The teachers know within a week or two who is going to have real problems with the material. The schools do not want them to put assessments in place that would have them leave, because they want money.
Then had grew bigger groups, lowered the bar for students, increased prices, reduced scholarships, more focus on financing via loans, and then changed the curriculum in response to the requests of local industry.
On paper they all have reasonable explanations.
Bigger groups? Well we just have so many more people applying! After all, they evangelized the hell out of the program, getting both graduates and local well-known business leaders to speak about the wonders of the program.
Lowering the bar and offering loans? Well they're just opening it up to folks from non-traditional and more varied backgrounds. Don't want to be classist or whatever the hell else -ist! I'm self-taught, I sure didn't want to be one to pull the gate up behind me, and what's more I saw folks from non-traditional backgrounds do well. There is some validity to this.
Changing the curriculum in response to your local board of industry advisors? Great idea! The students will be even more likely to land roles afterwards because those doing the hiring are telling us what their actual needs are. Well what it turned into was a tale of too many cooks. You have an already small time frame with which to teach core material further reduced to satisfy an advisor. Teaching Java and Spring? Why not throw in some Android! Well we'd be in remiss to not touch on Scala, oh and Clojure too! Because they need exposure to other languages!
So now you have a three-month camp for someone that needs to learn Java basics of Spring, basics of their build tool, Gradle, so throw in some Grovvy, oh and basics of Hibernate... which means basics of databases. Oh, don't forget this is all being run on their shiny new MBPs so there's the whole systems administration jackassery. So why not then throw in a week of Android, another week of Scala and Clojure, when they barely understand syntax as a concept to further confuse them. So that's 12 weeks minus 4 weeks for the capstone gives you 8 weeks for all that I just listed, only 6 weeks for the core material.
As I write this out, I'm even more amazed at the folks who came out of that and landed anything. Thankfully for a few of my friends and colleagues the front-end courses were a bit more focused and seemed to produce more working candidates.
Sometimes a shyster comes along and hoodwinks people, sometimes you have incompetence, sometimes both. Either way it's the students left holding bag.
