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Pure Science Becoming Less Popular Than CS
An Anonymous Reader writes "An article (free login required) in yesterday's New York Times (Business Section) says that the number of college students in the physical and biological science is decreasing because of the "easy money" available in the field of computers. It also says that the computer industry's growth will slow and that the next big boom of technology jobs will be in biotechnology. Interesting stuff. " Of course the real reason is Turing machines. We really just dig drawing out turing machines on chalk boards and arguing about NP problems.
In other words, CS != MIS . My university offered degrees in both. You didn't learn about Novell in the CS curriculum, and you didn't study the principle of mathematical induction (in three separate courses!) in the MIS curriculum. But have you read the classifieds lately? To most managers (MBA DEFINITELY != CS), a CS degree is a computer degree. I've seen jobs for NT admins, VB programmers (I am one, so don't get your knickers is a knot), HTML writers, and even tape monkeys, where one of the REQUIREMENTS for an interview was a CS degree.
I would also note that programming is not necessarily computer science, if you believe that CS is a scientific discipline. Most programming is more along the lines of engineering. You have to study physics to become a civil engineer, but building bridges does not make you a physicist. I don't think you're doing REAL computer science unless you're researching clever new algorithms in conjunction with others in the field who are studying the same kind of problem that the algorithm applies to. (I think the people who write 3-D engines for Quake etc. are doing computer science.) If you're writing a Visual Basic front end to an Access database, or even an HTML front-end for a Perl interface to a MySQL database, I don't care what your degree says; you're not dong computer science. At best, you're a computer scientist in the sense that all those waiters in LA are really actors.
"Computer science courses teach skills and techniques, but they don't teach critical thinking the way physics does,"
Now that's a great quote. It's probably true at some universities. At a certain university, there's lots of debate among undergrads about the "theoretical vs practical" teaching of computer science. Basically, there's complaining that, though the introductory classes teach component engineering, function specifications, algorithms &C, they should actually be teaching us how to use Visual Basic so that we can get internships the summer after our sophmore year.
Fortunitally, some students prefer to learn real computer science.
Also Ms. Corning comments later in the article point to something that was brought up 20(?) years ago in a book called Mindstorms (Pampert?) about the Logo programming language. This teacher(Ms. Corning) seems to think that computers are a fancy full-color chalk board. Mindstorms warned that we shouldn't try to use computers to program children (ie fit computers into the current education model, at least in the US) but when children learn to program computers, they'll learn geometry and other math at the same time.
"Computers can teach information, but they don't teach a way to ask questions or conduct experiments where you don't know the correct answer ahead of time,"
Again, what kind of computer use is this quote assuming? It's the same comment as above: Computers shouldn't program children. It takes a different kind of _teaching_ to integrate the really powerful uses of computers into the education of a child.
I'd argue that a computer can be used to learn basic scientific principals, or the scientific method. If children were encouraged to be creative with the computers, and to solve problems (as in LOGO) they would discover the scientific method with only a little bit of direction.
But as long as education is thought of as "the road to a career," students will go for easy money. That's what they had 12-16 years of school for, right?
Then again, I speak only from personal experience with education. Perhaps some of you out there have been encouraged to be creative and think for yourselves.
peace,
ijones
I think there's a big distinction that needs to be made here. Right now there's alot of jobs in the computer industry but how many of them are really CS? Coding HTML is not CS. Getting your MCSE is not CS. Being a Unix sysadmin is not CS. Running an NT mailserver is not CS.
True CS involves alot more of a high level understanding of what's going on. True CS involves people who are solving problems at a very high level, who are re-thinking the norm and who are applying their background in math and science to solve a problem, not people who are rebooting servers when the pager goes off.
I know alot of people who work answering the pager and maintain unix/nt/cisco systems as their job. They're all really smart people, but what they're doing probably isnt CS. In fact most of them dont have a degree in CS if they have a degree at all. I'm not even sure if what I do really has all that much to do with pure computer science, but I'm pretty sure I have a solid background to fall back on if it were to come up, which is why I dont worry. What worries me is people coming out of assembly line CS programs who dont have any idea what real Computer Science is about, and just want to get paid.
-Rich
I doubt that this is truly the intention. But...
The professors teaching these courses (both faculty and grad students) would rather be doing research, or working on papers, or something else entirely.
Instead they are forced by the administration into nursing snivelling freshmen who are required to take the course, but the mojority of whom couldn't care less about the actual material.
After about a semester or two of this, they (teaching staff) give up and go through the grind, all the while taking their frustration out on the students. The few students who have potential and interest, suffer, and many turn away. The ones who didn't care to begin with, care even less.
Very few people make it through the meat grinder of introductory science courses with their spirits and interests intact. These go on to become graduate students, all the while remembering how the majority of their peers in the 100 level courses, didn't give a crap.
It's an unfortunate vicious cycle.
Interestingly, everyone is also required to take Literature, History, and the like, where classes are much smaller due to the very interactive style of teaching that must be used. You'd think that the administration would have figured out the correlation between class size and student interest by now.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Many former geophysics grad students have been tempted away into pure computer science. A Stanford professor wrote some career advice for his students: "There are many good opportunities [in comp sci] because the computer world is always changing, and that puts young people on an even footing with older people... Are you planning to stay young forever? Math, Engineering, and Geophysics have their eternal verities: Fourier analysis, Maxwell equations, elasticity, finite differences, operators, eigenvectors, adjoints, conjugate-gradient solvers, expectation and covariance, moveout corrections, acoustic imaging, the list goes on and on. Learn these things and learn them well, because they can serve you for a lifetime."
(Reality reasserts itself sooner or later.)
That is, until he realized that his hobby, fixing computers, could be a better career bet.
Bingo. I find this article, and others like it, interesting, because many people seem to act surprised that students may want to consider career opportunities in selecting a career. This shouldn't be surprising at all, because that's what American society is heavily slanted toward: money == happiness. Well, I don't think that's the case, and I'm glad that I stayed in school for a bit longer to earn a dual English/CS degree rather than just English...or just CS for that matter. But I'd be a liar if I said that the CS half of my degree was more important in the job market than the English half...or if I said that enough salary to live comfortably was never a consideration along the way.
So, ultimately, the paradox of post-secondary education, apparently (judging by the clamor in the article), is that that level of education is twofold in purpose: to widen and deepen oneself intellectually, and to greatly increase one's future earnings potential. Not many fields of study offer both of these, at least IMNSHO. I attended a large public university, where the two largest schools were the Liberal Arts College (which included the 'traditional' sciences) and the Engineering College (where Computer Engineering and Computer Science were taught, although CS degrees were awarded only by the Liberal Arts school). The vibe I got from a lot of the engineering students I attended classes with was that they were viewing university as a pricey trade school. (To be fair, I didn't get a vibe of intellectual expansion from all of the liberal arts students I ran into.) But the way the curricula were set up did little to counter this attitude. Get your degree, get your job, and get out. Where fault for that attitude lies, I cannot say.
But I can say that it disgusted me to be in a classroom where most people were seemingly interested in the piece of paper from the registrar's office than what it (ostensibly) represented.
Having said that, however, I think that one crucial angle that the article missed was that it's not necessary to work at a job that deals directly with one's favorite intellectual pursuits in order to have a satisfying life. To expect otherwise is ridiculous. That's what hobbies are for.
In fact, people who do true CS could still do their job without writing a line of code.
True CS:_________Not True CS:
Knuth..........................Me
Negroponte.................CmdrTaco
Dijkstra.......................Gates
Date.............................Jobs
Turing..........................Torvalds
...
Still not sure where the likes of Kernighan and Ritchie come in, but I'd give all of the Ancient Gods the benefit of the doubt, and say that they're as close to True CS as Programming can get.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Also mentioned in the article was how many public high schools are dropping sciences curriculum.
This is bad, as young students that go to these schools will have no opportunity to pursue their interests in the sciences. They are being channeled into "popular" money-making fields (CS).
If you do not have any background in the sciences, it sure makes it a heck of a lot harder to get started in a career in it. College, IMO, is a little late. Same goes for learning foreign languages-the earlier, the better.
Our country is filled with tons of inadequately funded public schools, many do not even have enough money for technology, art, or music departments (mine had none of those).
Our country is based entirely upon technology, which is a byproduct of science. We need huge numbers of skilled, intelligent people with background in the sciences to run our infrastructure. Such as: oil drilling, mining, engineering (structural, civil, etc), geology (to name a very few). I don't know anyone who is any of those, bar engineering.
We may not notice the immediate effects of fewer people pursuing the sciences, because there are older people in these positions, but what about 20 years down the road? Will we have reestablished the necessary numbers of people in these positions to run our country smoothly? Or will we have to hire people from outside-Europe, Japan, etc, to do it for us?
One last point: I don't know about you, but it seems that fewer and fewer of the mainstream populace can even understand basic scientific ideas/principles. I bring up the Galileo mission, and they look at me funny. Benjamin Franklin wrote how science and democracy go hand in hand (got this out of Science as a Candle in the Dark: by Carl Sagan). Large populations cannot possibly make logical decisions about their world in a democratic nation if they don't even grasp the fundamentals of what makes everything tick! If someone doesn't understand the harmful effects of pollution, are they going to vote for environmental legislation, or are they going to listen to the lobbying/advertising efforts of corporations such as DOW Chemical?
Food for Thought.
Zilfondel
All I know is that my university seems to work pretty hard at lowering the number of people who end up in the hard sciences. Seems like a lot of first year science courses are geared to "weed out" undesirables, undesirables in this case often being people who would be perfectly capable of pursuing the degree, just not at the pace and depth at which the first class is taught, often in huge lectures with little access to useful assistance. A number of people that I have talked to have seen this to be the case, especially at large schools. People who, if attending a different college, could go on to become, if not nobel prize winners, at least useful members of industry, are shuttled into social sciences or the liberal arts. The impression that at least one person who I know got was that professors are interested in the top precentage of students, those who can assist them in their research and who will require the least attention. Sure, you produce more outstanding research assistants and super scientists that way, but odds are you're going to loose some very good people too. Combine this mentality with the fabled high pay and recent publicity of the computer field, and it's no wonder universities are hurting for geophysicists and mechanical engineers.
There are a couple of main issues here.
First, some background. I just graduated from the (or one of the) top CS schools in the nation, with a dual degree in CS and ECE. (And I busted my ass to do so, so please forgive any cockiness that develops, it's a pride thing). Around a hundred graduated this year, with the CS department as their home department.
How many double majors were there for CS/ECE? 1. CS and Mathmatics? 15. What about double majors in CS and Chem? 5. CS and Bio? 6. There was even one guy who in three years managed to pull a CS degree, a Pysch degree and a hard science degree.
And how many of the rest of the graduating class had a hard science as a minor? I know quite a few CS people who have entered into biotech based upon the merits of their minor degree. You wouldn't believe the number of *art*majors* with a CS minor.
My roomate was a physics major. Granted it was a small department, but he was the only one not to go on to grad school. Why? He realized that he was a better computer scientist than a physicist. More power to him.
What does this mean? I think that it means that the really bright *scientists* realize that having a full knowledge of CS will greatly aid them in their research.
I do not feel that biotech and other hard science research will be suffering by this movement. Why? Because the real scientists, the ones that are bright enough to make the breakthroughs in for things like nonotech livers and curing AIDS, WILL STILL BE IN THE FIELD. All they may have done is increased their knowledge, and by doing so are better suited to achieve their original goals.
Does it really matter if Joe Schmoe got-an-A-in-high-school-bio picks CS over Bio or Chem? Would he really have made a difference in the field anyways?
So there's a glut of CS majors. Fine. The people who enter CS for the purpose of learning CS will have better skills and understanding of what is going on. They will always be able to design and implement faster, smaller algorithms. They'll get the sexier work.
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
The reason why kids are so interested in computers is because of the opportunities that have in learning about them while still young. You dont learn anything useful about physics or chemistry until college. I was already programming computer games that my friends and I would play when I was in sixth grade. But now im a sophmore in college and I still am not allowed to do anything on my own. You cant just dabble with chemistry in your room like you can with computers. If you could we would have alot of dead potential chemistry majors. (oops, i spilled sulfiric acid on my shirt. oh well, ill clean it up later)
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Certainly, CS is not a mere way to learn to program well. Nor is it intended as preparation for an easy-money job (though all too often it is). CS is centered around mathematical fields, and concerns itself more with algorithms than with coding.
To be completely honest, knowing how to reduce a Nondeterministic Automaton to a Deterministic Automaton is not going to help most CS majors in the type of work they will be performing upon graduation. True, there do exist positions in which such knowledge is applicable, but most graduations are not doing programming of that caliber. Industry seems to be under the illusion that Computer Science trains people to work with computers. Will a CS education really help someone set up an NT service, or get Oracle running on Solaris? These are the jobs that await many CS majors. It is sad, but it is the truth. Is this a result of all the hype surrounding CS, that has made it appear to be the golden ticket to success that has attracted people who would otherwise have no interest in the field?