Computing Education from an Ex-Academic perspective

It is almost a year since I left academia and became part of the "real-world".  

This is effectively an rant starting from when the university management decided that the department of Computing should be part of the Business faculty and concluding with current state of computing education here.

When the number of students studying computing dropped (which was a world-wide phenomenon), the senior management at our university decided that the faculty of business was a natural home for computing. The arguments for this forced shift were highly dubious even then (e.g., business is more reliant on IT so IT graduates need to know business) and all academics argued against the shift.  The then chancellor, vice-chancellor and dean of business argued that the restructuring will attract more students and we will be an economically viable entity. They never provided any hard evidence for this -- only engineers and scientists demand hard evidence. Mangers, especially senior managers, at universities, avoid looking for evidence, lest it not support their decisions. The real reason for the restructuring was for the dean of business to grow his empire.

In our case the student numbers did not improve and after a few years, what started out as a small but capable department has almost disappeared. The three managers, have moved on and have not had to face the consequences of their action.

The view that computing students should do more business subjects was not unique to our university. Many other universities adopted this slogan and changed their curriculum appropriately.

In the real-world, I am now trying to recruit students for our projects. While there are some excellent students, most students who come from joint Bus/(IT, Computing) programs are totally useless. They can talk about technology but cannot actually do anything with it. Their technical foundations are non-existent; they cannot solve any technical problem (whether they can solve business problems remains to be seen).

Computing programs should give undergraduate students a solid technical foundation and leave all the "flaky/weak specialisations" to a masters programme.  Students need good programming skills combined with a knowledge of theoretical concepts such as automata theory, discrete mathematics and computational complexity.  Students also a good background in software engineering principles.

  

If universities cannot produce such graduates, companies are more likely to hire people from overseas leaving local graduates with very few options. Some universities are already doing this -- and going back to the "old-school" fundamentals. But universities that still produce graduates with weak foundations will find that the outcomes for their students is bleak.