Computer Science Is Future-Proof

April 29, 2016, at 8:00 a.m.
By Lisette Partelow | director of teacher policy at the Center for American Progress.
Source : www.usnews.com/ 

  

Here are some of the more outlandish predictions for the jobs people might hold in the future: mind-uploading specialist, personalized microbiome steward or de-extinction zoologist.

No one can really say for certain what the jobs of the future will be. A former educator argued that uncertainty about the future job market means that giving students opportunities to learn computer science, while trendy, is essentially pointless. Whatever students learn now will be as out of date as MS-DOS and car phones by the time they can put it to use, he reasoned.

He's not alone. It seems to have become fashionable nowadays to write naysayer articles about how popular efforts to expand computer science education are a waste of time.

Of course, many people disagree, and the popularity of code.org, Code Academy and other similar programs and websites attests to the widespread demand for computer science education. Last week, the Center for American Progress hosted an event in support of expanding computer science education in K-12 schools. The presenters discussed polling data showing the vast majority of American parents – 9 in 10 – want their kids to study computer science in school.

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Currently, only about a quarter of schools teach programming. Yet there will be three jobs available for every 2016 college graduate with a computer science degree, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates jobs in software development and other computer occupations are expected to increase at a much faster rate than that of other occupations over the next several years.

So what's with all of the skepticism? First to the former educator's point about technology becoming obsolete so quickly. Yes, the technology sector changes rapidly – when I was a teacher a few years ago, my first-grade students' eyes all went wide when I told them there were no internet, cell phones or iPads when I was growing up.

And it's true, the programming languages my classmates learned in high school and college are probably defunct by now. Yet those who pursued computer science back in those dark ages still managed to get jobs at Google and other prestigious tech firms and kept these jobs as technology changed. Like the rest of us, they learned to adapt on the job as their field shifted. Someone roughly my age managed to use these crude tools to design a little website you might have heard of called Facebook.

Once you have some foundational skills, you can evolve with the technology or figure out something new and exciting to use it for – but half the battle is getting that initial exposure. Data back this up: If a student takes AP computer science in high school, that student is eight times more likely to major in computer science in college. In the book "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell attributes Bill Gates' success in part to getting very early exposure to computer programming, well before most people had access to computers at all.

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 The exposure element is especially important for female students and students of color, both of whom are woefully underrepresented in tech jobs. (Exposure, however, is not a complete solution; hiring discrimination also plays a role.)

Notably, as with many courses taken during one's educational career, computer science also teaches many generalizable skills. Computer science is much more than learning to code, and its benefits go beyond knowing a particular programming language. Computer science teaches students about logic, understanding systems and engineering and design basics, all of which are applicable to other academic and career fields. Perhaps this is why correlational data show that learning computer science is associated with higher math achievement. Computer science coursework also naturally lends itself to 21st century skills like collaboration, problem-solving and creativity, which are valuable and highly sought-after skills in the modern workplace.

Maybe the naysayers are right that the jobs of the future will be super-strange and that many of them won't require coding skills that look anything like what we are teaching students now. However, computers and computing are taking over nearly every aspect of our lives – Americans look at their smartphones an average of 46 times per day.