While much of the full four-year undergrad experience is full of other priorities (ex. socialization, networking), there is usually a lot slow learning and almost traumatic adaptation that happens that I'm convinced can't happen on a shorter time frame. Being in a competitive learning environment with colleagues and resources specialized to help learning is hard to replicate. Many of the biggest and most interesting ideas require you to sort of soak your brain in them.
Unrelated to the four year undergrad experience, coding bootcamps and the like that are 3 month and 6 month courses do not work for building deep knowledge for complete beginners -- IIRC their most common usage was for people already in tech to make a change to different specializations. I think the claims that Flatiron School or a bunch of other coding bootcamps sold is basically fraudulent -- it would take over 6 months of high quality practice just to get a handle on HTML, CSS and Javascript, but they throw random new programmers into HTML, CSS, then JS by way of React (and sometimes even rails/backend stuff). Deep, stable knowledge is not built that way.
> Cynically, I'd say that Google is just trying to increase the number of qualified individuals to fill grunt-work positions so they can pay each employee less.
This is exactly what they're trying to do. I guess I could think about it as trying to vertically integrate employee education. This is also what Flatiron School and those other coding bootcamps were trying to do as well IMO, as well as getting at some of the funding that was made available for those efforts.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though -- while people in those positions might see a drop in salary (or rather a slowing of growth in salary), more people with those kinds of skills is probably a net positive.