So much of the high education system is vestigial from the Middle Ages(Why are the degrees in Latin?). I wonder how much of all that has been done away with.
It serves a purpose, but it was adopted by industry as a means to train workers, which the university was never meant to do. Universities will never go away, they will just transition back to what they were always meant to be: specialized institutions for cultivating the elite for cultural leadership (law, medicine, clergy, politics, the arts, etc).
Using such a platform to teach people how to do accounting, computer programming, engineering, nursing, or even grade-school teaching is a waste of time and money. What we call programmers/accountants/engineers/entrepreneurs are just the modern equivalent of factory workers and street merchants. Skill and talent exist for them in their own way, but those roles are not suited to the purpose of a university. They can be better trained in separate, more focused settings.
There is still a need for software developers to go to college (or something like it). I have a degree in computer science and when I was in college, we studied the theories behind compilers, language constructs, and database design (and many other things)
It allowed me to completely switch from PHP to Python in less than 3 months because I understand what is going on behind-the-scenes.
Many of these bootcamps just teach you how to mash apis together. You never truly get a full understanding of your craft.
Software development is part art, part science. Some people just want to learn the art side, which could turn into a career, but you won't go as far if you learn both.
Well I think that might be a false dichotomy. Just because a bootcamp isn't enough, doesn't mean we need to attend years of college. I'm grateful for what I learned in college, but it didn't need to take that long or be structured that way. I think a specialized school of computing could sufficiently train a student in all of the things you mentioned in far less time than college requires by combining focused, in-depth coursework alongside bootcamps in languages.
You're either painting a straw man of my position and pretending that I advocate unstructured learning or else you're creating a false dichotomy in which we choose between some sort of ad-hoc chaos and the traditional college structure. Maybe both.
Either way, college is structured for a specific purpose and skill-based careers are not that purpose. It might be best to have a structured education, but it's nothing short of ridiculous to think traditional college structure, with it's long semesters and mid-year breaks, is the most efficient way to teach someone how to work in IT, engineering, or any other industrial field.
But is college the best structure? There are probably a dozen alternative ways to structure CS learning. I think the really problem is monoculture, the monoculture that is the contemporary cult of college.
