Well, they aren't an accredited program, so they're pretty much eliding the regulatory aspects. The flip side is, its students are paying private-college prices (and over three times average resident tuition for state schools) for an unaccredited program. So, is the program significantly better than an AS, BS, or MS when factoring in time and price? Not sure about that. (It appears to be an accelerated and relatively superficial tour of CS, plus a lot of hanging out with startup types. Compare with an undergrad at Stanford or Berkeley plus regular Caltrain or BART trips for coffee in SoMa.)

Having said that, MakeSchool isn't trying to be a replacement for a traditional uni education -- hence the "gap year" terminology -- but for the price, I'd hope they're working with ABET to get some kind of seal of approval of their curriculum. Alternatively, they can do what some colleagues of mine did back in the late '90s, with a similar concept (a "web talent incubator" named Populi) -- they worked with accredited institutions like Pratt to build and monitor their curricula, giving them the imprimatur of a prestigious institution without the regulatory handcuffs.

There's no formal government approval of higher education in the U.S., but there's a quasi-official system of accreditation that effectively puts a stamp of approval on some programs. It's still legal to offer unaccredited programs, but they aren't eligible for some kinds of funding, and some kinds of legal recognition might also be tied to that status (varies by field). My guess is that they are not seeking accreditation, since they don't seem to be aiming to provide something similar to a traditional university curriculum. In that case, the space is basically unregulated. Some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_accreditation...

An online-only school can be accredited at least since the '90s, though, in cases where it does seek to provide education equivalent to a traditional physical-classrooms university, and wants equal recognition. I believe the first online-only university in the U.S. to receive accreditation was Western Governors University (founded 1997): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University. They charge about $5500/yr, fwiw.

If you ever wanted to get a professional engineering license, you'd need a degree from an accredited institution.

They'll likely just get a career school designation from the State of CA like other bootcamps.