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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."
I am honestly not a troll here, but most of the big companies prefer Indian workers who can work for much cheaper and can't leave for better working conditions as easily. Many fortune 500 companies only have 6 or 7 employees that even deal with I.T. as they switch to salesforce.com and outsourcers and leave it very lean and barebones to satisfy Wall Street investors.
This is similiar to obtaining technical certifications for factory jobs. Americans simply do not do them anymore in a global economy.
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.
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In Modern America, there just isn't any place for science, mathematics, engineering, and anything else that's remotely technical.
In Modern America, it's important to know about sports and Christianity. That is all that one needs to know.
In Modern America, why is anyone surprised when universities start cutting technical programs? That's just not what American culture is about today.
We're running out of money in WA. Nobody wants to pay income tax. You get what you pay for.
Let's face it: 97% of "computer science" graduates end up as code monkeys or cable stringers in jobs that a six-week trade certificate would be entirely sufficient to qualify for.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
WWU isn't in business to educate kids; they're in it to stay in business, and liberal arts majors vastly outnumber technical majors. In trying economic times, the money sinks are going to be the first to go.
As for the utterly irrational economic policies that have resulted in scores of directionless kids heading to college and picking the easier majors, distorting the market for technical degrees and leaving us with bottomless piles of college-educated baristas, well... I don't know where I'm going with any of this.
America: We're getting what we deserve.
I look forward to the law/medicine gold rush.
Well, it'll be nice to see as many doctors as in Cuba, and paid similarly.
Lawyers/"business"? It's hard to put value on nonproductive work.
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.
the media has been doing this for years: declaring a hiring boom anywhere our rulers want to depress wages. They did it with engineers, they did it with tech, and they're starting in on it with nursing. As has already been pointed out most of the jobs are meant for H1-B visas, and the only reason they're listed is to meet the legal requirement. There's tons of ways around hiring Americans.
Said it before, will not doubt say it again: stop voting Republican, put a majority of Dems in office. At least the Dems have to pretend to be pro-labor. It puts a limit on the crap they can do. The Republican's core philosophy boils down to: screw labor, the free market
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Speaking as somebody who has seen what sort of things can happen in campus politics, I see three reasons for what is going on.
1) The department of CS has become... clogged... with under-performing faculty..
2) The administration is playing a brinkmanship game with those above them.
3) The administration is incompetent.
Now, I've listed these in order of most likely to least likely. The administration could be incompetent, but do you really believe anyone could be that stupid? There may be a lot of liberal arts majors, but those are the money sinks; the smart money on alumni donations is still engineers, doctors, and lawyers. Rather than the administration being stupid, there are other explanations, which are far more likely.
They could be playing a political brinkmanship game. I wouldn't be surprised if the plan to close the CS department is just a threat, and nothing more. It would make sense; in a time of mild to moderate budget crisis, it is not uncommon to threaten to cut something popular in order to garner more money for other things. If the threat was to cancel the history department, would there be a big stink? Absolutely not (unless there are a bunch of history buffs in the state senate... who knows? Maybe sports psychology, or sociology, or some other useles.... I meant, less practical... major).
It is very unfortunate, but I think that the most likely reason for this is that the faculty in the CS department are not up to snuff. It could well be that they are, collectively, getting older and tireder, and just not putting the effort into teaching that they could be. It could also be that they just weren't that good to begin with. But, what I think may be the case, is that the CS department is populated by... faculty from an older time. Faculty who, when they were hired, it was a rock solid CV if they had a single top-tier publication. When they got tenure, a solid case had 1 top tier publication plus a smattering of lesser accomplishments. WWU's faculty could think a wonderful accomplishment is a single pub a year.
That is to say, WWU could possibly be staffed by professors who would be laughed out of the room if they tried to defend a thesis today. It isn't that they weren't worthy when they were hired; it is just that standards have gone way up. I personally have a better publication record now than Randy Pausch (famous for "The Last Lecture") had when he was made a full prof; I don't even rate an interview at top schools today. WWU may simply be looking at what they have, and then looking at what the supply of desperate fresh grads are, and deciding that the logical thing to do is to wipe the slate clean, keep maybe one or two of the old faculty, but to otherwise start fresh with, talented, sharp, bright-eyed, and coincidentally desperately eager, newly minted faculty. I've seen it happen at much more prestigious institutions.
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.
A degree in CS is not prepping you to be a sys admin. CS is an academic discipline, not a vocation. Also, going to a University is not a vocational move. Universities do not teach you job skills. They disseminate and create knowledge.
If you think students should have the opportunity to learn IT skills, it should not be done in a CS dept at a University. It should be done in a vocational school.
Your points seem more or less valid, but somewhat irrelevant to the situation: CS is not IT, and university is not vocational training. Even putting that aside, it strikes me as an odd choice of department to cut - I can't imagine running a CS department costs much, in comparison to engineering or physical sciences.
Cutting CS makes sense from a political point of view. Its equivalent to a city threatening to cut police, fire or K-12 teachers. The goal of the politicians, government or university, is to maximize outcry to get a budget restored. If a city announced cuts to administration, or a university announced dropping its Canadian Studies program, no one would care rather they would approve. This is all about restoring a budget or "punishing" those who called for budget cuts to prevent a second round.