Slashdot Mirror
Western Washington Univ. Considers Cutting Computer Science
An anonymous reader writes "Due to Washington State budget concerns, Western Washington University is considering cutting their Computer Science Department. The news comes even as local stations report a hiring boom in the tech sector. The WWU administration seems completely out of touch with the current state of the department. This story has gotten a lot of attention and support from local industry and the University of Washington professors."
We're running out of money in WA. Nobody wants to pay income tax. You get what you pay for.
If the university notices that students who graduate with these degrees do not find work compared to other majors then it makes sense to encourage these students to major in more profitable areas.
I know, I know, you didn't RTFA, but that's the exact opposite of what's been noticed.
A longer story with more info can be found in the WWU student newspaper:
http://westernfrontonline.net/top-stories/13487-westerns-budget-balancing-act-rumors-of-elimination-shake-up-a-trio-of-academic-departments
They say nothing's been decided yet, but at a minimum Computer Science has been singled out as a candidate for elimination or at least "restructuring" (and not in a good way).
I am attending Western Washington University as a Computer Science major. Thankfully, this report may be jumping the gun, as there hasn't yet been any confirmation to the future of the department, but it is certainly on the chopping block.
The students and the faculty have no idea what actually is going on. In an attempt to ensure that the students in the department can graduate, professors in our classes have told any premajors (including myself) to declare immediately. We've pushed 70 new applicants this week. The department involved in making the budget cut decisions have not been forthcoming in their intentions, and there is fear that they may be attempting to push this beneath the door, so to speak, so any publicity, especially here on slashdot, is very welcome.
We're speculating that this may be a public relations tactic to try and get some external funding, which the university desperately needs. Unfortunately, our fate is still undecided at this point, and I'm awaiting news just as earnestly as my professors are.
[From TFA comments]
From someone who was present at a meeting discussing this:
"This decision, apparently still potential, is a permanent statement of the University about the future of Computer Science. The impression conveyed in the meeting with the Provost and Dean was that we had reached the End of History. Now that everyone has a computer and a spreadsheet and a wordprocessor, the contribution of computing to the life of the mind has been exhausted. I do not write this sarcastically. This was the sense of the meeting."
And the IT business never cared about education all that much anyway. Lots of smart people go far on a HS degree or a little college
In my experience, at big companies there is a glass ceiling separating those with degrees from those without.
What the degree is in is irrelevant; just having a 4-year degree distinguishes the ordinary peons from the casteless peons.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I find it interesting that so many people seem to think science and faith are mutually excluseive. In my church we have medical professionals (doctors, surgeons, a medical examiner, and pharmacists), network engineers, broadcast engineers, etc. All very technically minded people, and all very much connected to their faith. I won't say religious, because there IS a difference. "Religious" people killed Jesus. People who have faith try to live their lives as best they can and leave the world better than they were brought into it. Do they always succeed? Of course not. But the whole point is it's something to strive for so you better yourself and have a positive impact on those around you.
As for myself, I'm learning quite a lot about audio engineering just through my work in the church's media ministry. I've had the opportunity to dabble in both live sound and broadcast mixing during our services, discover various techniques for getting the best sound from a given space and group of musicians, and a TON of various functions found in modern audio equipment (the Yamaha PM5D is an easy thing to get into, but not so easy to completely master). On several occasions I've even gotten into a bit of applied psychoacoustics. Sure, you can adjust the gain and volume if someone isn't singing very loudly, but that introduces background noise. Sneak the volume down on their monitor, however, and they sing louder without even realizing it.
Bottom line is, faith and science/technology do NOT have to be mutually exclusive. I'm sure there will be those who disagree with that statement as well as what I'm about to say, but it holds true for me. When working on a difficult technical problem, sometimes I get frustrated and can't figure out what to do next. Does God intervene and show me what I should do next? No. But I do tend to gain enough clarity to realize why a particular approach wasn't working, along with the motivation to try a different approach. And when I read about some unexpected result or novel discovery in any given scientific field, I can't help but wonder what else has been created just waiting for us to discover it. Science and faith are NOT enemies. God gave us scientific minds so that we could learn as much as possible (and that statement will probably irritate some of the more hardcore "religious" types, hehe).
To put it another way, seeing something truly amazing in the world of science (from the depths of space to the incredible variety of life in the ocean) is, I believe, God's way of inspiring us to want to learn as much about what we've discovered as we possibly can. And if we've learned all we can with current technologies, to invent new ones to further the quest for understanding.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Western's CS program is one of the ones that grew out of a math base. It's pretty hardcore on the theory, but you're sort of on your own for learning the stuff that business wants. Which is fine.... even if the program focused on exacty whatever buzzwords corps want these days, corps don't generally hire CS grads straight out of school. The stuff you learn in the 400 level classes is great for senior developers to know....but you're not going to start out as one. It wasn't till my 3rd job out of college (which I'm still at) that I actually got to touch source code at work. For long term personal growth, I'm really glad that I had my ass kicked with the theory; I find that the rigorous methods that were drilled into me really help me tackle the hard problems I work on every day. (debugging nasty kernel mode race conditions in code written by others for example). Besides, if you can handle the proofs and algorithm stuff, you can handle anything else, though you'll sure as hell not enjoy writing silly business apps over and over.
You know what the job finding foks at Western tell you about finding a job once you graduate? They tell you to forget about finding anything remotely in your field. The real difficulty in getting hired after college has less to do with your skills and what you're taught and more to do with risk aversion for employers...they don't like hiring green kids who don't understand corporate politics yet. You have to persevere in order to get to do what you love.
Computer science is supposed to be hardcore...unfortunately there is a huge variation in what different universities consider to be computer science, let alone what the business world thinks. For some, any old programming is CS, for others, they focus on software engineering methods, and some hardly touch on theory and math at all; others still consider web page design to be CS. CS is about understanding the extreme limits of what computers and software are capable of and pushing the limits of what's possible....it's not supposed to train you for "IT" (which most businesses consider to be the guys that fix their computers).
You really should not be doing a computer science degree unless you are going to be some kind of developer and you get off on things that require in depth knowledge of how to design and compare the performance of different algorithms, want to fix bugs no one else can, want to write really hardcore software (such as doing speech recognition, computer vision, or 3d rendering) at the bleeding edge, and need to be able to prove why your design is better than someone else's design. The industry is already full of very experienced, very compentent people who don't have CS degrees. In fact, many of them started before such degree programs even existed. They know how to code, but they generally don't have any exposure to the more advanced theory stuff and are therefore not inspired by it, nor do they generally value it. The degree is MUCH more a long term investment for your career than a credential to get your foot in the door, as you'll eventually get to apply the theory and start doing things that wow. After you've taken your lumps that is.