Hi, I totally understand your concern. I moved from Toronto last year for Holberton school and it was a big and scary move for me since I did not know much about the school either besides a couple of articles from online research. I liked their admission process and thats what reassured me to take a leap of faith. Also, when you are making big decisions about your career everything looks like a marketing strategy or a gimmick.
Thankfully, my bet for a rewarding career played really well for me. I could not have been happier going to holberton school.
Little about me, I have a bachelors in Biomedical engineering and I was working in the mechanical engineering industry and absolutely hating it. I did not like the work and the people and that's why wanted a switch. During research I was considering community colleges and masters programs. My friend(Masters in Software engineering, works at Cruise Automation) suggested that I should go to a bootcamp instead. They are shorter and teach you on the job skills (unlike colleges and universities), teach you major skills like networking, resume building, selling your story, interviewing skills etc. So, I started researching and came across bootcamps like hackreactor, hackbright, general assembly and Holberton School. After a lot of deliberation I decided I wanted to pursue Holberton school. My reasons included
1. the school does not charge upfront so they have a vested interest in my future and me getting a job
2. Having not much coding experience I wanted to learn from the basics and take some time to actually have strong foundation and fundamentals.
3. I did not think that I could learning programming in like 3-5 months only
4. I wanted to learn to think like a software engineer which takes time and effort.
5. Its not a bootcamp but a college alternative
Needless to say, I went through the first 9 months of the program and I am extremely happy about how this turned out. Last month I started my internship at Zume Pizza(a silicon valley startup) and I use all the skills learned in the program.
One thing that I will like to point out is that Software engineering field requires life long learning and Holberton taught me how to keep on learning and how to pick up on new languages fast.
Adding on to this I had to briefly attend De Anza college for my visa status (since I am canadian and cannot stay in US for more than 6 months on a visitor visa), I attended 3 classes- Intro to Bash, Intro to C++ and methodologies, Intro to SQL. Whatever I learned in those classes in a semester I actually had covered that stuff in like 2-3 weeks at Holberton.
In conclusion, I would not underestimate the work that you have to put into this program. You have to put your life on hold because it is very intense but I would also not underestimate my power of learning in this model. You will be surprised how much you can learn in just 9 months. I completed the 9 months, studied/interviewed for another 3 months before I got my job.
Also, if you're unsure that you can be a programmer or not, just do the application process for Holberton because its free and doesn't hurt to just try it out.
Coming to your low percentage question- Holberton does not purge out people from the school just to maintain their numbers. Sometimes people don't want to work as an "engineer" but want to learn Full Stack development to complement their career. We had a guy in my cohort who was a game developer before but feeling stuck in his career so he did the program, and now works at Facebook as a Production Engineer(ofcourse his previous experience factors in). UX/UI design jobs really value people with a knowledge in full stack engineering because that helps them come up with realistic website designs. The school cannot control what career trajectory people want to pursue so it has been their own choice. There are a lot of peripheral career paths that people decide to take that don't necessarily have the job title "Software Engineer".
I really hope I answered your questions and if you have more feel free to DM me on Twitter.
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