That's been brought up a few times in this thread. I don't think it's a fair comparison at all. You can borrow student loans for college, but the $20k comes out of pocket.
Or you could do what I did, get a shitty minimum-wage code monkey startup job beforehand so you know what you're getting into before you commit, then sock away some funds, take out a personal loan, and because you're a programmer you can turn the entire tuition into a business expense and also deduct the cost of moving to <insert tech hub here>.
Easily paid the loan off once I got my first job. Got a huge tax return last month. Now enjoying writing this from Mountain View.
Most bootcamp students already have college degrees. Many have families and mortgages, etc. Dropping from the workforce for four years to do another college degree isn't a realistic option. Tuition isn't the biggest cost of education at a certain point in life; lost wages is.
A second bachelor's is unlikely to take four years of full-time work; e.g., Oregon State's online second bachelor's in CS is a 1-year full time program.
That's cool and an option I didn't know about. Still, an entire year of lost wages is way more expensive than a bootcamp. I couldn't have made that work.
> Still, an entire year of lost wages is way more expensive than a bootcamp.
Plenty of people do online programs nearly equivalent to full-time (with loads like that of the 1.5-year track for the OSU second bachelor's, which is also available on 2-, 3-, and 4-year tracks with lower impacts, though longer terms) with full-time jobs and families, some even do full-time programs (like the 1-year track) that way. People that need to learn around an existing job and often family commitments are pretty much the core market for distance education.
That's not to say bootcamps don't have their place, but the idea that there is no other option for people who want to become programmers and can't afford to take a lot of time off of their existing job is just wrong.
You can now borrow for high quality, reputable Bootcamps. In fact, the lenders who do this are extremely diligent about researching our outcomes. They do not want to lend $20k to students to attend a program that doesn't have PROVEN high quality outcomes. Hack Reactor has demonstrated that we have those kinds of successes so we have a number of lenders willing to provide financing to our students.
