Where did this whole thought process of it’s not the job of college to help you become employable?
"If we seek guidance from the past, it is better to see the 'idea of the university' not as a fixed set of characteristics, but as a set of tensions, permanently present, but resolved differently according to time and place. Tensions between teaching and research, and between autonomy and accountability, most obviously. [...] between the transmission of established knowledge, and the search for original truth; between the inevitable connection of universities with the state and the centres of economic and social power, and the need to maintain critical distance; between reproducing the existing occupational structure, and renewing it from below by promoting social mobility; between serving the economy, and providing a space free from immediate utilitarian pressures; between teaching as the encouragement of open and critical attitudes, and society's expectation that universities will impart qualifications and skills. To come down too heavily on one side of these balances will usually mean that the aims of the university are being simplified and distorted."
[1] http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-ide...
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-average-income-in-usa-fam...
http://www.internationale-studierende.de/en/prepare_your_stu...
If college doesn’t give you real world skills and companies won’t train employees (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/09...) where does that leave a college graduate?
We are seeing similar behavior with unpaid internships.
I have experience with FANG companies and most employees have huge gaps in social,life,cultural and historial experiences. When it comes to a Liberal Education, they skipped leg day.
Are you saying that new grads need to understand packer, docker, 3-way git merges and react?
There is no loyalty from any company. The days where there was an understood social contract between corporate America where they would take you in a train you and where you could work your way up the ranks and stay there for years is long gone. Corporate America is only interested in “increasing shareholder value”.
Since corporate America has no loyalty to you and will not train you - it’s your responsibility to train yourself and be ready to either jump ship for a better opportunity at the first chance you get or be ready to swim to the next opportunity when corporate America throws you off the boat.
The reality is that whether you believe that a college education is “a right” and that people shouldn’t have to go into tens of thousands of debt for a chance at a better life, American society disagrees. If you are investing tens of thousands of dollars for college, your reward can’t be just “being a better member of society”, it has to be - can I get a job to provide my own income, health care, retirement etc and have enough saved to provide my own safety net.
A liberal education if you are a software developer won’t help you achieve those goals.
Why is it so crazy that a college should teach you how to use source control? No matter what type of software development you are doing, you’re going to need it. What’s wrong with teaching you whichever is the most popular marketable front end MVC framework during your senior year so you can be productive on a job that’s not going to train you?
True you have to be a life long learner but six months after you graduate from college you’re going to have to start paying that student loan back and the way the government is trying to overturn the ACA, you’re not going to be able to stay on mommy and daddy’s health insurance after you get out of college - if they even have health insurance.
If I have a choice between a hiring a junior developer who has a computer science degree and only knows theory and a junior whose only experience is a boot camp where they learned practical skills. I’m going to hire the boot camp graduate first. Yes I have a “computer science” degree in the early 90s from an unknown state school, didn’t learn anything and the only reason I was employable was due to my prior knowledge from years programming in AppleSoft Basic and assembly language and I fell in love with C and stayed on the comp.lang.c newsgroups.
Google, Faceebok and many others don't seem to agree with that statement.
Also, would your answer change if your company's goal was to develop better machine learning algorithms, or network technologies, etc.?
[1] https://qz.com/929275/you-probably-should-have-majored-in-co...
My point is... where would people get the education that bootstraps them to understand the state of the art then? To me that is the University's goal. In CS that means learning lots that may not be practical for a regular job (advanced algebra/calculus, computer architecture, data structure theory, etc.). However, in the long run this should leave you better prepared for the "boring jobs" too.
Now, you argue that this kind of education may not be the most efficient training process to regular job excellence? I totally agree. College as devised today is designed as the first step into eventually being able to contribute to the world's knowledge, or at least making good use of it. It is not devised as a way to prepare you for the job world, where immediate applicability trumps everything (in general).
I don't know the US system enough, but here in Spain (and at least in France and Germany) there are alternatives to College tuned to that goal. However, most parents (in Spain) still want their children to go the College route. Why? Because College is socially reputable (there are non-college educated leaders, but they are the exception, not the norm), and data shows that college educated people do have a higher expected income throughout their lives. It is percieved as a ladder up the social chain.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bootcamps-enterprise/some...
College is supposed to give you strong foundations so you can build on that. This means that college grads should be able to pick up "applicable skills" in short time (they certainly should be able to become productive at any company in less than 6 months), and from there they should be able to improve faster than their non-graduate peers, eventually surpassing their skills. If that wasn't your case, sorry mate, you are surrounded by exceptional non-graduate peers, or you are an exceptionally bad graduate (which may be your university's fault or your own).
In any case, those parents and students coughing up loads of money for graduate education seem to disagree with you.
On the other hand, how many students go into CS because they look at the starting salaries and expect to get a job paying well?
they certainly should be able to become productive at any company in less than 6 months)
Most companies aren’t willing to do on the job training even for juniors who don’t at least know the language they are using or a similar language on a junior level.
It is also true that practical projects in 12-week long courses just cannot compare to the amount of problem insight you get if you spend N years working on it from the business side. There many courses that I would enjoy (and benefit from) much more now that when I did them some ~15 years ago!
> So having the "let's build something" experience is useful in the real world afterwards. It is, but it’s not the job of academia to teach it. You have side-projects, internships, and your whole life to learn practice.
Have you never encountered a junior Dev fresh out of college who could talk theory all day long but couldn’t write an implementation of FizzBuzz?
As I understand, it was arguing against business-oriented teaching (i.e.: teaching to experts in the current fashionable web framework/language/ML system/whatever) instead of teaching the basics. It hardly said anything about practical projects.
> Have you never encountered a junior Dev fresh out of college who could talk theory all day long but couldn’t write an implementation of FizzBuzz?
Out of college? No. I've encountered a few who couldn't write FizzBuzz, but they also couldn't talk any theory either!
I taught myself how to program in Applesof Basic in 6th grade because I wanted to write a game. Then I learned assembly and how the interpreter worked, how the extension cards mapped memory, the OS etc.
Get them interested in the high level first and then drill down.
The former is for learning a job/role, the latter is for learning about a subject. The academic development in a subject/subjects may make you better for some jobs but that is not their primary purpose; you often need to add on your own extras if you want to be career ready.
I had no training and my university degree didn’t prepare me for it. While I already knew how to program, had played around with assembly on both my //e and later my Mac and taught myself C, and really only went to my little unknown state college for the piece of paper and not to learn, where would I have been if I had expected to actually learn something useful in college?
No one tells any other profession that they shouldn’t go to college expecting to get s job, why is CS different? Are you really going to say that most college students and parents spend tens of thousands of dollars on a college education just so they can be “a better member of society”?
Erm, isn't it your choice, study a subject or get a vocational qualification. I realise there's middle ground, they're the poles.
Why should we ruin universities just so businesses don't have to filter candidates, train recruits from a younger age, or have apprenticeships?
Seems better to use universities to expand human knowledge (individually and universally) than it does to use them as a hugely expensive way to do a first filter on company recruitment processes.
It’s not about should, it’s about reality. The corporations have already spoken. We can either accept reality for what it is or graduate a bunch of students with CS degrees that are saddled with debt that have a hard time finding a job. In the immortal words of Kosh, “Once the avalanche has started, the pebbles no longer have a vote”.
CS grads coming out of college are competing with foreign developers who were trained to get a job, have more experience and that will work for less.