Summary: As of late 2025, income share agreements (ISAs) have not become broadly successful or dominant in workforce training, nor have economically valuable trades generally moved to ISA-based schools. Traditional colleges remain central for high-earning fields. The trajectory of ISAs since 2020 has been contraction and regulatory pushback, not the expansion underlying Sacks’s scenario.

1. ISAs have struggled rather than “proved successful” at scale

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ruled in 2021 that ISAs are essentially private education loans and must comply with Truth in Lending Act requirements, signaling heightened regulatory scrutiny of the entire ISA model. (consumerfinancemonitor.com)
• A prominent early ISA program, Purdue University’s Back a Boiler (often cited as a flagship), stopped accepting new applicants and was effectively suspended by 2022; Purdue’s own site now states the program “is not accepting new applicants.” (purdue.edu)
• A 2023 bootcamp-market report notes “the fall of ISAs”: fewer than a quarter of coding bootcamps still offered ISAs, and only four of roughly 15 accredited colleges and universities that experimented with ISAs in the late 2010s had not paused or ended their programs as of 2022. (careerkarma.com)
• Major ISA-heavy providers have faced enforcement actions. Bloom Institute of Technology (Lambda School), a high-profile ISA bootcamp, was fined by the CFPB in 2024 for deceptive practices, with students released from ISAs and the company and CEO banned from consumer lending. (en.wikipedia.org)

Collectively, these developments show ISAs have encountered serious headwinds rather than the broad, sustained success Sacks implicitly assumed.

2. Training for valuable trades has not broadly migrated to ISA-based schools

• Some niche trade and tech programs (e.g., welding or specific tech bootcamps) use ISAs, but they represent a small, scattered set of providers, not “every trade that’s valuable.” (citybiz.co)
• The same bootcamp report emphasizes that ISA use is now a minority financing option even in the bootcamp segment, and that most traditional institutions that tried ISAs have exited. (careerkarma.com)

3. Traditional colleges still dominate economically valuable fields

• Bachelor’s degrees in computer and information sciences more than doubled over the last decade, reaching about 112,720 U.S. bachelor’s earners in 2022–2023, almost all from conventional colleges and universities. (studentclearinghouse.org)
• Overall U.S. bachelor’s degree production remains above 2 million per year, with strong representation in high-earning majors like business, engineering, health professions, and computer science, indicating that universities remain the primary pipeline into lucrative careers. (nu.edu)
• There is no evidence that “what’s left for colleges to do” is merely “the stuff that doesn’t add value”; on the contrary, high-earning fields are still core to university offerings and are growing in some cases. (studentclearinghouse.org)

Conclusion: Sacks’s forecast was that if ISAs became successful, then over time each economically valuable trade would develop its own ISA-based school, those functions would be “peeled out” of universities, and colleges would be left mainly with low–economic-value activities. By late 2025:

• ISAs have not become broadly successful; many early programs have been paused or dismantled, and regulators have tightened oversight. (consumerfinancemonitor.com)
• Economically valuable training remains largely inside traditional colleges and universities, which continue to confer the overwhelming majority of credentials in high-earning fields. (studentclearinghouse.org)

Given both the lack of ISA success and the absence of the predicted structural shift in higher education, this prediction has not come true and is best classified as wrong rather than merely “too early to tell.”