More Universities Should Shut Down Their Computer Science Programs
24th April 2012
Read it.
- Most undergraduates and professionals actually want to learn applied software engineering, not “computer science”. Most companies want to hire college graduates who know applied software engineering. But most university CS programs don’t actually teach applied software engineering. This isn’t to say that CS isn’t useful or valuable (even to someone who goes on to become an applied software engineer). But the majority of university CS programs are oriented to training undergraduates to become either systems programmers or academic computer scientists. I’m going to go out on a limb and say this isn’t what most 18-year-olds who enter undergraduate CS programs actually want to do. And I’m certain that the ratio of the demand for software engineers to systems programmers in industry is on the order of 100:1 (maybe even 1000:1).
April 25th, 2012 at 12:06
When I went to college, CS fell under the math department. The math dept. was constantly under pressure from the engineering and science depts. because they refused to lower themselves to teaching practical math. They believed that they existed to create new math PhDs, not to help engineers calculate tensile strength. The dept. chair treated the CS profs like they were Martians because they really didn’t have a lot of theory to teach. Of course, those were ancient times and the CS group eventually got large enough to leave the cave…