Comment by raddan

I am a professor of CS and we found, post-pandemic, that very few students had any exposure to real computers. It was all smartphones and tablets. So the things you mention—not knowing what a file is—really is the state of things. We now explicitly talk about files in our intro programming courses, first as a general idea in CS1, and then we dig into (some of) the representations in CS2.

Although there has also been a softening of math skills among the weakest students, the best students are still quite capable, so the erosion is mostly in tech skills, not analytical skills.