Natasha Singer

Thanks for having us.

Thanks so much for asking such provocative questions.

It's completely unexpected.

We've seen over the last two years a kind of remarkable spike in unemployment among recent college grads seeking software engineering and other tech jobs.

And let me give you some numbers just to illustrate that.

Among recent college grads aged 22 to 27,

Computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1% and 7.5% respectively, according to this new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

That's more than twice the unemployment rate among recent biology grads, which is just 3%.

Right.

And as a reporter who spent more than a decade studying Silicon Valley's influence on American education—

I can say that like the reduced job prospects for computer science grads this year represents a stunning breakdown in the promise that tech executives have made to millions of American school kids over the last decade.

Silicon Valley's promise to kids was if you just work hard and learn to code, computer programming will be your golden ticket to a high-paying, high-powered, high-status tech job, and you will be more or less set for life.

In the early 2010s, we see tech leaders begin to publicly warn that the U.S.

economic might and global technology leadership is at risk because not enough high schools are teaching computer science and not enough students were studying computer programming.

Right.

It's urgent.

The national economic prowess and technology leadership is at stake.

And so you see tech company leaders like Eric Schmidt at Google and Brad Smith at Microsoft start saying that their companies are creating new tech jobs faster than they can find skilled workers to fill them.

And then the tech companies begin lobbying members of Congress and state lawmakers to support elevating the status of computer science in schools, funding more teacher training, getting more curriculums.

Mm-hmm.