Changing workplace

02/03/2020, 4:35 PMCoding bootcamps are becoming the new pathway for computer science — Quartz
Page 1 of 9https://qz.com/1808479/coding-bootcamps-are-becoming-the-new-pathway-for-computer-science/
CHARTBOOK
How tomorrow’s
workplace is
changing education
now
✦ Member exclusive by Michael J. Coren for Beyond student debt
APPHOTO/JEFFCHIU,FILE
Learning how to code is as hard, and as useful, as you’d imagine.
The working world is undergoing its biggest change in generations.

Only around 60% of the core skills required to perform jobs today will
be crucial by 2022, according to the World Economic Forum. But
education is only just starting to catch up.
The great challenge of the coming decades will be how to train
hundreds of millions of new workers efﬁciently and affordably. The
answer will not look like a conventional college.
Instead, hundreds of alternatives are popping up, from coding
bootcamps in San Francisco, to classrooms in Amazon warehouses.
The promise and peril for students are great. Here’s what lies ahead
for the future of education in the digital economy.
Returns on education
The returns on higher education have never been higher. Neither has
the gap between college graduates and those without a degree.
In the US, the prosperous post-war world increasingly looks an
aberration for workers. In the 1960s, workers without high school
diplomas could ﬁnd a job in a factory, purchase a home, and support a
family. That’s virtually impossible now. Today, two parents would
each need to work two full-time minimum-wage jobs (77-hour work
weeks) just to support a family.
That’s because the returns on education are diverging. Incomes

across the educational spectrum climbed in parallel until the mid-
1970s. But then those without a college degree saw their fortunes
plummet. A graduate degree holder today has effectively doubled
their earnings potential, while a graduate with a Bachelor’s degree
earns nearly 50% more than they would in the early 1960s. For
everyone else, wage growth has ﬂatlined, or even fallen into negative
territory.
Get the data
Wage growth of educational levels since 1963
Real Wage Levels: 1963 is normalized to 1.0 for each group, and the subsequent values are
proportionate to that value (so 1.2 means 20% higher than in 1963)
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
Bachelor's
degree
high
school
graduate
high
school
dropout
some
college
graduate
degree
That’s created an enormous gap between the top and the bottom, a
microcosm of the US economy which has the highest level of
inequality in 50 years. The average college graduate now earns more
than double those without a high school degree.

US workers' earnings by educational attainment (2018)
Doctoral degree
Professional degree
Master's degree
Bachelor's degree
Associate's degree
Some college, no degree
High school diploma
Less than a high school diploma
20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000
$94,900
97,968
74,568
62,296
44,824
41,704
37,960
28,756
Quartz | qz.com | Data: MarketWatch
$0
This is not a US phenomenon. Around the world, wages for workers at
the bottom have largely ﬂattened out (despite a recent bump). And
the share of people working for low pay—the “working poor”—has
grown across Europe, Japan, and other wealthy countries.
Labor demands
Soon, every country will have to deal with the structural changes in
their economies driven by automation, artiﬁcial intelligence, and
globalization. A 2018 World Economic Forum survey on the future of
jobs estimated that almost half of the core skills required to perform
jobs would shift by 2022. Among the most anticipated skills are
designing and programming technology, as well as high-level systems
understanding and analysis. The least were anything that could be

automated or outsourced to the cloud: installing and maintaining
technology, memory and verbal abilities, and physical dexterity and
endurance.
That demand for more skilled labor, combined with rising education
levels, has pushed down the number of hours worked by those
without higher education to its lowest level on record: about 10% in
2017.
Quartz | qz.com | Data: David H. Autor, March Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement
Share of hours worked in the US economy by education group
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
’65 ’70 ’75 ’80 ’85 ’90 ’95 ’00 ’05 ’10 ’15
graduate degree bachelor's some college high school graduate
no highschool
Paying for school

Since the 20th century, most governments have funded universal
education through high school. Today, workers need more advanced
training to have a chance at competing and entering the middle class.
Countries are searching for ways to support retraining the workforce,
especially those with fewer skills.
Countries differ not only in how much they charge for college, but
how students can pay for it. In Germany, higher education is
effectively free. That hasn’t proved a panacea. After reintroducing
tuition charges in 2006, and rolling them back in 2014, the public is
split on how to pay for swelling enrollment without excluding or
miring students in debt.
A second model is loan subsidies, popular in England and Australia,
tying debt repayments to graduates’ salaries. Defaults are almost
unheard of, since payments only consume a predefined share of
someone’s salary.
That’s not the case in the US, the second most expensive country to
get a college degree, where student loans now account for a record
$1.6 trillion in household debt, the largest category behind home
mortgages. The average US undergraduate now leaves school with
$29,000 in student loan debt—and even more at for-profit schools,
where graduates sometimes leave with degrees less likely to translate
into higher salaries.
It’s easy to see why. In 1987, an undergraduate degree cost about 80%
of a graduate’s average annual salary in the years following
graduation. By 2016, the number had climbed above 200% and rising
(you can find the most comprehensive data at CollegeBoard.org).

Every age group is feeling the strain. Defaults are rising 12 to 20 years
after entering college, according to The Brookings Institution, which
estimates that 40% of borrowers will default on their student loans in
the future (defined as not making a payment for more than a year).
The US does offer income-adjusted repayment schemes, but due to
their complexity and a lack of promotion by government agencies,
few use them. That’s finally changing. Direct loans repaid through
income-driven repayment programs have more than doubled from
12% in 2010 to more than 45% in 2017, according to the
Congressional Budget Office.
Finding a job
Few degrees stand out in the workplace today like computer science
(CS). In hubs like the Bay Area, a persistent talent shortage in tech
has pushed the average annual salary in the industry to more than
$142,000, the country’s highest. But the gap between candidates and
job openings hasn’t narrowed much. Last year, the number of college
graduates with CS degrees was 71,416, according to the National
Center for Education Statistics. Yet job openings in computer-related
occupations stand at around 500,000.
Universities struggle to teach all the students who want to enroll in
CS programs, a shortfall exacerbated by a lack of faculty. CS
enrollment surged so much after the introduction of the personal
computer (1980s) and the web (2000s), that universities capped

admissions into many computer science programs, according to the
National Academy of Sciences. By 2011, coding bootcamps had
emerged as an alternative pathway for learning software
development at a fraction of the cost. Since then, the number of
bootcamp graduates has soared to more than 33,000, just under half
the number of computer science major graduates.
Bootcamp participants often learn only a basic understanding of
concepts and coding skills. Still, many can ﬁll junior software
development roles before rising through the ranks, unburdened by
the debt associated with a degree. A four-year, out-of-state tuition
bill for a computer science degree can exceed $171,752. At $15,000 to
$20,000 for a few months, bootcamps appear to be many to be a steal.
Many bootcamp graduates dream of being hired to work at Google,
Facebook, and other top tech giants where median incomes can
exceed $200,000. Most won’t. Last year, the top ten employers hired
only 2,415 bootcamp graduates, according to CareerKarma (pdf), or
about 7% of the total. Some students report schools failing to deliver
credible courses or job prospects.
Many graduates are hired as junior employees who face years in the
trenches building basic skills before they can graduate into the next
tax bracket. That’s not to say they don’t earn more at the start. In a
study of 1,862 students by Course Report last year, bootcamp
graduates reported an average starting salary of $66,694, a 51%
increase over their previous one.
Just as technology has transformed how we do our jobs, it is remaking
how we train and educate the next generation of workers. A deﬁning

challenge of the next decade will be to ensure the beneﬁts accrue to
those at the bottom, rather than continuing to ﬂow
disproportionately to those at the top.

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