a high-quality learning experience is not limited by those two resources? I think Thinkful is doing a pretty good job. There is plenty of pedagogical evidence of the high impact that mentor-led education has (e.g. Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem). However, I think they are quite limited in a way that I consider crucial to solving the education problem:

They are very dependent on their mentor-led approach, both from a marketing and a financial point of view. That makes them very expensive and don't let them approach the problem/solution challenge from a more global point of view (i.e. only people in the US can, at scale, afford to pay $15k for a training like this, and their Income Share Agreement is only available to people in the US).

My main question here is this: What makes a mentor such an important element in the formula for student success? Is it the guiding, the technical knowledge, the accountability, the motivation?

My thesis here is that technical knowledge is not that important, but accountability, guiding and motivation are. At Microverse, we currently have students all around the world who are learning to code as part of distributed teams. They key here is that they spend almost 8 hours per day doing pair programming and holding each other accountable. We are "outsourcing" the task of holding students accountable to the students themselves.

However, there is also the motivation and the guiding aspect of the role of the mentor that students themselves can't take care of. In order to solve that, we are using quantitative/discrete input from the students that trigger the intervention of a more experienced mentor.

Also, one of my main hypothesis is that creating more content is not the key to adding value. There is already so much high-quality content available for free that only needs to be curated. And Thinkful (and almost every other player) is not understanding this part either.

Some students will think that they are paying for nothing if there are no teachers, no mentors, no physical space and no original content. However, if you flip the pricing in the way that Lambda School is doing by charging after the program, then the student perspective changes because she knows the only thing that matters is the outcome, and the payment is tied to that outcome.

We (Microverse) are the only training program that is currently offering an ISA available to anyone in the world. And there is a very simple reason why we can afford to do that: we don't have teachers, we don't create content, and we don't need to pay for real estate, all while making our remote experience accessible to everyone and while designing an experience from a motivation/accountability point of view through peer-to-peer work. All of this makes our margins way bigger, and that gives us much more room to take risks.