I think that's perhaps the wrong comparison. The whole idea of bootcamps is that they are directly comparable to a four-year CS Bachelor's as measured by employment results.
Lambda School (YC S17) is a 9 month full-time (or 18 month part-time) school that packs in the equivalent of two academic years, including Computer Science core and costs nothing until you're hired and making $50k+ in the field you studied (US only -international terms are different).
Once you're hired you pay 17% of salary for two years, capped at a maximum of $30k.
If you don't get a job in the field after five years the agreement disappears and you don't owe anything.
We not only have a team of a dozen full-time career coaches, but another team of 12+ people whose only job it is to reach out to companies and actually line up interviews for you. A real enterprise sales team working in your behalf.
We (along with the review sites) will hold a raffle or offer swag to anyone who leaves a review (positive or negative).
One of our students last year won a gift card from the review site for leaving a review and tweeted “I just got a $50 Amazon gift card for leaving a review for Lambda School” and it turned into a whole thing. We literally weren’t involved in that in any way.
Trying to twist that into “Lambda School pays students to leave reviews” is 100% incorrect.
The thing is, reviews (in general) are usually biased towards the positive. Even more strongly so when you consider that (in the case of a coding bootcamp) you've just spent an enormous amount of time, money and energy there - nobody's going to want to trash it.
I think we'd agree that in the case where someone had a great experience with your school, they'd post a great review, and when someone had a truly terrible experience, they'd probably post a terrible review. But what about when someone has a merely "meh" experience? In that case, someone will likely (with a bit of a push towards the positive) write a simple, positive review. Maybe they thought they'd have learned faster by themselves... but there's a gift card? And my friends will see the review? Hmm... I'll just write something short and positive.
In general, I think there are a lot of things that are a careful balance, easy to tip in one way or another - politics, public opinion, social issues - and reviews are certainly one of these things.
But generally I think it's fair that you should not take code school reviews very seriously.
- Cost: $$$ (50-100K or more) - No job guarantee or any incentive for the school to help - Lots of out of date material - Faculty could care less (there to do research, teaching is a secondary job) - Little career support (over worked job offices with 1-2 staff for 100s) - Few connections in major tech hubs (typically)
I would claim these programs are more predatory than these accelerators. And that's saying something!
The fact is, if you want to transition to tech after doing a non-technical undergraduate degree, it is going to be hard and there's really no shortcuts. But who has money to do a second undergraduate degree?