Part of the problem is that higher education in the US is used to both give knowledge and rank students and the latter is very much NOT conducive to giving knowledge.
Society has demand for X trained software engineers as long as X is higher than the available number (X - Y), you have higher salaries which flashes a bright light drawing more people to Software Engineering. To fill that gap, the current educational system draws in the [talented with luck to have gotten the freedom to learn and play with code early] + [people who are talented at anything and pick SE for because of the lifestyle] + [the people who are in it for the money but not necessarily the inherent talent for it] + [the confused or misled who want to try things]. There is a massive missing pool of people who are talented or have the brain to be excellent in SE but never get to try it in an approachable way at with a good teacher or educational tool before they get pulled into something else. The truly talented SE people are often more interested in the Tech and less in teaching, and those who teach may not always have the love for the field an obsessed SE has. The Education system is a very brute tool - spray a little bit of many fields among many kids and see who catches on and then squeeze any love for the field out of them with as much pressure as possible to surface the gold nuggets of aptitude (talent) and attitude (persistence) who are the only ones sent on to train properly. If you want real outcomes, expose every child to a great Software Engineering program that is fun (maybe online, maybe via a textbook, maybe by video + a piece of software like scratch), then let them play consistently for their entire educational career without judgement but with rewards for talent and persistence (only upside, like computer games). Then start filtering only at the career level - when applying for jobs, or judging open source contributions after graduation. You would have a much broader pool of candidates and much higher quality at all levels.
Society has demand for X trained software engineers as long as X is higher than the available number (X - Y), you have higher salaries which flashes a bright light drawing more people to Software Engineering. To fill that gap, the current educational system draws in the [talented with luck to have gotten the freedom to learn and play with code early] + [people who are talented at anything and pick SE for because of the lifestyle] + [the people who are in it for the money but not necessarily the inherent talent for it] + [the confused or misled who want to try things]. There is a massive missing pool of people who are talented or have the brain to be excellent in SE but never get to try it in an approachable way at with a good teacher or educational tool before they get pulled into something else. The truly talented SE people are often more interested in the Tech and less in teaching, and those who teach may not always have the love for the field an obsessed SE has. The Education system is a very brute tool - spray a little bit of many fields among many kids and see who catches on and then squeeze any love for the field out of them with as much pressure as possible to surface the gold nuggets of aptitude (talent) and attitude (persistence) who are the only ones sent on to train properly. If you want real outcomes, expose every child to a great Software Engineering program that is fun (maybe online, maybe via a textbook, maybe by video + a piece of software like scratch), then let them play consistently for their entire educational career without judgement but with rewards for talent and persistence (only upside, like computer games). Then start filtering only at the career level - when applying for jobs, or judging open source contributions after graduation. You would have a much broader pool of candidates and much higher quality at all levels.