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Lambda School 2020 Placement Rate at 30%: Insider Report

Leaked documents reveal rapidly declining placement rates at Lambda School.

A Business Insider report (behind a paywall) by Vincent Woo (@fulligin on Twitter) sheds some light on the actual placement rates of Lambda School. Woo got his hands on leaked documents from the company.

Leaked documents from company all-hands meetings in the summer of 2020 and January and February of this year, led by the school’s now former chief operating officer, Molly Graham, who resigned on Friday, and others led by its chief business officer, Matt Wyndowe, showed that Lambda School placed only 30% of its 2020 graduates in qualifying jobs during the first half of 2020. This figure is in stark contrast to the 74% placement rate it advertised for its 2019 graduates, the latest figure the school has made publicly available. 

Previously, Woo had written in New York Magazine that, while Lambda School publicly advertised a placement rate of over 80% in 2019, their actual placement was closer to 50%.

This kind of behaviour from Lambda School is all too familiar to some of us at Class Central. A few months ago, we wrote about it in Lambda School Woes: Lawsuits, Fines, Layoffs, and Media Scrutiny. We also examined the dubious usage of ISAs in some coding bootcamps, including Lambda School.

According to Woo, the documents he acquired also reveal that Lambda School was losing $7,250 per student on average and venture to say that, if they could enroll 2,000 students per month, Lambda School could be profitable even with a placement rate below 50%.

Dhawal Shah Profile Image

Dhawal Shah

Dhawal is the CEO of Class Central, the most popular search engine and review site for online courses and MOOCs. He has completed over a dozen MOOCs and has written over 200 articles about the MOOC space, including contributions to TechCrunch, EdSurge, Quartz, and VentureBeat.

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