“ I know a few of my peers that walked out without even setting up their local development (because they were on windows and there was little help or instruction for students with windows).”

I remember the pains in undergrad of trying to get tensorflow to correctly make use the gpu on a windows machine. Not fun!

Anyways, not trying to be rude here, but this is pretty concerning to read. If someone needs to have their handheld through installs then I’m not sure how effective I’d ever expect them to be in any autonomous role with any ambiguity (hint: data science requires both). Even more concerning if this is at a later stage of the curriculum.

It's in the third month of the curriculum, after primarily only working with Google Colab in the previous two.

Keep in mind that a majority of the students have never seen or touched a command-line, and trying to install various tools resulted in a lot of errors for a lot of students, troubleshooted by TLs that were only students 2+ months ahead.

Right, that all makes sense, but you can’t join a company just to say, “well only 6 months ago I’d never touched a command-line!”. I know plenty who have succeeded from boot camps and plenty who haven’t. I think the best thing boot camps can do is have a stronger acceptance criteria - letting anyone in just sets them (and the brand’s reputation) up for failure. But I guess they need to make money.