still only placed 100 cadets
They've placed nearly 160 (edit: unless you're talking about ATP cadets in which case I apologise as I have no idea!). Just a minor point but worth mentioning! Is the wings holding pool still being filled? Last I heard they didn't have enough cadets for easyJet.
The ATP entrants are told that there's no guarantee they'll be placed at all. With the bottleneck in the intermediate/advanced training pipeline being the use of the A320 sims, the capacity in the B737-300/700 FNPTII is actually unrelated to the rate of placement (type rating). They can keep taking 8 grand from ATP entrants because there is no immediate hurry for wings cadets to complete an AQC when the A320 sim backlog is several months.