Yes. The way education makes big money is through job-placement, legal compliance (food safety, sexual harassment training etc) and promises of higher pay. Certifications, credentials, upskilling, the value proposition is you'll make more money at your job. It's not about learning.

This isn't a moral argument btw, i'm making sure of it because I used to be really into edtech [1]. There's no money in education, only its commercial outcomes. Education for learning is a public good.

bootcamps cannot deliver placement at scale because the premise is flawed. anyone and everyone cannot learn to be a professional coder in 10 weeks.

Anyway, so the coding bootcamps spread like wildfire because they implicitly or otherwise promise high paying careers that anyone can do, all over the internet, in 10 weeks, for a fraction of college tuition.

[1] https://words.nom.city/posts/jade-what-s-next

I agree that anything suggesting you'll get a high-paying job as a coder (or "SWE" to sound fancy) after a short bootcamp is misleading. I've seen those before. I really feel like a proper bachelor's comp-sci degree made a huge difference for me, even though I also had to self-teach a ton of stuff.

Not sure if Women who Code made any such promises. There are plenty of lower-paying coding jobs or jobs that involve coding as a useful skill, and a bootcamp can help with that. Or, maybe someone has the CS background but not the practical skills.