This is from 2025 | 31 minute read

User Experience Bootcamps: A Dead-End

The collision of higher-ed bloat, Silicon Valley's appetite for disruption, and corporate-scale training led to thousands of largely unemployable UX designers

Introduction

Over the past decade, user experience design went from an industry where anyone who could draw a wireframe could get a job, to one where hundreds of applicants now compete for a single job posting. Many are largely unqualified and under-skilled, yet spent thousands of dollars trying to break into a market that appeared lucrative, fun, and most importantly, rich with jobs. Training in user experience design was seen as a way into tech; now, it's largely a dead-end.

How did we get here? It began with structural changes in U.S. higher education leading to bloat; it accelerated when Silicon Valley saw education as a ripe target for "disruption," spawning short-form, job-focused programs designed to bypass traditional degrees. And it peaked when corporate training companies, flush with private equity money, pursued scale itself as their measure of success. This history lesson is not one with a happy ending, but we are left with some options for adjusting the future of design, and design education, to better match the real needs of industry, and more importantly, to better prepare students for creative jobs.

The Bloat of Higher Education and the Conditions for "Disruption"

Until the mid-20th century, it was generally accepted that Americans—though in practice, limited primarily to white men—could build stable, middle-class lives without a college degree. Farmers, machine operators, assembly-line workers, and laborers made up the majority of the workforce, and a high school diploma—or in some cases, no formal credential at all—was often enough to secure steady employment. These jobs were often unionized and valued reliability, physical skill, and consistency over formal education. Over the second half of the century, this changed, and professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service roles grew from roughly one-quarter of total employment in 1910 to three-quarters by 2000.U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Changes during the 20th Century. By Ian D. Wyatt and Daniel E. Hecker. Monthly Labor Review, March 2006, 35–57. U.S. Department of Labor.

With this shift, higher education became far more important. As employers redefined what it meant to be "qualified," educational credentials began to operate as signaling mechanisms. Sociologist Randall Collins describes this as "credential inflation"Collins, Randall. “Credential Inflation and the Future of Universities.” Italian Journal of Sociology of Education 3, no. 1 (February 2011): 228–51.—a cycle in which qualifications that once secured elite jobs become commonplace, forcing employers to raise requirements even when the work itself hasn't changed. A high school diploma "barely qualifies for manual or menial service work" by the end of the century, and the bachelor's degree followed a similar path, shifting from an elite credential to a baseline expectation.Ibid

This demand required additional capacity. The government was supportive, although not necessarily because they saw intrinsic value in education. Instead, education was viewed as a response to the scientific and existential threat posed by the Soviet Union. In the US, most things that get funded seem to trace back to the military, and education was no exception. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 was the federal government's second major investment in higher ed—the first was the GI Bill in 1944.

The 1958 bill created loan programs and federal aid for students pursuing college degrees. As a result, college attendance doubled, from 3.6 million college students in 1960 to 7.5 million in 1970, "thanks to Sputnik."U.S. Senate. “Sputnik Spurs Passage of National Defense Education Act.” United States Senate. Accessed August 5, 2025. This was followed by the Higher Education Act of 1965, part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiatives, which expanded federal grants and loan guarantees and created the framework for modern financial aid.Ibid The result of these pieces of legislation was to position college access as a fundamental part of being an American.

At the state level, university systems scaled to meet demand. Public systems such as the State University of New York (SUNY) systemThe State University of New York. “History of SUNY.” SUNY. Accessed August 5, 2025. and the University of CaliforniaCalifornia State Department of Education. A Master Plan for Higher Education in California, 1960–1975. Prepared for the Liaison Committee of the State Board of Education and the Regents of the University of California. Sacramento: California State Department of Education, 1960. expanded their physical campuses, opened new institutions, and increased enrollment capacities. Between 1950 and 1980, enrollment increased from 1.1M to 9.4M students—at public universities alone.U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. “Total Fall Enrollment in Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions, by Control and Classification of Institution: 1947 through 2022.” Digest of Education Statistics, 2022. Accessed August 5, 2025. These institutions were supported by state subsidies, which allowed them to keep tuition relatively low while accommodating dramatically increased enrollment. Giving us a brief preview of present-day policy, Ronald Reagan took aim at the subsidy model first in California and then nationally, explaining that taxpayers shouldn't be "subsidizing intellectual curiosity."Berrett, Dan. “The Day the Purpose of College Changed.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2015. Accessed August 5, 2025. Yet while overall college enrollment briefly stalled in the early 1970s, the longer-term implications of less government financial support was not decreased attendance—it was an increased dependence on loans. Intellectual curiosity was traded for "practical" or "grown up" majors that could lead directly to a financial return on investment.

College attendance became synonymous with professional responsibility and ambition, and educational debt became considered "good debt," acknowledged by the widely circulated claim that a college degree would earn its holder $1 million more over their lifetime.Day, Jennifer Cheeseman, and Eric C. Newburger. The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Synthetic Estimates of Work-Life Earnings. Current Population Reports, P23–210. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, July 2002. It was a simple, persuasive promise for upward mobility, and by the end of the century, college attendance was considered non-negotiable.

At scale, higher education required more systems and services than simply teaching. Universities had to manage facilities, financial aid, enrollment services, housing, campus safety, and compliance with a growing stack of federal and state regulations. Title IX required new student protections; FERPA mandated systems for protecting student records; the Americans with Disabilities Act required accessibility coordinators and infrastructure changes. Accreditation bodies increased reporting requirements. Each of these mandates was important, and so each required competent staff to implement the services effectively and document compliance. And many of these changes were implemented in the early phases of software-based backoffice systems, which were notoriously difficult to use and maintain—adding even more overhead.

Between 1975 and 2005, the number of professional staff in U.S. universities grew at more than 5 times the rate of faculty.Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. The administrative layer became both the machinery and the public face of the institution. At the same time, non-instructional spending became a larger share of the budget, while per-student instructional spending stayed flat or declined; from 1998-2008, private colleges increased instructional spending by 22%, and administrative and support staff by 36%.Ginsberg, Benjamin. “Administrators Ate My Tuition.” Washington Monthly, August 28, 2011.

By the late 1990s, this shift had become visible to students and their families. Tuition was rising faster than inflation; at public four-year universities, it increased about 2.4x faster than median household income, and at private universities, about 2.8x faster.U.S. General Accounting Office. Tuition Increases and College Affordability (GAO/HEHS-00-198R). Washington, DC: U.S. General Accounting Office, September 2000.

The logic of this was circular, and very self-reinforcing. More students meant more services, which meant more staff. More staff meant more coordination, reporting, and oversight—requiring yet more administrators. And all of this required more money, which came out of tuition. Universities became complex service organizations where teaching was just one function among many. The physical and cultural architecture of the institution shifted toward efficiency, throughput, and measurable outcomes.

From the outside (and for students, from the inside, too), these changes looked like bloat. The perception that universities were overbuilt and ineffective created a political and cultural opening. Education was a big, slow service industry, and one that needed to be blown up.

Move fast and break things

Blowing things up is one of the things the Valley does best. In 2005, Y Combinator launched with a mandate to find precisely these conditions—verticals with high costs, entrenched processes, and consumer demand—and rebuild them with speed, scale, and software instead of people.Coren, Michael J. “Y Combinator Will Back 10,000 Startups to Prove There’s Nothing Magical about Silicon Valley.” Quartz, July 20, 2022. Higher education was one of the largest domestic industries, it was labor-intensive, and its operating model was philosophically at odds with the Valley ethos of rapid iteration and minimal oversight. The global edtech market, valued at $89 billion in 2020U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration. “Education Technology.” Trade.gov, 2021. and projected to reach $285 billion by 2027,MarketScale. “Education Technology Market Size Worth $285.2 Billion by 2027: Grand View Research, Inc.” MarketScale, July 20, 2020. became a magnet for venture investment.

The most visible product of that investment was a new kind of vocational training: the bootcamp. These programs offered short, intensive, job-focused instruction designed to bypass the expense and time commitment of a four-year degree, and ultimately, replace the bloat.

General Assembly was the most visible and, in many ways, the most emblematic of the bootcamp movement. Founded in New York in 2011 with a $200,000 grant from the city, it began as a co-working space before pivoting to education.Kolodny, Lora. “General Assemb.ly Scores $200,000 Grant To School Big Apple Entrepreneurs.” TechCrunch, January 24, 2011. Within a year, it was running immersive programs in web development, product management, and UX design. The founders—coming from tech, finance, and entrepreneurship rather than academia—focused on growth and scale. By 2015, GA had raised over $70 million in venture funding and expanded to more than 20 campuses worldwide.Mathewson, Tara Garcia. “General Assembly Adds $70M in Capital during Latest Funding Round.” Higher Ed Dive, October 2, 2015.

GA's approach became the blueprint for bootcamps: compressed timelines, industry practitioners as instructors, project-based portfolios in place of degrees, and a curriculum built almost entirely around discrete, repeatable methods. Early bootcamps tended to cluster around three marketable disciplines: engineering, product management, and user experience design. These mirrored the primary skills that were valued by the "disruptors" themselves. UX might have felt like an anomaly, as design has historically been viewed as little more than styling; but by the early 2010s, UX had become culturally prominent in the Valley, associated with the success of companies like Apple, Instagram, and Tik Tok. It was presented as creative and influential, a hybrid of art and technology that could command high salaries.

For bootcamps, adding UX alongside technical tracks made the offering attractive to a wider audience, especially those without a STEM background. Over time, UX came to be viewed as the most accessible entry point into tech for career-changers—something learnable without years of prior training. Unlike software development, it didn't carry the same disciplinary barriers or math-heavy focus, and didn't have a perception of being "really hard." Unlike product management, it seemingly didn't require any real business experience. UX offered a weird middle ground: sort of technical, sort of creative, and most compelling for some, it was about people. And in the decade-long boom of tech hiring, especially pre-COVID, these roles promised high salaries, remote work, and upward mobility, which was particularly appealing to mid-career professionals, parents, service workers, community college attendees, and those seeking a pivot into tech.

The Valley is notorious for describing how technology-driven disruption is a democratizing force. UX bootcamps were described as being much more flexible, claiming that students could continue to keep their day jobs while completing the experience (Brain Station, a Canada-based General Assembly, describes that you can "become a UX Designer on Your Evenings and Weekends.")BrainStation. “User Experience (UX) Design Bootcamp.” BrainStation. Accessed August 12, 2025. Some were tailored for people traditionally excluded from tech—women, people of color, caregivers.Thayer, Kyle, and Amy J. Ko. “Barriers Faced by Coding Bootcamp Students.” In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, August 2017. Compared to an undergraduate studio-based design degree, UX bootcamps were much, much shorter and cheaper.Course Report. “UX Designer.” Accessed August 12, 2025. They seemed perfect.

But programs running 6 to 12 weeks could not offer any depth. Studio time was compressed or eliminated, and critique—the slow, cultural practice of learning to see—was sidelined. There was no time for exploration, or for broad curiosity, or for playfulness. Perhaps entirely due to the quick duration, the loose pedagogy leaned primarily on teaching methods: self-contained activities (some skill-based, and some attempting to encapsulate an entire discipline), applied to a generic design process. As the General Assembly User Experience Design Immersive Curriculum described, in the eight-week immersive course, students were to learn Content Strategy, Information Architecture, User Research, Competitive Analysis, Sketching, Interaction Design, Flow Diagrams, Use Cases, User Psychology, User Centered Design, User Testing, Personas and Scenarios, Rapid Prototyping, Stakeholder Analysis, Project Planning, Design Patterns, Product Roadmaps, and Presentation Skills. These methods were presented in the context of a process, but the process itself was presented as a linear, step-by-step way of starting and finishing a project, rather than exploring a problem, experimenting, and contextualizing their work in a larger discussion of technology, politics and culture.General Assembly. User Experience Design Immersive. New York: General Assembly, n.d. PDF.

Beyond their role in classrooms, methods became cultural artifacts. IDEO's method cards—51 prompts across categories like Ask, Look, Learn, and Try—offered concise instructions for discrete design activities, from "competitive product survey" to "brainstorming."IDEO.org. “Methods.” Design Kit. Accessed August 12, 2025. The Stanford d.school produced its own set of method cards, with the same format and same style of reductive instruction.Stanford d.school. “Method Card V3.” Accessed August 12, 2025. Despite disclaimers that these were not "how-to" guides, they were presented as guidebooks and quickly adopted in bootcamp curricula.

Methods took on the style of a cargo cult: stacks of cards, laminated templates, the double diamond as backdrop. In startup culture, method outputs—the iconic "brainstorming with post-its on a wall"—were celebrated as standalone artifacts, detached from the projects that produced them. High-profile practitioners endorsed them, bootcamps taught them, and visual deliverables became a kind of design theater.

What emerged was a mutually reinforcing loop. Bootcamps, drawing from this methods-only culture, taught discrete activities as the backbone of design education. The industry, steeped in the same visual and procedural shorthand, validated that framing by hiring graduates who could produce those outputs immediately. In the middle of a historic tech hiring boom, the alignment between what bootcamps offered and what employers recognized created the appearance of a complete solution.

And when it broke…

As early as 2020, some designers were discussing the problems with UX bootcamps,Levitt, Debbie. “Let’s Talk About Gatekeeping in UX?” but these problems didn't seem to matter because the timing was ideal. In 2010, there were approximately 1M software development jobs;Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Table Data – Employed Full Time: Wage and Salary Workers: Software Developers, Applications and Systems Software Occupations: 16 Years and Over.” there were close to double that by 2022.U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook: Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm. UX spread into industries that had never had it before, and hiring appetite outweighed selectiveness. Graduates from bootcamps, practitioner-focused master's programs, and certificate courses filled those roles. Even the sameness of portfolios—identical case studies, wireframes, and process slides—was acceptable in an undersupplied market.

General Assembly was just one of dozens of similar bootcamps, including Brain Station, Flatiron School, Thinkful, and Career Foundry. The path of each bootcamp was similar: the "big exit" that defines valley disruption. BrainStation sold to Konrad Group;Hardy, Ian. “BrainStation Acquired by Konrad Group.” BetaKit, December 18, 2014. Career Foundry to Verdane;Tracxn. “CareerFoundry — Funding and Investors.” Tracxn, June 17, 2025. Flatiron to We Work for $28 million;Crook, Jordan. “WeWork Acquires Flatiron School.” TechCrunch, October 23, 2017. Thinkful to Chegg for $80 million;Chegg, Inc., “Chegg to Acquire Online Skills‑Based Learning Platform Thinkful to Help Students Accelerate Their Path from Learning to Earning,” Chegg Press Release, September 4, 2019 and most notably, GA to Adecco in 2018 for $412 million.Miller, John. “Adecco Buys General Assembly in $412.5 Million Deal to Boost Growth.” Reuters, April 16, 2018. GA was integrated into a global talent services portfolio and marketed as a scalable, repeatable engine for producing "job-ready" graduates in high-demand digital fields, including UX. Annual reports framed GA's value not around the nuances of pedagogy or alignment with actual hiring needs, but around its ability to be plugged into other Adecco business lines, deployed across geographies, and counted toward a public goal to upskill or reskill five million people by 2030.Adecco Group, Annual Report, 2019, 5. The language was one of throughput and corporate jargon, with hundreds of thousands trained each year, global reach expanded, and developing "important synergies with other Group brands."Ibid GA was part of Adecco's growth strategy, with expansion treated as a strategic end in itself.

That began to change in early 2022. Tech hiring slowed, then broke. Meta, Amazon, and Google announced mass layoffs, soon followed by smaller companies and by startups.Alyssa Stringer, “A Comprehensive List of 2023 Tech Layoffs,” TechCrunch, September 19, 2023 Like engineering, design teams—built out rapidly in previous years—were scaled back. When acquired in 2018, GA had trained 50,000 students and claimed another 40,000 were enrolled.Tony Wan, “General Assembly to Be Acquired by Swiss HR Firm for $412.5 Million,” EdSurge, April 15, 2018 By mid-2023, these tens of thousands of engineers, product managers and designers were competing for a very small number of jobs. Recruiters encountered portfolios that were nearly indistinguishable: the same e-commerce redesigns, nonprofit apps, and five-step process decks. In a buyer's market, employers favored experienced designers; method-only graduates struggled to stand out or demonstrate how they could adapt to ambiguous, multi-stakeholder problems. The gap between executing a method and solving a problem—overlooked in the boom—was now impossible to ignore when every hire had to be justified.

The contraction exposed just how dependent the boom-era UX job market had been on constant intake. When hiring slowed, the volume of designers being produced each year didn't adjust. Bootcamps, practitioner-focused master's programs, and corporate-scale training engines like General Assembly continued to operate on the same cadence and global scale.

As recently as 2023—well past the aforementioned implosion of technology jobs—Adecco's own reporting celebrated the number of individuals "upskilled" or "reskilled"Adecco Group, Annual Report, 2023 annually, claiming 884,029 individuals who were "up-/re-skilled"—metrics that made sense to investors but have no relationship to the current number of available UX jobs.

In a crowded applicant pool, portfolios need to stand out, but the case-study approach that had once signaled job-readiness is now evidence of how interchangeable, or poorly prepared, UX designers actually are. The oversupply of talent has led to an unfortunate spillover phenomenon for designers with much longer careers: when they apply on common platforms like LinkedIn, their applications are tossed into the same crowded sea of applicants, and so they find themselves facing the same difficulties in finding jobs, even with a more robust or established portfolio. Recruiters simply can't find them.

For more than a decade, UX had been positioned as a growth field and an accessible on-ramp into tech, a career path where training translated quickly into employment. Now, it's a backdrop for disillusionment. Students had made substantial investments of time, money, and trust in programs that promised a clear route into the profession. Instead, they found themselves in prolonged job searches, pivoting into tangential roles, or leaving the field entirely. The problem wasn't that they had been lazy or inattentive; it was that the hiring climate they were trained for no longer existed.

Hiring managers experienced their own form of fatigue. During the boom, a short-form credential was rarely, at least overtly, questioned. In the downturn, those same credentials began to signal risk: a likely narrow skill set, a portfolio that looked like dozens of others, a candidate who might require more onboarding than the process allowed.

The result has begun to change, and narrow, what "counts" as design. In the compressed training models that defined the bootcamps, methods became not just a way to learn design but the definition of design itself. Personas, journey maps, competitive analyses—once viewed as tools to be adapted within a broader, context-specific practice—were recast as the whole discipline. Other dimensions of the work, the ones that take time to develop—critical framing, cultural awareness, systems thinking, the slow refinement of taste—fell away.

Over time, that narrowing reshaped how the field was perceived, both inside and outside the profession. In the boom years, it barely registered because naming some methods was enough to get hired. But when hiring slowed, the absence of deeper capabilities became more visible. Interviews that probed beyond the template revealed gaps in strategic thinking, in comfort with ambiguity, in the ability to define the problem rather than execute a predetermined sequence.

This shift didn't just affect individuals; it altered the profession as a whole. The association of "UX training" with high-volume, low-depth instruction made it harder for more rigorous programs to signal their difference. And as hiring managers changed their expectations, the profession's credibility eroded: UX came to be seen less as a creative, problem-framing discipline and more as a set of procedural tasks—easily taught, easily replaced, and, in the eyes of some, easily discarded.

What does post-bootcamp UX education look like?

The collapse of bootcamp-driven UX education isn't a mystery; the hiring boom that sustained it is over, and the narrow, method-centered training it produced no longer matches the demands of the field. What comes next is less clear. This was not a story of AI, but AI is reshaping what counts as valuable work in technology, while higher education faces its own structural pressures. In this context, UX design education can split, contract, or be absorbed into adjacent disciplines.

What follows are scenarios of the future of UX design education. None of the scenarios are recommendations, but each is a plausible trajectory, grounded in existing educational models or historical precedents, that could take shape as the profession works to figure itself out.

Some of these scenarios are incremental extensions of what we already do. Others are reversals to earlier forms. A few are outright provocations that challenge our assumptions about what design education is for. Together, they map a range of possibilities for what might replace the UX bootcamp.

Lean further into methods

The least disruptive response to the previous disruption would be to double down on methods. These are the one consistent pedagogical structure bootcamps provided, and rather than abandoning them, design education could recast methods with much more intellectual rigor—moving beyond the brevity and superficiality of IDEO-style method cards toward sustained, discipline-specific inquiry.

This would mean replacing shallow exercises—"create a persona" or "run a quick user interview"—with approaches as more structured and deliberate as those in John Chris Jones's Design Methods handbook, such as Systematic Search or Strategy Switching.Jones, John Chris. Design Methods. 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992. Bootcamp-style methods were often little more than thinly veiled project templates; the older methods from the original Methods Movement at least tried to treat design problems as complex, data-rich systems that could be decomposed, analyzed, and recomposed through explicit procedural steps. It would not be hard to imagine elements of design today that could be taught with that same level of systematic rigor: mapping stakeholder networks in healthcare delivery, modeling interaction flows in aviation control systems, or conducting multi-stage ethnographic coding in urban planning.

But this approach carries a particular danger: it moves design back toward being framed as a science, or—as Jones describes—alike to using a "cookbook."Ibid That was the very reason Jones and Alexander abandoned their own methods advocacy—not because the methods "didn't work," but because the underlying epistemology of design-as-science proved limiting. Alexander explains that "I have been hailed as one of the leading exponents of these so-called design methods. I am very sorry that this has happened, and want to state, publicly, that I reject the whole idea of design methods as a subject of study, since I think it is absurd to separate the study of designing from the practice of design. In fact, people who study design methods without also practicing design are almost always frustrated designers who have no sap in them, who have lost, or never had, the urge to shape things".Alexander, Christopher. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Preface to the paperback edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. If bootcamps' use of methods failed because they were shallow and uncritical, a rigorous methods turn could fail for the opposite reason—because it mistakes the value of design for its capacity to mimic the procedural certainty of scientific disciplines.

Teach craft in isolation

If methods were the only real pedagogical spine of bootcamp education, one overzealous reaction would be to abandon them entirely. Without methods, design naturally reverts to a type of craft, and the Bauhaus workshop model offers an obvious precedent—only here, the isolated craft-building exercises would be reimagined for UX. Instead of spending a quarter working methodically through color theory, students might spend weeks working exclusively with form elements like input boxes, select boxes, and checkboxes, exploring them in all their variations and states without integrating them into larger systems.

This atomized curriculum could extend beyond interface components: ten weeks might be spent solely on writing research plans, another ten on building representations of user journeys, another ten on microcopy for checkout flows. Only after these fundamentals were mastered would integration occur—if it occurred at all.

In his initial Bauhaus Manifesto, Walter Gropius described that students must "learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts."Gropius, Walter. Bauhaus Manifesto. 1919. Accessed August 12, 2025. Selecting those "separate parts" would be a philosophical statement for a school, with programs signaling their values through what they chose to isolate.

In theory, this approach could fit a bootcamp delivery model—short, intense units of mastery—but the narrowness of each unit risks making it economically and logistically unreasonable. Few students will enroll in "ten weeks of enterprise menu design," and those who do may find themselves highly skilled in a niche too small to sustain a career. The danger here is the inverse of the methods approach: instead of reducing design to a set of abstracted procedures, this reduces it to LEGO pieces, leaving students without the integrative experience that gives design its coherence.

Teach only projects

Longer design programs have typically incorporated project-based learning, with most studios organized around a single project that spans a quarter or semester. In HCI programs, the capstone course can stretch across a full year, often sponsored by a real client—bringing with it the logistical complexity of scheduling, stakeholder management, reconciling conflicting feedback, and other realities of professional practice.

A program built entirely on projects would push this model to its limit. Students would either arrive with substantial making skills already in place or would acquire them in real-time, learning to create a wireframe precisely when a wireframe was needed, and navigating the uncertainty of the moment under close instructor guidance. This kind of mentorship is labor-intensive, incompatible with large class sizes, and requires very motivated faculty. It would, by necessity, reinforce small cohorts and selectivity.

To be pedagogically effective, students would need to complete multiple projects and be guided to reflect on their similarities and differences. The emphasis would be on discussion of process and experience rather than solely on the artifact produced. Yet in a client-sponsored model, those artifacts would still be the primary focus for assessment, creating a built-in tension: the educational priority on reflection versus the sponsor's priority (and expectation—sometimes even contractual, as with paid capstone programs) on results. Historically, project-only approaches have been used in elite design and architecture programs, where small scale and high faculty involvement are possible. Outside that context, the risk is that projects become less about developing reflective practitioners and more about unpaid labor for clients.

Teach only through internships and co-ops

Of all the speculative futures for design education, this may be the most effective for preparing students for jobs. If the goal is to produce graduates who can fit into what companies are doing right now—and "right now" is changing month to month—then embedding students directly in professional practice offers the most immediate and relevant preparation.

In this model, the school becomes less a site of instruction and more a coordinator of experiences. While some of those experiences would be intimate, classroom-based master/apprentice relationships reminiscent of pre-Bauhaus craft training, the majority would be structured internships with industry partners in the style of the University of Cincinnati's DAAP program, where alternating terms of coursework and professional placement create a continuous feedback loop between theory and practice.Cedercreutz, K., and C. Cates. “Cooperative Education at the University of Cincinnati: A Strategic Asset in Evolution.” Peer Review 12, no. 4 (2010): 20.

The benefit for students is clear: substantial, real-world experience and exposure to current tools, workflows, and organizational realities before graduation. But the logistical demands are material. Industry placements depend on companies' willingness to host and meaningfully engage with students, which makes the model inherently exclusive and vulnerable to economic cycles. In lean hiring climates, placements may dry up entirely, cutting off the program's main pipeline to professional practice.

Revert UX back into HCI

Another plausible evolution is not absorption so much as reversion: stop calling UX a separate thing and fold it back into its earlier disciplinary home. Human–Computer Interaction emerged from the intersection of statistics, computer science, cognitive psychology, and design, and for much of its history design's role within HCI was limited to usability engineering. In an era of AI-all-the-time, a technical, engineering-centered framing could become the default again.

In such a future, "design" would still exist, but in the historic HCI sense: as part of a deeply computational culture, working alongside software engineering and cognitive science rather than positioned as an independent, user-facing discipline. The emphasis would be on rigorously tested interfaces, measurement-driven optimization, and integration into technical workflows, with less emphasis on broader questions of brand, narrative, or aesthetic form.

For technically minded students, this model offers a high-status, deeply integrated place in technology development. For others, it becomes a turnoff: the level of statistical, computational, and experimental literacy required cannot be acquired quickly, and learning is necessarily scaffolded—statistics I before statistics II before multivariate analysis; introductory programming before algorithm design. This is full-on the opposite of the compressed, rapid-onboarding model of bootcamps.

Historically, HCI programs have thrived in technical universities with strong research agendas, but they have also narrowed the scope of design's contribution to fit the expectations of computational science. Reverting UX back into HCI would remove much of what has made UX attractive to students and practitioners without a technical background.

Absorb UX into the humanities

Another potential evolution of UX would be to position it within the larger substance of the humanities like history, philosophy, religion, and language (excluding the arts, not because they're irrelevant, but because they have been the traditional academic home for design). Rather than viewing UX as an applied craft, this would recast it as a way of understanding our role in the designed world around us. It's difficult for many practitioners to imagine this, because making things is so integral to the idea of design, and embedding design in the humanities is very different than viewing it as an organizing principle like the humanities. But if UX was not about making things, but instead about analyzing the things that are made, vocation would no longer be a goal of UX education; instead, knowing about the world as a context of designed things would become a set of lenses, like literature, to bring to another job and to look through.

If UX were repositioned as a humanities discipline—specifically, one that studies designed things in the way literature studies texts—it would shift the classroom from studio to seminar. In this "humanities UX" classroom, primary activities would be reading, discussing, and writing about designed artifacts—interfaces, services, systems—rather than prototyping them. There would still be "methods," but they would look familiar to those of art history, anthropology, or media studies: archival research, comparative analysis, close reading of visual and interaction elements, semiotics, and rhetorical analysis. Students wouldn't design interfaces; they would explore metaphors used in early graphical user interfaces, unpacking design decisions without ever opening Figma.

Six potential futures; none are fast, and none are cheap

UX bootcamps were a moment that, in the context of a decade-long hiring boom, almost made sense. They certainly seemed logical in the larger story of bloated higher education and valley-style disruption, and even when looking at that disruption with skepticism, bootcamp founders provide heartful and thoughtful justifications for the businesses. Adam Enbar, Co-Founder of Flatiron School, described that "The problem with many liberal arts institutions is not that we shouldn't support learning for the sake of learning; it's that we typically charge too much for it, people go into a lot of debt to get a degree, and it doesn't really help them get a job at the end."Triple F.A.T. Goose, “How to Revolutionize Your Skillset | Adam Enbar, Co‑Founder of Flatiron School,” Down Time (Triple F.A.T. Goose blog), published ~3.1 years ago, accessed August 13, 2025. And after General Assembly sold to Adecco Group, founder Jake Schwartz, 39 years old, reflected on the purpose of the school. He explained that "At the end of the day, the heart of GA is all about helping 22-year-old Jake feel better about where he was at that moment."Caroline Howard, “How General Assembly’s $412.5 Million Deal Signals a Classroom‑to‑Career Revolution,” Forbes, April 26, 2018

But both statements—combined with the enormous financial exits—suggest a gap between why these schools were built and what they offered, and what real design education (or education in any discipline, really) demands. The motives, whether personal fulfillment or rapid market growth, did not center on building depth of skill. That is a legitimate business choice, but it leaves a pedagogical vacuum.

Of the above futures, those that will likely fill that vacuum are those that can best promise return on investment while preparing students for real jobs. While bootcamps promised return and speed, the future of UX education will mean offering more than tactical training—particularly if the remaining UX jobs will demand designers who can do more than just follow a method. History, and common sense, would indicate those programs will require students to learn in as close proximity to industry as possible, and so long projects and co-ops are the most likely contenders to take root; of course, those are the same models that are difficult or impossible to scale, which will result in higher tuition and elitism. The result will be fewer professional designers, likely more homogeneous in all ways, and trained through more demanding and selective paths. They will likely be very good designers, if judged through a lens of employability.

While education will change to educate fewer practicing designers, it would be a very good idea to train everyone in the idea of design, and this may have been the only lasting benefit of design bootcamps. Design theorists have long embraced Richard Buchanan's framing of design as a "liberal art of technological culture."Buchanan, Richard. “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (1992): 5–21. It's unlikely he envisioned design as being taught literally in the same building as the humanities, yet that is the closest place academia currently has to house a discipline that examines the human-made world in both critical and cultural terms. Most people will never be professional designers; all of them live in a designed world. Positioning design in this broader frame allows more people to learn to read, interpret, and critique the artificial world, without having to train as practitioners.

If that produces a profession that is smaller, more deeply trained, and prepared through longer, more demanding education, while also producing a public that is more critically literate about design, the change should be understood not as a deliberate narrowing of opportunity, but as a structural outcome of the time and resources serious preparation requires. That outcome raises real questions about access and equity—questions that institutions and policymakers will have to address—but it does not change the underlying need for depth. The collapse of the bootcamp model is not a crisis to be reversed, but an opportunity to reshape both the profession and the culture that surrounds it.