This opens a new front in Silicon Valley’s push for a much bigger tech emphasis in California’s public schools. The Golden State is one of the 25 states that don’t require passing a computer science class to get a high school degree, resisting a national trend.

Sunday’s San Jose Mercury-News has details:

It’s the backbone of Silicon Valley’s world-changing tech industry, but — like journalism and geography — computer science is considered just another high school elective by the University of California.

 

Now, a powerful coalition of technology leaders, state politicians and high school teachers has taken aim at the university’s influential set of high school courses required for admission, pressuring UC to count computer science as advanced math, alongside calculus and statistics.

 

They say elevating computer science would encourage more California high schools to offer it — and more students to sign up … .

 

“My kids learn how the Internet works from the ground up; they learn how to program. It’s mathematical thinking,” said Karen Hardy, a computer science teacher at Wilcox High in Santa Clara.

 

Like many others, Hardy believes UC’s stance is holding back California schools. “I feel like we’re in the Dark Ages,” she said.

Gender, racial disparities cited in who takes classes

The Los Angeles Times’ coverage of Newsom’s letter emphasized …

… concern about the gender and racial gap of those taking courses and pursuing computer science as a profession.

 

According to data cited in the letter, fewer than 9,000 California high school students took the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam in 2015. Of those students, only about 2,300 were girls, less than 1,000 were Latinos and about 150 were black.

 

According to state data, meanwhile, salaries for computing jobs are high — averaging an annual $105,622 — but the number of graduates in the field are not expected to meet workforce demands.

But it’s not just schools in poor communities or rural areas that aren’t providing access to computer science. According to Re/Code, fewer than 5 percent of high school students in San Francisco took computer science in the 2014-15 school year, with a lack of classes seen as why.

Here’s a partial list of the executives who co-signed the letter with Newsom: Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman, Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!.

Other signatories included California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, superintendent-president of Long Beach City College, and Republican Assembly Leader Kristin Olsen.

Newsom is a member of the UC Board of Regents as part of his duties as lieutenant governor.

In the 1990s and early 2000s [it was] common knowledge that most Seattle-based startups had only two viable exit strategies: go public, or get acquired by Microsoft.

This led to a lopsided startup ecosystem, with a very small number of tech titans, and a large number of relatively tiny startups, with very little in between. …

The last 10 years have seen a sea-change in this dynamic in Seattle, caused by two forces.

The first part of the change has been the rise of a new breed of large Seattle-based tech companies – companies that are still smaller than the two local titans, Microsoft and Amazon, yet large enough to fill out the middle tier of the tech ecosystem.

This group includes public companies such as Expedia, Zillow, Tableau, and Zulily, as well as very large acquisitions such as PopCap Games, Isilon, Big Fish Games or Bluekai. Along with older companies such as Adobe and Real, the home-grown tech industry in Seattle now has a sizeable number of companies not only at the $100 billion valuation, but throughout the $10 billion, $1 billion, or $100 million valuation ranges. …

The second force has been the increasing appearance of Silicon Valley engineering offices in the Seattle metro area. Google was one of the first major Silicon Valley offices to open an engineering office in Seattle, and in fact Google now has two engineering offices – one downtown in Seattle, and one in the suburb of Kirkland, WA. …

A decade after Google set up shop in this city, Seattle has seen an explosion of Silicon Valley companies setting up their second engineering office. Seattle is now home to engineering offices for Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Salesforce, eBay, Dropbox, Uber, SpaceX, Taser, Palantir, Groupon, Hulo, Electronic Arts, Yahoo!, Pivotal Labs and many others …

Seattle’s secret weapon: relatively cheap housing

That’s a striking list. Virtually all Silicon Valley tech giants have a Seattle wing. But at some point, the dynamic may change from Expedia and Zillow co-founder Rich Barton’s characterization of Seattle as the “blond, scruffy-haired little brother of the star quarterback (Silicon Valley).”

That’s because the Seattle area has a huge advantage: housing is relatively affordable. Finding affordable housing in California isn’t just a problem for poor people. Many well-paid professionals are unable to afford to buy their own homes and start families.

According to bizjournals.com, in 2013, the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley had the highest average salary ($111,885) for software engineers of any U.S. city. The Seattle area was second at $103,196 per year.

In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, that much money doesn’t get you much in the way of housing. The National Association of Realtors says the median cost of a home in San Jose/Santa Clara/Sunnyvale was $855,000 in the fourth quarter of 2014. In San Francisco/Oakland/Fremont, it was $742,900.

The housing outlook is grim for renters as well. A new Forbes magazine survey finds that the Bay Area and Silicon Valley have arguably the nation’s worst housing shortage, allowing landlords to constantly push up rents. The average monthly rent in the greater San Francisco area is now $2,802.

CA pols stick with same affordable-housing approach

A $100,000 salary buys a lot more creature comforts in the Seattle area.  The median cost of a single-family home in Seattle-Tacoma-Bellvue was $352,000 over the last three months of 2014. The average apartment rent in March was $1,615 in all locations within 10 miles of Seattle city limits.

In New York City, housing costs are also sky-high, and Mayor Bill de Blasio is heeding economists who say the best way to make homes and apartments more affordable is to increase housing stock. De Blasio wants to add 240,000 housing units.

In California, however, the politician who has focused most on the affordable-housing issue — Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego — instead wants to ramp up the traditional California affordable-housing policy of having the government subsidize some homes. Atkins’ proposals haven’t focused on the regulatory reforms that developers say are the easiest way to spur more housing construction in the Golden State.

Corporations have been known to up and leave California for many reasons. Being able to retain your engineers and coders by guaranteeing them they will live in an area where they can afford the American dream of a single-family home would appear to be a powerful incentive for a company to move to Seattle, especially now that there is such a huge concentration of tech firms in the Seattle region.