Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'I Don't Think a Four-Year Degree is Necessary to Be Proficient at Coding'

Earlier this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited an Apple Store in Orlando, Florida to meet with 16-year-old Liam Rosenfeld, one of 350 scholarship winners who will be attending Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference next month.

Apple CEO ‌Tim Cook‌, left, and WWDC 2019 scholar Liam Rosenfeld via TechCrunch
Echoing comments he shared with the Orlando Sentinel, Cook told TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino that it is "pretty impressive" what Rosenfeld is accomplishing with code at such a young age, serving as a perfect example of why he believes coding education should begin in the early grades of school.

"I don't think a four year degree is necessary to be proficient at coding" says Cook. "I think that's an old, traditional view. What we found out is that if we can get coding in in the early grades and have a progression of difficulty over the tenure of somebody's high school years, by the time you graduate kids like Liam, as an example of this, they're already writing apps that could be put on the App Store."

Cook made similar comments during an American Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting at the White House earlier this year.

While in Florida, Cook attended a conference that saw SAP and Apple announce an expanded partnership focused on new enterprise apps taking advantage of technologies like machine learning and augmented reality.

Despite all of the technological advancements in recent years, Cook told Panzarino that many businesses have not "changed a whole lot" and are "still using very old technology." With more solutions like those from SAP and Apple, and tech-savvy employees of the future like Rosenfeld, that could change.

"I think what it is is they haven't embraced mobility. They haven't embraced machine learning. They haven't embraced AR. All of this stuff is a bit foreign in some way. They're still fixing employees to a desk. That's not the modern workplace," Cook says. "People that graduate from high school and get a little experience under their belt can do quite well in this job."

The full interview can be read on TechCrunch with an Extra Crunch subscription or in the Apple News app with an ‌Apple News‌+ subscription.

WWDC 2019 begins June 3 in San Jose.