u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
There's a fundamentally broken aspect of the entire education industry - both colleges and bootcamps.
You aren't paying for quality of education, you are paying for a name and an entrance bar. It just so happens that if you have a strong brand and the highest entrance bar that you end up with the most brilliant people all networking with each other and who go on to great things. It also means you have the best teachers who want to work at the best school and get the easier research funding.
Stanford is an example of this working.
Bootcamps are examples of where this entirely falls apart.
People should be paying to learn - but they aren't, they are paying for a label and community. If the thing doesn't deliver Stanford-like outcomes, the entire thing falls apart.
Codesmith is the closest example of this. It was trying to be the Ivy League bootcamp and unofficially had that reputation when the outcomes matched... despite being 6 weeks of udemy-level curriculum and 7 weeks of projects. It attracted the best students and best teachers. Codesmith teachers don't disappear in the middle of lectures. But the wheels fall off the bus when the outcomes no longer keep the story going to justify $22,500, both in terms of 75% of the staff leaving or being laid off and in terms of students realizing there is no such thing as magic.
Even if the outcomes bounce back on the industry, people have seen the reality - that no program's materials can systematically turn someone into a software engineer in 13 or 16 weeks.
Imagine if Stanford grads started struggling to get jobs overnight. The 100 years of history will buy them several years to bounce back, whether it's them or the market, they will likely bounce back fast enough.
Bootcamps have been around for a single digit number of years. The best ones maybe buy a year of leeway to show they can bounce back. It's been 1.5 years and none have so that leeway has run out and many bootcamps are failing.