Unregulated postsecondary education that makes potentially false promises? Or awesome educational resource, especially for women looking to learn to code? Or both?

Both! Buyer beware. Definitely do your homework about the place purporting to teach you.

It does feel like as more people express desire to learn to program, there are more bad people seeking to take advantage of those would-be learners.

If I was a university/college with any lobbying pull you're damn sure I'd be trying to shut down any alternatives to my curriculum. "higher education" is a gigantic industry. That's what I think is happening here.

That's part of it.

The other part of it is that some of these classes are doing a very poor job of teaching:

http://pandawhale.com/post/10677/trouble-at-code-school