Students Opting Away from high-tech Degrees?

Toddius Maximus writes "A report, issued by the American Electronics Association, found that high-tech degrees -- including engineering, math, physics and computer science -- declined 5 percent between 1990 and 1996. Preliminary findings from 1997 and 1998 indicate the trend is continuing, the AEA said. Read more here "

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Change the focus...

I find it pretty interesting that about 90% of the responses to this thread are referencing CS or MIS degrees. What about EE? EE-T? ChemEng? ME? And all the other 'E's that make up the core of engineering?

Many people seem scared to death of the technical fields. Why, I cannot say. Maybe it's laziness, maybe it's fear of being labeled a "geek" (merely a form of modern racism, IMO), maybe it's just that they feel they ought to be able to buy the kind of comprehension and understanding a good engineer has without putting out the effort required to earn it (yes, I mean -earn.- Understanding is not a saleable commodity, thank God).

I do have a theory, though. I believe our own culture is to blame, and not in the way one might think.

The public schools -- heck, all schools I've attended -- tackle education in a rigid, linear fashion regardless of how slow or fast the students in a given class may be learning. One subject before another, period, regardless of how much one might be learning outside the classroom on their off-hours.

I think that whole thought model needs to be tweaked. For those students who show aptitudes and interests outside what a given classroom or school teaches, move them ahead and let them learn it! Don't have the facilities? Need a chem lab or electronics shop, but don't have the budget? Contract with a nearby university that does to allow use of their facilities!

I say this because I know darn well I don't learn in the 'conventional' way. I'm very much a hands-on type of person, and I've also found that I often 'learn backwards' better than I do if I were to start with the basics.

As an example: I started out in electronics by learning to solder and taking things apart (though I rarely got them back together). Only later on did I gain theory and design rules, and only now (after 20 years of hands-on experience in a multitude of electronic and mechanical sub-disciplines) am I starting to put it all together and go for my degree.

In short, I learned more going from the top down than I think I would have if I'd progressed in the conventional linear mode.

I would be shocked if I were the only person in the entire world who was like this. Had I been encouraged and supported in my efforts early on, rather than being teased, held back in grades, and beat up, God only knows where I'd be now. Heck, probably have my Ph.D...

Anyway... Change the focus, change the world. Recognize the fact that none of us would be sitting here jabbering about this if it were not for the very "geeks" and engineers that invented computers, and the electronics that make them run. Recognize that we wouldn't have the lifestyle we do today had it not been for the engineers and scientists who invented the materials and devices to make it possible.

Above all else, recognize that many people have a true gift for creativity, and the skill to learn the techniques to turn an idea into something that could easily benefit us all. Those that have this gift should be encouraged rather than spat on, no matter what their inclination towards sports or the senior prom.

As Bill Nye says: "Science Rules!" Perhaps a little extreme -- our science can only describe the world around us in human-based terms, and cannot define it in the least -- but a good starting point. The only way we're going to make it an attractive field to pursue is if we, as a race, stop knocking those members of it who show aptitude for such things (and this includes getting rid of the negative connotation that often comes with silly labels like "geek" and "nerd!")

Keep the peace(es).

Complete absence of a problem

When I read this report my primary response was:
"So?"

The software development industry is young, but not that young. Ever read the date on most of RFCs? They are in computer terms ancient, thus from "archeaological" data we can infer that computer programmers did in fact exist before 1985 and thus the computer industry, having lasted this long, will probably last just a bit longer. (Like, perhaps for the rest of our lives) No news there.

Will there be a glut after 2000? Probably for a while. Then the COBOL programmers will either retrain, or change jobs, or join middle management. Not much news there.


"I want to claw my way up through middle management" , "I want to be expendable" , "I want a brown nose." I love that commercial.


Less people in school:
This is because of low unemployement. Everyone knows that when you can't find work you strudy, and when you have work you don't. This is not newsworthy.

More Indian/Russian/Where-ever-ian programmers:
WORLD WIDE web. I think it's great to hire and train more foreign programmers. You get multiple perspectives, and they're not going to bring down the salaries of American counter parts. That is a myth! If anything they'll get their visa and demand real money or they'll go home to start business on their own soil. Again, not really newsworthy.

CS is too hard/boring:
My degree is in Applied Math. I took that because I knew it would be more meaningful in the long term than a CS degree might have been. The vast majority of people are not suited to or interested in the kind of mental training that is required to do computer science. THAT is why programmers will eventually be regarded in the same way as architects, IT people will be seen as Construction Foremen and the 'grunt' laborers. (But did you ever wonder how much training the guy operating that big hydralic arm has had? I bet it is more than the name 'grunt' implies)

I don't have a problem with this future, and to me it seems fairly likely.

Any comments?

They don't teach generalized skills anymore

This article jibes with my own personal experience.

This is a generalization, of course, but a lot of schools nowadays (including my own, it seems) seem to be intent on producing a bunch of trained monkeys who know the motions for a specific set of software -- basically Microsoft Excel + Microsoft Visual Basic + Microsoft Access. There are some places were C/C++ isn't even a requirement anymore, whereas Excel w/ VBA is!

Too bad very nearly everything us students are learning now is going to have to be re-learnt in some manner with the next revision of the software...

The problem is that they're not teaching generalized skills and abstract thinking as part of the curriculum. I think this one section of the article is very telling in this regard:

> He won't choose a high-tech subject, he said,
> because he's interested in examining more
> abstract ideas.

> "I'm here at college mainly to learn to explore,
> because I love thinking about ideas," he said.

I know a lot of students (many of them ex-CS majors or soon-to-be-ex-CS majors) who feel the same way. The really brilliant people are either learning this stuff on their own, or are going into other fields altogether.

Something is fundamentally wrong with the current state of CS education in the U.S. -- shouldn't CS _by definition_ be about abstract ideas?

The point is that you need to teach the kids the _theory_ either first or in parallel with the specific skills. Once they have the theory down, they can pick up individual skills pretty easily.

If, however, the students train for a bunch of individual skills without first understanding how they relate, it makes it very difficult to learn new things. Sometimes (I have experienced this personally), it can even interfere with a student's ability to learn the theory later.

One thing that would help is if students were exposed to several vendors' software, instead of just one. You can't generalize very well when you only have one example to reason from.

Another thing would be if they actually started teaching _logic_ and _reason_ in schools again, instead of rote memorization. I see a lot of interest in rhetoric (vis a vis the popularity of debate teams), but next to none in logic or critical thinking. That's not a healthy balance.

If you don't get that preparation before college, you're pretty screwed if your college is going to have any kind of worthwhile curriculum itself.

The last thing that would help tremendously would be to return to teaching CS in a primarily Unix environment (note I said _primarily_, most certainly not exclusively).

It's not that Unix is the "magic OS of knowledge", it's that it does a better job of exposing the structure of things to the user. Yet, it still has a healthy amount of abstraction. There aren't really any other widely-used environments that are especially good at both.

That is, Unix is designed primarily to abstract the underlying system so that it can be manipulated and restructured effectively. It allows the student to play with and think a lot more about abstract ideas.

If you design a system so that the user is presented with a complete set of tools that require some intelligence to manipulate and use together, it becomes very effective for teaching a student generalized skills which can later be applied in specific situations.

If, on the other hand, you design something so that "a trained monkey could operate it", you'll find that it's hard to use it to teach people to do any more than what a trained monkey could do.

The problem is that students aren't being educated anymore. They're being trained.

Is this so bad?

Another story that calls for a little self examination. In high school I intentionally opted for a broader education in softer, non-geeky subjects, while still screwing around on an Apple ][ at home. In college I did philosophy, in grad school American Studies. I held onto enough of my geeky skills that I am doing okay now as a self-employed developer. I like this path.

I can think about a lot of things that I couldn't have if I had if I had been hardcore into CS. I can deal with my customers a lot better because I have taught undergraduates. I am never going to make fundamental contributions to the field, but what would the odds of that been anyway? More likely I would have been a C drone, too lazy figure out the sources of my discontent.

They don't even teach CS anymore

I have interviewed people with CS degrees who didn't know what pipelining was, couldn't tell me the maximum number of "reads/compares" to find an element using binary search in a sorted 1000 element array, and couldn't explain how function calls and the stack pointer were related.

I could go on and on, but it seems to me that MenTaLguY has it right. We are turning out a bunch of C++,VBA,ACCESS,MS trained monkeys, not real programmers who understand computer architecture, programming, languages, and data structures.

This, of course, does not apply to all computer science schools. There still are a few schools that understand that CPU's, languages, and tools may change, but the underlying foundations won't. Unfortunately in many other schools, in order to created people trained with the "latest" tools, they are educating people who won't be able to produce when tools/os/languages change.

Because to me, a B.S. in M.I.S. doesn't mean diddly to me if you don't know the theoretical issues of concurrency and collision. A B.S. in Computer Science doesn't mean a bucket of spit if you don't understand recursion. And a B.S. in programming doesn't mean anything if you don't know what a regular expression is.

All too often today, it does.


There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself

High Tech == computer related?

It would seem that the general view and description of what constitutes High Tech, and the CS majors that are taught in preparation for a High Tech career seem to be no more than highly skilled laborers or technicians. It seems to involve coding, debugging, and some degree of problem solving.

Computer Science(note the term, Science) is much more than being able to do Verilog, C++, OOP, Un*x, or TCP/IP. At least here, at Caltech(Woohoo! I graduate this year, finally), there is much more Science and much less Computer, since all that Computer crap can be essentially learned by picking up a book at Amazon or your local bookstore. Once you've figured out the underlying principles, the major abstractions, then one language is as useful to learn as another, a set of grammars and production rules that is used to describe a computer and how it works.

Are there any CS degrees that do more than just learn:

C/C++/Java
Object oriented programming/design
Data structures
Algorithms
Operating systems
Compilers

Caltech is actually deficient in not offering a real operating systems course, or compilers, or a bunch of other things, but instead offer much more abstract and science/math things that are of much more use to a computer scientist, rather than to just a programmer.

For example, the nature of computation and computability:
How to represent problems and systems in a computer? Is it computable? Can it be solved? What order and complexity is it? How much 'data' is sufficient, and necessary?

Can you reason about a program or algorithm's correctness? Can you prove that it terminates, or that it is correct, or that it occurs in finite time? Can you prove that it doesn't fail, or break? Or that if it does, that it only does so in specified ways?

Or information theory: Data encoding and representations, and how it can be applied to data encryption, error recovery, data compression, and transformation into other representations without loss or in an efficient manner.

Or other things, such as grammers and production rules, Turing machines and how to describe the entire set of computable problems with a language and a grammer, and how to reason about the language and what kind of issues there are with non-deterministic programs or algorithms, or with distributed parallel multi-process algorithms and dealing with data integrety, locks, exclusion, sharing, write protection, non-deadlocking algorithms, efficient, fair, or priority based schedulers?

A lot of this stuff may be mentioned in passing when dealing with OSes, threads, OOP/OOD, languages, compilers, and such, but I would imagine that for a Computer Scientist, in which the stuff that you work in is data and information, math and theory is much more vital than the languages you know, the hardware you can work in, the network protocols you can code in, etc. While these are important, they are also fairly well documented and picked up in a book, right?

AS

We really don't need more unemployed scientists...

In the mid 80s, back in college, a document called the "House" report was put out by the NSF detailing the "imminent shortage of scientists and engineers." Of course, since the NSF (the National Science Foundation) put this report out, it had to be correct... right?

Well... no. It was basically a fabrication at best, and perpetuated what is generally called "The Myth" (capitalized as such) by members of the YSN (Young Scientists Network). The Myth was used to justify increased graduate student spending, e.g. more graduate students into Ph.D. programs. It was used to generate more research dollars, so that more work could be done.

In physics, we were pumping out 1400+ Ph.D's per year. Sounds like too few... right?

Well, it turns out that there were only about 150 tenure track jobs opening up each year, and about the same number of industrial jobs. This is what the House report failed to mention, that the reason the supply was dwindling was that demand for the Ph.D scientists was actually quite low. It was simple economics.

The problem at the time was that few of the undergraduate students at the time really knew where to find this information. Few knew that the report put out by the NSF was not worth the paper it was printed on. Few could verify the research in the report, as most didn't have ready access to the sources.

The end result was a glut of scientists and engineers in the market. Too many. Not enough jobs. There is a general belief these days that there were many apochraphal stories floating about how Ph.D.s were driving cabs and what not else. The entrenched establishment of research professors strongly disbelieved that there were problems getting jobs. They pointed to the back of Physics Today and shouted "look at all of those...". This reminded me of when Ronald Reagan called ketchup a vegatable. Most of those jobs in Physics Today were temporary employment. Very few were for tenure tracks. Few were for permanent positions.

You go to college for 14 years and it would be nice if there was some possibility that you could make more than $20k/year starting.

Today the situation is governed by simple economics. There are not that many people going for Ph.D's, not that many people going after post-docs, etc. Now, you need incentives to keep the students in the program, as there are real attractive alternatives to years of mind-expanding indenture.

Face it. In graduate school, as a hard science type, you are an indentured servant. Have no illusions about this. Your purpose in life is to further a professor's career and publication list. Your purpose is not to get a degree, that is an accident if it happens, and largely the professors want you to take your sweet old time about this. You see, you are cheap labor. You are not in a union (this is changing), you are not a professional, and they can pay you under $10k per year to do their work (60-80 hours/week).

You see, I believed the House report. I believed that there would be a shortage of scientists. I believed that the salaries would be high.

Welcome to reality.

I chose to finish my Ph.D part time. That was gruelling and added 2 years onto my time. However, I was paid reasonable wages by my employer. I worked 1/2 as hard at my employer, and got recognition, rewards, raises.

I learned in time. Many of my friends did not. The system chews you up and spits you out.

There is a lesson here, a nice juicy object lesson for anyone wanting to believe these reports of shortages. Assume that they are written by those with a vested interest in keeping a large supply of cheap talent available. Assume they are written by people who are unaware or wish you to be unaware of the real circumstances. And make sure you look at the department of labors job outlook guides.

Epilogue: Several physics departments that I am aware of have lost their supply of new graduate fodder. Moreover, as they have been declining enrollmentwise in the Ph.D. programs, the number of postdocs have decreased as well. Now there are vacancies. In short order, the other part of the law of supply and demand will kick in... they will be forced to raise wages to attract new blood.

And a final note: I note with more than a little bit of black humor that I have been asked to submit a writeup and bio as I appear to be one of the successful graduates of my Alma Mater. They are learning (and in large part due to a change in leadership, to one with a good clue) that they need to market themselves in order to attract new blood.

They don't teach generalized skills anymore

If "they" don't teach generalized skills at your school, you need to get a better school. In these parts, they teach classes on:

• Databases (including all sorts of theory, including some subsets of logic)
• Operating systems (which is to say, general principles underlying operating systems, not "How to configure NT")
• Computer languages (overview of different types of languages, including Prolog, Lisp, and others.)
• Assembly language
• Data structures
• Algorithms
• Circuit design
• And a whole lot more

And, oh, they teach all of this using Unix systems and require that CS students take twice as many non-CS classes as CS ones. And I don't think the U. of Wisconsin is particularly unusual in all these regards.

If there are CS majors out there who are getting one-dimensional educations, they're doing it in spite of the system, not because of it.

Well, what counts as "CS" anymore?

Unfortunately, the short term equation is easy - you don't need a hightech degree to make lots of money in a hightech field. Companies will hire anybody.

The shame of it is, this implies that making money is all that it's about. If that's your sole motivation, well then I wish you well. I'd rather i didn't have to compete with you for a job, but that's just par for the course.

Think about it for a second - you quit school, and get a job in a field where anybody can get a job. What exactly does that prove? Does that tell me anything about the quality of your work? Nope. The bar is set incredibly low right now, so of course most people aren't going to exert any extra effort going over it. I spend a good part of my week turning down recruiters who don't even know (or care) what I can do - they see buzzwords and they smell blood. The sad part is it doesn't even matter to them. They're not searching on buzzwords so that they can interview me later, they're searching on buzzwords because that's all they need.

what a joke...

"...the computer industry is desperate for well-trained graduates..."

umm, no. the computer industry is desperate to find people that they can underpay (recent graduates) to do the same job as other people that might want a realistic amount of money for the job.

let's face it, most B.S. degrees will dance a jig when offered 40k straight out of school. what they dont know is that they are being seriously low-balled.

a recruiter (who was quite impressed with my skill set) once brought negotiation prices down by $30k per year when he found out that half of my experience was done while going to school. now, we all know that this company is still going to charge the client the same amount for my services, but its just another way to increase their cut of MY paycheck.

and people wonder why attendance might be down. heh! spend those four years as an apprentice and make twice the money of any grads!!!

Biased Study

The report, issued by the American Electronics Association, found that high-tech degrees -- including engineering, math, physics and computer science -- declined 5 percent between 1990 and 1996


A recent Mindcraft survey, commissioned by MS, concluded that NT runs faster than Linux. A survery commissioned by Oracle concluded that Oracle runs faster on Linux than NT. (There was a posting a week or so back on /., but I can't find it)

Now, the AEA, which represents companies that want to convince politicians to loosen imigration restrictions to keep their costs low. I think it's obvious that this is simply another study that was purchased to serve somebody's interests.


My opinions are my own, and not those my anybody else, including my employer