They solved this problem by going to App Academy, a three month long, $15,000 course that taught programming. App Academy graduates compete for the same jobs as people who have taken computer science in college, a four year long, $200,000 undertaking.

This is actually a very common discussion over on /r/cscareerquestions. The general consensus is that you can't cram four years or study into three months, so a lot of the standard CS curriculum is cut out--these bootcamps are very limited in depth and breadth. So the question becomes: does the stuff cut out really matter and does this prevent graduates from competing for the same jobs?

CS fundamentals like data structures, algorithms, databases, theory, software engineering practices, concurrency, security, compilers, etc. are not going to be covered in a typical coding bootcamp. You don't necessarily need experience in these for every coding job; a job updating a business's webpage might only require some experience with JQuery and maybe Rails depending on how fancy you get. But most companies will want to see a much greater breadth of knowledge, especially very well-known companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft. So I don't feel that bootcamp graduates are really competing (at least in any real sense) for the same jobs in the vast majority of cases. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that there probably almost no SWEs at Google whose CS education consists solely of a coding bootcamp.

As an aside, plenty of public schools have great CS programs, I feel it's a bit disingenuous to claim it costs $200k to get a CS degree. Especially since a university degree is accredited, you could spent $15k on your bootcamp and learn almost nothing because there are no standards to speak of.