Code Fellows Alumni Stats
codefellows.org
codefellows.org
They aggressively filter applicants (on prior work experience, passion, etc.) to only keep the ones most likely succeed and make their program look good (not unlike most private high schools, and a lot of private universities). And a lot of them charge crazy tuition (not far from the most expensive US universities if you bring it to a cost per week of instruction), further narrowing the funnel.
There's not a lot of merit in having a very high success rate if your students were going to succeed anyway. That's where the real educational challenges lie, and why public universities or non-profits who aim to reach precisely the people who couldn't get in those bootcamps have much lower success rates.
At my current workplace, we just hired a developer who came from a dev bootcamp. She's fantastic- but she also has an undergraduate degree in math, she wrote some C++ out of college, and has an MBA as well as pretty impressive work experience. Of course she was very likely to do well in a cookie-cutter Ruby course!
Try teaching former convicts, unemployed people, veterans, teenagers from poor neighborhoods, etc. But, it's much harder work, less glamorous, and surely less profitable (I've taught CS/programming in public universities and to disadvantaged teenagers).
To be fair, Code Fellow seems to be upfront about this, since only 88% of successful applicants actually graduate.
Edit: More related to your point above, they are also up front about previous degrees held. 82% of their students had degrees before entering their program.
Some of these programs kick out some successful applicants in the first few weeks, further reducing the field from which they pluck these success figures.
I feel like the real super power is the ability to learn effectively. Not just how to write code, but how to do anything. I get the feeling that a lot of people who have had just the right combination of upbringing + opportunities take this ability for granted. They do it very naturally.
Coding is only as powerful as your ability to think. I don't care how many monkeys are coding in PHP you're never going to get Facebook.
It's entirely possible that the higher salaries are caused by the prior education and not the boot camp.
Adding that up you have
6% Associates + 65% Bach + 11% Masters
Or a total of 77% with degrees and an 88% pass-rate. They don't tell us the overlap or what % that passed and had a college were the top earners from their averages.
Stats can be twisted to tell just about any story, without the raw data and a chance to perform independent analysis it's hard to tell who the real success stories are.
What a newbie gets in 8 weeks is probably not much, but a CompSci masters holder, he may get much more.
I don't like these partial stories with pretty stats that don't tell us the overlaps and give us real pictures.
These stats are great PR, but they're about as helpful as asshole on an elbow.
Some schools might find out that 8 weeks is too short. Others might find it too long. Being that these rapid fire dev ramp-up programs are still pretty new it'll be interesting to see what insights emerge.