“Learn to Code” Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment

It looks like the “learn to code” push is backfiring spectacularly for those who bought in.

As Newsweek reports, recent college graduates who majored in computer science are facing high unemployment rates alongside the increasing probability of being laid off or replaced by artificial intelligence if and when they do get hired.

In its latest labor market report, the New York Federal Reserve found that recent CS grads are dealing with a whopping 6.1 precent unemployment rate. Those who majored in computer engineering — which is similar, if not more specialized — are faring even worse, with 7.5 percent of recent graduates remaining jobless. Comparatively, the New York Fed found, per 2023 Census data and employment statistics, that recent grads overall have only a 5.8 percent unemployment rate.

While folks who majored in fields like anthropology and physics fared even worse, with unemployment rates of 9.4 and 7.8 percent respectively, computer engineering had the third-highest rate of unemployment on the New York Fed’s rankings, while computer science had the seventh — a precipitous fall from grace for a major once considered an iron-clad ticket to high earnings and  job security.

(Those numbers, notably, are worse even than the outcomes for journalism grads. Despite being accurately advised that their chosen field is dying, recent grads who majored in journalism are only experiencing unemployment at a rate of 4.4 percent, per the NYFR’s analysis.)

Bryan Driscoll, an HR and business consultant, told the magazine that the pipe dream “sold” to CS majors doesn’t match up to the reality of the current job market that still “rewards pedigree over potential.”

“We’ve overproduced degrees without addressing how exploitative and gatekept the tech hiring pipeline has become,” Driscoll said. “Entry-level roles are vanishing, unpaid internships are still rampant, and companies are offshoring or automating the very jobs these grads trained for.”

By automating, of course, the consultant means being replaced with AI as part of the second apparent phase of the tech industry’s latest crash following major layoffs in recent years. Michael Ryan, another of Newsweek‘s experts, suggested that recent CS grads are, somehow, doing a crappier job than their AI competition.

“Every kid with a laptop thinks they’re the next Zuckerberg,” the finance guru behind MichaelRyanMoney.com told the magazine, “but most can’t debug their way out of a paper bag.”

“We created a gold rush mentality around coding right as the gold ran out,” Ryan continued, referencing the “learn to code” craze of the late 2010s and early 2020s. “Companies are cutting engineering budgets by 40 percent while CS enrollment hits record highs. It’s basic economics. Flood the market, crater the wages.”

Where do they go from here? Aside from going back to school for something more lucrative, they could take the suggestion from one laid-off tech veteran, who last year told SFGATE that she had started selling her blood plasma to make ends meet.

More on post-grad struggles: Berkeley Coding Professor Says Even Grads With 4.0 GPA Can’t Find Jobs