(2012-10-05) Dash Blue Collar Coder

Anil Dash recognizes that the typical push to increase the number of Computer Science majors misses the point. Our industry can grow in a very meaningful way by giving lots of young people at a high school level the knowledge they need to learn jQuery straight out of high school, or teaching maintenance on a MySQL database at a trade school without having to get a graduate degree in computer science... Someone has to run that intranet app at an insurance company, and somebody has to maintain the internal iOS app at a law firm, and those are solid, respectable jobs that are as key to our economy as a 22-year-old trying to pivot and iterate their way into an acqu-hire... We need web dev Vo-Tech.

Public education serves many roles in society, from the intrinsic social value of having an educated populace to make decisions about elections to the indispensable role it serves in introducing many kids to the arts, music, science and other fundamental aspects of culture. Today, most Americans also rely on our Public School-s to prepare their children for their careers, too. And if we in the tech industry want to keep claiming that we'll continue to be the biggest driver of those new jobs, then we have to engage in a significant conversation about how the public high schools of our country can help prepare just as many future employees of our companies as the handful of highly regarded computer science programs in the country do today. The new jobs of the Economic Transition?

Comments Marc Canter and Douglas Rushkoff note that in addition to programming itself (Program Or Be Programmed), there are many other/more semi-tech/support opportunities. (Digital Literacy; Internet Marketing)