Learning About Outsourcing in College?

nial-in-a-box asks: "I just started my software engineering course today at Loyola University Chicago and I found out that I will be learning hands-on about outsourcing. My classmates and I will be outsourcing parts of projects to students at another university, and then those students will be doing the same for us. This seems like it could be rather interesting. Has anyone out there been in a class like this before? Any other ideas on how to effectively teach about the implications of outsourcing (especially pointing out that outsourcing doesn't necessarily mean no jobs upon graduation)?"

Comments

First thing is...

[Otter]

No, actually, I'll start with an anecdote, instead. We had a talk last year from one of our foreign colleagues who figured (not unreasonably) that the opposite of "in-house" is "out-house". He went on at some length about "out-housing" certain studies, to the puzzlement of the audience.

Anyway. The first thing that needs to be clarified is that outsourcing doesn't necessarily mean India! It simply refers to having some task done by people outside your company.

(That said -- this guy's class does sound an awful lot like it really is "Outsourcing to India 101", doesn't it?)

Re:Is it worth opposing outsourcing in the longter

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The real difference can be seen in our current INDUSTRIAL outsourcing. America has a huge supply of natural resources- even today. What we're doing is shipping our natural resources to China and our informational resources to India, then importing the finished product back to America to sell to the consumers- which happen to be the same people we laid off so that we could take advantage of the cheaper labor rates in India and China. If this sounds like it breaks the economic equivalent of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, well, now you know why America has such large inventories of stuff nobody will buy.

it's a sham

[Optical Voodoo Man]

It sounds like a ploy to keep students from going into other fields. How else can the keep up the rolls in the computer science department? "No no no, outsourcing won't take the jobs away, here, pay for this course and we'll show you."