Are students responsible for learning Computer Science?

Tech companies have upped the ante with tech jobs. Demands are high, and supply is low. Companies are using higher salaries and even increased benefits such as paternity leave to compete in the market and gain the interest of top talent. This has caused a lot of focus and effort on the supply side of the equation: Computer Science education in the United States. The more Computer Science education, the more programmers enter the job market, and thus the more US-born students are hired, right? Chicago has added programming as part of the core graduation curriculum. New York City has set a ten-year deadline for offering a Computer Science elective in every school. And Microsoft has invested an additional $75 million into educational initiatives, including their TEALS program, which assists high schools in developing their own program. But are there students out there waiting for these opportunities, and is it their responsibility to use them?

Increased CS education always focuses on providing more opportunities for taking classes and courses in high school, and often times even as early as middle school or elementary school. But why computer science? Should we not also be teaching engineering and philosophy and politics in high school? Orthogonally is the question of whether high school is really the right place for topic-specific education. (The answer to that question is not necessarily yes.) Furthered by companies dropping college degree requirements, citing "no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken", all of this points to a bigger issue with higher education in the United States.

Universities are not teaching the necessary skills to enter the professional field, nor are they measuring students to accurately describe their academic success. And companies are avoiding this. Pushing into high schools and getting students to learn programming in their earlier years avoids combating the issue that later education will not teach them anything worthwhile. And this will not save the Computer Science industry, nor will it actually fix the issues with United States secondary and post-secondary education. I usually refuse to cite the NY Post, but in one article Naomi Riley says, "Running such a program internally is bound to be a disaster. Especially in an area like computer science, which is always changing, the New York City Public schools cannot possibly hope to keep up." And she is right. The separation between mandatory education and post-secondary Universities is intentional. Students go to high school expecting to receive instruction in a set of solid and relative unchanging core skills. Computer Science, like most other fields, is not one of these. Not everybody needs to learn Computer Science, nor is Computer Science something that can be taught consistently and repeatedly.

Does that mean opportunities for Computer Science in high school should be eliminated? Of course not. There are students out there—I know, because I was one of them—who have their hearts set on Computer Science, and will jump at the opportunity to gain more experience. But this experience does not need to be in the form of a class, even an elective class. Passionate students can and will find their own way; they just need a push in the right direction. This is why many of Microsoft's other YouthSpark opportunities, like Hour of Code, are so effective. They provide opportunities for younger students to get their foot in the door, but have no strings attached. That's not to say that Computer Science courses, especially those taught by TEALS, are not worthwhile. But tech companies need a wake-up call that shoving Computer Science into high school will not fix the larger talent issues that the industry is (or at least claims to be) suffering from.

Are students responsible for learning Computer Science? by Tyler Romeo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.