[chriszf]

It's like the movie Ratatouille: Not everyone can be a good coder, but a good coder can come from anywhere.

While they may receive an impossibly large number of candidates, in the end, they will boil it down to roughly 15 students. That means that as long as their application process is sane, they will have found 15 good candidates who are going to be 'coding for the right reasons', whatever that means.

This is different from codecademy, which says that anyone and everyone should learn to code. Instead, they're claiming that you don't need a CS degree to be a professional programmer. That doesn't mean they're also saying you don't need to be dedicated, and analytical. Ultimately, the people who enter these programs are the kinds of people who would have made it on their own, albeit on a much longer timeline. I don't see any problem with jumpstarting it with careful curation and guidance.