I see a future where more and more Universities start doing this. The University of Florida had many more issues than this but Universities just can't keep up with how much the field of Computer Science changes. They were built around books and static resources that you come in and study and get a job after four to six years where that information is still relevant.
Four to six years in Computer Science is an insane amount of time, so much changes in the world of CS in this amount of time that basically your information is outdated by the time your graduate.
Most of my CS friends have dropped out after 2-3 years and gotten great jobs. (Albeit they all went in with a solid working knowledge of programming and work experience to begin with.) People who go to college to learn CS to get a good job in the field tend to leave getting a corporate Java programming job which just doesn't interest the majority of programmers/potential programmers anymore.
Wow, that's a lot of generalizations in one comment.
First, yes, if you're the type who wants to start a YC-funded startup... you're going to skip college and do that. That's a small, small percentage of the number of CS grads though - say 1%. 1 in 100 young people interested in Computer Science will found a startup in the United States.
If you think its the "majority" that do that, you have to get out of San Francisco and visit a place like Florida.
But that still leaves 99% who would love to go to college, get a degree, and get a good job doing interesting things. And even if they get a CS degree, they may not even go into programming after college. That happens quite a bit.
I think what this move portends is that Universities can no longer fund research. They get a shrinking amount of money, and they have to focus on teaching.
By the way, the fundamentals of programming do NOT change all that much. You know what Android runs? Java. You know when Java was invented? 1994. Do you know how long it takes to learn Android or iPhone programming if you have a solid understanding of Object Oriented programming? Days. So a 3 year degree in CompSci still has a lot of relevance and value.
Unless your dream is to start a startup, in which case, go do that.
First off, at any decent school the CS curriculum focuses on theory and other things that are relatively slow changing. Big O theory, language parsing, etc are absolutely just as relevant now as they were 10 years ago.
Second, it is asinine to suggest that people with CS degrees don't get interesting jobs. In the end, people with good degrees just have access to a superset of the jobs available to someone who skipped school. Both can be hackers who make cool web apps, or iPhone apps, etc. But only one has the ability to go to Google or Facebook and work with machine learning algorithms. Or go to Apple and work on the iOS platform. Or go to Pixar and build the guts of their rendering engine. That's the value of a degree - there are a lot of really awesome jobs that are very likely out of reach for you having never gone to school for CS.
I don't believe the poster is wrong per say, I believe that their perspective may be colored by their experience. There are a lot of schools out their teaching their CS and IT degrees like an expensive vocational school. Sure the top schools with research centers are teaching theory that stands the test of time, but many of the lesser schools are teaching Intro to Java and Business Math for Programming. For these schools the poster is correct, a 6 month vocational course would be cheaper and would probably put a student in the market, better equipped, than a 4 year degree that started out with a mid-lifecycle language to start.
CS != IT. I think a lot of people have begun to think that it is. The core difference is that the foundations of CS change at about the same pace as a discipline like Formal Logic from Philosophy/Mathematics (that's where CS has a lot of formal roots). IT's core varies a lot more, as it's a younger discipline with less formal and more varied roots than Computer Science. Granted, this is all ideals, there are bad CS programs that teach you the wrong stuff, and there are stellar IT programs that teach you to change with the times, but, ideally speaking the two are quite dissimilar in their foundations.
I apologize if it appears that I implied that it was, that was not my intent. My intent was to highlight that their are bad CS and IT programs out there, and that may be what is coloring the perspective of the original poster.
My University basically taught The Art of Computer Programming. I remember one C++ class (an elective), one assembly class (required, I think), and the rest was just math. That stuff never goes out of style (not that I remember any of it...). I think I'd be much worse off if I was just taught the latest hotness. Node.js 101!
In a few areas that's true, but there are wide swathes of computer science that change more slowly, and not only in the Java enterprise space. Machine learning changes year to year, but undergrad-level foundational material from 2000 serves you reasonably well today; you still need to know what a loss function is, what cross-validation is, etc. Architectures change, but you should still know what registers are, what an instruction pipeline is, all the basic material, enhanced with some advanced stuff. As far as PLs, a grounding in all the major programming paradigms---functional, object-oriented, procedural, etc.---is still useful to have. And so on.
The big-data space is increasingly important within CS, and I don't see a big move away from academic content there. Whether you learn it in an actual academic program or self-teach, you'll need a solid mathematical background.
If you're interested in how little programming languages change over 40 years check out The Next 700 Programming Languages[1], from 1966. Sure, it's easy to point out advances like ATP or modern concurrent, generational GC, but the underlying ideas are relatively constant.
Four to six years in Computer Science is an insane amount of time, so much changes in the world of CS in this amount of time that basically your information is outdated by the time your graduate.
I'm going to re-phrase what others have already said: You do not understand what "Computer Science" is.
Computer Science changes very little in 4-6 years. Computer programming might change - but if that was true then nobody would still be programming 3years after graduating because everything would have changed.
The reason for schools dropping CS is market forces. In the late 90s everyone wanted to do CS because that's where the jobs where, the market crashed and nobody wanted to do CS, then the market picked up and there were no CS grads, so wages went up, so people enrolled, then the market dipped .... Unfortunately there is a 3-4 lag in the system.
Of course if the schools taught CS rather than programming this wouldn't matter as much.
If you really want to get worried, check out how many schools still teach chemistry. Google/Facebook/etc can get by with self-taught programmers. The rest of industry can't get by with self-taught chemists.
No, Google/Facebook can NOT get by with self-taught programmers. Much of what they do is the realm of highly educated people with a PhD or Masters in CS. Look at one of Google's highest visibility projects - the self driving car. I highly doubt you're going to find anyone associated with that project that doesn't have a degree, and rightly so. There's more to CS than making fun jQuery hacks.
Most "computer-science" graduate jobs are jQuery hacks.
The self driving car would do perfectly well built by a group of physics + maths PhDs who were self-taught programmers. We managed to build self-driving flights to the moon that way.
Google and Facebook, between them, employ somewhere in the range of 15,000-20,000 engineers. Look at the entirety of the two companies' web presence (ie their jQuery hacker designed stuff) - that's work that could be done by a very small percentage of those 15,000 people.
The real challenge for both those companies is scalability and algorithmic complexity. They both do things like tweak well-established open source packages, implement machine learning, build programming languages/operating systems, influence technical web standards, etc. Stuff that decidedly is NOT the realm of your average hacker who decided to skip college because the curriculum wasn't "revelant".
If you don't believe me, feel free to try to get hired at either company without a college degree. Unless you've done something VERY notable, it's not gonna happen.
You seem to equate their requiring a degree with a person being able to perform the task. Just because they require a degree as a filter it does not mean that it is a constant that a person must hold degree X to perform task Y. This is not the case, what is the case is that Google requires a degree as a filter, nothing more nothing less. There are many people lacking degrees or degrees in that specialty that can competently perform the task.
For example I can hack a Bosch Common Rail onto an older diesel engine and build a custom ECU for it. I have no formal experience in EE or Mechanical Engineering but I am confident that I could work on the self driving cars at Google. Would they hire me, no because I don't have a degree in that field, does that mean that I cannot do it, no. I am confident that I could get a job tomorrow with a performance diesel product vendor, that is doing just as complicated development in their niche, should I chose to. Some companies, specifically smaller companies have the time to deeply investigate the candidates, larger companies on the other hand many times have to rely on filters. But don't mistake those filters as an indication of quality or superiority, they are rather administrative processes, nothing more nothing less.
excuse-me is just saying that you don't need a CS degree in order to be employable in the field. Which is true, even at places like Google and Facebook - I know plenty of people with math, physics, and other science degrees, and most of them have never had any trouble finding programming jobs.
Especially if you go after jobs that actually involve your area of expertise. When a company needs a programmer that's awesome at statistics, they're going to choose the math major that can code over the CS major that can do math, all else being equal...
I agree the education system is completly broken more so for comp sci than anywhere. There is no need for 4 years of school. Why do you need bio and comunication. Before anyone say that grammer and english help you in a career look back at your college career did you honestly take those classes seriously. I have comp sci course I've past and haven't retain one word.
I don't know how to say this without being offensive, but your entire comment is evidence that people should be taking those courses seriously. You may be an extremely competent programmer, but when I see the spelling mistakes and inability to communicate effectively, I would be hard-pressed to take you seriously in any way.
I know it is not your intent and I have tried my best to not take offense to your comment but their are a lot of issues that can affects ones ability to communicate in a particular medium. In this particular one (written) dyslexia can be almost debilitating, if a person has dyslexia, the are no more or less incompetent than any given person they just strive to overcome a disability in the way they their mind works. If the parent poster happens to have dyslexia then your post is the equivalent of walking up to a person on the street with a speech impediment and telling them it is hard to take them serious because of how they talk. I know that was not you intent, which is why I do not take it personal, but I did want to draw the parallel. That being said, I do disagree with the contents of the original post. I think their is a lot of value in a good CS program.
From the grandparent post: but when I see the spelling mistakes . I don't disagree with the conclusion that the original poster did not present a compelling argument, even if it where spelled correctly, but spelling has very little to do with ones ability to reason. All too often people use it as an indicator of intellect in other areas of reasoning, when doing the same thing in public to a person with speaking difficulties would be out of the question. It is roughly the same offense, but for some reason it is far more acceptable in written communication, this causes a lot of long harbored issues for those that suffer from the affliction.
I think it really comes down to two things:
1. It is (generally) obvious if someone has a speech/language disability when you interact with them face to face.
2. Sheer probability dictates that it would be ridiculous to ignore a metric (written communication skills) that I find useful in evaluating people for fear of offending a VAST minority of cases. What percent of the time do you think that someone exhibiting incorrect spelling or grammar online is doing so because of dyslexia or another disability, as opposed to simply being lazy or unprofessional?
I would never knowingly ridicule someone who suffered from dyslexia or a similar disability, but I think we have to be careful of becoming so politically correct that we are afraid to criticize or hold anyone accountable for anything.
It's pretty prevalent 1 in 10 people (at the top end) that you interact with has dyslexia of some form. Among people in the arts it is much much higher, I am making an assumption here, but I would assume it is significantly higher on HN given that their is a population of designers that frequent the site. It is far more prevalent that speech related disabilities, but less recognized because people are embarrasses about having it, some of that embarrassment comes from the fact that unlike a speech condition it is acceptable to highlight their disability, many times to discredit their argument.
as opposed to simply being lazy or unprofessional?
I can't begin to help you understand how many times I have been called lazy for not being able to spell, and how frustrating that is. That is the problem, you assume the majority are lazy people that cannot spell and don't want to learn, so you immediately assume someone is in the majority, because well you set up the odds that they are. But if 1 in 10 suffer from it, and the prevalence of people on HN exhibit spelling mistakes at close to the same rate would in not be just as valid to assume that maybe those that do exhibit them, may be in that 1 in 10 population.
Four to six years in Computer Science is an insane amount of time, so much changes in the world of CS in this amount of time that basically your information is outdated by the time your graduate.
Most of my CS friends have dropped out after 2-3 years and gotten great jobs. (Albeit they all went in with a solid working knowledge of programming and work experience to begin with.) People who go to college to learn CS to get a good job in the field tend to leave getting a corporate Java programming job which just doesn't interest the majority of programmers/potential programmers anymore.