Those who make it through the funnel with only X are likely more than the X+Y scenario simply because it's less learning and new concepts so drop out will be reduced. This cohort are probably more likely to go on to learn Y if we further assume it was so valuable as to have been "required". In reality requiring X+Y backfires as step 1 because X is all they want and X may be worth 10Y to the student at step 1. The value of Y may increase to >X after learning X.

When I learned basic HTML, CSS and JS. On step 1, JS had essentially no value. CSS sounded like it had value but was a bit nebulous and optional sounding. HTML seemed like an obvious requirement for building a website, so that's where I started. Once I learned HTML, the value of CSS became obvious and I pursued it. JS still seemed esoteric but later once I got HTML/CSS down and wanted to do more JS kept coming up as the solution. So I learned it too. Now, I'd say JS is way more valuable to me than HTML/CSS even though I learned it last.

This was in the 90s BTW and the path wasn't very clear back then. The first book I bought was actually a Perl book and quickly realized it was too advanced of a place for me to start. I learned about Perl after noticing the /cgi-bin/ portion of URLs and wondering what that meant. It had to be something most sites where doing similarly. This was before Google so whatever random SE I used back then told me cgi-bin was associated with Perl scripting for web development. I continued to struggle with the backend stuff (JS was FE only back then) until PHP3 came around. I'm self taught if that wasn't clear.

I mean, if you're self taught, you can take whatever path you want.

My comment was in the context of students, which generally is backed by public funding. I'm worried about getting less value for the same number of public dollars. That being said, maybe it does still work out as an increase in total value, we should probably do a study on that.

That being said, I'm self-taught too, so I actually benefit if these classes provide less value, as it's easier to convince business folks to hire me instead, but it's the principal of the matter in this case (also I'm not really competing against recent college grads anymore).

I think the problem here is ordering. At the end we probably want them to know X and Y but we would rather they learn X then Y.

But to learn X they need to do some steps from Y.

If we can remove those steps we can make more people learn both.

But also in practice I don't think anyone struggling to set up their env before writing a line of code is learning much. They are just following arcane instructions until it works.

Learn how to deploy your app before you write it or learn how to write your app before you deploy it...

Guess what, if there is nothing to deploy then learning how to deploy is just a waste of time.