SOTU: Community Colleges, Employers To Train Workers For High-Paying Coding Jobs

theodp writes: Coding got a couple of shout-outs from the White House in Tuesday's State of the Union Address. "Thanks to Vice President Biden's great work to update our job training system," said President Obama (YouTube), "we're connecting community colleges with local employers to train workers to fill high-paying jobs like coding, and nursing, and robotics." And among the so-called "boats" in the new "River of Content" that the White House social media folks came up with to enhance the State of the Union is a card intended to be shared on Twitter & Facebook which reads, "Let's teach more Americans to code. (Even the President is learning!)." President Obama briefly addressed human spaceflight, saying, "I want Americans to win the race for the kinds of discoveries that unleash new jobs – converting sunlight into liquid fuel; creating revolutionary prosthetics, so that a veteran who gave his arms for his country can play catch with his kid; pushing out into the Solar System not just to visit, but to stay." He also called once more for action on climate change. Politifact has an annotated version of the transcript for more background information on Obama's statements, and FiveThirtyEight has a similar cheat sheet.

Comments

Re:Paradox

[LaurenCates]

Community colleges are not equipped to train people for high-paying coding jobs. They can teach you the basics, sure, but any kind of advanced programming skill comes from interning, mentorship and/or *gasp* actually sitting home and coding, coding, coding. All night, non-stop, my-brain-is-a-compiler-now coding. Most people aren't fit for that, and it's not a crime to point that out.

The real experts are well aware that a few non-elite college classes aren't going to fill the advanced skill level, high-paying, rock-star-coding-ninja slots, and the President is doing a vast disservice in painting a rosy picture that communicates to people that all you need is a couple of entry-level courses and you too can be a professional coder, when the real problem here is access to the jobs that will get you the experience and the status.

And where are those slots advertised? Hint: not in the community college placement offices.

(Apologies if I sound glib to the parent poster; I mean only to be glib towards the original quote.)

2-yr code, no devel edu == hacks, healthcare.gov

[raymorris]

Coding isn't a high paying job, and isn't what the country needs. A community college course that teaches how to code in a particular language, rather than teaching systems development, pays about the same as flipping burgers and produces systems like TJ Maxx, Target, Home Depot, and healthcare.gov.

Teaching millions of people computer code is like teaching everyone medical codes - it doesn't do them any good, and it doesn't do the country any good.

Re:Paradox

[pastafazou]

You're making the mistake of believing this is an actual plan, not just a bunch of feel good speechmaking and propaganda.

Re:Paradox

[Enry]

Community college gives a few things:

1) a stepping stone to a college they might not have been able to get in before
2) a way of getting two low-cost years, then move to a better school and only pay for two more expensive years
3) two more years of education

We have an awesome tech school near my house. Nobody thinks that the graduates are going to become astronauts and doctors, but not everyone has to be a doctor or astronaut. We still need plumbers/electricians/carpenters/mechanics/welders in this country and those kinds of jobs should pay well enough to put a family in the middle class.

Re:Paradox

[LaurenCates]

I don't disagree that it's a stepping stone. And that's good. I believe in continuous education.

I just don't like the simplistic promise from the President that the OP quotes. "[H]igh-paying jobs like coding" is the part that rankles me especially. It's an overly-simplistic view of the state of high-paying jobs. They're frequently inaccessible to most people for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that a few community college courses are not the key to that door.

It gives the impression that a high-paying job is relatively easy to get, and that's just not true.

Re:Paradox

[NotDrWho]

He's just parroting the nonsense that tech industry bullshit artists like Mark Zuckerberg have been shoveling for years now--namely, that the tech industry needs more H1B's because we just don't have enough entry-level programmers coming out of U.S. tech schools and colleges. Of course, that's total bullshit. There are plenty of grads coming out of these programs. But they can't get hired because they can't be enslaved as indentured servants like the H1B's.

The only thing that's going to result from more Americans getting tech degrees from community colleges (and colleges in general, for that matter) is more unemployed people with student debt.

Here's why this is a bad idea

[XxtraLarGe]

I teach Computer Information Systems at a community college, which includes some programming courses (C++, Java, JavaScript & PHP w/MySQL, etc.), and some non-programming courses on general computer use. When I teach a programming course, I teach it with the idea that the students I have need to be competent in order to succeed when they move on to a 4 year college. What ends up happening is about 1/3 will stop coming to class after about the first few weeks of school--just long enough to not have their Pell Grants and other financial taken away. Then they go off to party/play video games/whatever. About another 1/2 will struggle, complain that there's too much homework, that the homework is too hard, but they either don't post messages on the course message board, or they do it the evening before the homework's due. They also tend to skip class if they didn't get the homework done. Then about 1/6 excel in the course. They show up every time, do most of the homework, and try to assist other students who are struggling.

I've been teaching for 5 years now and this has been a consistent pattern. The first & last groups are typically composed of traditional students, and the middle one is mostly non-traditional students. I think the reason why NT students struggle so much is because they're shuttled into CS/CIS but have no technical background. They're told "go into computers, that's where all the jobs are", then they take the classes & struggle. I try to accommodate them as best I can, but there's only so much hand-holding you can do.

So basically from my anecdotal experience, you're going to be pissing away money on about 5/6ths of the students you're sending into the field. The number of successes may increase when this program kicks into gear, but that's not really going to be a good indication. "Why's that?" you ask. The answer is simple: There will be more smart students at community colleges who probably would have gone to a better 4-year school if community college wasn't "free".

I want to see everyone have as much success as possible, but the truth is, some students would be better suited for going straight into the job market rather than go to college. Most of the students in the lower 1/3 I mentioned previously either lack the intelligence, (but mostly) the maturity, or both.

Re:Bull pucky

[dywolf]

You've gotten the cause and effect reversed.
Tuitions being increased led to the creation of the federal student loan program, not the other way around.

Tuition went up because the majority of colleges are state schools.
And State schools used to have low or almost non existent tuition because they were primarily supported by state taxes, NOT TUITION.

In the same past 20 years (actually goes further, to 30 or 40, around the same time the voodoo economics of trickle down theory started being pushed) as states started being taken over by the GOP, they reduced their budgets and therefore number of things supported by state funds. One of which was state colleges.

That's why tuitions went up.
They had to.

It had nothing to do with "the federal teat". You try to make an anti-government point, the actual reality of the situation was that tuitions were low BECAUSE OF (state) GOVERNMENT, and tax support. Tuitions had to go up in response to that funding being reduced or even cut off.

There are other factors that have come into play since (it's not a static picture, but a dynamic one), but the original reason that