I did App Academy in January 2018, so I can only speak to their curriculum, not Lambda School’s. I have done about 2.5 years’ worth of computer science degrees

I did App Academy in January 2018, so I can only speak to their curriculum, not Lambda School’s. I have done about 2.5 years’ worth of computer science degrees (mostly the first half, I dropped out and restarted) so I can speak to how coding bootcamps stack up against college. At that time it was an incredible job market for new developers, so the “pay us once you get a job” model made a lot more sense back then (obviously, the current job market makes it seems borderline insane). I chose to pay upfront for my course because a job search would have been significantly less fruitful for me due to visa requirements, and as it played out, it was a good decision for me. In the current market, paying upfront with alternate financing probably makes sense for a lot more people. The curriculum was definitely solid. A highly motivated person with some prior tech experience could maybe cover the same ground in their own 3 months of self-directed study for 8-10 hours a day, but the expert guidance on-hand and the boatload of testing to validate the learning doesn’t seem reproducible for an individual. In my opinion, computer science degrees are simply not in the same game as either focused individual learning or a bootcamp - they do not teach nearly as much of the day-to-day developer skills like the shell, git, React, Rails, etc., their theoretical learning of data structures and algorithms is less focused on practical early career content, and the pace is much slower so the total content is less. (I think this understanding that compsci degrees aren’t lined up with junior developer roles is borne out by the general view in tech hiring, that a compsci degree is neither necessary nor sufficient to make a hire, though it is a positive.)