AdamBraun

We've built a skills-focused curriculum that enables students to complete the year with a robust resume, industry certifications and a public portfolio of work. Nowadays what we've heard from hundreds of people on the front lines of hiring is that competency matters more than credential, and our focus is on producing students with the skills and competencies companies are desperately seeking. You can read a lot more detail at http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/21/start-up-partners-with-lyft-spotify-to-help-young-people-skip-college.html

Yes that's correct, it's 15% of income for just 3 years and only when making $50K or more. If they don't get a job immediately or if they lose their job within the three years and take some time to find that job they have up to 48 months of deferment. We're extremely different from the schools getting shut down (read more at https://www.fastcompany.com/3068505/innovation-agents/this-college-alternative-only-makes-money-if-you-make-a-salary or http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/21/start-up-partners-with-lyft-spotify-to-help-young-people-skip-college.html or https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/why-traditional-academic-welcomes-missionu), primarily in that they were shut down for taking lots of government money via student loans and then delivering poor quality education. We take no gov money or student loans at all, and our entire success is dependent on us helping students succeed and get great jobs.

There's something really important that you're missing, which is that if after the deferment period (48 months) and your three years of expected contribution back to MissionU are reached and you're not earning at least $50K, you owe us nothing. With traditional student debt, you owe a college money regardless of your career outcomes. We're aligning our well being entirely with our students and if they don't achieve that $50K threshold then they owe us nothing at all.

Additionally, one of the biggest challenges to paying back student loans are that a lot of the time you're not paying back what you borrowed, you're paying the interest (often 6% or 9%)... on an income share agreement, there's no interest applied at all.

We give all students that are accepted into the program a trial period of 4 weeks to test out their MissionU experience and make sure it's something they deeply want to commit to... anytime in those first four weeks they can leave the program and the income share agreement would be cancelled, but after those four weeks the commitment goes into effect, which protects students and gives them the choice to depart early if they'd like and then aligns both us and them on making sure they complete the program and are as successful as possible going forward.