By contrast, I left college last May with a large theoretical base in Finance and with no desire to pursue it practically.
In some sense, programs like Dev Bootcamp and traditional education start on the path of knowledge from opposite ends. In the middle lies experience (that mystical thing people say I will have one day).
Having started on each end of this path exactly once (on a large scale anyway), I don't know if they hold any gravity, but, in my experience, learning practically by "hacking out some web apps in Ruby on Rails" left me hungry to understand software engineering while learning theoretically about investment strategies and real estate markets left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
My goal in designing the curriculum was to graduate world-class beginners, not to quickly hack together one or two rails apps.
The first half of devbootcamp was just Ruby. We covered basics of OO design and TDD.
One of my students blogged every day, if you're interested in the details of what we covered: http://douglascalhoun.tumblr.com/
Overall, I feel strongly that folks graduated with a strong sense of what's involved in building software, some basic knowledge and more importantly feeling resourced to learn what they don't yet know.
However, I would also posit that what they covered is enough to get them in the door. The rest can (and, for those passionate and determined) will follow.