Within the early 2010s, practically each STEM-savvy college-bound child heard the identical recommendation: Learn to code. Python was the brand new Latin. Pc science was the ticket to a steady, well-paid, future-proof life.
However in 2025, the glow has dimmed. “Study to code” now sounds a bit like “be taught shorthand.” Youngsters nonetheless need jobs in tech, however they not see a single path to get there. AI appears poised to grab up coding jobs, and there aren’t a plethora of AP courses in vibe coding. Their lecturers are scrambling to maintain up.
“There’s a transfer from taking as a lot pc science as you may to now attempting to get in as many statistics programs” as attainable, says Benjamin Rubenstein, an assistant principal at New York’s Manhattan Village Academy. Rubenstein has spent 20 years in New York Metropolis lecture rooms, lengthy sufficient to look at the “STEM pipeline” morph right into a community of branching paths as a substitute of 1 straight line. For his college students, learning stats feels extra sensible.
Forty years in the past, college students impressed by NASA dreamed of turning into physicists or engineers. Twenty years after that, the attract of jobs at Google or different tech giants despatched them into pc science. Now, their ambitions are formed by AI, main them away from the stuff AI can do (coding) and towards the stuff it nonetheless struggles with. Because the variety of youngsters in search of pc science levels falters, STEM-minded excessive schoolers are taking a look at fields that mix computing with evaluation, interpretation, and information.
Rubenstein nonetheless requires each pupil to take pc science earlier than commencement, “to allow them to perceive what’s happening behind the scenes.” However his college’s math division now pairs information literacy with function: an Utilized Arithmetic class the place college students analyze New York Police Division information to suggest coverage modifications, and an Ethnomathematics course linking math to tradition and id. “We don’t need math to really feel disconnected from actual life,” he says.
It’s a small however telling shift—one which, Rubenstein says, isn’t occurring in isolation. After a protracted growth, universities are seeing the computer-science surge cool. The variety of pc science, pc engineering, and data levels awarded within the 2023–2024 educational yr within the US and Canada fell by about 5.5 p.c from the earlier yr, based on a survey by the nonprofit Computing Analysis Affiliation.
At the highschool stage, the urge for food for information is seen. AP Statistics logged 264,262 examination registrations in 2024, making it one of many most-requested AP exams, per Education Week. AP computer-science exams nonetheless draw massive numbers—175,261 college students took AP Pc Science Ideas, and 98,136 took AP Pc Science A in 2024—however the sign is obvious: Information literacy now sits alongside coding, not beneath it.
