Looking at them under the light of self-selection effect, bootcamps are an excellent source of engineers. Going to college signals your parents have money, and about yourself, maybe risk-aversion / conventionality. Bootcamps signal hustling, risk-tolerance, autonomy.
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Cherry-picking people who would've otherwise succeeded and charging them a lot of money for very little education so that they a meager certificate is parasitism.
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That same artificially selected population could've gone a lot further with the same amount of money applied differently.
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I get what you’re saying, but not sure it’s true. Most people would profit from direction and good* education over self learning, even the smart ones. That said, self learning is the greatest selection bias you could ever have.
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Adding an inexperienced human to a poorly designed curriculum and charging five figures does not make that more effective than a good curriculum augmented with community support. I've seen this from experience across many contexts (uni, bootcamps, etc.)
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Agreed, of course. And we also agree, I’m sure, that some need education on the margin. But there are people who could succeed on their own that will be even *more* successful with an education than on their own.
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My point is about opportunity cost (for the students) and access. Manipulating admissions to make yourself look good and then charging 5 figures for something that produces worse outcomes than books + community support merits no praise.
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Those kinds of programs draw their time and resources away from better options that could've gotten them _further_ in their understanding and at a couple orders of magnitude lower cost.
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Further, you're assuming your ability to evaluate future outcomes and ability/adaptability is accurate and it is extremely unlikely that is the case or you'd find a more profitable use for that faculty than filtering for marginally-likely-to-succeed customers.
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