Do Not Waste Money on a Bootcamp. Get a degree.

I partially agree with the OP yeah. I do think the "ship has sailed" for a group of people that had a previous career they didn't like, saw the flexibility and high salaries of SWEs in a youtube video or an ad, and impulsively joined a bootcamp to career switch without considering all the options. I do think a smaller number of people it's still a viable option (not THE ONLY option, but a viable one). People who have put in months or years of self study, have a lot of personal runway/savings and no hard headlines, and have a previous career that has some or many transferrable soft skills to SWE (e.g. lawyer, doctor, accountant, teacher). Then a bootcamp might be a good option to focus and make the final jump. People post on here when they get their job or shortly after to celebrate, but it's not the end, it's the beginning and there is quite a journey ahead - of ups and downs. But to corroborate the OPs post, who seems highly likely talking about Turing School, I think a number of the top programs have had layoffs in the past two months: Codesmith, Turing, Hack Reactor. Launch School and Rithm I'm not aware of any, but both had very small (ie. 20 - 30 people at a time) programs that were way oversubscribed and might just be barely filling up right now vs the others which have actually shrunk. So I think most people get this already.

CS degree from a good school does make a massive difference. We worked with a number of college students for our Netflix and Waymo programs and a number have tons of interviews for amazing companies right now and competing offers. CS degree from the cheapest and fastest school you can find is a different story.

Ah sorry, just to clarify I was talking about CAPSTONE only. I don't have any information at all on enrollment in Core.

Zooming out, masters degrees are super complicated. You know how 2U/Edx/Trilogy has partnerships with most of the top schools to run bootcamps under their names. Masters degrees fall into a similar world of for profit, where a lot of top schools that have expensive, short degrees that they offer online or in remote cities for a very high fee. The real benefit I'm talking about above for CS degrees is if you are able to engage directly with recruiters who are dedicated to hiring from your school and get priority interviews and "the red carpet treatment" (recruiters taking you out for dinner, fancy events, boxes of coconut water mailed to you). It's not going there just grants you these benefits, they happen because the students end up being superstars at the companies and the recruiters go back for the next year's graduates. The fundamental problem with bootcamps is that there isn't A SINGLE BOOTCAMP that has recruiters lined up for their graduates. Not even Codesmith with it's best of the best salaries. Anyways, Georgia Tech is a top 10/20 CS school but their masters program doesn't give you the above, so it's reasonable to consider it, but not a hands down clear choice.

I consider them a bootcamp still