In my time in academia, I was always struck by how uncomfortable academics were with the idea of university educations being vocational training, rather than education "for its own sake." It's a nice ideal, but almost all students, especially those in STEM fields, are in college to improve their career prospects. But academics are mainly focused on replicating themselves, i.e. focusing on teaching things that are useful to students who plan to attend graduate school in the field, but not useful to the majority of students who do not. This is how we end up with CS grads who can implement obscure data structures they will never use in industry but cannot do practical things like use version control or continuous integration, or write good unit tests.
For someone who wants to work in a technical field, I think new programs like this one, or like code boot camps, are becoming increasingly attractive as college tuition becomes more expensive and student loans become more burdensome. If employers are willing to hire graduates of these programs, traditional universities will have trouble attracting students. And they should.