Amazon To Offer Over 130 New York City High Schools Computer Science Classes

Amazon has slowly approached the “Big Apple” where housing has a crazy price. With Amazon’s announcement on opening its HQ2 corporate campuses, 40,000 jobs will be created. New York City will undoubtedly be even more crowded than before. And the crumbling subway system of the city will be suffering.

To defuse the situation, Amazon is planning to provide more than 130 New York City high schools with computer science courses. This number of schools makes up for one-fourth of the total high schools in the “Big Apple.”

The intro, as well as Advanced Placement courses for the college level, will be offered to schools in the five boroughs by Amazon. The company's plan takes into consideration the promising job market for coders and deals with the lack of coding classes in high schools. Simultaneously, Amazon can raise students’ interest in working for the company in the long term.

The funding belongs to the Future Engineer program of Amazon, which sets out to offer computer science classes to more than 100,000 underprivileged students coming from 2,000 low-income high schools around America. But before we can praise Amazon on its effort, there are a few things to consider. A lot of the high schools on the funding list are well-funded already, like Manhattan High School for Girls or Townsend Harris High School.

In some schools’ requirements, students need to come from relatively wealthy neighborhoods, have a high GPA for their middle school reports. Some schools’ names already have “science” in them and in their curriculum, advanced science courses are already included, like Bronx High School of Science.

While there are some underprivileged public schools included in the list, it is critical to examine if Amazon is able to make any significant difference by helping those who are in need or it is only trying to impress New Yorkers.