The Rise and Fall(?) of Coding Bootcamps

The value proposition always seemed too good to be true: Earn a relatively cheap credential in a few months, and you’re almost guaranteed to land a high-paying job. No college required.

For tens of thousands of people who invested time and money into coding bootcamps, it worked.

Yet even as world-class universities jumped into the fray, questions of quality, legitimacy, and integrity lingered. Disgruntled students sued. Bootcamps began to close.

Depending on what you read, today’s coding bootcamp industry is either thriving and poised for continued growth or withering under the pressures of a shaky economy and the incursion of artificial intelligence.

What, exactly, is the state of coding bootcamps in 2024?

Coding bootcamps arrived on the educational scene in 2011 as the economy was slowly recovering from the Great Recession. While some industries continued to struggle, demand for software engineers outpaced supply.

Schools such as Dev Bootcamp, Hack Reactor, and Codecademy sprang up overnight to fill that void, teaching coding languages such as JavaScript and Python. Offering short programs, relatively low tuition, and high placement rates in jobs with good salaries, these schools grew in popularity, attracting young professionals and career changers, including those without college degrees.

By 2016, 91 bootcamps had sprouted across the U.S. and Canada, up from 67 the year before, graduating almost 18,000 students, compared to just over 10,000 in 2015. For U.S. schools alone, the tuition revenue totaled roughly $200 million.

Recognizing this burgeoning opportunity, traditional universities tossed their hats into the coding bootcamp ring. University-based bootcamps grew from five in 2015 to 120 in 2020.

Many hitched their wagons to online program managers (OPMs) such as 2U, which ventured into the bootcamp business in 2016. By 2022, 2U and its university bootcamp partners had educated more than 60,000 students. That year, 2U shifted its bootcamp portfolio to the newly acquired edX.

A 2022 survey of 2U bootcamp graduates revealed that these programs boosted their salaries by 17%.

Across the industry, almost 60,000 students graduated from coding bootcamps in 2023 alone. On average, they paid about $13,000 for their credential.

Today, bootcamps are generating more than $700 million in revenue. But the news isn’t all good, and the future of these schools remains in question.

Despite their explosive growth, fissures began forming in the bootcamp industry’s foundation early on.

As more bootcamps sprang up nationwide, competition for students increased. By 2017, nearly 100 bootcamps had been established in the U.S. and Canada, and this oversaturation forced eight schools to close that year, including Dev Bootcamp, one of the pioneers in the field.

At the same time, employers complained that bootcamp graduates weren’t being equipped with the latest coding skills.

Some schools found themselves in legal hot water. In 2017, the Flatiron School settled a case in New York, paying a hefty fine after it was discovered that the school had inflated its placement rates and graduates’ salaries. A similar suit was filed against Bloom Institute of Technology, formerly known as Lambda School, in 2023.

Two years earlier, former students of the Make School in San Francisco filed a class-action suit claiming the school misrepresented income-share agreements, alleging they were predatory, risky, and exorbitantly expensive.

Meanwhile, university-OPM partnerships, whose growth was fueled by the pandemic, began to evidence holes of their own.

One issue pertains to how they’re typically structured and operated. According to a 2021 report by The Century Foundation, OPMs hire instructors, recruit students, and provide the curriculum while maintaining the illusion that the university, often a highly respected name brand, is responsible for the product.

For its efforts, the OPM keeps 80% of the tuition revenue.

Led to believe they were receiving an education from a world-class institution, some students claim they’ve been duped, while many haven’t realized the benefits they were promised. In response, the Department of Education has stiffened regulations governing university relationships with OPMs, tightening the reins on bootcamps and related programs.

The world of computer programming — and, potentially by association, coding bootcamps — faces a more existential crisis in the form of artificial intelligence (AI). Some analysts believe AI tools such as ChatGPT will replace programmers by automating the function.

Bootcamp grads are in for a world of hurt, Aline Lerner, founder and CEO of the recruitment training platform Interviewing.io, told Fast Company. There’s a world where AI replaces the bottom 10% of engineers and some work that junior engineers do. And junior engineers are bootcamps’ sweet spot.

Likewise, Matt Welsh, in an article titled “The End of Programming,” wrote, It seems totally obvious to me that of course all programs in the future will ultimately be written by AIs, with humans relegated to, at best, a supervisory role.

When Southern New Hampshire University shuttered Kenzie Academy in 2023, a bootcamp it had acquired only two years earlier, it cited AI as one of the reasons. Likewise, Triangle bootcamp shut down earlier this year in part because of AI’s coding takeover.

But others argue AI’s not to blame. As with other fields, they say, AI promises to complement, not replace, the work of programmers. A McKinsey & Company survey determined that up to 80% of programming jobs will remain human-centric, requiring programmers to develop new skills to work in concert with such tools.

Programmers will remain important because the true value of a programmer is not knowing how to build it,Stuart Foster of Perforce.com argues, but knowing what to build.

The incursion of AI wasn’t the cause of Launch Academy’s decision to cease its operations in May. Instead, it cited a shift in the value proposition thanks to an influx of new programs and a saturated market.

What’s more, layoffs across the tech industry have altered the supply and demand curve. This year, more than 84,000 tech workers have lost their jobs, following the nearly 263,000 who suffered that fate last year. Job postings on Indeed.com for software development roles have decreased by 30% compared to pre-pandemic levels, noted The Wall Street Journal.

In a seller’s market, tech companies can attract experienced professionals to fill programming jobs instead of neophyte recent graduates of coding bootcamps.

These economic conditions are what caused Texas-based bootcamp Codeup to close its doors late in 2023.

And AI is partly to blame, argues Megan Morrone on Axios, as tech companies point to a renewed focus on AI to justify layoffs. This new trend in layoffs, she wrote, could be less about replacing workers with AI, and more about replacing workers with a smaller number of workers who are more skilled in AI …

Prospective students clearly see this AI-generated handwriting on the wall, causing many would-be bootcampers to think twice. A study by Edge Research and HCM Strategists found that high school students and adults not enrolled in school ranked coding bootcamps last among eight options based on perceived value.

Despite recent closings and the growing presence of AI, some market projections remain bullish on bootcamps.

According to Verified Market Research, the global coding bootcamp market, valued at $899 million in 2023, is estimated to crest $2.4 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 15% from 2024-2030.

Another forecast, from Technavio, expects an annual growth rate of nearly 20% between 2022 and 2027, with North American bootcamps constituting 40% of that growth.

Noted philanthropist Mackenzie Scott evidently shares this positive outlook, having recently donated $2.5 million to Resilient Coders, a bootcamp focused on providing career opportunities for people of color.

Another philanthropist, though, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, says young people shouldn’t bother learning how to code because programming is no longer a valuable skill thanks to AI developments.

Job outlook projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics corroborate his argument, showing an 11% decline in computer programming jobs between 2022 and 2032.

Given these seemingly contradictory data and opinions, it’s tempting to conclude that the truth lies somewhere in between. Perhaps many of today’s coding jobs, as currently configured, will be gobbled up by AI. Yet the role of the coder will continue to morph, aligning with new realities brought about by AI advancements.

If coding bootcamps keep pace with AI and harness the tool instead of falling victim to it, they might indeed meet those market projections.

It is the human touch that adds uniqueness and originality to software applications, making them stand out in a crowded market, tech author Rick Spair wrote on Medium. Programmers should embrace AI as a tool that complements their creativity and enhances their productivity.