Assembly Bill 2097, proposed by California State Assemblymember Marc Berman, will require all California school districts and charter schools to offer a computer science class by the 2026-2027 school year and make the course a graduation requirement by the 2030-2031 school year if enacted. In a February press conference, Berman said AB 2097 would provide students with skills necessary to enter the computer science workforce, supposedly a “more lucrative” field, and close statewide inequalities.
“Not only will AB 2097 help provide the workforce needed for California to remain competitive with other states and other nations, but it is also crucial in closing the existing gender and diversity gaps,” Berman said. “If we truly value equity in our schools, we need to ensure all students have access to computer science education.”
While the evidence remains unclear as to how prioritizing computer science over other fields will directly close the existing identity-based inequities, the former part of Berman’s rationale is clear: California is one of ten states that has not mandated computer science. According to the proposed bill, as of January 2023, California has over 45,000 open computing jobs with an average salary of $153,544, though there were only 9,339 graduates in computer science in 2020. However, it remains unclear whether the open computing jobs were entry-level and whether the graduates reflected students from California-based schools.
Additionally, the bill argues that while 49% of the high school population are female students, only 30% of students enrolled in a computer science course are female. The Campanile agrees that offering STEM courses to a wider array of students would benefit all students and potentially encourage more female students to pursue STEM fields. However, we believe that mandating a computer science course strictly in hopes of reducing gender gaps in the workforce will not yield as much fruit as prioritizing structural inequities, and the mandate also unjustly highlights computer science as opposed to other STEM fields.
Placing an emphasis on computer science for the sake of graduates’ average salary marks a shift in educational priorities to encourage students to pursue fields that earn more money.
The Campanile believes that all offered courses are deserving of students’ time, so mandating computer science disincentivizes students from pursuing CTE courses besides computer science and decreases students’ autonomy over their course load.
Additionally, among student opinions, some found only a few concepts to be particularly meaningful and disagreed with the standardization of a course.
As such, we believe that if any skills need to be particularly highlighted, they be offered as part of the required Living Skills course or future media literacy course, if possible.
Paly currently offers more graduation requirements than is expected of a California public school, with another on the way. Since the state has mandated schools offer an Ethnic Studies course as a graduation requirement from the 2030-2031 school year onward, we believe that placing computer science on equal footing with ethnic studies devalues other VAPA and CTE courses.
While The Campanile understands the high demand for computer science graduates and praises the state’s initiative to democratize access to computer science while catching up to other states that have required literacy, we believe that mandating the completion of a course isolates the subject as being more important than other offered fields of study.
While some opponents of the bill argue that computer science is becoming an oversaturated field, with too many people and too few occupational roles, the lucrative job prospects and supposed job openings stated earlier disprove the claim, and there is little empirical data supporting the idea that the field is becoming oversaturated.
However, shifting focus toward the course itself, computer science courses teach important skills in literacy and systematic problem-solving skills.
As such, we strongly urge the state to enact the first half of the bill, requiring schools to offer the course to students in all California public and charter schools.
In sum, we propose California mandates schools offer the course, but not as a graduation requirement.
Not only would requiring a computer science course for graduation stunt the academic growth of students hoping to pursue other fields of study through their CTE graduation requirement, but it also offers little substantial quantitative benefits for the general California population.
As such, we believe it is necessary to introduce students to the field as an offered class, not a required one.
In the name of student autonomy and promoting both the STEM and humanities courses to an equal extent, we believe it is unnecessary to promote computer science over other fields of study.
