Anonymous wrote:My son will be graduating high school in May and wants to be a computer coder. Unfortunately, academics have never been his strong point. None of the universities he's been accepted to are very well-known, and if he does go to college, he'll be going a nearby state college, living at home to save money on a room and board. The thing is, though, that in order to achieve his dream, he doesn't have to go to college at all. There are bootcamps that teach people how to code in a matter of weeks, after which he could be making serious money
https://www.bestcolleges.com/bootcamps/guides/salary-potential/#:~:text=Hack%20Reactor's%202019%20online%20software,a%20median%20salary%20of%20%2460%2C000.
You'd have thought that when I pointed out to him that he could start a serious career in coding after a matter of weeks instead of 4 years, he would've felt relieved and excited. Only he didn't. He said that he wants to actually accomplish something, and not going to college would rob him of that satisfaction. Graduating from a lackluster college is really not an accomplishment. If he were going to be attending Harvard or Stanford or Yale or Berkeley or Princeton or UCLA or MIT, then I would more than understand his desire to go to college, as extremely few people graduate from schools like that, and those who do become highly respected worldwide afterwards. But graduating from a college like the one my son's been accepted into is the easiest thing in the world and hundreds of thousands of people do it every year.
When I explained this to my son, he responded by saying that graduating from a bad college would be better than never graduating from college at all. So then I told my son that I would be happy to pay for the coding bootcamp, but if he wanted to go to the state college, he would have to take out loans and would likely be in lots of debt by the time he graduated and started his career. He said he would be willing to do whatever it took to pay off his debt. I just don't understand why anyone would want to take 4 years to do something that can be accomplished in 12 to 24 weeks.