Despite the recently announced closure of Dev Bootcamp, the coding school industry is a more than $266 million market that continues to grow, according to a new study from Course Report.
The 2017 Coding Bootcamp Market Size Study estimates that 22,814 people will graduate from coding schools this year, up from 15,048 in 2016. This year, coding schools will graduate more than 10 times the number of students than they did in 2012, the year Dev Bootcamp was founded. This growth means that for every 3.5 people who get a computer science degree from a university, one person graduates from a coding school.
The report found that there are 94 full-time coding schools across the U.S. and Canada, with 15 new ones opening and seven closing in the last year. That includes Dev Bootcamp, which had six campuses around the U.S. including one in Seattle. Liz Eggleston, Course Report’s co-founder, said closures like Dev Bootcamp show that some consolidation is happening in the industry, but it is not a sign of a downturn.
“Dev Bootcamp isn’t closing because the education model failed; they still trained 2,700 developers and we see those developers really growing in their jobs and doing amazing things,” Eggleston said. “If other bootcamps can find a profitable business model (and they really should be able to) while focusing on quality outcomes and student experiences, then they’ll continue to thrive.”
One of the advantages of coding schools is the ability to quickly adjust to trends in the tech industry in ways that university programs may not be able to. The report found that coding bootcamps are starting to offer longer programs. This year, the most common programming language was Full Stack JavaScript, overtaking Ruby on Rails.
“The bootcamp model is interesting because it can constantly adapt to employer demands, tech trends, and student needs,” Eggleston said. “For example, when they first launched, most bootcamps were around 3 months long, but most recently we are seeing a trend towards longer courses of 6-12 months. Additional weeks at schools like Galvanize, Turing, and Holberton School mean these schools can teach more computer science theory like data structures and algorithms, in addition to hands-on practice.”
As one of the nation’s top tech hubs, it’s no surprise that Seattle has one of the highest concentrations of coding schools. New York and San Francisco lead the way, with 22 and 14 schools respectively, and Seattle comes in third with 13 coding schools.
