Bootcamp vs. College

Why is it expected that bootcamps cannot cover computer science rigorously? I hear this all the time and I don't really understand the logic. One argument is that they don’t have the time, but I don’t see how that makes sense. If we look at the curriculum at my alma mater (Wisconsin), which is considered a top N comp sci school for moderate values of N, they simple don’t cover all that much material.

When I attended, schools (degrees) in the college of letters & science (which included computer science) couldn’t require more than 40 credits of work, which is two heavily packed semesters or three light semesters. IIRC, that included material in other departments, so requiring a semester of calculus would count towards that limit. Two semesters might sound like much more than a bootcamp, but in fact it’s much less. Each credit hour is expected to be 50 minutes per week in a 15 week semester, which puts 40 credits at 40 * 15 * (5 / 6) = 500 hours. The intense coding bootcamps claim to have their people put in 80 hours per week for 3 months, which is 960 hours. 960 is nearly double 500!

You might object that I’m not counting out-of-class time for the degree, but you can easily get a degree by putting in less than the “required” class time, so I think that the “required” class time is an overestimate, not an underestimate.

Getting a degree required 120 credits, but, due to the limitations on departments (outside of specialized departments like engineering), most of those credits *had* to be breadth credits, things like history or sociology. I have nothing against those things, but when people complain that bootcamp grads don’t know computer science and can’t program, I don’t think people are complaining that bootcamp grads haven’t taken modern european history.

Most hiring managers I know won’t even look at someone who hasn’t done internships, so maybe the argument is that universities can cover theoretical stuff because students pick up practical knowledge in internships. But there’s no reason bootcamps can’t have internship programs! Ada Academy places people for a six month internship, and by all accounts both the companies and the students benefit a lot from that. A related argument is that it takes time for things to sink in, but a six month co-op or internship is pretty long.

Another argument is that students pick up a lot doing side projects, and bootcamps are short enough and heavily scheduled enough that people don’t have time for side projects. The side project thing is true of some people, but I have a hard time believing it’s true for most people. Most people I knew from school weren’t the kinds of nerds who’d do programming for fun. Those people did exist, and were a significant fraction of the class, but I’d guess that it was less than 10% of the class.

Another possibility is that most incoming CS grads already know how to program and that most incoming bootcamp students don’t. I think this was probably true in the 90s, and might’ve even been true ten years ago, but I don’t think it’s true today. If you look at schools that are well regarded and make intro CS accessible (like Washington or Harvard), intro CS is the most popular course in the school. A lot of people take intro CS and most of them probably haven’t programmed before. Not all of those people will go on to get CS degrees, but I’d be surprised if most CS majors now have significant prior programming experience.

I don’t see any reason that coding bootcamps shouldn’t be able to produce people who are better prepared than the median CS graduate. What am I missing?