Lambda School's For-Profit Plan to Solve Student Debt

This story is part of a series on how we learn—from augmented reality to music-training devices. The coding forums he frequents, where people usually talk about JavaScript bugs and command line functions, were being suffocated by rants and raves on a particular topic: a coding bootcamp called Lambda School, which Allred happens to run. “People want to think that Lambda is a scam, because they want to believe the results we’re producing are impossible.” Lambda School is an online coding program that’s free until you finish and get a job. Lambda School has no campus; the video lectures are available wherever students have Wi-Fi and are thus infinitely scalable—so long as there are coding jobs to fill. On Twitter, @Austen offers a viral mixture of pathos—retweeted tales of students delivered from the brink of poverty to plum coding jobs—and sober charts about student debt and the pace of innovation.