Deciding Between a Bachelor’s Degree and Coding School

For all the coverage of millennials struggling to find jobs in today’s changing market, one labor statistic is especially astounding: each year there are nearly nine times the amount of computing jobs open as there are freshly graduated Computer Science majors to fill them. What’s more, this field continues to grow at a pace nearly three times the national average.

So if there are so many well-paying jobs available in a growing and exciting field, what exactly is keeping people from snatching up these positions?

The problem stems not from a lack of willing applicants, but from a lack of adequate education options.

Colleges and universities cannot churn out enough qualified graduates to meet the demand for programmers, developers, and data scientists. To be sure, university Computer Science departments have grown rapidly over the last decade as a reflection of the surging job market for computing. But this growth is not nearly enough to fill this nine-fold employment gap. For one thing, these are coveted admissions slots and not everyone gets in. For another, CS is among the academic disciplines with the highest dropout rates.

And because many computing jobs have a ring of prestige to them, many assume that a formal degree is necessary to succeed in the field. This assumption keeps people in their late 20s and older from seriously considering this field as an option should they be looking to change their career path. After the college age-group, most people already have student debt and/or serious financial or familial obligations that make it extremely difficult if not impossible to attend a four-year degree program in Computer Science.

Against this backdrop, coding bootcamps truly couldn’t have arrived at a better time. The coding bootcamp model of education is a natural and necessary development given the rapid job growth in the computing sector. By offering a rigorous, accelerated curriculum with a flexible and affordable tuition model, bootcamps are making careers in the tech industry accessible to a diverse and dedicated population that may have otherwise never been able to get a foot in the door.

The following infographic from WhatsTheHost shows that the demographic statistics of U.S. coding bootcamp grads and U.S. Computer Science grads are starkly different. After all, not every aspiring developer is fresh out of high school and both capable and willing to take out four academic years’ worth of student loans. Different life situations call for different choices. Here are some of the most noteworthy differences that an aspiring programmer should consider when deciding between a coding bootcamp education and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science: