What Does the Rise of the Coding Boot Camp Mean for University Programs? A View from the Front
Series: How is the Digital Revolution Coming to Higher Education?
By
Osei Bonsu
Robert Manzer, PhD
of the College Consortium
We are colleagues at a new company called the College Consortium. Osei serves as the Chief Technical Officer, and has previously worked in tech startups while teaching at Coding Bootcamps. Rob serves as the Chief Academic Officer, and has previously worked as a professor, a dean and provost at four independent colleges and a larger online university. The goal of our collaboration is to bring our perspectives together — on tech and higher education — to try and see more clearly how the digital revolution is coming to higher education. Our combined perspective begins with an awareness that higher ed’s digital revolution has been less abrupt and violent than those occurring in industries like music, retail and publishing. While the arrival and spread of online learning is historic, traditional models still largely hold sway, and the messianic enthusiasms for educational technologies like adaptive learning and “big data” have ebbed, relegating true believers to futuristic education summits while leaving most of higher ed relatively untouched. The digital revolution in higher ed is going to take some time.
More on these themes later; today we look for clues as to where we’re headed in the rise of the Coding Boot Camp — a development widely heralded as an “alternative pathway” to a university degree program and so well-regarded that the US Department of Education accommodated it through a new student aid option (EQUIP). Undergirding such enthusiasm is the long-standing critique of the Ivory Tower as insufficiently interested in the “real world,” career skills and jobs. Along these lines, the new Boot Camps are part of an ever-widening divide between more practical majors and traditional disciplines (especially in the Humanities) and the concomitant steep, accelerating and shocking decline of the latter. Do Coding Boot Camps presage the future of higher education — more practical, industry-aligned and of shorter duration?
Not surprising, Coding Boot Camps (CBCs) have occasioned a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), but let’s begin with what they can and can’t do. CBCs exist to help fill entry-level web development roles that exist in the workforce. After going through a 12-week fulltime program or 24-week part-time program, students can obtain jobs as software developers. Compared to much longer 4-year trek to a computer science degree, this new pathway may seem like a much faster route to the same career, but it really isn’t. CBC programs and Computer Science (CS) degrees give students very different skill sets that are valued differently in the marketplace. Like vocational programs or trade schools, CBCs give students a practical set of skills directly related to using a set of tools to perform a task and solve problems while CS degrees give students an understanding of the fundamentals required to build the technology that underlie computer systems. A CBC student learns how to connect to and query a database system, while a CS student learns how to build a database engine. CBC students learn how to use a programming language while CS students learn how to make programming languages.
Consistent with their reputation, CBCs are great at launching technology careers because they give students a strong reference point for understanding technology and its use. These students are a great fit for most companies, because these companies are more concerned with applying current technologies to solve problems (building a website to support their business) rather than creating new technologies. As a result, there exists a large space where CBC students can find jobs, and the availability of these jobs raises the question of whether universities should do more to incorporate CBC skills into their degree programs. The problem here is that such incorporation is much harder than it first seems. Technology, specifically web technology, changes at such an amazing pace that the typical course/curriculum approval process would make it difficult to keep the curriculum relevant.
Principles of CS are 20–50 years old, while web development changes dramatically every few years. It’s more an issue of culture than anything else. Apart from schools like Stanford and MIT, universities don’t have the culture (or resources) necessary to make sure they are teaching web development skills that are relevant in the marketplace. There are always exceptions, and any talented professor with enough influence could create a course that would be relevant, but keeping that curriculum up to date when you are not directly involved in the industry or located in a tech hub is very difficult.
So, what should universities do in the face of the market’s demand for skills like those taught in CBCs? First, they should take some solace in the fact that companies that actually build new technologies — rather than applying current ones — will continue to focus recruiting on CS graduates. More difficult is what universities need to do to stay abreast of how technology is changing other practical majors like marketing. In this one case, technology has made marketing more immediate, more dynamic, and more directly measurable.
One can create an advertising campaign on Facebook and instantly measure its impact. Moreover, the fantastic amount of data that one can collect and process about consumers means that the ability to pair strong technical/data analysis skills with traditional marketing skills is invaluable. As a result, what many universities are realizing is that to make their graduates relevant to the marketplace, they must provide them with an ever-increasing array of technical abilities. Bottom line: If you are given the choice of hiring a traditional marketing major or a marketing major that is capable of architecting and evaluating an online campaign, as well as assessing how different changes to your website will result in increases or decreases in revenue, which would you pick?
In sum, Coding Boot Camps highlight key skills of the Digital Economy, and they thereby raise the question of whether universities should focus on creating these skills. Rephrasing this slightly, should universities focus more on preparing students for entry level employment?
In the past, such a question would have been met with a resounding “no.” But now the answer seems less certain, for the very condition of the Digital Economy — its radical and profound pace of change — puts a premium on having the skills to adapt to such change. This condition necessarily points to a more nimble if shallower education — one that prepares students to get a footing in an ever shifting landscape. Unfortunately, this radical pace of change also means universities will really struggle to be good at such an education, and many will thus question their value. Such is what we see through the clarifying lens of the Coding Boot Camp.
