UK Announces Hybrid Work/Study Undergraduate Program To Fill Digital Gap

An anonymous reader writes The UK's Digital Economy Minister Ed Vaizey today revealed a new scheme where undergraduates will be able to avoid student fees and student loans by working for companies for three years whilst simultaneously undertaking academic studies with participating universities, resulting in a degree at the end of their successful involvement in the scheme. The British government will fund two-thirds of the cost of tuition and the host employer the remainder. The "Digital Apprenticeship" scheme will remunerate students at an unspecified level of pay, and though details are currently sketchy, is reported to obviate the need for student loans. The initiative is targeting the skills gap in the digital sector, particularly in the field of web-development and technical analysis.

Comments

This is an "excellent" idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. It will flood the market with labor, helping lower labor costs for those tech businesses.

2. It will possibly detract from being a well-rounded student. So all the things about being a good citizen and such will be out the door, allowing you to be manipulated a lot easier.

3. Please feel free to mod me down if you disagree.

Re:This is an "excellent" idea!

[novium]

The UK doesn't do liberal arts education: there aren't any gen ed requirements within degree programs. You study your subject, and that's it. Which has its downsides.

Re:This is an "excellent" idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

You study your subject, and that's it.

Yeah, that's what a degree program is. The minor system was invented in the US in 1910, 700 years after the formation of Cambridge and Oxford Universities. It's not a universal aspect of higher education, in fact it's rather unusual.

Which has its downsides.

You don't mention what the downsides are of going to university in order to study a subject, and then studying that subject? I can however think of several downsides to not focusing on the subject you're there for - especially if you're paying fees to be there - and of having government interference in the setting of degree requirements.

The UK doesn't do liberal arts education

On the contrary, if you want to study History, you can study History. But generally the time for mandatory curricula ends when one leaves high-school. University students are adults, not children.

Serfdom

[Freshly Exhumed]

This is harmful to critical thinking and objectivity when a researcher is indebted (literally or otherwise) to any corporate entity.

Re:Serfdom

[pjt33]

The topic is undergraduate study, not research. The people who are inclined towards research will want to take a full CS degree rather than an apprenticeship.

I'm torn

[NoMaster]

On the one hand, this recognises the reality that the vast majority of what's called "IT" is really at a skilled trade level (not dissing trades or tradespeople; I was a tradesman for many years and now consider myself as an 'academic tradesman').

On the other hand, it's likely to open the door to even more half-interested people wandering through a half-arsed degree just to get some 'qualifications'...

Re:I'm torn

[pr0nbot]

I disagree. Churning out a Wordpress brochure site requires some non-zero level of IT skills, but it's not the same level as, say, designing a data processing algorithm to run on MapReduce.

skills gap is a myth

[ihtoit]

what's not a myth is the pay gap. Pay people what they're WORTH not what the Law says you can get away with. Cunts.

Could be a good idea..

[jcr]

I learned to write C code by writing code, sitting in an office between two experts, one of whom later sat on the original ANSI C committee that defined the standard. I made mistakes, they told me what I did wrong, and I learned. Based on what I've seen from kids coming out of college, their instructors appear to have been people who couldn't make it as software developers.

-jcr

Re:Could be a good idea..

[_Shad0w_]

Most of the fresh graduates we interviewed recently couldn't actually tell us what the difference between a class and an object was. And these were people with 2:1s.

Re:Could be a good idea..

[Dr_Barnowl]

It boggles the mind, doesn't it.

One of my favourite interview questions is "What's your favourite data structure, and why?", and when they answer, I ask "How would you implement it?"

For something like 80% of the candidates I've interviewed, the answer is usually "erm...."

The vast majority of the remainder say "ArrayList" but don't usually say why.

Out of those, I've only interviewed one who could give any kind of basic indication that they knew how to implement one.

The state of the industry is shocking.

Re:Could be a good idea..

[cascadingstylesheet]

One of my favourite interview questions is "What's your favourite data structure, and why?", and when they answer, I ask "How would you implement it?"

"Favorite"?

Data structures are tools. I don't really have affection for any particular one. It depends on what I need them for.

And does the job require implementing one (assuming you are using that word the way I think that you are)? Or does it involve using them, in service of business goals?

Re:Could be a good idea..

[BarbaraHudson]

My favorite is chunks of ram from alloc(). I can make it into whatever I want. A stack, a linked list, a ring buffer, a series of buckets, whatever. After all, everything except the raw bytes is an abstraction, right? So abstract away :-)

Re:Could be a good idea..

[Hognoxious]

I learned to write C code by writing code, sitting in an office between two experts, one of whom later sat on the original ANSI C committee that defined the standard.

So it's all your fault recruiters always want longer experience in something than it's existed?

Why the subsidy?

[GoddersUK]

I'm struggling to understand why this particular group of students should have such a heavily government subsidised education when they claim they can't afford it for the rest of us. Presumably this scheme, in its current form, will never be funded enough to accommodate a substantial proportion of the UK's students.

Don't get me wrong - I fully understand why this scheme may be good from an educational perspective and I think encouraging employers to invest in the education of the next generation of their staff is a good thing, but I don't understand why this apparently needs the remainder funded by government rather than by the student loans system? Surely it would be better to encourage companies to contribute to the education of any students in relevant fields rather than just this special group? Especially as this would have the effect of reducing pressure on the student loans system (which, for many loans, the tax payer will end up coughing up for when the student finds their degree in tourism from the University of Dudley is actually completely worthless). Not only would it be beneficial for employers, students and the taxpayer it would hopefully help weed out all the non-courses, non-universities and students that probably should be following a career path other than university, that are currently subsidised at taxpayers' expense by the SLC, because no company would pay towards the costs of such a student taking such a course at such a university.

Re:Why the subsidy?

[Half-pint HAL]

I'm struggling to understand why this particular group of students should have such a heavily government subsidised education when they claim they can't afford it for the rest of us..

Isn't it obvious? We've got a general election in 6 months, and the guys currently in charge want to still be in charge in a year's time, so they want to be seen as the guys who did something to address the problem of unaffordable tuition fees, instead of the guys who caused the problem within months of the last election.

As for why computers, it's simply a way to give their regressive, exclusionist tactics an illusion of "progressivity". This is "real world" stuff rather than "ivory towers", so it's "economy". Yay for the world's oldest democracy.

Re:Another way to get cheap labour

[bigalzzz]

It's also about people learning useful skills. Lots of universities are teaching web design using dreamweaver! The university curriculums are too slow to reflect the latest tech in an industry that changes completely every year. It might not be the perfect solution with regards to pay, but it's certainly a step towards graduates coming out of uni with useful skills.

Re:Another way to get cheap labour

[MrMickS]

It's also about people learning useful skills. Lots of universities are teaching web design using dreamweaver! The university curriculums are too slow to reflect the latest tech in an industry that changes completely every year. It might not be the perfect solution with regards to pay, but it's certainly a step towards graduates coming out of uni with useful skills.

It doesn't matter what tools are used, I still craft web pages in a text editor. A CS degree shouldn't be thought of as providing the graduate with knowledge about how to use the latest toolsets. It should provide them with the answer to "why" rather than necessarily the "how".

Repo Man

[Bob_Who]

I love how the say they'll subsidize two thirds the cost of a tuition that they just tripled in recent years. I think its also crap how you can buy an imported car at times with nearly 1% APR, but an education that does not depreciate or get repossessed must not only accrue ridiculous finance fees, it now must also involve indentured servitude. The slavery might only last for a few years, but the loan will stay with you longer than you'll remember the curriculum. And that's how the smart and successful people channel their ambitions: serving master. Its a deal with the devil in the details. Slavery doesn't just grow on trees, ya know.

Now you have two problems

[namgge]

So, you're an employer who is short of skilled labour. You sign up to a scheme that requires the skilled personnel you do have, let's call her Nellie, to spend a significant fraction of her time training a school-leaver who's been told to sit next to her for three years. After three years the apprentice says 'Thanks for all the help, I've just been offered a nice job with another company.'. Only a C-level executive would think that this is going to work out well.

This sort of scheme has been tried before in the UK. For example, when there was a shortage of physics and maths teachers in schools a decade or so ago. Long story short, it was paying early career physics and maths teachers a bit more that fixed the problem.

Re:Another way to get cheap labour

[Half-pint HAL]

It's also about people learning useful skills. Lots of universities are teaching web design using dreamweaver! The university curriculums are too slow to reflect the latest tech in an industry that changes completely every year. It might not be the perfect solution with regards to pay, but it's certainly a step towards graduates coming out of uni with useful skills.

And yet this is actually the industry's fault -- for two decades, they've been complaining that universities aren't teaching practical tools that have commercial use. As soon as a university tries to fill that demand, they find that whatever tool they're using is the "wrong" one, and they've drained a lot of value out of the curriculum by teaching vendor-specific rather than generalisable skills. The industry should stop trying to tell unis what to teach, and be prepared to put new grads through additional tools-specific training.

Re:Another way to get cheap labour

[lgw]

A CS degree shouldn't be thought of as providing the graduate with knowledge about how to use the latest toolsets. It should provide them with the answer to "why" rather than necessarily the "how".

Almost everything that's been useful from my college studies, 20 years back, came from about 3 courses: the first year in-major courses (which taught recursion, functional programming, and pointers), and the data structures and algorithms course.

There was a lot of crap that seemed interesting at the time, but was from other specialties (and no classes even offered related to my specialty). Those basics: recursion, functional programming, pointers, data structures and algorithms are quite important long term, and won't age out, but that's just a few classes.

Beyond that: people need jobs more than they need to keep professors busy, and practical skills with tool that will get you hired upon graduation need to be a priority, The future won't hold any unskilled labor - that will be all taken over by automation before much longer - and that means far more people will need to prepare for highly skilled jobs.

What happens if you just make 'em work

[rsilvergun]

Nellie keeps doing her job and the Apprentice gets their work. If the Apprentice can't keep up you fire them for incompetence and suddenly they have $20k in tuition bills for what they've used so far (gotta make sure if they get lazy they pay it all back, after all we can't give stuff away for free). Suddenly the dynamics change. The Student will work 60, 70, 80 hours a week because if he doesn't perform they're on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars plus no degree. It's kinda like what they do with H1-Bs. It puts the employer in a tremendous position of power which history tells us they'll abuse.

Re:Another way to get cheap labour

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Just to expand on this there's the insistence that unless it's an exact match they don't want to consider it. For example if you've got over a decade of C++ experience that doesn't count with a lot of companies that are looking for C#. (Even though it's both OOP, C# has similar syntax, and was explicitly developed to let C++ developers jump into it quickly.) I can't wait when these kids come out with experience in say Visual Studio 2014 and then every company says, "No, we want VS2016 and we'll dump your app in the trash."