In the 2010s, coding bootcamps caught the higher education world’s imagination. The movement sparked both excitement and fear.

General Assembly, Galvanize, Flatiron School, Dev Bootcamp, and more were written up in media outlets like Forbes, the New York Times[NYT +0.9%] and Tech Crunch and attracted venture capital and heady valuations.

At the Christensen Institute, we wondered if they might disrupt universities’ master’s degree programs. In some cases, they may still be well positioned to do so, as several coding bootcamps have evolved to now work directly with companies to upskill and reskill their employees or added apprenticeship programs.

Yet the initial bootcamps model was predominantly direct-to-consumer. These entities were created during the same period that business guru Rita McGrath described recently in her post,…