"trade school is cheaper, and boot camps are shorter in duration."
Right now, they are quite inferior. Not because they are necessarily bad, but just, they don't last long enough to cover what a computer science education does. (Being in mind I am aware that "computer science" and "programming" aren't even really the same thing.) I think, without judging it good or bad, if something could fill in the gulf between the 4-year rounded degree and its computer programming content and the 8-week bootcamp a lot of people would be interested in it, but there's a lot of activation energy required there.
When I took computer science 20 years ago, it was only marginally related to "programming", and it has gotten much worse since then, because "programming" hasn't exactly changed but all the stuff around it has. "Deploying" used to be copying over the directory full of .ASP or .PHP files and maybe restarting the server, not committing to source control, handling a PR, running through CI, open source compliance analysis, and sundry other automated things, to be package up to something that we use devops tools to manage deploying, etc. etc. I'd love a new graduate who came to me with enough programming skills to prove they can do it, but knew source control, monitoring, basic commit hygiene, and the dozen other skills you need to have nowadays to get anything released to the public. You'll learn none of that in college.
And I'm not even saying you necessarily "should". But you definitely don't.
Right now, they are quite inferior. Not because they are necessarily bad, but just, they don't last long enough to cover what a computer science education does. (Being in mind I am aware that "computer science" and "programming" aren't even really the same thing.) I think, without judging it good or bad, if something could fill in the gulf between the 4-year rounded degree and its computer programming content and the 8-week bootcamp a lot of people would be interested in it, but there's a lot of activation energy required there.
When I took computer science 20 years ago, it was only marginally related to "programming", and it has gotten much worse since then, because "programming" hasn't exactly changed but all the stuff around it has. "Deploying" used to be copying over the directory full of .ASP or .PHP files and maybe restarting the server, not committing to source control, handling a PR, running through CI, open source compliance analysis, and sundry other automated things, to be package up to something that we use devops tools to manage deploying, etc. etc. I'd love a new graduate who came to me with enough programming skills to prove they can do it, but knew source control, monitoring, basic commit hygiene, and the dozen other skills you need to have nowadays to get anything released to the public. You'll learn none of that in college.
And I'm not even saying you necessarily "should". But you definitely don't.