Chapter 1: What has been the promise of coding for American students?
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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. For the past decade, a simple message has been delivered to a generation of American students. If you learn to code and get a computer science degree, then you'll get a job with a six-figure salary.
But as my colleague Natasha Singer found out, thousands of students who followed that advice are discovering that the promise was empty. It's Monday, September 29th. Natasha? Michael? Thank you for coming back on the show. Thanks for having me.
You, Natasha, came to us with a counterintuitive observation, which is that at this moment that on paper seems like a highly lucrative opportunity in the world of tech because of the boom in artificial intelligence, this moment is turning out to be a bust for those recent college grads trying to get into the tech industry. That's unexpected.
Yeah.
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.
And what does that compare with everybody else?
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Chapter 2: Why are recent computer science graduates facing high unemployment?
Look at all that stuff going on. Way to go! Code.org!
And that was also widely influential because it was fun, it was easy, and your whole school could do it at once. And, you know, since that launch in 2012, Code.org says that kids have done these lessons or started them anyway hundreds of millions of times.
I just got a award for completing a hour of code and it says, and this is for Minecraft and this is from Microsoft. Here you guys go.
What happened after the video and the hour of code or as these things are happening was companies like Microsoft and Google together with code.org and dozens of national and local nonprofit groups across the country began an effort to scale computer science in schools. And they used different methods.
One was they did lobby from state to state and get laws passed to elevate the status of computer science instead of like making an elective. 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.
And so, Natasha, as all of this focus on coding, basically coding mania, settles over America and American education, how well kept is the promise in this period? How well is it working out for the students who are going through it and the companies who are promoting it?
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.
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Chapter 3: What was Silicon Valley's promise to students regarding coding careers?
The AP course I took, a lot of that was focused on games. We made Minesweeper. We collaboratively as a class made like a dungeon crawler board game. I made Tetris for my final project. And as a high school senior, he takes an AP computer science class and it ends up being a really formative experience. He said he had a really great teacher who taught him a lot.
I think that's kind of where that interest sparked was we'd make a game and then my teacher would drop something like, oh, like, did you know that everything that you're working with is actually just stored in like a But along the way, he discovers he loves programming. He loves being able to make stuff with code. It's not just the promise of money. It's the promise of making stuff.
It really does feel like he is a true product of the world that these tech company leaders created within American education.
Right. He seems like he is the ideal person for the pipeline that the tech industry is building. So then he goes to college at Ohio State. And I kind of thought back in that moment to how much I enjoyed programming, how much I enjoyed creating on a computer. And I was like, OK, I'll pivot to programming. Computer science.
And after a brief moment as a math major, he decides to switch to the field that he loves, computer science. And as you switched from math to computer science, how did you think about the potential career skills and job prospects? I mean, honestly, at the time, this would have been... Fall of 2021, I thought nothing of it.
I thought, I mean, I've been told my whole life that computer science is a good place to be in. I mean, math as well, but computer science always felt stable to me. So yeah, at the time, that was my mentality. And he does really, really well. Summa cum laude, he's on the dean's list. He's worked as a teaching assistant for the more basic computer science courses. He did all the right things.
And yet, as he starts applying to internships, reality hits that, in fact, coding is not going to magically produce a host of job options. Starting fall of 2023, I believe I applied to 90 positions before that summer of 2024. Probably got, I think, three or four interviews and no offers. Wait, sorry, can I just interject for a minute here? Sure.
In the fall of 2023, you applied to 90 different internship programs for the next summer in tech. You got a couple of interviews, but no internship offers?
Correct.
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