Comp Sci Programs at Junior Colleges?

An anonymous reader asks: "What place does a Computer Science Department play in a Community College? I recently started taking classes out of an interest in learning new things and getting a few college credits toward my first degree. I come to find out (only 1 semester after I started) that none of these credits will transfer to a bachelor's degree at one of our state schools. Many of the courses here are 'applied technology' such as Linux Administration/Installation or Web programming with PHP, but the local University only accepts their own 'theory based' courses such as Data Structures, Theory of operating systems, and so forth. I was wondering where a community college fits in, has anyone seen a great community college program recently and if anyone knows how these programs are designed?"

Comments

Forget it...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Forget CS at the community college level. In today's world, you need a BS. Really, you need a Masters, but you can work on that later. Instead of thinking about an Associate CS "degree", think about getting a whole lot of prerequisites out of the way at a much lower per credit cost, than transfer to a respectable 4 year college and finish up with a decent BS.

Re:Forget it...

[oni]

think about getting a whole lot of prerequisites out of the way at a much lower per credit cost

bingo. That's what community colleges are for. You get two years on the cheap, then go to an expensive school for two years, and when you graduate with a BS, nobody is going to care about those first two years.

Go For What Employers Want

[lbmouse]

Working in the IT arena for over 15 years at numerous companies and responsible for the hiring of resources for many of them, I can tell that you are probably better off taking the 'applied technology' (hands-on) courses. While a degree might help get you through the HR trolls, managers prefer experience and current/relevent industry certification.

Go for the degree if you want the piece of paper (and a well-rounded education), but remember that it won't guarantee you a job.

Re:Go For What Employers Want

[flabbergast]

Here's the thing though. The OP said nothing about wanting to work in IT. His specifications are a little vague. I agree with you that a university setting is not the place to learn how to administrate a bunch of Unix boxes. It is a great place to learn the fundamentals of CS though and "good" algorithmic design. Remember, getting your certs won't guarantee you a job either.

Re:Go For What Employers Want

[tadd]

The funny thing is that, my experience is exactly the opposite. Darn near anybody can memorize a bunch of "facts" and pass a cert exam... anybody. Event the more "practical" ones are game-able. Having a university degree in anything shows, you have the ability to learn things you know nothing about, and apply that knowledge thoughtfully. To use more the ability to learn and adapt, rather then just the knowledge/experience that is in your head is much more important in most jobs, because things change. In an old job I had I interviewed/supervised uni undergrads in a co-op situation, most of who had never done what we did, or even seen it for that matter. They were loads more fun, smarter, and quicker learning than the typical guy/gal with "10 years industry experience" or the freshly minted "MCSE" the PHBs sometimes foisted on us. Give me an educated person with curiosity and the ability to learn/be trained/think for him/her self over a truckload of hands-on experience almost anytime.

University vs. Community College

[kenneth_martens]

A university degree program and a community college/technical institute program do not have the same focus. The community college's goal is to get you a job as soon as humanly possible, so they offer:

• Practical courses, e.g. DNS and BIND
  
• Current hottest technologies
  
• Immediate job skills

A university is about a foundation of theoretical knowledge. You don't go to university to be trained for a job, you go to learn the knowledge to understand a field. Universities offer:

• Theory-based courses, e.g. Networking
  
• Exposure to good technologies, not necessarily the latest hottest thing
  
• Related knowledge, such as mathematics
  
• No specific job skills

At a university they won't teach you the specific skills you'll need to get a job. That does not mean you won't have job skills by the time you graduate. You're expected to learn the theory in class and learn the practical job-skill aspects on your own. If you aren't comfortable with that responsibility, a university degree is not for you.

Re:I can't imagine a community college Comp. Sci.

[SnowDog_2112]

Absolute flamebait.

For example, check out this CS program at Springfield Technical Community College in Massachusetts. It's designed specifically to transfer into a 4-year CS degree and includes such "hard and specialized" topics as Discrete Math, Linear Algebra, Digital Logic, and Data Structures.

Sorry to say, but your gut instinct is completely incorrect in this instance.

I know because I went through that program, transfered to a 4-year school (WPI), and stuck around to get my Masters. And I wasn't the only one; several of my classmates in CS and other disciplines stuck out the two year transfer program and ended up graduating and are working in industry right now.

It can be done, and in some cases is a great way to bypass two expensive years at a 4-year school.

Same here...

[identity0]

I am going to a community college majoring in IT with a Unix/Linux concentration. I am finding that I wish I'd gone into another major, like graphic arts or English or something.

I basically did it because I figured since I'm a computer geek, I may as well get a degree in it. However, I've found that the IT program at my school sucks. 40% of the students have left the IT program in the last year. Most of the credits will not transfer to another school, so if I go to a CS program I might have to start from scratch. And I do want to study CS more than IT.

In retrospect, I am thinking I should have used the comm. college to broaden my horizons a bit before concentrating on getting a BS in my chosen field.

I don't mean any disrespect to them, but I suspect that the other departments are not as inferior to their 4-year school counterparts as the IT/CS departments at a CC. Perhaps majoring in something like math at a CC will help you in your quest for a BS. It would be more likely to transfer credits, anyways.

most CS majors learn that IT stuff on their own

[cheezus]

actually, it's my experience that most CS majors have significant background in it/programming before they even start university; it's this background that's often the driving force behind choosing CS

get your AA degree first.

[ajayrockrock]

I dropped out of school in '96 (with a decent job, who needs stinkin' school!).

Then I was laid off in 2001 ("sorry, we don't hire non-college graduates")

So now I'm going back to the local Community College and will transfer to complete a Computer Information Systems degree at Cal State San Bernardino. From all the advice that I'm getting, everyone is saying that you should get an AA degree before leaving community college. The requirements change at the universities all the time so once you complete your AA degree they can't take away any of those classes that you completed.

--Ajay

Dijkstra

[Rufus88]

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"
--Edsger Dijkstra

Re:What junior and community colleges are for

[bill_mcgonigle]

Computer science is simply too hard and too specialized to fit into a "community college", and any community college teaching it is either out of its league and something you should stay well away from, or trying to transition away from "community college" to true University. I don't know if that ever happens, but it sounds plausible.

Baloney. I took some CS in high school. To say it's beyond the ability of community college students is condescending at best. Granted, it wasn't hard core 400-level college classes, but we did cover boolean algebra, notation systems, simple data structures, and runtimes. It was good enough to earn me perfect scores for two years on ACSL exams (sample).

You'd have to make parallel arguments for biology, chemistry and physics, all of which are well established in community college. To be consistent we should stop teaching theory in those areas and focus on running a DNA sequencer, doing dilution series, and turning metal on a machine lathe. But we realize that you need theory behind your skills to do a good job in those fields, so we teach theory and application.

I see IT guys with no CS training and they do some pretty dumb things because they don't understand the consequences of their actions. They don't do anything wrong on purpose - they just have a limited framework in which to think about the problem. So, even for job training we can't serve students by skipping the basics.

More and more students are starting their college careers in community college as a way to afford the skyrocketing costs of higher education, and there's really no reason most of the basics can't be taught closer to home.

Re:Wrong courses

[undef24]

Here's the answer... you should be taking all your math and physics pre-reqs at your community college and save the real deal CS for your university.

Don't worry: The truth is always "-1 Flamebait".

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

I can't imagine a community college computer science cirriculum of any kind. One of the first computer science courses you have to take is Discrete Math, covering basic boolean logic and set theory, and the university students I was with whined enough as it is; I suspect a community college would simply revolt.

I have Mod Points at the moment, but modding you up would be useless; you'd just get modded back down [as I expect I will be shortly], and, in the process, I'd have lost my chance to reply to you [if I understand Mod Points correctly].

Anyway, the situation is much, much worse than you imagine: A poster later in this thread mentions a Massachusetts "college" that got rid of their "Linear Algebra" requirement because the students couldn't cut the mustard [and I imagine the "Linear Algebra" in question wasn't a whole lot more complicated than multiplying a couple of matrices].

My experience was even more pathetic than that, however: In the first week of teaching a course in "Intermediate C/C++", I tried to impress upon the students the importance of data typing, and of chosing a data type that was appropriate to the problem at hand. I tried to teach them about things like additive and multiplicative overflow [e.g. if you're really serious about your mathematics, then you've got to consider the possibility that adding two positive numbers could give you a negative number, or that multiplying two numbers could give you an NaN], and about granularity in floating point numbers [abcissas and exponents, and how e.g. 32-bit floats lose begin to lose their integer granularity at i = 16M].

The result? The students went absolutely ballistic, stormed the dean's office ["This isn't computer science! This is MATH!!!"], and damned near got me fired.

Well, I hung in there, and finished out the course. For their final project [with several weeks advance notice], I asked them to write a program that would dissect very large files into a series of smaller files [or "chunks", as I called them], each capable of fitting onto a 1.44MB floppy disk, and then reassemble the large files from the little chunks [this was about eight or nine years ago; similar commercial programs now exist to do this sort of thing, such as e.g. WinRAR, which, as I understand it, is very popular with pr0n downloaders].

I figured something like this might take them about a day or so - maybe a solid eight hours on a Saturday afternoon/evening, or four hours on two consecutive Saturday afternoons - but that it was not completely unreasonable, given that they had several weeks to work on it.

The result? No student in the class turned in a working program. Or, as a certain [formerly] rotund radio personality would say: "Zip, Zero, Nada". It was just completely beyond their abilities to even begin to undertake.

Furthermore, this was not the only community college course I taught [although it was certainly the most "advanced"], and I would say that, in the maybe 18 months to 2 years that I was hanging around the community college system, I NEVER SAW A SINGLE "STUDENT" WHO WAS EVEN REMOTELY CAPABLE OF WRITING A WORTHWHILE COMPUTER PROGRAM IN A LANGUAGE LIKE C, OR EVEN REMOTELY CAPABLE OF ADMINISTERING SOMETHING MISSION CRITICAL, LIKE AN RDBMS DATABASE.

I realize that what follows is a profoundly un-PC thing to say, but community college students are morons; their IQs just aren't high enough to do this sort of thing [on average - and yes, I know that any time you take a population of several million, there will always be a few bright bulbs way out at the far end of the bell curve, and that one of those exceptional lights just might be a lone Slashdot reader who stumbles upon this comment]. And [what's possible worse]: Even if they did have the requisite IQ, they don't have the "fire in the belly" that a person needs in order to tackle a complicated problem and see a potential solution through to its completion.

And I'd go even one step further than that: Having taught at major