> Isn't the incentive here to choose the most buzzwordy and low-barrier-to-entry technologies, and spend just enough time/effort to get the students through an interview so the bootcamp can get paid?

This reminds me of some recent comments about the iPhone XS performance for the Speedometer 2.0 JavaScript benchmark [1]. The comment was something like "Apple just optimized their processor to beat benchmarks." In reality, the benchmark uses the TodoMVC project to run through dozens of real-world JavaScript frameworks. So even if Apple was just optimizing for some benchmarks, they've also improved the performance of real-world applications that use React and Ember.js.

Lambda School might be teaching some "buzzwordy" programming languages and frameworks, and the students might learn just enough to pass technical coding interviews and get a job, and they might have just enough experience to start contributing code and working on features that bring in more paying customers (or raise more VC funding), and they can ramp up quickly enough to not get fired. And those customers/VCs give money to the company, so the company can pay the employee, who gives some of the money to Lambda. This seems like a good "benchmark" to optimize for.

[1] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1043277162676072449?lang=en