Like many of the other commenters here, I'm also a co-founder of a trade school (Code Fellows, we're 2 years old) that offers immersive programs for web and mobile developers. We have 13 different offerings to accommodate developers with varying skill levels and interests. Our flagship program teaches students who have on average ~2yrs of experience writing code professionally, and our hiring partners offer them >$75k/yr in Seattle (on average, though the spread is interesting...detailed stats here --> https://www.codefellows.org/alumni-stats)
I've talked with hundreds of hiring managers about this topic, and - to answer your last question - the reason why they want CS degrees is because web/mobile developers often need to design systems and solve complex computational problems (not to mention the need to build well-tested, scalable products). There really is no shortcut to learning the foundations of CS necessary to perform well at these tasks.
Thus, to piggyback off of what others have said here, many students who go through these intensive programs often have CS backgrounds and are looking for intense "polish" to get up to speed on recent industry tools and practices.
I've never understood the whole thing about CS foundations...
For the most part you're never discovering new datastructures, the rest of it is just knowing which data structure to pick, 50/50 dictionary/arrays, once in a while a set, and use a tree every year or two.
Even then if it's an esoteric data structure you'll still use an off the shelf implementation.
Even in data science it's mostly off the shelf R packages.
Like many of the other commenters here, I'm also a co-founder of a trade school (Code Fellows, we're 2 years old) that offers immersive programs for web and mobile developers. We have 13 different offerings to accommodate developers with varying skill levels and interests. Our flagship program teaches students who have on average ~2yrs of experience writing code professionally, and our hiring partners offer them >$75k/yr in Seattle (on average, though the spread is interesting...detailed stats here --> https://www.codefellows.org/alumni-stats)
I've talked with hundreds of hiring managers about this topic, and - to answer your last question - the reason why they want CS degrees is because web/mobile developers often need to design systems and solve complex computational problems (not to mention the need to build well-tested, scalable products). There really is no shortcut to learning the foundations of CS necessary to perform well at these tasks.
Thus, to piggyback off of what others have said here, many students who go through these intensive programs often have CS backgrounds and are looking for intense "polish" to get up to speed on recent industry tools and practices.