Article note: Lambda School/BloomTech is, was, and always has been the most obviously predatory fuckin' thing, sitting right at the intersection of rampant fraud-adjacent startup behavior and rampant fraud-adjacent higher ed behavior.
They had their bogus "Don't pay unless you get employment in the field" shtick, which was so loosely defined they always won. Their "income sharing" agreement is ... a loan with particularly unfavorable terms. Their startup douche/VC buddies love them because they trivialize programming to depress wages in the nerds they try to exploit in other valley bro endeavors.
$164k fine and some debt reduction? Execs should be in jail. Their fake-loan and VC lucre should be getting liquidated out in the settlement. At least they're basically banned from handling education money now, though they've already one greasy regulator-avoidance restructure so it may not be adequate to put them down.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
In 2020, we wrote how coding bootcamp Lambda School seemed like a bit of a bait-and-switch. Four years later and one rebranding to “BloomTech” later, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is finally slapping it on the wrist — it’s permanently banning it from issuing any more student loans, fining the company and its CEO $164,000, and releasing some students from some of their debt.
Why? Among other deceptive practices, the “Bloom Institute of Technology” didn’t call them loans. It advertised a way for students to get high-paying tech jobs “risk free” with “no loans” by paying 17 percent of their future income for five years — rather than the $20,000 sticker price of tuition.
There’s an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.
