If you were anywhere near the world of education in the 2010s, one thing you heard over and over was "STEM! STEM! STEM!"
Schools and other educational institutions - the expert class - were pushing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education - aka STEM - because computers and coding were the future.
If your kids don't know how to code computer programs, we were told, then they would not be prepared for the future.
Aaaaand, here's where we're at now that those children have graduated from college:
Yep, we told a generation of children that computer programming was THE thing that mattered most and by the time they got out of college all of those jobs were taken by AI.
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.
Yep.
Computer Science degrees have the 7th-highest recent grad unemployment rate and Computer Engineer grads have the 3rd-highest unemployment rate.
The dying career path of journalism fares better than these two STEM degrees.
This is not meant to dunk on these kids, they were all deceived.
But these adults, the "experts" who thought that elementary schools needed to focus more on putting a computer screen in front of kids' faces rather than Shakespeare, are to blame.
And now we've got unemployed CompSci grads with no other credentialed skill that are essentially unemployable.
'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.'
I'm telling you "craze" is the right word. The push for coding in schools, and even places like 4-H clubs, was out of control.
Kids who don't know the classics know irrelevant coding languages and skills that have been completely replaced by artificial intelligence.
It's the ultimate irony that the desire to be modern, cutting edge, and to set kids up for the future has only resulted in them being left behind and in tremendous debt because no school advisor saw technology advancing beyond what it was when they started this push.
But these college grads don't need to panic, right?
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.
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