It would be wonderful if the instructors at those schools built relationships with open source maintainers and the maintainers knew when their students were submitting PRs.
Could be used as a teaching experience that many maintainers would be happy to participate in, instead of feeling attacked with random low quality PRs.
You might be underestimating the number of little schools, and computer shops. I can recall even back in 2005, there were HTML shops popping up here and there, in little cities around the world.
Open source contributions being a great way to learn and to pad out your CV has been considered good advice on all sides of the various seas I’ve lived throughout my career too - it’s not just a dubious code camp thing.
A robust open source profile is my single favorite hiring profile indicator. However, with the current state of things, if I get a whiff of AI-driven "contribution" it becomes an instant black mark against the candidate.
Could be used as a teaching experience that many maintainers would be happy to participate in, instead of feeling attacked with random low quality PRs.