It might be worth considering that the underlying question - does this model even work at the scale it was sold as? - goes unanswered.
With that in mind, it sounds like what might be needed is the education they were looking for in the first place. Resume review, remote tutoring, and coaching are great ideas, born of a genuine blossoming of kindness and compassion. It may be possible that these well-meant ideas could be of perhaps slightly limited value for people who, based on the contents of the article, seem to have roughly as much marketable knowledge of Ruby as they did before they started the program.
The students in the article were taken advantage of. It sounds like nobody even got the chance to find out whether they would like or succeed at coding.
So many responses in this thread are written from a middle/upper-middle class context. Folks who had reasonably good schools, access to computers at a young age, a stable home environment in which to work with them, a culture (parents and/or peers) that supported them, an expectation and pathway to higher education at a young age. Maybe not all of those boxes are ticked for every successful software engineer but I bet a good number of them are.
The people in this article didn’t have as many of these factors. Maybe they had none of them. That doesn’t mean that they’re dumb, untrainable or not cut out to be coders. I think what it means is that an appropriate approach to training needs to be taken.
That approach is probably something akin to a gateway aptitude test to demonstrate ability and commitment followed by a significant period of apprenticeship combined with some formal classes at the community college level.
This is the way that people enter the skilled trades, and also seems similar to military occupational training. I don’t see why it couldn’t produce competent entry-level folks who are capable of working on 95% of business systems/websites/etc at the end of their training.
With that in mind, it sounds like what might be needed is the education they were looking for in the first place. Resume review, remote tutoring, and coaching are great ideas, born of a genuine blossoming of kindness and compassion. It may be possible that these well-meant ideas could be of perhaps slightly limited value for people who, based on the contents of the article, seem to have roughly as much marketable knowledge of Ruby as they did before they started the program.