> Imagine if every high school had the budget to run a modern, staffed programming lab

I don't need to imagine. If you work that minimum wage job for ONE DAY, you'll have 100 bucks in your pocket. You know what you can do with that money? You can buy a ten year old enterprise grade server that's been decommissioned and is for sale on eBay, with free shipping. Now you go on /r/homelab and get free help to get it up and running. All the software is free.

There are always excuses, but let's not sit here and pretend like things are more difficult now than they were before. They've never been easier and we've never had as much opportunity.

When I was growing up, any capable computer, used or new, was $3k and there was no internet, no help, and no free software.