Occasionally found UX courses costing $0 up-front + 17% of salary for 2 years

https://www.lambdaschool.com/courses/ux/
They suggest several courses 30 weeks long, including UX Design with an interesting payment scheme:

Instead of paying tuition, students can agree to pay a percentage of their income after they’re employed, and only if they’re making more than $50k per year.
If you don’t find a job, or don’t reach that level of income, you’ll never pay a cent.

Unfortunately, for US or EU citizens only, so I do not qualify. But I am curious if maybe anybody knows about this school and have a positive experience with it?

This could be a great starting point!

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100%, absolutely, positively, STAY AWAY from these courses. To call them predatory is an understatement.

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Agreed, sounds dodgy. How long do they make you commit to that?

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They say first 2 years if salary is at least $50k per year.
They say that their course is worth 20k (they have an option to pay it up-front instead of 17% agreement). For this price, the course must be of a very high quality, which I doubt. That’s my concern, but the terms of the agreement itself seem quite clear to me.

Why? What’s the catch?

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Pick something that is clear. I’ve done my share on online training and I still keep on doing it.
I find it at least suspicious that they say that this costs 20k.
On top of that there are many good starting points if you look around.

Well, they claim a lot. The question is whether all of this is true…

$20k and 17% of salary is the catch. The first is amazingly expensive for such a short course, and the second is downright predatory.

Agree. They claim a lot. Nevertheless, it is too much.

17% of salary during the first 2 years. So, disagree here. But everyone decides to himself, it’s the same as deciding whether to take a loan.

Yes, that’s the course I took. It helps when you do a project you’re interested in vs the suggested. I had a really great mentor who also had a research background before she became a UX designer.

If you sign up with this link, it’ll take $25 off the course:

I think IDF offers first 3 months free. If they don’t, I think I have a link for that. Just ping me.

@jdebari Thank you for your great advice!

@candicodeit Yes, UXMastery gives this 3-month discount on IDF. Although the subscribtion is pais tearly.

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I rarely speak in absolutes, so please understand that I mean this respectfully.

You are wrong. This isn’t a “everyone decides that for themself” sorta thing. 17% of salary is an absolutely huge number - enough to make it economically impossible to survive as an individual (let alone a family) if your salary is low enough. Consider if your salary is $50k/year (a not un-heard-of, but low, salary for a Junior UXer in my area). Between taxes and a 17% salary forfeiture, you’d be making around $30k/year. If you have any family at all, it’s not going to be easy to stay afloat on that wage.

There’s another whole conversation to be had here as well - increasingly, employers are ignoring the education of applicants who have gone through these types of training courses, preferring only to recognize education from accredited, 4-year degree programs. Whether or not this is fair is a conversation to have, to be sure, but it’s absolutely an accurate reflection of what’s happening.

The reason why this is happening is because the quality of these types of programs is often dubious. When you buy into this type of program, you have no idea what you’re getting - and employers who are seeing a name of a course provider on a resume have no idea of the quality they represent. UX boot camps and intensive courses have increasingly become cash cows for unscrupulous operators who run them in the “University of Phoenix” for-profit diploma mill fashion.

Because of this, some employers are discarding applicants with non-accredited UX education on their resumes outright. In short, even if you go through one of these programs, it may hurt your application, not help it. You may be better off not even listing it on a resume.

So what are you really getting for $20k or 17% of your salary for two years? A certificate that may mean something to your potential interviewers - but probably won’t help you, and may even automatically disqualify you. You might be getting some practical work that you might be able to put in your portfolio, but given the quality of the education even this practical work might not be able.

Moral of the story - you are far better off spending $20k on a community college UX/UI/Design degree than you are going through one of these bootcamps. It will do more to help you get noticed, give you better experience, and give you more in the way of practical skills.

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@dougcollins
I’m sorry, I am not ready to argue further. Don’t want to be their advocate and don’t want to dig deeper as I did not consider enrolling.

Just want to add that I appreciate your wholehearted commitment to justice and common sense (I hope this does not sound like sarcasm, I am absolutely sincere)! I am so glad to get into a community with such frank and generous people!

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Fair enough.

No worries! I try not to be too overbearing and to be open to new ideas, but I’ll stick to things when I feel sure my opinion is backed by solid evidence. I hope I can be more helpful in the future.

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