The Strangulation of Lambda School

A scalene-shaped Bermuda Triangle runs from San Francisco to New York to Washington, D.C. It's wider than corruption at Tammany Hall and narrower than a line of coke.

Everything that comes out of it is fascinating, mysterious, and dangerous.

But it's mostly under control. If anyone threatens to get out of the Triangle, he's strangled.

Austen Allred was one of those guys who threatened to get out of the Triangle.

He created Lambda School in 2017 with a big yet simple goal: to solve the student loan problem. The bullet: income share agreements ("ISAs"). Students paid nothing for their degrees, but if they got good jobs, they had to give Lambda School a slice for five years, at which time all payment requirements expired.

The incentives lined up better than rum-running for a gangster during Prohibition. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos enthused that income share agreements could replace the student loan system entirely.

But then Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and other rulers got to work, churning out a disengenuous white paper every week about evil ISAs. The media followed like the obedient crows they are and cawed about evil Lambda School. Then the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau came in and put its hands around Allred's neck, threatening him with personal bankruptcy if he persisted.

You can read about it here (subscription required).

The article doesn't refer to the outsized influence of colleges and universities within the Triangle, but you can feel their viperish presence, warping and churning under the page.

You can envision college and university presidents dialing their friends in Washington, all saying the same thing, "You need to kill this shit now!"

Higher education is the Wolf of Wall Street in ivy. Predatory, avaricious, brash. It cares about its students about as much as Jordan Belfort cared about his clients. It's all about money: getting it, spending it, and not giving a rat's ass about anyone else.

It's an industry of pricks.

But hey, it's still the Christmas season. Charity is required. Benefits of the doubt must be bestowed.

So I want to provide a more charitable account.

Here goes:

The educational administrators mean well, but they're dominated by their left hemispheres. They have unbridled confidence in their intellects and assume anything that comes out of their brains and the institutions they run, no matter how shit-stained, are richly embroidered tapestries.

Like all left-hemispherics, they also love abstractions and love to wield them on society like bulldozers razing poor ethnic neighborhoods to force those backward-ass foreigners to assimilate better and make room for freeways.

"Education" is an abstract good, right up there with "Freedom," "Happiness," "Equality," and the other gods of the secular pantheon (like "Melting Pot").

Education, being a god, needs sacrifices so it can thrive. Colleges and universities are the greatest places of Education, so they understandably command the largest sacrifices.

But goat blood doesn't buy much these days, so they demand taxpayer blood in the form of government funding and student blood in the form of loans that keep students in a financial genital clamp for decades.

If anything comes along to staunch that flow of blood, the maenads of Education shred it apart.