Successful schools, analysts say, will increasingly be the ones that expand their programs to suit the changing needs of employers.

By Steve Lohr

New York Times

In the past five years, dozens of schools have popped up offering an unusual promise: Even humanities graduates can learn how to code in a few months and join the high-paying digital economy. Students and their hopeful parents shelled out as much as $26,000 seeking to jump-start a career.

But the coding boot-camp field now faces a sobering moment, as two large schools have announced plans to shut down this year — despite backing by major for-profit education companies, Kaplan and the Apollo Education Group, the parent of the University of Phoenix.

The closings are a sign that years of heady growth led to a boot-camp glut, and that the field could be in the early stages of a shakeout.

“You can imagine this becoming a big industry, but not for 90 companies,” said Michael Horn, a principal consultant at Entangled Solutions, an education research and consulting firm.