The United States spends magnitudes more on educating the nation’s public-school students than the computer-science money the White House is proposing: Over half a trillion dollars go toward education spending, amounting to roughly $10,800 per student—a tenth of that coming from federal resources. On instruction alone, federal, state, and local governments spent $326 billion in 2013.

With 50 million students in U.S. public schools, the $4.1 billion proposal and additional $135 million from currently funded programs would translate into $86 per kid.

Among administration officials, there’s been some acknowledgment that federal spending alone won’t be enough to teach every student computing. “This is an investment to accelerate state and local efforts,” said acting Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. during a call on Friday with reporters. “It will need to be accompanied by continued investments on the part of states and districts.”

Still, the White House is hopeful its computer-science-for-all initiative will get the ball rolling on exposing the nation’s students to coding and other related skills. During the press call, Megan Smith, the administration’s chief technology advisor, said the initiative is an “ambitious, all-hands-on-deck effort to get every student in America an early start with the skills they’ll need to be part of the new economy.”

The White House also enlisted advocacy chops of technology-industry heavyweights to back its proposal. Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, stressed to reporters on the call that the United States is lagging behind other countries in producing talented workers who can fill computer-science positions. “The country has a problem,” he said, because the “the skills gap is leading too many of these jobs unfilled.” He noted that half a million new jobs over the next decade will be created that will require computer-science know-how, from agriculture to manufacturing to more traditional forms of information technology.

But a loud chorus of researchers in education and labor markets question the notion that workers are unqualified for the growing sophistication of tech jobs. For several years some academics have pushed back against concern the U.S. labor market has a dearth of employees for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), citing data that shows positions in those fields aren’t experiencing spikes in wages—something economists say would need to happen in a labor shortage because it shows employers are willing to pay more to attract the talent they need.

Michael Teitelbaum, a scholar on the history of STEM, said in 2014 to an audience of education reporters that the post-war U.S. period is dotted with “repeated cycles of alarm, boom, and bust.” He went on to say that “many of the people who were attracted in during the boom phase into majors and graduate degrees in these fields … end up graduating and finding there’s no attractive career path.”