They went for scale before App Academy and in doing so exacerbated an already present schism in the quality of each players' respective applicant pools created

They went for scale before App Academy and in doing so exacerbated an already present schism in the quality of each players' respective applicant pools created by App Academy's more flexible payment options. Dev Bootcamp initially was a 10 week program for 20 students, then that was upped to ~40 students, and finally to 54. So in the first year, ~110-120 students were educated. Then, in an effort to scale, they moved to a 9-week rolling cohort broken into 3-week phases where ~16 new students walk in the door every 3 weeks. This means they are now bringing in almost 3x as many students per year (only considering the main SF branch) as when they started, and doing so in a time where there are plenty of other coding schools around as alternatives for prospective students. Where before they got basically the whole applicant pool and brought in a smaller percentage of them, they now get a fraction of the (admittedly larger) pool and accept more of them. Oh, and they charge $12,200 upfront whereas App Academy allows you to opt only to repay them out of your first year salary after the program. I just saw an article earlier this week about how a much too high percentage of the American populace has no emergency fund (a few month's expenses to float them in the case of job loss, etc.), so given that it's no surprise that people with a choice of those 2 payment options will opt to choose App Academy. Frankly a lot of people don't even have the ability to choose because they don't have the upfront $12k + living expenses to cover Dev Bootcamp -- not sure if it's still the case but App Academy's office at one point was also zoned as a live-work space and students were able to live there, reducing their expenses during the program to almost nothing. There is some (mostly) back-channel chatter about the potential padding of hiring numbers, but I think the prestige difference is more so the result of App Academy's more measured approach to scaling and more student-friendly terms resulting in less brand dilution, though perhaps at the cost of missing out on the big payday here.