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Programming Technology

Hundreds of Tech, Business and Nonprofit Leaders Urge States To Boost CS Education 49

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
theodp writes: In partnership with tech-bankrolled nonprofit Code.org, over 500 of the nation's business, education and nonprofit leaders issued a letter calling for state governments and education leaders to bring more Computer Science to K-12 students across the U.S. The signatories include a who's who of tech leaders, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella, Steve Ballmer, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg. A new website -- CEOs for CS -- was launched in conjunction with the campaign. "The United States leads the world in technology, yet only 5% of our high school students study computer science. How is this acceptable?" the CEOs demand to know in their letter addressed "To the Governors and Education Leaders of the United States of America." They add, "Nearly two-thirds of high-skilled immigration is for computer scientists, and every state is an importer of this strategic talent. The USA has over 700,000 open computing jobs but only 80,000 computer science graduates a year. We must educate American students as a matter of national competitiveness."

A press release explains that the announcement "coincides with the culmination of the National Governors Association Chairman's Initiative for K-12 computer science, led by Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson." Hutchinson is a founding Governor of the Code.org-led advocacy group Govs for CS, which launched in anticipation of President Obama's tech-supported but never materialized $4 billion CS for All initiative. Hutchinson was a signatory of an earlier 2016 Code.org organized letter from Governors, business, education, and nonprofit leaders that implored Congress to make CS education for K-12 students a priority.
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Hundreds of Tech, Business and Nonprofit Leaders Urge States To Boost CS Education More

Hundreds of Tech, Business and Nonprofit Leaders Urge States To Boost CS Education

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  • Like how they offer just a letter, and not, you know, 100s of billions of dollars.
    Because sure as shit no one in gov think education is important and it always underfunded. Or at the very least it is here.

    • Don't worry about those 700,000 open computing jobs. They will soon be soaked up by AI coding.

      Not sure if GDP will collapse or expand because of this...

      • If you want those filled, then offer assistance to adults to go back to school. Plenty of motivated people who would jump at the chance, and be able to complete a course and be into the job market in 2 years or less. CS is important to have in secondary schools, but the 5% rate is more a reflection of how many people actually want to do it and not an indication of lack of access.

  • Will they support raising their taxes (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @04:19PM (#62697726)
    to pay for it? No? Do they just want cheap labor? Yes?

    Stay out of IT kids. Mathematics is fine, but IT is worse than a dead end career. They're working hard to make sure your pay goes down, meanwhile the student loans will destroy you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      I second the vote for mathematics. Math you can use just about anywhere.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      Yes, but being able to write computer programs is a very useful skill, no matter what your profession. It's also easy to learn, as evidenced by the millions of young children that taught themselves with little more than a kids book and ready access to their home micro.

      We could use tools that easy to use, like BASIC back in the 80's. I don't mean like toy crap like Scratch. Just something simple that people can use to do useful kinds of calculations. I knew a guy who designed dies for aluminum extrusion

      • In your first paragraph, your second sentence argues very effectively against jamming more "CS" classes in schools.

        • No it doesn't.

          Many millions of people also read a lot of books by themselves, yet we still teach English in school.

          Many millions of people learn a second language at gone yet we still teach foreign languages in schools.

          Just because some people come to it on their own doesn't mean we should therefore not teach it in school.

  • Stop the presses! (Score:3)

    by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @04:21PM (#62697730) Homepage

    Computer science educational institution shouts tjat we need more computer science education!

    ...this is not news.

  • College sophomore (Score:4, Interesting)

    by refers ( 10097500 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @04:26PM (#62697748)
    this makes me mad. I have been doing learn-c.com and watching various videos, my goal would be to work in AI. I'd love to do CS full-time, but a couple of things stand in way. 1) my parents don't think I'll do well in the math classes, thus they are not allowing me to switch majors 2) If I was to try, I risk losing my in-state scholarship if I don't do well, and my parents will make me live on my own / not pay for housing (they are atm). The scholarship covers all of the tuition. Instead, I'm being forced to do business. The reason (from my parents) being it's the easiest to get A's and its the "safest route". Which after watching some of George hotz and Astral Codex Ten, I feel like I'm basically walking into future suicide. I wish I was able to just not do college and learn all this on my own. I think it would be better. I showed my parents all the coding videos and websites, but they won't let me not do college. I hope this shitty system dies. What iv'e noticed, is the people who are doing coding that I know are either 1) doing it cus they are forced to, not what they truly want or 2) just a nerd that can't think for themselves. Furthermore, the ones that are r becoming react / web dev experts, which I think will just be useless in a few years. I HATE IT HERE
    • "forced to do business" a business major is not a bad thing! I didn't go that route and looking back, I think I should have. "and learn all this on my own." you still can and the degree will put you ahead of those without it. For most, CS is just a great add on skill for what you really do. You may not want to hear it. but a Business Degree will open more doors what you do after that is on you.
      And Hey! your still in the protected world of school. Enjoy it! once you step into the real world the work begins

    • Re:College sophomore (Score:4, Informative)

      by dvice ( 6309704 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @05:19PM (#62697896)

      > I wish I was able to just not do college and learn all this on my own.

      You could do college and learn on your own at the same time.

    • Don't be a soy boy (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Kid, right now, if you want the decent money for a decent day's work, go learn a trade. There are too many people with silly college degrees and not enough people who can lay pipe and run wires and stuff.

      Your parents are playing it safe and if you're smart you'll play along, for it brings in the dosh. You've got a scholarship? You don't know how good you have it. Hate it all you want, but just do get that paper. It'll let you be a manager by day (with decent pay!) while you pick up new skills by night. At

    • Have you looked into ways to foot the bill yourself? If you want to call your own shots, you've got to be a free agent.
    • Don't worry, a CS degree prepares you for no real jobs out there and less then %50 of graduates end up working a career in their field of study anyways. Just because you will graduate with a Business Degree, it doesn't mean that Wall Street and sacrificing your soul to Satan are inevitable.

    • You've got a few options.

      1. Continue with your BS degree but align your electives to select a CS Minor. A resume with "Business degree, with honors, with a CS minor" might get you just as many CS job offers as a strictly CS degree, and it might get you a few job offers where that mix is preferred.

      2. Talk to your college about a double major. If your scholarship allows, you might graduate a semester later than planned with two majors.

      3. Find out how far you can continue in your current major and still c

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      Of course, one can also learn to simply program on his own, but that's not a full CS degree--maybe that's enough for you to do on the side? My programming career started out as a hobby. Be aware though, that a lack of a degree might limit you in the future: As a drop-out myself, I have to either explain my skills every time versus the interviewers simply considering 'degree X'; or, I get filtered out before even getting an interview, no matter how good I am.

      If you are doing more than showing up for cla

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xalqor ( 6762950 )

      If you're over 18 years old, your parents are NOT forcing you. If you want to use their money and resources, then you follow their rules. This is called mutual consent. Maybe you don't like it as much as getting whatever you want for free with no strings attached, but it's better than paying for everything by yourself.

      Assuming you don't become a victim of a natural disaster, violent crime, etc. you have plenty of time to learn both computer science AND business. You can do it while you're in school and also

  • Translation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by codebase7 ( 9682010 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @04:40PM (#62697770)
    Translation: Pay our training costs, now damn it! -Your masters.

    The issue for the industry has never been actual education. If people want it, they can get it (by making themselves indentured servants via student loans). If companies want it, they can get it. (Through H1B Visas.) It's always been that the companies don't want to train people. They want rockstar talent that can hit the ground running for entry level prices. Yes, the education system in the US sucks as a whole and CS in many places is an extracurricular if it's even offered at all. Yes those systems need fixing, but at the end of the day it's a means to an end for the industry. They need more people that are smart enough work the machinery, but not smart enough to question management, at as low of a price as possible.

    This strongly worded letter is just another (scheduled) stunt that the critters in Washington can point to for justification. As the next round of legislation gets brought up for consideration by Congress. What the industry wants: More H1B visa allocations, less education funding (we need drones, not intelligence), and do something about the whole "idiots clicking on the obvious virus" crap that's costing us our profits. The industry just wrote an additional week's worth of news headlines for the next time the puppets go before the media on this subject. Once again, /. happily parrots the corporate talking points like a good stooge.

    The real news headline is that after decades of miss direction and lies on the causes of too many "unqualified" local applicants in the IT industry. The general public is still refusing to hold their representatives accountable and demand that the IT industry quit getting special treatment. If they want workers they can train them just like any other industry. But that's apparently too much to ask of the US constituency on multiple fronts so you can expect more of these stories in the future.

  • The new Fast Food industry? (Score:3)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @04:56PM (#62697830)

    IANAP so I could be way off base here. But when I worked with programmers and did a minuscule amount of programming myself there was a distinction between "programmers", who could design as well as program, and "coders", who could write code for a specific well-defined task but who couldn't do much in the way of architecture.

    I hear a lot, here and elsewhere, about people who couldn't program for shit without access to libraries, which they don't understand and whose functionality they couldn't ever replicate. Yet a lot of them are holding down jobs.

    So what I'm wondering is if the tech industry simply wants lots of coders to do grunt work. If increasingly fewer highly-paid architects can create the libraries and frameworks and code samples that make it possible for the bulk of programming to be done as McJobs by people whose understanding of "real" programming is pretty much non-existent, then programming will be a low-skilled commodity.

    I'm not sure this would ever work out, but I'm sure accountants and PHB's are salivating at the prospect.

  • What we desperately need in this country are more Electrical Engineers, specifically those interested in working at chip fabs. Everyone wanted to go into STEM for those sweet $200k+ salaries from Big Tech. Naturally, they want more talent, which will create a bigger selection pool for talent, and drive their wages down.

  • Poor little Bobby Tables is gonna grow up to be a post-hole digger or a can-and-bottle redemption center sorter. The horror. -- Fact of the matter is, for 35+ years I've watch the kids in school dodge STEM and "hard" courses, more intent on getting drunk or laid on Friday night rather than worrying about their collective future, let alone Math or Science. They'll be content with hanging trim for Generous Motors or working on the railroad or at a WalMart Distribution Center driving a fork lift if it mean

  • Don't assume aptitude (Score:3)

    by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @05:04PM (#62697860) Journal
    I've mentioned this before, but one could consider just having kids fire up Google Sheets, then trying to:
    • populate cells
    • enter an arithmetic expression, e.g., =A1+B1+C1
    • enter a function, =sum(A1,B1,C1)
    • enter a function with a linear range
    • enter a function with a rectangular range
    • enter functions in both ways to demonstrate associative and commutative properties

    If they can grasp these concepts, then sure, move them forward into a computer science class. But don't assume that all kids can necessarily do this with comprehension and some assistance, and if they can't ... what are the odds they'll be able to get to step one in a computer science curriculum?

  • These would be the same leaders, at least on the business side, who do their damnedest to chase people out of the field by the time they're 45 or 50? The US has a huge amount of technical and engineering talent that business refuse to employ.

  • If you keep wasting it on building more Skinner boxes, it's never going to be enough.

  • Drawing in the world's (Score:3)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @05:36PM (#62697938)
    best programmers was the smart thing to do. No country can produce enough coders to meet the current demand. This is gonna get me instantly downmodded, but here's the logic:

    1. A huge chunk of economic development in last 50 years has been driven by computers, networking and coding
    2. It's been so new that no single country could produce enough top-notch people who are willing to code
    3. The US creates a system that draws in large numbers of top notch coders from the rest of the planet.
    4. A lot of barely-good-enough coders come along with the top ones
    5. All this drives the US to grow faster, and the rest of the world grows a little bit slower.


    The side effect? The local population of coders face massively intensified competition. But the overall US population benefits greatly.

    I have nothing but respect for US citizens who become coders. You're competing with every single international student who mastered calculus and 2 programming languages in high school, is willing to code for a living and is willing to relocate to the US. And huge numbers of international students who can barely pass an intro-to-databases course and will sling code for 50k/year+ a work visa. All this extra competition clearly makes your life harder. This depresses your wages. Anyone telling you otherwise is being inexcusably condescending to you.

    However, this is done by design. The last 50 years has been a computer age, and the country with lots of coders had an advantage. It was done on purpose. By both sides of the political spectrum and in collusion with every level of the computer industry. And the country, as a whole, has benefited immensely from it, even if it made the coder's lives harder. Basically, you're like the coal miners from the early 1900s. The whole country gets to prosper while you die of blacklung.

    It was the right call. I wouldn't change it. The whole country is stronger and richer for it. But at least I'm going to honestly acknowledge what's been done to the coders.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      If I tell a "coder" to program a flying-cutoff machine for the machine tool industry, s/he would fall flat on their face. We don't need more coders. We need more engineers.

      • I'm a physical engineer myself, so emotionally I completely agree with you. However, let's compare mechanical and computer engineering for a moment. Mechanical engineering has been around for hundreds of years. Modern mechanical engineering was pretty much in place by about 75 years ago (development of modern FEM). Electrical engineering didn't even exist 100 years ago, computer programming barely existed 50 years ago. And these fields are still explosively evolving.

        So, there's still a huge amount of "l

  • This is just another end run by corporations to keep wages suppressed. They've been spouting this bullshit for decades but here's the truth: they need to pay more in taxes so that more taxes can go toward schools. With a more educated populous, you will have more skilled workers. However, with this method, you will only get more people in CS if you actually pay them what they are worth. However, they have no interest in improving society which is why nobody should listen to them.

  • But they'd learn binary! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    We can't have anyone teaching *binary* to our children. They must learn that the data is whatever it identifies as.

  • Back to reality (Score:3)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Tuesday July 12, 2022 @07:41PM (#62698256)
    If you're realistic & actually want to make a difference, any system-wide changes you try to make in education take around 10-15 years to come into effect. In that time, you have to ensure that whatever changes you want to occur are consistently & broadly supported by initial teacher education programmes (i.e. you have to coordinate with colleges & universities that do teacher training) & teacher continuing professional development. In addition, you need to decide what you're going to cut out of the current curricula, i.e. decide what CS is more important & beneficial than. For that, you need hard data on the actual longer-term academic & career benefits of studying CS in K-12 education.

    AFAIK, very few studies have been done & of those they show little or no support for what the pundits are claiming, i.e. that studying CS contributes to mathematical &/or logical reasoning skills, & that mathematical &/or logical reasoning skills seem to be a predictor of academic performance in CS.

    In other words, strengthening maths education (which all western education systems are in dire need of doing so) & integrating critical & analytical thinking skills into existing subject matter curricula is far more likely to be beneficial to pupils in the longer-term, bigger picture. Who knows, if more pupils are confident at maths, maybe they'll be more inclined to choose CS as an option in post-secondary education & training?

    • Careful; you'll be suggesting teaching the proles to think next. Is that wise? Actually it can be argued that Trump and Biden are evidence that we do need change, but let's be careful here ;)

      • Careful; you'll be suggesting teaching the proles to think next. Is that wise? Actually it can be argued that Trump and Biden are evidence that we do need change, but let's be careful here ;)

        Don't worry - no danger of that ever happening. BTW, increases in academic performance tend to follow increases in economic activity rather than vice-versa, i.e. pupils perform better in secondary & post-secondary education & more students stay in education longer (a good thing, economically speaking) when there's jobs, & the hope of jobs, to study towards. In other words, you can't educate your way out of poverty or recession, although it is an economically good idea to increase access to educa

  • Everyone has access to programming today. If they want to, they will. CS in HS is basically things kids that are interested in the first place did when they were ten.
  • Yeah? In my experience and observations and talks with people, companies hire immigrant tech labor over Americans. So conning American kids to go invest in university attendance may not have desired results for the graduates.
    Yeah, I'm taking about YOU, Google, Adobe, Cisco, and others in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
  • Until they force the university to place actual value, as in X years of High School CS, to be considered as a candidate for a major or minor in CS.

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