Dive Brief:

• Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering is teaming up with 2U's Trilogy Education to offer a non-credit coding boot camp that will teach front- and back-end development skills to working professionals in the Baltimore area.
• The 24-week, part-time program begins in September and will cover the basics of algorithms, coding and data structure as well as programming languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Students are not eligible for financial aid. Those who complete the course will receive a certificate in full-stack web development from the engineering school.
• Colleges across the country are offering boot camps to give local workers a quick way to learn new skills. Last year, more than 36,000 jobs in the Baltimore region that required some coding ability went unfilled, according to a Trilogy press release. 

Dive Insight:

2U's acquisition of boot camp provider Trilogy Education Services earlier this year shined a light on the role colleges expect short-term training programs like boot camps to play as they find ways to address existing students' and workers' need for training on new technology platforms. 

Trilogy brought to the table more than two dozen new higher ed partnerships, which included campus-based offerings. 2U, meanwhile, appears poised to expand those shorter programs online. The move follows its 2017 acquisition of GetSmarter, a purveyor of online short-courses for working professionals.

Just how much the expansion of boot camps will change higher ed is still to be determined. A report out earlier this year from the Clayton Christensen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, suggested that while these skills-based programs may be "inferior to traditional degrees" they are "simpler and cheaper" for students to achieve.

The efficiency has attracted workers and employers alike.

For instance, Trilogy struck a similar collaboration with the University of Oregon last fall, and also teamed up with WeWork to bring educational programs to the company's co-working locations. Other institutions, such as Northeastern University, have developed their own boot camps.

Though an estimated 25% of student developers are self-taught coders, according to a survey last year by HackerRank, there is still a place for formal programs. In particular, colleges are considering boot camps to help tap into workers' need to return to school throughout their career.

"How do we enable universities to have the right offering at the right time to make people more competitive?" said Trilogy founder and CEO Dan Sommer in an interview with Education Dive earlier this year. "If that's embedding a boot camp into a degree, great. If that's a standalone non-credit boot camp, great. If that's a short course, fantastic."