21ST CENTURY EDUCATION: Code schools and boot camps that teach computer programming skills prove they can rapidly retrain American workers for the 21st century.

Code schools aren’t the place to go if you want to be a “rock star” at Google or Facebook. These are designed to turn out junior developers, or “apprentices” as they’re known at Software Guild, which currently has 16 instructors and 148 students split between in-person and online programs. Students learn just enough to be dropped into teams of more experienced coders and continue their education at a company, even as they draw a competitive full-time salary. They aren’t building the high-flying startups; most are simply translating business processes into code, transforming data or helping maintain and update legacy systems.

The number of code-school graduates is roughly doubling every year, says Liz Eggleston of Course Report, one of the few organizations that track these schools. In 2016, there were nearly 18,000 graduates of code schools, a healthy number when you compare it with the nearly 60,000 students who graduated with computer-science degrees from U.S. colleges and universities in 2015. There are currently 91 full-time coding “boot camps” in the U.S. spread across 71 cities, up from just a handful in 2012, when the phenomenon began in tech hotspots like San Francisco and New York.

It doesn’t seem possible for public education to keep up, much less compete. Or stay relevant.