Following President Barrack Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address in which he declared that improvements need to be made in the domain of computer science education, the Obama Administration has pledged a total of $4 billion in funding for IT-related education.

Declaring that computer science is a ‘new basic’ skill needed for economic growth, the White House plans to divide the $4 billion over a period of three years to states that will come up with well-thought plans to assimilate computer science education among students, through the Department of Education.

This strategy is mainly targeted at areas where students have historically been less advantaged when it comes to access to computers.

One hundred million dollars will be distributed in the form of competitive grants in an attempt to reach as many students as possible with the ultimate goal of establishing a model that will be applicable nationwide.

Big names from the IT industry have announced their intention to back this plan. Apple says they will be investing in training workshops and curriculum integration of its own Swift programming language. Companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Qualcomm and Google have also declared their support of this project, pledginh to invest resources to aid in the training of computer science educators while Ruthe Farmer of the National Center for Women in Technology states that the most important step in this program is to provide states with the resources neccessary to make computer science an integral part of the standard curriculum.

Hadi Partovi, founder of the well-known website Code.

org, says that it is the general vision of this plan that matters most. According to Partovi, the details come second in importance to the overall idea that every school should teach computer science and that what is already happening at local levels should be escalated to schools in every state.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by the year 2020, there will be significantly more jobs available in the IT industry than graduates qualified to occupy them. 1 staggering million more, actually. With these numbers in mind, an emphasis on computer science education within the next few years is more than wellcome.