Okay, I agree in the abstract that "intense immersive study" is a better form of education than any other. This is really obvious. But the breadth and depth of

Okay, I agree in the abstract that "intense immersive study" is a better form of education than any other. This is really obvious. But the breadth and depth of knowledge required in the areas is huge. (e.g. for distributed systems, you'd ideally understand things at all levels of the computing stack - OS, networking, databases, C/C++, data structures, algorithms, some basic discrete math). This could easily require a "bootcamp" to be a year long. Would it really be a bootcamp then? Also, the world experts in all those areas are at research universities. Now, it's true you could probably offer them a lot of money to teach bootcamp courses, but one of the best routes to developing skills in these areas is to do actual research in these fields. Research takes a long time (> 1 year), so this goes back to my original point.