COURSE REPORT JUST RELEASED THEIR 2017 CODING BOOTCAMP STATS

Course Report is an organization that tracks and analyzes the North American coding bootcamp industry. Today they published their 2017 North American Market Report and we’ve had a chance to take a quick spin through the stats. Since this is our thing, it’s of course endlessly fascinating to us to study what’s going on in our industry. But while some of the stats are “inside baseball” of interest mainly to us accelerated learning program nerds, we thought there were some interesting highlights.

One stat that jumped out to us was the average program length statistic. The average coding bootcamp length jumped in one year from 12.9 weeks to 14.1. That’s a pretty meaningful jump in just one year. Of course, we plow along with a 24 week program, so we’ve always been advocates of longer, deeper programs. Nice to see the industry may be moving in our direction!

Course Report includes a nice infographic in their report which we are including below. Click it to expand and take a look at all the stats.

Overall, the trend lines seem to be healthy but possibly market saturation is starting to slow the rate of growth in new schools and new locations. The total number of new programs was not up greatly this year when balanced against closures. Plus, in the last week Kaplan announced they were closing Dev Bootcamp, one of the pioneer coding bootcamp programs, which means another five locations closing above and beyond those reported by Course Report.

Expected graduate numbers are up substantially at 51.6% growth from 2016 to 2017 to a total of 22, 814. That’s as compared to an estimate of 79,650 undergraduate computer science grads in 2016. That suggests that coding bootcamps taken as a whole are making a meaningful contribution to starting to close the gap between supply and demand of professional software developers in North America. That’s assuming reasonably comparable placement rates for both types of students which are numbers not available from Course Report.

One last stat that we always look at when we get the new Course Report analysis is tuition rates around the country. If you look at Course Reports reported average program cost and divide by the length of the average program, you get an average weekly tuition cost of $815.46 nationally. At NSS, our weekly tuition cost is $495.83, or about 60% of the national average. We’re stoked that we continue to be able to offer our students everything we offer in terms of program length and depth, range of technology options, and deep community relationships at such low cost.