Natasha Singer

It's now a core science course.

They got money and they started programs to train thousands of more teachers to teach computer science.

Wow.

And they launched new curriculums in schools.

Wow.

You see, for example, in 2016, the College Board launched a new advanced placement course that was funded by the National Science Foundation, and it was called Computer Science Principles.

It was made to broaden the audience of kids who could participate in computer science.

And it has been wildly successful in terms of getting a huge number of kids to take this introductory on-ramp to computer science and just get a taste of what it means.

I think both the massive marketing and the increased availability of computer science in high schools helped spur a massive influx of kids to get into computer science.

And we can see from the data, last year the number of undergraduates majoring in computer science in the United States topped 170,000 students.

And that is essentially triple the number of students majoring in computer science since 2012.

It worked.

I mean, getting more kids to care about this and be interested in this, want to major in it, consider careers in this, really, really worked.

And for certain kids who followed the pipeline through AP Computer Science and graduated from some of the elite schools that tech companies like to hire from, they did end up with these golden ticket jobs, doing interesting work on high-profile software and making a lot of money, much more than

humanities majors who are starting out with hourly jobs.

So there's a confluence of factors.

First of all, it turns out that some of the same big tech companies who pushed schools to teach computer science and told kids coding was magic are very picky about who they hire.

And many of the young students who studied programming or software development really had no shot working at big tech firms.

Why not?

Because the hiring process at some companies has long skewed to kids who are already advantaged to begin with.