Do ISA agreements only apply to a job in tech?

I disagree that you need to get a job in tech in order for an ISA to apply, but with a little bit of nuance. Here's why: 1. First off, you shouldn't expect to have a tech job guarantee in an ISA. The best bootcamps have like an 80% placement rate (from people signing up -> getting a job 6 months after graduating). A school offering a tech job guarantee is wayyyyy more sketchy than a school NOT offering one, because it's very unlikely that even the best bootcamps can guarantee that. 2. If you get legitimate training (i.e. it's not a scam) and the school paid their staff, content creators, instructors, etc... then you should be paying something for that training. Maybe you shouldn't be paying the ENTIRE amount if you don't get a tech job, but you got SOMETHING out of the training, even if you didn't get that job. 3. You should see an ISA as an alternative to paying upfront, but be mentally prepared to expect the program to cost approximately the upfront cost. The ISA lets you shift the cost to the future, when you have the income to pay, rather than be burdened by a large bill upfront. If you go into it with the attitude "well if this doesn't work out I won't pay anything" then the whole ecosystem will collapse (as many bootcamps have....) and you might be doing it for the wrong reasons.

I don't co-own a school, no.

I co-founded a technology company called Formation.dev but we are building a technology platform to train engineers that's nothing at all like a school. We offer ISAs as a choice to engineers who train on our platform to pay for that training, yes, but it's fairly irrelevant, it's a choice people wanted and we are indifferent. As long as you put in the work, we work with you for as long as it takes to get a new job you love, so people like the ISA model to wait until that transition to pay.

Your account is 8 days old and some of the things you reference reminds me of several accounts from alleged Codesmith students/alumni that have attacked me in the past and then been eventually deleted from Reddit. So I will be choosing to not engage. Sorry if I'm completely off the mark here I just don't have time to for this to keep going on if that is the case. Anyone reading this, please read my comment history, it's public, and decide for yourself what you think of my advice and my disclosures. I accept the feedback that I need to be very careful about disclosures and it will continue to be top of mind in my comments in this subreddit and across similar subreddits. EDIT: and I'm blocked... the classic "last word" long text + block strategy I was alluding to in the patterns above happening yet again. I use my real name here to be transparent. If I wanted to have a secret campaign of manipulation, wouldn't I have some fake accounts seeding Formation all over the place very subtly? Would you rather trust rando anonymous people with no history for your advice? 🤷‍♂️

That sounds like a very stressful situation, but it also sounds like a Lambda School problem. Some ISAs (like Pathrise and Formation) explicitly only look at BASE salary on a new job to prevent this kind of thing from happening because its awful.... especially to take the money without any heads-up or warning. As you said, because there is no regulation, an ISA is just a contract between two people, and some people can be trusted more than others, and you are ultimately banking on your trust with the specific program. Sorry this happened to you :(

The ISA providers put that in there to have the power to do go very deep in collecting if needed, but the program itself can choose to not require tax reconciliation and can choose which types of income to consider. Your agreement/contract with your program, not the ISA itself, should specify clearly what income is considered and you can hold the program accountable to that.

Sorry if my language wasn't clear but I meant a guarantee that only a job in tech is considered. I agree that it might be possible to structure a program around that gaurantee as well, nothings impossible, it's just not really reasonable for most bootcamps.