Here is the offensive part (to me, anyway):
Students who successfully complete the six-week program will be certified by General Assembly in Ruby on Rails. Certification is a way for General Assembly to let our partner organizations, start-ups, and others know that a student successfully completed the course.
I know that slippery slope arguments are logical fallacies, but how long before this type of thing becomes the equivalent of a Microsoft certification and is a check-box that HR departments look for when hiring Rails developers?
Now I've got to spend nearly 3k dollars every couple of years to maintain my 'Rails certification', which I don't really need because I learned Rails on my own in a weekend and the point of Rails is that it makes things easy (reasonable defaults and all of that). If you need a certification to learn Rails, something has gone seriously wrong!
If the community legitimizes efforts like this (by not laughing at them and running them out of town on a rail)... There is a possibility that they will give some clout to certification organizations, which could lead to above (fairly unlikely, but plausible) slippery slope situation where you need certs to program Rails.