Natasha Singer

It seems like my degree doesn't matter.

Some of my skills are now worthless.

It's too demoralizing.

Some students told us that while they're looking for tech jobs, some of them are applying for fast food jobs at Chipotle.

One student was working as a clerk at Walgreens.

It's not the kind of job they envisioned when they were told if they just learned to code, they'd get six-figure jobs.

It's no longer the golden ticket.

It's the tarnished ticket.

And some of these students ended up moving back home, rich in degrees, poor in employment.

And when I called them, they were applying for jobs out of their childhood bedrooms.

up near Cleveland, northeast.

One of the recent grads I spoke with whose story really resonated for me is named Nathan Spencer, and he's 22, and he grew up in a small town outside of Cleveland.

Let's see, I probably first encountered a computer through those big boxy family computers probably when I was in middle school.

And he enters school just as this coding careers promise is becoming entrenched in American popular culture and education.

Everybody is on computers.

I mean, we were introduced to like the Google suite and like writing on a computer like in fifth grade and middle school.

And he talks about watching some of the videos we talked about earlier and the hour of code and learning coding basics in middle school.

Yeah.

And as he enters high school, his interest and his learning in computer science deepens.

The AP course I took, a lot of that was focused on games.