My first reaction was that 17%x3 seems like it's on the high side. But then I read Sylvain's (who I've met a few times over the years back when he was at LNKD) profile and saw that Holberton is a 2 year program, which is something like 8x as long as any other "coding school" (I refrain from using "bootcamp" since a 2 year school is clearly not a bootcamp) that I can think of.
That puts an even more interesting twists on how their financials work out.
There should hopefully be a significant difference in scope and quality between the material offered at a coding school and a community college's CS program.
A CC programming degree was enough to get me a professional job at 19. It was taught by the same professors that taught CS at the 4 year affiliate, they just focused on application over theory.
I can't imagine boot camps are any better. We built applications using technology stacks that were popular at the time (.NET/MSSQL, LAMP) and our capstone project involved writing actual production code for a company. Everyone who graduated the program got a job or went on to a four-year university.
That would be exactly the criterion I had in mind. Colleges and universities should teach computer science, not coding. Dijkstra was an accomplished computer scientist and never owned a computer; there is a whole academic discipline there which should be taught in its own right. Whereas a coding school should probably lead off with source control and the command line, the university should start with lambda calculus.
It's not that these things can't be just as useful, it's that they are distinct topics and neither should be used as a replacement for the other. (The unfortunate corollary to this is that it takes 6-10 years to become competent as a programmer, and a number of those years must be in the industry. We should really get a guild structure together.)
Why would I compare a two-year program nobody's ever heard of to a four-year program at a top university? Community college is a much more accurate match, as another two-year program nobody's ever heard of.
If Holberton wants to publish standardized test scores for their students, we'd have better information to go on.
The reason is because the starting salaries of people coming out of the boot camps is higher than the average starting salary of people coming out of top colleges.
Tech Bootcamps and tech college replacements have a starting salary around 80-100K whereas top schools for an average graduate(including ALL graduates, not just CS majors) is less than 80K.
Test scores are dumb. They don't matter. What matters is OUTCOME. And the best way to measure outcome is via salary.
> Tech Bootcamps and tech college replacements have a starting salary around 80-100K
Not according to the comments in this very thread from satisfied bootcamp customers.
But even if it were true, the appropriate comparison would indeed be starting salary of top school graduates who took a job similar to what the bootcamps are targeting, not starting salary of all graduates of top schools.
That puts an even more interesting twists on how their financials work out.