What happened to the bootcamps people ask about

Coding bootcamps do close, and the internet's account of which ones have closed is not reliable. So on 24 September 2026 we opened a list of school websites in a browser and wrote down what each one returned. That is a small thing to do and almost nobody does it; it took about ten minutes and it contradicted several widely repeated claims.

What we did, exactly

Each address below was loaded in a Chromium browser pinned to United States locale and New York time. We recorded the HTTP status, the address we ended up at after any redirects, and the page title. No judgement about a company's finances is involved: this is a record of what a prospective student would have seen that day.

The last row in that table is the one people misread. TripleTen has changed what it sells rather than whether it sells: its site was live and organised entirely around AI programmes for career changers and working professionals. That is a product decision, not a closure, but it matters if you bookmarked it for something else.

The two that are unambiguously gone

Codeup's domain does not resolve. That is as clear a signal as this exercise produces: there is no server answering, no holding page, nothing. Kenzie Academy's address now sends you to Southern New Hampshire University, which is what absorption into a larger institution looks like from the outside — the programme may continue in some form, but not as the thing you were searching for.

The one that changed customers

Thinkful's address now lands on Chegg Skills, and Chegg Skills is not selling to individuals. Its page describes solutions for employers, higher education and government, with ready-made pathways and custom programmes. If you are a person with your own money looking for a coding course, that business is no longer aimed at you, whatever it was called when you bookmarked it.

Something similar has happened at edX. 2U, which operates edX, announced on 13 September 2024 that it had successfully completed its financial restructuring and emerged from Chapter 11 as a privately held entity — its own words in its own press release. On the day we checked, the edX boot camps address redirected to the general course search rather than to a boot camps page.

The one that is still trading, and why people think it is not

BloomTech's website was live, titled Bloom Institute of Technology, and describing an online coding bootcamp. People assume it is gone because of what happened to it, which is a separate and documented matter: on 17 April 2024 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a consent order against the company and its chief executive, permanently banning the company from consumer lending, banning its chief executive from student lending for ten years, and imposing civil penalties of $64,235 and $100,000. The details of what the Bureau found are in how people pay for a coding bootcamp.

A regulatory order is not a closure. Both things are true at once: the school is trading, and the order is on the public record.

Why a redirect is worse news than a closed door

A domain that does not resolve is honest. A redirect into a parent company is the harder case, because the brand survives in search results, in old articles and in the recommendations of people who went there years ago, long after the thing itself has changed shape. A prospective student can spend a week researching a school that, at the level of what is actually for sale, no longer exists in the form they are researching.

The hardest case of all is neither of those. It is the school that keeps every marketing page up, prices and all, and puts one sentence about ceasing operations somewhere you would only find it by reading to the bottom. Nothing about the course pages changes. The advisor button still works. We got this wrong ourselves on the first pass of this very page — we read the top of one school's site, saw a full catalogue, and moved on, and the notice was sitting in the footer of the same capture. That is why the third and fourth steps below exist.

That is why the redirect column above matters more than the status codes. Two of the addresses we opened returned a perfectly healthy page belonging to somebody else, and in one of those cases the new owner is selling to employers and universities rather than to individuals. Nothing about that is announced to a reader arriving from a search engine.

Run this check yourself, in one minute

1. Type the school's address into a browser directly, rather than clicking a search result. A paid search result can point at a landing page that outlives the programme behind it.
2. Look at the address bar after the page loads. If you have been redirected to a different company's domain, that is the most important fact about the school you were researching.
3. Read the whole page before you conclude a school is open, and read the footer in particular. A school winding down announces it in a thin banner or a line above the legal links and leaves its marketing pages up for months — course listings, prices, advisor buttons, all of it. A page that looks like it is selling you something is not evidence that anyone is.
4. Search the page for the words ceasing, closing, winding down or teach-out. It takes three seconds with your browser's find command and it beats every other step on this list.
5. Find a cohort start date on the site, and check the year on it. A start date in a past year is a page nobody has updated.
6. Look at who the site is addressing. Pages aimed at employers, universities and government departments are pages that are no longer aimed at you.
7. Search the school's name on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's own enforcement pages. It takes a few seconds and it is a primary source rather than a rumour.

That sequence is the whole method behind the table above. There is nothing expert about it, and it beats reading a listicle written eighteen months ago.

There is one more thing a redirect cannot tell you, and it is the one that costs money: whether a school still taking enrolments intends to run the cohort you are joining. A live website is evidence that a company exists, not evidence that a particular class will start on the date printed beside it.

What this means before you pay

The failure mode that matters is not a school vanishing overnight; it is a school winding down a consumer programme while still taking enrolments, or being absorbed into something with different priorities. Three checks cost nothing. Ask when the next cohort starts and whether it is confirmed. Ask what happens to money paid if the cohort does not run. And check that any credit contract carries the Holder Rule notice, which is the only thing standing between you and paying a finance company for a course nobody delivered.

Then do what we did: open the school's own website and look at it properly. The whole question of whether a coding bootcamp is worth it rests on the school still being there in six months, and that is one of the few things you can check yourself in a minute.