The study, published as a working paper this month, found that taking a high-quality computer science course in high school increased the chance that the student goes on to major in computer science in college by 10 percentage points, and increased the chance that the student would finish a CS degree program by 5 percentage points. “It’s not surprising in some ways,” says the lead researcher on the study, Jing Liu. “But we need the numbers so we can show it concretely.” Liu, who is an assistant professor of education policy at the University of Maryland at College Park, surmises that taking a class in computer science helps some students overcome popular misconceptions about coding.
