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    Computer Science Students Face a Shrinking Big Tech Job Market

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    A new reality is setting in for students and recent graduates who spent years honing themselves for careers at the largest tech companies.Ever since she was a 10th grader in Seattle, Annalice Ni wanted to develop software for a prominent tech company like Google. So she went to great lengths to meet the internship and other résumé criteria that make students attractive hires to the biggest tech firms.In high school, Ms. Ni took computer science courses, interned at Microsoft and volunteered as a coding teacher for younger students. She majored in computer science at the University of Washington, earning coveted software engineering internships at Facebook. After graduating from college this year, she moved to Silicon Valley to start her dream job as a software engineer at Meta, Facebook’s parent company.Then last month, Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees — including Ms. Ni.“I did feel very frustrated and disappointed and maybe a bit scared because all of a sudden, I didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Ni, 22, said of her unexpected career setback. “There’s not much I could have done, especially in college, more than I already did, better than I already did.”Over the last decade, the prospect of six-figure starting salaries, perks like free food and the chance to work on apps used by billions led young people to stampede toward computer science — the study of computer programming and processes like algorithms — on college campuses across the United States. The number of undergraduates majoring in the subject more than tripled from 2011 to 2021, to nearly 136,000 students, according to the Computing Research Association, which tracks computing degrees at about 200 universities.Ms. Ni spends her days interviewing for jobs and brushing up on her skills.Jason Henry for The New York TimesTech giants like Facebook, Google and Microsoft encouraged the computing education boom, promoting software jobs to students as a route to lucrative careers and the power to change the world.But now, layoffs, hiring freezes and planned recruiting slowdowns at Meta, Twitter, Alphabet, Amazon, DoorDash, Lyft, Snap and Stripe are sending shock waves through a generation of computer and data science students who spent years honing themselves for careers at the largest tech companies. Tech executives have blamed a faltering global economy for the jobs slowdown.The cutbacks have not only sent recent graduates scrambling to find new jobs but also created uncertainty for college students seeking high-paying summer internships at large consumer tech companies.In the past, tech companies used their internship programs to recruit promising job candidates, extending offers to many students to return as full-time employees after graduation. But this year, those opportunities are shrinking.Amazon, for instance, hired about 18,000 interns this year, paying some computer science students nearly $30,000 for the summer, not including housing stipends. The company is now considering reducing the number of interns for 2023 by more than half, said a person with knowledge of the program who was not authorized to speak publicly.More on Big TechMicrosoft: The company’s $69 billion deal for Activision Blizzard, which rests on winning the approval by 16 governments, has become a test for whether tech giants can buy companies amid a backlash.Apple: Apple’s largest iPhone factory, in the city of Zhengzhou, China, is dealing with a shortage of workers. Now, that plant is getting help from an unlikely source: the Chinese government.Amazon: The company appears set to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs, in what would be the largest cuts in the company’s history.Meta: The parent of Facebook said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work forceBrad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman, said the company was committed to its internship program and the real-word experience that it provided. A Meta spokeswoman referred to a letter to employees from Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, announcing the company’s layoffs last month.Hiring plans are also changing at smaller tech firms. Roblox, the popular game platform, said it planned to hire 300 interns for next summer — almost twice as many as this year — and was expecting more than 50,000 applications for those spots. Redfin, which employed 38 interns this summer, said it had canceled the program for next year.There are still good jobs for computing students, and the field is growing. Between 2021 and 2031, employment for software developers and testers is expected to grow 25 percent, amounting to more than 411,000 new jobs, according to projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But many of those jobs are in areas like finance and the automotive industry.“Students are still getting multiple job offers,” said Brent Winkelman, chief of staff for the computer science department at the University of Texas at Austin. “They just may not come from Meta, from Twitter or from Amazon. They’re going to come from places like G.M., Toyota or Lockheed.”College career centers have become sounding boards for anxious students on the cusp of entering the tech job market. In career counselors’ offices, the search for a Plan B has heightened.Some students are applying to lesser-known tech companies. Others are seeking tech jobs outside the industry, with retailers like Walmart or with government agencies and nonprofits. Graduate school is also an option.“This particular class has been a lot more savvy than previous classes,” said Hazel Raja, senior director of the career development office at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. “Even those who have secured job offers, they’re still making sure they’re networking and staying engaged in campus recruiting opportunities.”Helen Dong, 21, a senior majoring in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, interned at Meta twice, in 2021 and 2022. So she was surprised at the end of this summer, she said, when she did not receive a job offer from the company. Meta’s recent layoffs prompted her to apply for jobs outside tech, at automotive and financial companies. Last month, she posted videos on TikTok advising her peers to adjust their job expectations.Helen Dong, 21, a senior majoring in computing at Carnegie Mellon University, interned at Meta but did not receive a job offer. Now she is looking in the finance and automotive industries.Helen Dong“I chose to major in computer science so that I could get a ton of offers after college and make bank,” Ms. Dong joked in one TikTok, as she sang along to “Reduce Your Expectations to 0.” In this job market, she wrote at the bottom of the video, “be grateful with 1 offer.”In interviews, 10 college students and recent graduates said they were not prepared for a slowdown in jobs at the largest tech companies. Until recently, those companies were fiercely competing to hire computer science majors at top schools — with some students receiving multiple job offers with six-figure starting salaries and five-digit signing bonuses. An entire genre of TikTok videos had sprung up dedicated to young techies extolling their job perks and their annual compensation, with at least one highlighting a $198,000 package, complete with stock options and relocation expenses.Dozens of people who were recently laid off, or whose tech job offers were rescinded, have posted details of their plights on LinkedIn. To alert recruiters, some have added the hashtag #opentowork to their LinkedIn profile photos.Tony Shi, 23, who majored in computer science and business at Western University in London, Ontario, is one of them. After graduating this year, he began working as a product manager at Lyft in August. In November, the ride-hailing company laid off about 650 employees, including Mr. Shi.Now he is on a tight deadline to find a new job. Mr. Shi is Canadian, from Waterloo, Ontario, and obtained a visa to move to San Francisco for his job at Lyft. Under the visa, he has 60 days to find a new job. He said he had become more sensitive to the businesses and balance sheets of potential employers.“I need to be a little more risk-averse. I definitely don’t want to get laid off again,” he said. Instead of his taking a company for its word, he added, “now, the product needs to make a lot of sense.”Meta rescinded its job offer to Rachel Castellino, 22, weeks before she was scheduled to start work.Jason Henry for The New York TimesSome recent graduates did not get the chance to start their new tech jobs.Rachel Castellino, a statistics major at the California Polytechnic State University, worked to land a job at a major tech company. During college, she interned as a project manager at PayPal, received a data science fellowship funded by the National Science Foundation and founded a data science club at her school.Ms. Castellino, 22, knew she would have to grind to pass companies’ technical interviews, which typically involve solving programming problems. Last year, she spent much of the fall job hunting and preparing for coding assessments. For four days a week, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., she studied probability concepts and programming languages. Even so, she said, the interview process was brutal.In November 2021, Meta offered her a job as a data scientist, starting in December 2022. Last month, Meta rescinded the offer, she said.“I worked so hard for those interviews. It felt really good to earn something of a high caliber,” she said. “I had so much to look forward to.”The setback has been disheartening. “I was upset,” Ms. Castellino said. “It wasn’t good to hear.”As for Ms. Ni, she now views losing her dream job as an opportunity to broaden her career horizons. Over the last month, she has applied to midsize tech firms and start-ups that she finds innovative — potential employers she had not previously considered.“I’m exploring opportunities that I didn’t before,” Ms. Ni said. “I feel like I’ve already learned some things.”Karen Weise More

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    Are You Applying for Tech Jobs or Internships? We Want to Hear About It.

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    Layoffs and hiring freezes at companies like Amazon and Meta are changing the job market for recent grads and college students. Tell us about your experiences.November was a bleak month for tech workers. Meta, Amazon, Lyft, Stripe and Twitter laid off thousands of employees. Microsoft and Google announced hiring slowdowns.The cutbacks and hiring freezes affected not only veteran employees. Some tech companies laid off recent college graduates or rescinded their job offers. Some firms are also cutting their summer internship programs for college students next year.The industry slowdown is sending shock waves through a generation of computer science and data science students who spent years preparing themselves for careers at the largest tech companies. Many recent grads and college seniors are now seeking tech jobs outside the tech industry, in industries like retail, banking and finance.I’m a technology reporter at The New York Times who investigates the societal impacts of tech innovations and tech company business practices. And I am reporting a story about the implications of the industry jobs slowdown for people in the early stages of their tech careers.If you are a college student or recent grad applying for tech internships or jobs, I’d like to hear from you.We may use your contact information to follow up with you. If we publish your submission, we will not include your name without first contacting you and obtaining your permission.Tell us about your experiences applying for tech jobs and internships More

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    The Subprime Loans for College Hiding in Plain Sight

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    Many families can borrow most of the cost of college using a Parent PLUS loan. This will not end well.If you want your kids to go to college but you can’t afford the bills, the federal government has a deal for you that will blow your mind.You can borrow the entire cost — minus any other aid your child receives — through something called a Parent PLUS loan. Moreover, your income — and thus your ability to repay the debt — doesn’t matter. As long as you don’t have one of a handful of black marks in your recent credit history, you can borrow six figures even if your take-home pay puts you below the federal poverty level.This is totally bananas. But don’t take my word for it.“The honest truth is that Congress created a subprime lending program unintentionally,” said Rachel Fishman of New America, the left-leaning think tank.“I absolutely hate them,” said Beth Akers, of the American Enterprise Institute, the right-leaning think tank, referring to these loans.“It’s gone completely off the rails,” said Justin Draeger, the president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.Most parents don’t pay for college using this loan. But about 3.6 million of them — with about $107 billion in outstanding debt — have. Within that group are a number of low-income Black families at schools that may not have given their kids enough help in the way of scholarships. Many of those families are struggling to repay the money that the federal government so freely offered up.And, really, why wouldn’t moms and dads use a PLUS loan if it appears to be the least horrible option? For many people, parenting means keeping the American promise that children should do better than family members from previous generations. A college degree is a rocket booster that can help make that possible.When Congress created parent PLUS loans in 1980, there were decent reasons for doing so. College costs had increased, and many middle-income families struggled to pay for tuition out of their income. At the time, interest rates were also very high.The PLUS loan, which came with a lower-than-market interest rate, solved a worsening problem. It also made it easier for parents to pay a larger share of the bill and perhaps help their children borrow less.At the time, you could borrow only $3,000 per year. In 1992, that cap went away, thanks, it seems, to a successful push by a higher education lobbying association, according to a report from the Urban Institute report in 2019.What to Know About Student Loan Debt ReliefCard 1 of 5Many will benefit. More

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    Biden’s Big Dreams Meet the Limits of ‘Imperfect’ Tools

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    The student loan plan is the latest example of Democrats practicing the art of the possible on the nation’s most pressing economic challenges and ending up with risky or patchwork solutions.WASHINGTON — President Biden’s move this week to cancel student loan debt for tens of millions of borrowers and reduce future loan payments for millions more comes with a huge catch, economists warn: It does almost nothing to limit the skyrocketing cost of college and could very well fuel even faster tuition increases in the future.That downside is a direct consequence of Mr. Biden’s decision to use executive action to erase some or all student debt for individuals earning $125,000 a year or less, after failing to push debt forgiveness through Congress. Experts warn that schools could easily game the new structure Mr. Biden has created for higher education financing, cranking up prices and encouraging students to load up on debt with the expectation that it will never need to be paid in full.It is the latest example, along with energy and health care, of Democrats in Washington seeking to address the nation’s most pressing economic challenges by practicing the art of the possible — and ending up with imperfect solutions.There are practical political limits to what Mr. Biden and his party can accomplish in Washington.Democrats have razor-thin margins in the House and Senate. Their ranks include liberals who favor wholesale overhaul of sectors like energy and education and centrists who prefer more modest changes, if any. Republicans have opposed nearly all of Mr. Biden’s attempts, along with those of President Barack Obama starting more than a decade ago, to expand the reach of government into the economy. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sought to curb what it sees as executive branch overreach on issues like climate change.As a result, much of the structure of key markets, like college and health insurance, remains intact. Mr. Biden has scored victories on climate, health care and now — pending possible legal challenges — student debt, often by pushing the boundaries of executive authority. Even progressives calling on him to do more agree he could not impose European-style government control over the higher education or health care systems without the help of Congress.The president has dropped entire sections of his policy agenda as he sought paths to compromise. He has been left to leverage what appears to be the most powerful tool currently available to Democrats in a polarized nation — the spending power of the federal government — as they seek to tackle the challenges of rising temperatures and impeded access to higher education and health care.Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who consulted with Mr. Biden’s aides on the student loan issue and supported his announcement this week, said in an interview that the debt cancellation plans were necessarily incomplete because Mr. Biden’s executive authority could reach only so far into the higher education system.“This is an imperfect tool,” Mr. Dube said, “that is however one that is at the president’s disposal, and he is using it.”But because the policies pursued by Mr. Biden and his party do comparatively little to affect the prices consumers pay in some parts of those markets, many experts warn, they risk raising costs to taxpayers and, in some cases, hurting some consumers they are trying to help.Mr. Biden’s plan would forgive up to $10,000 in student debt for individual borrowers earning $125,000 a year or less and households earning up to $250,000, with another $10,000 for Pell grant recipients.Cheriss May for The New York Times“You’ve done nothing that changes the structure of education” with Mr. Biden’s student loan moves, said R. Glenn Hubbard, a Columbia University economist who was the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. “All you’re going to do is raise the price.”Mr. Hubbard said Mr. Biden’s team had made similar missteps on energy, health care, climate and more. “I understand the politics, so I’m not making a naïve comment here,” Mr. Hubbard said. “But fixing through subsidies doesn’t get you there — or it gets you such market distortions, you really ought to worry.”Mr. Biden said on Wednesday that his administration would forgive up to $10,000 in student debt for individual borrowers earning $125,000 a year or less and households earning up to $250,000, with another $10,000 in relief for people from low-income families who received Pell grants in school.What’s in the Inflation Reduction ActCard 1 of 8What’s in the Inflation Reduction ActA substantive legislation. More

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    Biden Student Loan Plan Squarely Targets Middle Class

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    President Biden is offering what independent analysts suggest would be his most targeted assistance yet to middle-class workers — while trying to repair what he casts as a broken bridge to the middle class.WASHINGTON — The big winners from President Biden’s plan to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans are not rich graduates of Harvard and Yale, as many critics claim.In fact, the benefits of Mr. Biden’s proposals will largely go to the middle class. According to independent analyses, the people eligible for debt relief are disproportionately young and Black. And they are concentrated in the middle band of Americans by income, defined as households earning between $51,000 and $82,000 a year.The Education Department estimates that nearly 90 percent of affected borrowers earn $75,000 a year or less. Ivy League graduates make up less than 1 percent of federal student borrowers nationwide.Economists say the full scope of Mr. Biden’s plan, including significant changes meant to reduce the payments that millions of borrowers will make for years to come, will help middle-income earners from a wide range of schools and backgrounds.“You’ll have a lot more people who are making zero payments and will have significant loan forgiveness in the future,” said Constantine Yannelis, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “The relief to borrowers is going to be more targeted to the people who really need it.”Yet despite the appeal of such debt relief, the program still has set off a contentious debate as economists and political figures assess the full consequences of the plan. By some estimates, it will cost as much as a half-trillion dollars over the course of a decade, imposing a future burden on American taxpayers.The plan also could encourage colleges to raise tuition even faster than they already are. Schools could try to persuade borrowers to take on as much debt as possible to cover higher tuition, with the belief that the federal government would help pay it back.Some conservative and Democratic economists also say the program could add significantly to what is already the highest inflation rate in four decades. Evidence suggests those claims are overstated, however, and American shoppers are not likely to see prices spike because of the program.The announcements Mr. Biden made, including both debt forgiveness and a restart next year of loan payments for all borrowers after a nearly three-year pause, will most likely be a wash for consumer prices, a wide range of economists say.“Debt forgiveness that lowers monthly payments is slightly inflationary in isolation,” analysts from Goldman Sachs wrote in a research note on Thursday, “but the resumption of payments is likely to more than offset this.”What to Know About Student Loan Debt ReliefCard 1 of 5What to Know About Student Loan Debt ReliefMany will benefit. More

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    Who Qualifies For Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan

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    President Biden’s move means the student loan balances of millions of people could fall by as much as $20,000. This F.A.Q. explains how it will work.President Biden announced on Wednesday that the federal government would cancel up to $20,000 worth of federal student loans for millions of people. But not everyone with debt will qualify.The action includes rules that will maintain the balances of debtors who currently have high incomes. Those who do qualify will need to navigate the balky federal loan servicing system and keep a close eye on their accounts and credit reports for any mistakes.It also extends the pause on monthly student loan payments, which means that borrowers won’t have to resume payments until at least January, and provides details on a new proposal to create a more affordable income-driven repayment plan.What follows are questions you may have about the cancellation program with answers that have come from the White House, the Department of Education and student loan servicers.We will update this article in the coming days and weeks as more details become available.Who qualifies for loan cancellation?Individuals who are single and earn under $125,000 will qualify for the $10,000 in debt cancellation. If you’re married and file your taxes jointly or are a head of household, you qualify if your income is under $250,000.Eligibility will be based on your adjusted gross income. Income figures from either 2020 or 2021 can render you eligible, but 2022 income will not.If you received a Pell Grant and meet these income requirements, you could qualify for an extra $10,000 in cancellation.Loans obtained after June 30 are not eligible for relief.Which types of debt qualify?Only federal student loan debt is eligible. This includes PLUS loans, whether parents or graduate students took them out.Private loans are not eligible. Neither are many so-called F.F.E.L. loans, which stand for Federal Family Education Loan. If your F.F.E.L. loan was not eligible for the payment pause that began in 2020, it will not be eligible for the new cancellation.I didn’t finish my degree. Does that disqualify me?No.President Biden, speaking at Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University, is also giving those who received Pell Grants the possibility of qualifying for another $10,000 in loan cancellation.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWhat’s the first thing I need to do if I qualify?Start by making sure that your loan servicer knows how to find you, so that you’ll be able to receive any guidance it provides and follow any instructions that it issues. Check that your postal address, your email address and your mobile phone number are listed accurately.If you don’t know who your servicer is, consult the Department of Education’s “Who is my loan servicer?” web page for instructions.Will the $10,000 in cancellation happen automatically, or do I need to submit a tax return or do something else to prove that I qualify?It depends. If you’re already enrolled in some kind of income-driven repayment plan and have submitted your most recent tax return to certify that income, your servicer and the Education Department know how much you earn and you should not need to do anything else. Still, keep an eye out for guidance from your servicer.What to Know About Student Loan Debt ReliefCard 1 of 5What to Know About Student Loan Debt ReliefMany will benefit. More