$70K for 2 years? No, thanks.

Community college for 2 years ~ 20-25K tuition, then "learning your heart out" for those 2 years and transfer to a proper university with scholarship seems far more plausible to me.

Classical CS education with high standards is a proper way to go, otherwise you'll spend first 10 years your programming career "wishing you had known that before", and you might never step into the depth of career, especially into ML/AI field, without that prior knowledge of the theory.

Actually, such "new kind of school" done better is https://www.42.fr

Talking with my 7+ years of software/data engineering experience, last couple of years spent in DS{ML/DL}.