The Tech Education Con
By JS Chen, Jacobin
15 January 19
Big tech companies are spending millions to get young people into coding and
STEM - not out of altruism, but to create a future supply of cheap labor.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are the champions of teaching tech in schools.
For many, they are saving education. Apple cuts prices on their hardware for
dot-edu email owners to make their products available to students. Google
competes by selling cheap Chromebooks and provides a suite of education
services to improve teamwork and collaboration. Microsoft has countless
programs to empower classrooms with new technologies, such as teaching with
Hololens.
These companies have catchy slogans for their programs like "expanding
learning for everyone" and "empower every student on the planet to achieve
more." But we shouldn't be fooled. These companies position themselves as
good corporate citizens by empowering students with tech skills and
accelerating STEM education; their motives, however, aren't pure.
While it may seem like these companies are competing in the education market
simply to broaden their consumer base and give back a little, their
collective strategy is much more concerning. Tech oligarchs are pushing
skills like coding in education to train their own future labor force - and
pay them low wages.
It makes sense that these companies are playing the long game on skills and
wages. Labor is among their most expensive costs, with tech worker salaries
running to the low six figures at Facebook and Google. But with few workers
possessing the skills to do these jobs, a competitive salary is the only way
that tech companies can compete for talent today.
There is no reason tech workers should expect disproportionately high
salaries to be permanent, however. Execs are already doing what they can to
suppress wages. The shorter-term strategies are clear. Tech companies
collude via anti-poaching schemes to keep wages down. They use non-compete
disclosures to push wages down by forbidding workers to get jobs from
competitors. They also take advantage of the H-1B visa, hiring immigrant
workers for cheaper than their American counterparts.
But we should also note their long-term strategy. Under the charitable guise
of providing tech education for all, tech giants are doing whatever they can
to increase the labor supply of technically skilled workers so that they can
cut tech workers' wages.
STEM Education and the Rise of the For-Profit Sector
In 1967, then-California governor Ronald Reagan criticized a liberal arts
education, declaring that there were "certain intellectual luxuries that
perhaps we could do without." In other words, the reason to go to college
was simply to get a job. As part of his broader argument to cut funding for
public education, he added that the state should not be subsidizing
intellectual curiosity.
Obama offered a new iteration of this idea in his last years as president.
Having wooed Silicon Valley execs for financial support during his campaign,
he announced his plan for STEM education as a cure to America's economic
woes. His goal was to "provide opportunities to learn computer science for
all students." At the 2015 White House Science Fair, Obama announced a $90
million "Let Everyone Dream" campaign to expand STEM opportunities to
marginalized students.
But despite Obama's push for STEM and some recent across-the-board
increases, state spending on higher education remains historically low -
nearly $9 billion below pre-financial crisis levels a decade earlier. This
is good news for the for-profit sector. The combined demand for STEM
education and lack of state funding for education leaves a gap in the market
that big tech companies are eager to fill.
Google has developed their own computer science programs for educators.
Microsoft is spending $75 million to increase access to computer science
education over three years starting in 2016. Investments in education
technology rose to a historical level of $9.5 billion in 2018.
The push for STEM has continued under Trump. Working with Ivanka Trump, tech
execs from Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Salesforce agreed to
collectively spend $300 million toward computer science education to prepare
more students for tech jobs of the future. Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke with
Donald Trump shortly after he assumed office, advocating coding classes as a
requirement in public schools.
To further the cause, Code.org, backed by CEOs from Google, Microsoft,
Amazon, and Infosys, campaigns on an apparent "skill gap" in the US. The
idea is that there aren't enough coders to fill all the programming jobs out
there. They suggest that there are over five hundred thousand unfilled
programming positions in the country.
But as tech education writer Audrey Watters points out, those numbers are a
vast distortion of reality - propaganda from the tech giants. The five
hundred thousand figure comes from a projection by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics about the number of computer and IT jobs that will be added to
the economy by 2026. In the aggregate, tech workers are also not seeing any
substantial growth in wages - one we'd expect, at least according to
mainstream economics, if there was a shortage in the supply of workers.
These tech companies are not simply investing in STEM education to equip
students with the skills needed to succeed in the twenty-first century out
of the goodness of their hearts. Nor do they just want a cut out of the
growing market of education, which for private education alone brought in
$68 billion in revenue as of last year. With the help of the White House,
tech companies want to get young people trained in computer science to build
an army of reserve tech labor. And where better to learn the skills for the
job than from the job creators themselves?
Coding Bootcamps and MOOCs
Coding bootcamps are highly intensive programs where adults, having not
studied computer science in school, can develop coding skills over several
months. Upon completion, these programs usually promise students a tech job.
For the tech giants, these bootcamps are low-cost solutions for increasing
the labor supply in the short term. In 2017 alone, some twenty-two thousand
students graduated from such academies. In comparison, fifty-nine thousand
students in 2015 graduated from college with a computer science degree.
Google partnered with the professional development school General Assembly
to launch a coding bootcamp for Android application development. Facebook
teamed up with Dev Bootcamp to fund scholarships for their nineteen-week web
development program. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has backed the coding
bootcamp Andela to place engineers throughout Africa. With tremendous
corporate support, the coding bootcamp industry is on track to make $219
million in revenue in 2018.
Massively open online courses (MOOCs) employ a similar strategy. But instead
of training students from unrelated majors, they target other STEM
degree-holders who are trying to enter the tech industry. It's not too hard
for a physics student who already writes R code to learn web development
from a MOOC in order to get an entry position at a startup.
Like coding bootcamps, MOOCs are big business. In 2017, Coursera, one of the
biggest MOOC companies, was just short of $100 million in annual revenue, a
dramatic jump from the $1 million they made in 2013.
With their ability to rapidly increase the supply of tech labor, tech
companies have rallied around MOOCs. Cofounded by an ex-Google exec,
Coursera maintains a deep relationship with Google and is part of their Grow
with Google initiative. Similarly, EdX and Pluralsight - close competitors
of Coursera - have a close relationship with Microsoft. Their partnership
involves teaching students how to code, specifically on Microsoft's cloud
computing platform, Azure.
By supporting coding bootcamps and MOOCs, tech companies shift the
responsibility of training workers to the workers themselves. In order to
keep up in this digital economy, workers must now pay private companies
(coding bootcamps and MOOC providers) and spend additional hours reeducating
themselves with new skills.
Most outrageous is the Obama-era initiative Educational Quality through
Innovative Partnership (EQUIP) - an experiment allowing students to take out
federal loans to pay for "new models of education and training." Put simply,
this is a way for low-income students to borrow money from the government to
pay for coding bootcamps and MOOCs.
While bootcamps and MOOCs are a way for workers to pay for their own
employment training, relieving corporations of the burden, EQUIP legitimizes
that practice on a policy level. As Tressie McMillan Cottom points out, it's
poor students paying a tax for job entry - and the government subsidizing
the practice.
Tech Education and Philanthropy
It is impossible to talk about tech education and philanthropy without
talking about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its younger
equivalent, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Created from the immense wealth
of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively, these organizations - aside
from helping these billionaires keep their money isolated from public
coffers and democratic control - have their eyes set on expanding tech
education in some of the world's most impoverished countries.
In the same way the American military uses the idea of "freedom" as a reason
to invade other nations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan
Zuckerberg initiatives use philanthropic means to exploit some of the
poorest and most vulnerable regions in the world. For Gates and Zuckerberg,
foreign tech education is a way to develop cheap labor for their corporate
empires - and a way to garner praise while doing it.
Gates and Zuckerberg are both backers of Bridge International Academies
(BIA), a for-profit education business that provides low-fee, private, and
informal schools throughout Africa. Highly profitable, BIA streamlines their
education system by collecting massive amounts of data on student
performance and compares students across classes, regions, and countries,
making standardized testing and score-based performance central to their
education system. By backing companies like BIA, Silicon Valley investors
yield sizable profits at the expense of some of the world's most
marginalized children while also delegitimizing public education in those
countries.
While not exactly technical training, BIA's tech-driven education builds the
foundation for many students in Africa to enter the tech job market. It's no
coincidence that one of Microsoft's largest international investments is in
"transforming the [African] continent." Named 4Afrika, this initiative is a
large recruiter for local workers. Through the initiative, Microsoft has
invested millions in "educating the next generation of African web
developers" in order to galvanize the massive and largely untapped market in
Africa.
Gates and Zuckerberg have a long track record when it comes to privatizing
public education in the US as well. Zuckerberg donated $100 million to
replace Newark public schools with charters. Gates was a primary backer of
Pearson's Common Core system, a now-widely adopted curriculum for K-12 that
emphasizes standardized testing for its efficiency and low costs. Pearson
and Microsoft signed a deal to put the Common Core courses on Microsoft
devices, allowing Microsoft to compete against Google's Chromebooks and
Apple's iPads for school district spending. Gates, who is still a major
shareholder of Microsoft stock, is cashing in on this, too.
Summit Learning, Facebook's attempt at education software has been adopted
by over three hundred schools nationwide. Students have complained about the
ineffectiveness of the application, and last November students in New York
City walked out in protest of the teaching method. This should come as no
surprise given that the tool was built largely by Facebook engineers, none
of whom are trained in pedagogy.
And while the short-term financial gains can seem significant, the broader
project of privatizing education isn't just about making a quick buck for
these companies. It's also a long-term transformation that benefits capital
in multiple way, from new (and often unregulated) business opportunities to
make money to churning out the next generation of pliant workers, in tech
and elsewhere.
The tech giants are obsessed with technical training initiatives for poor
and marginalized students. Microsoft works with Girls Who Code, while Google
backs the National Society of Black Engineers. Amazon launched a program,
blatantly named Amazon Future Engineer, that encourages more black, Latino,
and female students to code.
For the tech giants, it's a clever move. They get showered with good PR for
practicing diversity and inclusion (despite their own companies not actually
being diverse) and save on hiring costs by paying women and black tech
workers lower-than-average salaries - women and black software engineers
both make 8 percent less money on average than their male and white
counterparts, respectively.
***
Public education, like any institution, has to change with the times.
Learning digital skills like coding should be part of any twenty-first
century educational program.
But tech giants' interest in remaking our education systems isn't
altruistic. We have to remain skeptical of their technological solutionism
and tax-evading philanthropy.
As education is taken over by private corporations, with tech companies
playing a key role, and the White House continuing to promote STEM as the
only solution for students, we should ask: who benefits from a growing
supply of reserve tech labor? Who wins from the nationwide push for STEM?
And what is lost in the single-minded pursuit of this goal?
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