Have Coding Boot Camps Lost Their Appeal?

In the 2010s, people who wanted a faster, cheaper on-ramp into a well-paying career increasingly turned to coding boot camps instead of traditional college degrees.

For anywhere between $5,000 and $20,000, students—many of whom already had four-year degrees but were looking for a career change—could enroll in a boot camp and learn to code in a matter of months. After graduation, they could expect to land an in-demand job as an entry-level coder at a tech company.

Despite allegations that some of the for-profit companies running boot camps misled students about curricula and job-placement rates, thousands of students flocked to the programs, and more than 100 boot-camp providers started up during the 2010s.

But now, public enthusiasm has seemingly cooled and many prominent boot-camp providers are closing shop.

Just last week, one popular Reddit post read, “Boot camps will not get you a job right now. Stop asking.”

That was only a month after the online program management company 2U announced the closure of the boot-camp programs it offered in partnership with universities. “Simply put, the long-form, intensive training that boot camps provide no longer aligns with what the market wants and needs,” Matt Norden, 2U’s interim CEO, said in a news release.

2U’s decision is the latest signal to industry experts that the once-popular programs are losing their appeal. And they suspect a confluence of factors may have contributed to that shift, including the widespread use of generative AI, saturation of the market, the tech industry’s declining demand for entry-level coders, increased demand for online learning and the dramatic growth of other short-term credentials over the past several years.

“Boot camps may never be as big as they were, but they won’t ever disappear from the fabric of the learning world,” said Ken Ruggiero, co-founder and CEO of Ascent Funding, a private loan servicer that helps students finance boot camps, adding that his own company has shifted toward supporting other short-term training programs, including those in the fields of welding, allied health and HVAC. “The innovation [of boot camps] has been really positive and shown the market that these short-duration, high-intensity programs can be profitable and helpful to the labor market.”

Rise of Boot Camps

Boot camps took off in the early 2010s, growing from just a handful of small businesses run by tech leaders to more than 100 by the end of the decade; enrollment multiplied ninefold between 2012 and 2018. Venture capitalists took note of the surge and infused the market with cash.

And then bigger companies scooped up boot-camp providers.

Kaplan was one of the first—it bought DevBootcamp in 2014 for an undisclosed sum. Bridgepoint Education (now Zovio) purchased Fullstack Academy for $50 million in 2019. That same year, 2U acquired its boot camps from Trilogy Education Services for $750 million. And in 2021, Southern New Hampshire purchased Kenzie Academy for an unknown amount.

But while those acquisitions signaled greater support for boot camps, the closure of two of the first boot camps, the Iron Yard and DevBootcamp, in 2017 spurred warnings that the boom wouldn’t last.

“There are simply too many schools for everyone to be profitable,” Rick O’Donnell, the founder and CEO of Skills Fund (which later merged with Ascent Funding), a private lender that worked on quality control with boot-camp providers, told Inside Higher Ed at the time. “Consolidation in growing industries happens all the time—from retail banks to airlines to gas stations to auto manufacturing to ERP software firms—industries with increasing customers and revenue often go through a consolidation phase on the path to profitability and sustainability.”

Nearly a decade later, the industry has seen a wave of boot-camp closures.

In 2023, Southern New Hampshire University shut down its coding boot camp, citing low-cost competition and the broad adoption of AI tools. In early 2024, Portland, Ore.–based Epicodus said it didn’t have enough money to stay open after enrollment fell amid tech layoffs. In August 2024, Raleigh, N.C.–based Momentum Learning’s Triangle coding boot camp closed for similar reasons, followed by 2U’s announcement months later.

At first, “there were only a handful of schools and half of the founders were full-stack programmers who were very entrepreneurial and thought, ‘I can teach people to code better than the MITs and UCLAs of the world,’” Ruggiero said, noting that back then, the vast majority of students were career-shifters with bachelor’s degrees who were able to get good jobs after boot-camp graduation.

“Then, the student type changed. There were only so many people who had a bachelor’s degree and the time, skill and will to go through a program. They still existed, but there was a lot of competition for the same predictable student outcome, so people were fighting over that declining base of students.”

Boot camps retooled their offerings to accommodate less experienced learners. But doing so may have backfired, said Michelle Van Noy, an associate research professor and director of the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University.

“My first hunch is that boot camps are expensive and started off being very selective and then they expanded from there,” she said, speculating that declining interest in coding boot camps may be “a natural correction that some of the selectivity that was driving the initial interest has waned as they got more expansive.”

Online Learning Fueled Disruptions

Around the same time, the pandemic forced the majority of students nationwide into online learning, which had big implications for coding boot camps.

Although remote learning had already found a foothold in the higher education market by the mid-2010s boot-camp boom, many coding boot camps advertised their immersive, in-person training programs—often in big tech hubs like New York, San Francisco and Seattle—as a benefit that would give students a glimpse into what it’s like to work at a tech company.

“That was a big part of the model. It was like a 9-to-5 job,” said Sean Gallagher, consulting director for education and research at Huron Consulting Group. “Demand for that and interest in that very demonstrably shifted after the pandemic with the shift toward online learning.”

In early 2020, 13 of the 105 coding boot camps Career Karma studied for a market report offered online options. By 2023, however, the same survey showed that online boot-camp models had become the norm.

But of course, it wasn’t just boot camps that went online. In 2023, two-thirds of colleges said they were adding online courses to meet student demand, according to the annual Changing Landscape of Online Education report.

“Part of the appeal of the coding boot-camp model was that the ROI could be higher for the learner,” Gallagher said. “As boot camps became more expensive and all kinds of things have shifted in the market—in terms of interest rates to borrow for school, salaries and demand for these jobs—some of the financial equation has evolved to where perhaps some of these low-cost online degrees developed in parallel may be a better value.”

New Competition

And even if prospective students aren’t interested in pursuing an online degree, boot camps are now competing within a quickly expanding market of more than one million microcredential programs, including many that are even cheaper and quicker to complete than most boot camps.

For example, 2U is now shifting toward developing shorter-term microcredentials “to create more flexible programs that equip learners with the in-demand, practical skills for success in today’s rapidly evolving digital economy,” according to its announcement about the demise of its boot-camp offerings.

In a national landscape marked by growing public skepticism that higher education isn’t worth the cost, those shorter-term programs may be an easier sell than a boot camp or a degree.

“It’s easier to get someone to pay $3,000 one time than $9,000 one time,” said Caren Arbeit, a researcher in the education and workforce development division at the Research Triangle Institute. “People complain about the cost of higher education, but these microcredentials with very little outcome data are quite expensive. If you sit down and do the math, it doesn’t end up being a less expensive option, but it’s all about perception.”

It’s also about what employers want, and AI has diminished the demand for entry-level coders like the graduates of coding boot camps.

“Ten years ago, employers wanted people who could convert business practices into programming languages,” said Daniel Pianko, managing director of Achieve, a private equity firm that invests in educational technology. But in 2025, AI-powered machines can do much of that programming, which has elevated demand for higher-level workers who have an “understanding of the specific business problems you want to solve rather than specific coding skills.”

The remaining boot camps’ ability to stay in business will hinge on how well they adapt to all of these changes, according to a joint statement from the board of the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting, which was the first standardized outcomes reporting system for the boot-camp industry.

“With universities remaining expensive and inaccessible to many, boot camps created inclusive pathways into tech careers, while addressing a severe shortage of software developers,” CIRR said in its emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed. “Programs must now focus on developing professionals who can continuously learn and adapt to new tools and technologies, rather than merely teaching specific coding skills.”

No ‘Magic Bullet’

Despite a flood of headlines about tech layoffs over the past couple of years, there’s still plenty of demand for coders outside of Silicon Valley, said Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, a senior fellow at the National Skills Coalition.

“There are still lots and lots of entry-level tech jobs in so-called non-tech companies,” she said, adding that agriculture and health care are two such industries. “But boot camps are mostly set up to help people find jobs in the tech industry and not so much in other industries that need tech workers.”

That hang-up, she said, highlights a fundamental need for innovative education programs—whether it’s boot camps, microcredentials, MOOCs or whatever fad emerges next—to equip students with a skill set they can adapt to a rapidly changing economy.

“You can go back 150 years in American history and at every point there has been someone selling the magic bullet that if kids just learn a particular skill they’ll be protected forever from losing their job,” Bergson-Shilcock said.

“What that points to is a very real anxiety of how devastating it is to become unemployed,” she continued. “Everyone wants insurance against that, but the reality is there isn’t ever going to be a magic bullet.”