SAN FRANCISCO - Since the early 2010s, a parade of billionaires, tech executives and even US presidents has urged young people to learn coding, arguing that the tech skills would help bolster students’ job prospects as well as the economy. Tech companies promised computer science graduates high salaries and all manner of perks.

“Typically their starting salary is more than US$100,000 (S$128,500),” plus US$15,000 hiring bonuses and stock grants worth US$50,000, Mr Brad Smith, a top Microsoft executive, said in 2012 as he kicked off a company campaign to get more high schools to teach computing.

The financial incentives, plus the chance to work on popular apps, quickly fed a boom in computer science education, the study of computer programming and processes like algorithms.

In 2024, the number of undergraduates majoring in the field topped 170,000 in the United States – more than double the number in 2014, according to the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit.

But now, the

spread of AI programming tools

, which can quickly generate thousands of lines of computer code – combined with layoffs at companies like Amazon, Intel, Meta and Microsoft – is dimming prospects in a field that tech leaders promoted for years.

The turnabout is derailing the employment dreams of many new computing grads and sending them scrambling for other work.

Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 per cent.

In response to questions from The New York Times, more than 150 college students and recent graduates - from state schools as...