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Updated April 28, 2026
Teacher Jake Baskin remembers exactly where he was when he first watched the viral 2013 video that introduced Code.org to the world, inviting kids to learn how to code.
“I was sitting in my high school classroom in Chicago,” he said. “I got a link to that first video and thought, ‘I’m so excited. Someone else is saying the things I’ve been saying to my students.’ ”
A longtime educator who now leads the Computer Science Teachers Association, he watched as the nearly-six-minute video showcased Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and a constellation of tech celebrities recalling their first experiences with a computer: creating games, drawings, quizzes and more. “I was 13 when I first got access to a computer,” says Gates, a wistful smile crossing his face.
It didn’t hurt that he and a few others onscreen were by then among the wealthiest people on the planet.
The video soon helped spark what would become arguably the most successful education reform campaign of the past few decades.
By 2021, 53% of U.S. high schools offered computer science, known widely as “CS.” Code.org persuaded legislators in 12 states to add it to their high school graduation requirements. And every U.S. president since 2013 has made computer science a pillar of their education agenda.
Baskin liked the video so much he’d go on to spend four years at Code.org, helping the nonprofit write its first curricula and building district partnerships nationwide.
But fast-forward to 2026, and the landscape looks more fraught. So-called Silicon Valley “oligarchs” have spent the past few years secretly building addictive apps and survival bunkers while shedding thousands of software engineers. And the organization that made “learn to code” a national rallying cry must confront an existential question: In an era when generative AI tools can create functional code from plain-language prompts — and where kids too young to drive are making millions “vibe coding” professional-looking apps — where exactly does a nonprofit called Code.org fit in?
When It Comes to Developing AI Rules, Who Asked the Students?
New CEO Karim Meghji admitted that he and his colleagues must reframe their offerings and message without abandoning their core ideals. “Our foundational principle is not, ‘More kids need to learn how to be software engineers,’” he said in an interview. “What we’ve been promoting is that a world that is very digital, and has technical products all around us is a world where students deserve to understand how these things function, how they work.”
That reframing comes at a key time for the nonprofit, whose gift-fueled funding has dropped significantly in recent years, from $42.8 million in 2023 to $25.2 million in 2025. It reflects both shifting philanthropic priorities and the existential questions now swirling around the field of computer science.
Is computer science collapsing?
The shift Meghji describes is happening not just in K-12 education, but in the higher ed landscape and in the broader job market. Student enrollment in computer science at four-year colleges fell 8.1% last fall, the biggest single-year drop of any major discipline since at least 2020. In one year, computer science fell from the nation’s fourth-largest undergraduate major to its sixth, even as the fortunes of Silicon Valley continued to rise.
Karim Meghji
At the University of California, computer science graduates are expected to number about 350 next year, a 59% drop from 2025. Across the entire UC system, computer science enrollment declined last year for the first time since the early 2000s.
The job market for young coders has softened, too. A recent study by Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, using payroll data from millions of workers, found that by September 2025, employment for software developers aged 22 to 25 had declined nearly 20% compared to its peak in late 2022 — even as employment for more experienced developers held steady or grew. The study’s authors described entry-level engineers as “canaries in the coal mine,” early casualties of AI tools that can easily replicate their work.
Other data paint a less clear picture. A recent report by the finance analysis firm Citadel Securities found that in the long term, software developers’ jobs may be relatively safe because replacing them en masse with AI would require “orders of magnitude more compute intensity” than the industry has. Alex Kotran, CEO of the AI Education Project, noted that job postings for software engineers are actually up 11%.
“Something that I just want to shout from the rooftops, is, ‘We really don’t know what is about to happen,’ ” he said.
Can AI Keep Students Motivated, Or Does it Do the Opposite?
That uncertainty, it turns out, is what Meghji is emphasizing as Code.org shifts direction.
Yes, AI seems miraculous and it’s improving quickly. But it also fumbles on occasion, hallucinating, making up references and generally threatening to wreak havoc on the world. Meghji invoked the notion of AI’s “jagged frontier,” which describes its strange, counterintuitive competence in complex processes — but that can also fumble the simplest tasks.
For Meghji, a veteran consultant and technologist who most recently was Code.org’s chief product officer, that jaggedness is exactly why teaching computer science matters now: “The further we move away from how these systems work — the further we abstract away from what’s happening under the hood — the more important it is that students learn foundational CS and computational thinking concepts,” he said.
When AI shows its fallibility, he suggested, educators should view it as a teachable moment.
As it rebuilds, his organization plans to keep coding at its center while weaving AI into instruction, Meghji said. It has replaced its well-known “Hour of Code” with an Hour of AI, and it’s developing an “AI Foundations” course for high school students, due this fall, in which students use AI to help build and lay out interactive websites, then use a combination of their own written code and AI-generated code to improve the sites. A middle school curriculum is also planned.
“We don’t start with AI,” Meghji said. “We start with the foundation, teach the principles. Then we introduce AI coding, have students read code that AI is generating, find the issues, and hopefully have a higher ceiling — both in terms of their creative output, their agency, and what they’re producing.” He estimates that where previously perhaps five out of every 100 students built something genuinely impressive, AI tools could raise that to 30 or 40.
He’s also tweaking the organization’s business model. With philanthropic funding down sharply, Meghji said, he’s exploring whether Code.org can generate earned income through curriculum offerings tied to dual-credit and career and technical education pathways, models where public funding could help students earn technical credentials. He wants its curriculum to remain free for students but is exploring state and federal funding to underwrite it.
‘A fool’s errand in any field’
Meghji is also eager to correct a misconception that he believes was never really Code.org’s message: the idea that learning to code was a golden ticket to a six-figure salary.
“Our message was not, ‘Hey, come to Code.org, take computer science, and you’re going to write your ticket,’” he said. “We’ve always been of the mindset that every student deserves the right to learn the foundations of how technology works.”
Jake Baskin
Baskin, the computer science teacher, said he wishes that distinction had been drawn more sharply from the beginning.
“If I could go back in time, I would try to keep the movement from explicitly linking computer science to short-term career outcomes, because that’s a fool’s errand in any field,” he said. “No one knows what the jobs of the future will be like, and if they did, they’d be very, very rich. It’s about preparing students for the things we don’t know that are coming and giving them the broadest opportunity to engage in what is meaningful to them.”
aiEDU’s Kotran made a similar case, arguing that computer science should sit “alongside reading and writing and math and science,” not as vocational training but as the place where students practice so-called “durable skills” such as collaboration, design thinking, productive struggle and iteration.
He worries about the consequences if schools abandon the field entirely. “If we turn our backs to computer science, you’re going to have this deviation where kids who have access to those learning experiences are just going to be on a separate track,” he said, with access to knowledge that others don’t have. That’ll worsen inequality.
It’s Time to Embrace AI Literacy for Kids
The strongest case an organization like Code.org can make, Kotran said, is actually a counterintuitive one: That AI, the very technology threatening to upend coding careers, might actually help recruit the next generation of computer scientists.
Alex Kotran
Despite the appealing creation myths embedded in Code.org’s famous intro video, he said most young people who study computer science must put in upwards of two years before they get to a place “where you could build something that’s actually cool.” But many students never made it that far. With AI, the time horizon shrinks: “Your first class is like, ‘OK, let’s vibe-code something. Think of a problem you want to solve that’s relevant to you — finding the right makeup, predicting fashion trends, sports data analytics, whatever,’” he said.
Students build something, but to further develop it, they need to go deeper and understand the code behind the vibe. Code.org and groups like it could open that experience up to students for the first time. “I don’t think we ever had something that powerful before,” he said. “And if we wield it right, we can actually start to reach kids who don’t think of themselves as CS kids.”
Updated: This story has been updated to reflect the most recently released funding figures for Code.org.
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