[Barrin92]

Sorry but am I the only one skeptical of this narrative? There is no way in hell a Purdue grad cannot at least land a lame IT role at a healthcare provider, the public sector or in the military. The government is turning 21 year olds from prestigious universities with technical degrees away?

Maybe goodbye to six figure tech jobs at fancy company X, just take the high five figure tech job where you'll have to write a lot of boring C# but at least you're getting paid

[nickm12]

I find these types of articles from the Times very frustrating. Most of this article is filled with sad anecdotes, but no indication of how those people were chosen. Were they the biggest sob stories found that fit the narrative? Even the data in article is presented in a useless way. CS grads unemployment rates are compared to biology and art history grads (why those in particular?)

I don't doubt that it is much harder to get big salary entry-level work in programming these days. My guess is this is due to a combination of high interest rates / lower investments, flattening business curves, and AI, but the article doesn't try to make a causal case. It just puts forth a bunch of anecdotes sprinkled with a few facts and leaves the reader to infer the causes.

[herewulf]

It's not a good article for relying on so much anecdata and making little overt analysis.

The (3rd party) unemployment numbers do not lie though and the comparison to art and history majors is due to the fact that these degrees (at the bachelor level) usually do not lead to good job prospects, except maybe in roles unrelated to those fields where there is in fact no advantage whatsoever versus another degree.

[nickm12]

The article compared to biology and art history. It's my impression that art history doesn't lead to good job prospects, but is it actually true? A good article would provide support for that choice rather than rely on stereotypes in the reader's head. Or better yet, compare to the median using some data set