Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow.

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from the New York Times, I'm Michael Bolbaro.

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.

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?

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

College grads with tech backgrounds, the lottery ticket, or so we thought in American life, are having a harder time getting jobs than biology majors.

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.

Well, just describe what exactly was that promise and how did it filter through the entire system?

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.

I remember those warnings.

They were kind of explicit.

Asia, in particular places like India, they were doing a much better job of training their future, their young people, for this industry than the U.S.

We had to do something about it.

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.

Along the way, they're beginning to say, by the way, these are great jobs.

They're interesting jobs.

They're powerful jobs.

And then in 2013, you get Hadi Partovi, who is a well-known tech entrepreneur in Seattle, who had started his career at Microsoft and then became an investor in companies like Uber and Dropbox.

He comes along and he starts a new nonprofit group called Code.org to promote coding in schools.

And although it's an education nonprofit, it acts very much like a startup with viral marketing methods.

Like what?

Well, the first thing they do to promote coding in schools is code.org made a video in 2013.

I was 13 when I first got access to

a computer.

Starring the biggest tech Titans of them all, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

I was in sixth grade.

I just started off because I wanted to do this one simple thing.

I wanted to make something that was fun for myself and my sisters.

And it opens with them talking about how they got started learning to code.

I wrote this little program, then basically just to add a little bit to it.

And then when I needed to learn something new, I looked it up.

And

you have these powerful billionaires

making this pitch that anyone actually can learn to code any kid whether you're trying to make a lot of money or whether you just want to change the world computer programming is an incredibly empowering skill to learn these are our heroic innovators and they're rich and they've achieved the American dream and they're telling every kid in America you could be us if you just learned to code and by the way we'll hire you like what's better than that?

The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future.

You know, you're going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.

It's amazing.

I think it's the closest thing we have to a superpower.

And how much does this actually infiltrate, maybe it sounds like too aggressive a word, but become institutionalized in schools during this period?

You know, the video was very influential.

Millions of people saw this video in the first couple of weeks.

And I think it also, you know, just the idea that coding is you give computers an instruction of what to do.

In many families with school-aged kids, this video helped coding become a household word.

Hi, I'm Leah, and I'm Tanya, and we're lucky enough to be studying computer science.

And then later that year, code.org launches another thing called Hour of Code.

How do you get him to get to the sunflower?

He needs to do some actions.

I got it.

And that was an annual event in schools where millions of kids simultaneously did these hour-long coding tutorials.

He coded this.

Look at all that code.

Look at all that stuff going on.

Let it 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 this is 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 it 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.

And they launched new curriculums in schools.

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 the 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.

It worked.

I mean, getting more kids to care about this, 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 were starting starting out with hourly jobs.

Okay, so how do we go from these companies telling everyone there's a golden ticket to a lot of kids going out and seeking the education that would give them the golden ticket to this moment that numerically you described at the beginning of our conversation where so many computer science students can't seem to find a job and are doing worse.

than their classmates.

How did that happen?

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.

Like some of the hiring criteria, you have to pass these coding tests.

They're looking for students who have done side coding projects and built their own software.

And some of those criteria are more easily met by middle and upper class students who have money and time than lower income students who have to work full-time jobs during school.

And so it has always been hard for certain students to get hired by big tech companies.

So that's one of the major factors.

Other factors that have come up more recently is that tech companies overhired during the pandemic, and now some are shedding jobs.

We also saw that some of the big tech companies over the last couple of years, like Amazon and Microsoft, have increased the number of foreign workers they hired because they can be paid less in some cases than Americans.

And recently, the Trump administration actually tried to limit the visas that go to these workers in part to address this.

Right.

This is the recent policy to increase the cost of what are known as H-1B visas.

Exactly.

So there's the visa issue already.

And then AI comes along and that changes a number of things.

First of all, big tech companies have changed priorities.

They want to invest more in building these huge data centers that they need to run AI services.

And that means less is going to go to humans on the workforce.

So they're cutting back on that.

And then the AI itself is beginning to replace workers.

We saw Salesforce announce, you know, they're laying off thousands of customer service workers because AI can do some of those jobs, but also in software engineering itself.

Right.

AI literally codes.

Yeah.

I went to visit Anthropic when I was in San Francisco.

You know, they make.

the AI tool Claude and they have Claude code, you know, which generates code.

And, you know, they were talking about everybody coming to terms terms with the fact that being a software engineer is changing

and that producing the code yourself is no longer the backbone of some of these jobs.

And, you know, that is a particular hardship for kids who have just spent the last decade learning how to master computer programming.

And so what exactly happens to the tens and I guess almost hundreds of thousands of kids who have built their entire academic lives around preparing for a market that for all the reasons you just described has shrunk and may not exist for them anymore.

So as part of my reporting on this, we asked recent computer science grads around the country to share their experiences with us.

And we heard from more than 100 recent college computer science grads.

And I'm just going to read you some of their responses.

They said, it's extremely discouraging.

It's incredibly frustrating.

It is soul crushing.

It seems like my degree doesn't matter.

Some of my skills are now worthless.

It's too demoralizing.

They're having a really rough go of it.

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 get six-figure jobs.

Right.

That's not the golden ticket.

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.

We'll be right back.

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So, Natasha, tell us the story of one of these recent college grads majoring in computer science.

whose visions of a career in tech have been challenged by the new reality reality of the industry.

So I'm from Sugar and Falls, Ohio, 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.

Probably first experience block coding, yeah.

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

The APE course that 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 binary code and everything's just on and off and it's all just electrical switches.

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, okay, I'll pivot to 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, no offers.

Wait, sorry, can I just interject for a minute here?

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.

What kind of companies were you applying to?

This was anything in Columbus, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, anything around kind of of Midwest area, probably mid-size, I'd say.

The math he describes to you is almost comically cruel that he doesn't get a single internship from 90 applications.

Right.

The thing that's striking is many students I spoke to applied to 90, hundreds, maybe even thousands of jobs and didn't get a single offer.

And neither does Nathan.

Yeah, so, I mean, the cycle began again.

I think I did a little less.

I think I hit 70, 71 applications during senior year, interviews for about three or four.

But this year, he actually does get one offer for a summer internship.

It's application development.

So it's what I've been looking for for the past four years.

And after graduating college in May, he gets this internship at a Ohio state government agency where he's developing apps.

But he does not have a full-time job offer this whole time i've been applying to jobs over the summer so it's just yeah it's just really frustrating i'm curious how nathan sees this gap that we have been talking about this entire episode between

what kids like him were told about programming and coding and the reality of his situation today you know i asked him about it and he had a very nuanced view.

Yeah, I think it was jobs will be plentiful.

I won't run into crazy monetary risks.

And also, I'll get to create what I want.

I think that was a big draw to.

You know, he did not expect

to instantly move out to Silicon Valley and land a big tech job and make a lot of money.

I think when you tell every young person for several years computer science is the place to be, they start to believe that.

And then all of a sudden, everybody has a computer science degree.

So it's very difficult to feel like you're competing against this mass quantity of people and also feel like you don't have a way to make yourself stand out.

At least for the moment, he feels like too many kids bought the tech industry marketing and decided to major in computer science.

And his view is that the supply of student or recent grad programmers is now exceeding industry demand.

Basically, he believes too many people did what he did.

Right.

And now there's a glut.

That's what he thinks.

How much blame does he put on AI for what's happening?

Nathan says he's very concerned about it.

I mean, the fact that entry-level and junior-level positions are effectively being eliminated because companies are deciding that AI can do that work instead, that's just ⁇ that boggles my mind because how are you going to have senior developers if you get rid of all the junior developers?

His view is that AI is going to increasingly be used to code and displace entry-level software engineers and junior programmers.

And it wasn't just the money.

He wanted to be a builder, which is what the tech industry wants.

And he was very wistful that now the AIs are going to be the creators and humans are just going to be essentially the handmaidens that steer AI coding and then check whether the AI code that was produced is correct.

And, you know, that's like training a whole generation of kids to be chefs to cook from scratch and then saying to them, okay, you're going to just be in charge of cake mixes from now on.

Does he think that there is a career in tech for him?

You know, he is really interested in being a designer.

I've been investigating, switching out of this field.

And he's thinking about if he cannot design software, what other careers are there where he could design things and that would be meaningful for him?

I took some really, really great architecture classes in undergrad.

And so he's thinking about maybe going to graduate school in architecture so that he can build things, which is the thing that he feels he's good at, he's talented, and he cares about.

And I think it might be a good time to pick up a secondary skill, whether that's through grad school program or even just starting an internship in a completely different field.

As disheartening as Nathan's experience clearly is, I just want to level set for a minute with you, Natasha.

Nathan and those like him clearly came along at a time

when

computer science transitioned into artificial intelligence

before

they had a chance to really know that was going to happen and to train for it, right?

There's no AP AI class.

So I guess what I'm asking is, is this a temporary problem?

One that can over time be addressed by the education system?

So I think the answer is both yes and no.

I think that computer science majors who graduated this year and last year are going to have a particularly hard time because many of them have not yet learned to use the AI coding tools that big tech companies now want software developers and software engineers to use.

So it's certainly conceivable that five years from now, when college computer science departments are teaching kids both the fundamentals of computer programming and then how to use these new coding tools, that computer science majors will be much more employable.

But I also think in the long term, it's really hard to know.

And so so, Natasha, I wonder what you think the big lesson of this story is.

I mean, superficially, perhaps, one observation I take is that tech moves a whole lot faster than our education system.

And so there's inevitably going to be a mismatch here if tech folks tell schools to prepare kids and then tech just changes and those kids are prepared for a market that no longer exists.

I think that this is completely true.

And also I think it's sort of the moral of the story.

I'm working on a book right now about the decade-long push for computer science and now AI in schools.

And one of the things I've learned from doing historical research is that this is a pattern of the tech industry of pushing school reforms.

And it's always the latest hyped thing that's urgent for schools to teach.

And schools respond.

And we want schools to respond because we want kids to be able to use the technology of the day.

And we want kids to be able to learn the subjects that are the most important of the day and that help them navigate their worlds and get jobs.

But at the same time, tech companies have outsize influence in schools.

And we have bowed to tech industry education agendas in school without a lot of public discussion or independent scrutiny.

And if you think about other industries, We don't let big pharma companies like Pfizer or Johnson ⁇ Johnson tell high schools what to teach in biology.

Right.

You're saying tech has a unique purchase on American education.

Tech companies supply the laptops, the software, the email, the writing apps, the PowerPoint apps, right?

They supply the platforms on which schools run.

And it gives them a unique power to then say, we are the backbone of schools.

We are at the forefront of innovation.

And so we're going to tell you what kids need to learn.

No other industry occupies that kind of powerful influence in schools.

And I'm reporting on how some of the same tech companies that pushed for computer science are now pivoting from coding to pushing for AI education and AI tools in schools.

And we see Microsoft just announced an effort to provide $4 billion in AI technology and training to skill students in schools and community colleges with AI.

Google just announced a $1 billion commitment for a similar AI education effort.

And the crisis rhetoric is similar to the coding crusade, right?

The country needs more skilled AI workers to stay competitive.

And kids who learn to use AI will get better job opportunities.

So it's 2010 all over again.

Exactly.

So I think we have the opportunity now to proceed more deliberately and think more clearly about what are the things that are most important for kids to learn and not so much what's best for tech companies?

Well, Natasha, thank you very much.

We appreciate it.

Thanks, Michael.

Always great to be with you.

Natasha Singer is writing a book about all of this.

It's called Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools, and it will be published next fall.

We'll be right back.

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Over the weekend, President Trump ordered that federal troops be sent to Portland, Oregon to quell small protests there directed at a U.S.

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The move has been opposed by the state's governor, Democrat Tina Kotek, who said that she had told both the president and his Secretary of Homeland Security to stay out of the city.

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After his arrest, Des Moines school board said it was unaware of Roberts' legal status and quickly voted to put him on leave.

Finally, New York City's Mayor Eric Adams is ending his beleaguered campaign for re-election just five weeks before Election Day.

In a video, he acknowledged that his indictment on federal corruption charges last year, charges that President Trump later dropped, had hurt his image with voters.

Recent polls showed Adams in fourth place in the race, winning just 7% of the the vote, which will be held on November 4th.

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It was edited by Mark George and Patricia Willits, contains music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

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I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.

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