Big Tech is getting cozy with computer science departments

Maybe it is a better way to learn independently, with regular, e.g. monthly or quarterly check-ins with an experienced mentor?

Would solve quite a few problems altogether - people getting more independent and following their interests. You would still have competition, but that would be moderated by actual needs, both in the private and public sector.

Not sure an end to the classic higher-ed system would be a bad thing.

> the large problem is the university expects you to use books from well known publishers

Interesting, and disturbing.

I am a math professor at a US state university, and thankfully I haven't observed any of this at all. For lower-level classes such as calculus we all use the same book, decided upon by the department as a whole, but when teaching upper-level classes I generally choose as I see fit.

I am curious, what form does this expectation/pressure take? At my university, if administrators tried to do this, my colleagues (at least the tenure-track/tenured ones) would briefly chuckle, delete the email, and not remember it five minutes later.

Why can't the books be able to teach about "how" as well? I'm from a mediocre country where I went to the best CS college and 99% of the things I learned there was from powerpoint presentations, pdf scripts or books full of math exercises. I still got into FAMANG as my first full time job and so did many other people from there. I just never saw the value in our professors. They mostly repeated stuff from text books, had 10 year old lab assignments and similar exams for 20 years. And I don't think it's that bad. It teaches you enough of the basics for average programming job or as basis for you to expand into what's more interesting to you specifically. The only thing missing was cool projects like having your college develop GHC or stuff like that.

Point being, I think college professors overestimate their impact a bit when regarding bachelors/masters topics. All that is too basic to really need some expert domain knowledge and is knowledge which hasn't really changed that much the last 20 years. SVM's were invented in the 90s. Linear algebra some time before that. The rest is industry or postdoc stuff.

I get the "teaching" part but if you are "teaching" a room of 50 student's it isn't really that different from watching a youtube video for them.

I’m doing a CS degree now, mostly lower level classes now. I find that teaching well does make a difference. Interestingly, when my professors use slides provided to them by the textbook company, I generally find it much harder to be engaged by watching their lecture. Compare to professors who make custom material and truly have some skill in presenting it.

Professors who choose to use the full suite of textbook, plus textbook provided slides, plus electronic auto graded homework might save themselves some time, but definitely are less effective educators, in my limited experiences.

Just to add another anecdote: I'm also a CS professor at a well-known state university. We are free to choose whatever books we want for classes. To the best of my knowledge, these choices are not even reviewed. We are also free to use no textbook and just hand out lecture notes or whatever.

I do not worry about the loss of social constructs like university per se.

To a large extent it’s a political institution, with outdated historical baubles forced upon it (administrative nightmare).

We’re at a hinge point in social evolution where perhaps a university is generally unnecessary.

Accurate information discovery, storage, and retrieval is what a university was built for conceptually.

It’s a matter of human history it is mired in old political speech and social construct. Not necessity to execute its purpose.

You have skills to teach people. Teach them. Dispose of the pretense of teaching “in politically normalized settings”.

Go teach. Really historically you’re teaching people who paid the political price. How free.

Those publishers are so predatory and user-hostile, I wonder if they will actually be able to restrain themselves long enough to establish a market. As it is, very few people are stupid enough to buy a "textbook" that comes with auto-self-destruct DRM that renders it unusable at the end of the semester.

Of course many college kids are just kids fresh out of highschool with no financial skills or haggling skills so I guess I take back what I said about there not being enough dumb-dumbs to fuel a market for DRM "textbooks". People do still take out loans to finance their English major, after all.

Big tech is already choosing most of what you watch on your screens.

For example if Google decides that something doesn't exist, 90+% of connected people won't see it.

This is scary.

>>The purpose of Universities is to uphold, expand and disseminate human culture, not to prepare people for a career in the industry.

Like, I personally agree with you, but then I also think that we don't have the right to define it as such. There's plenty of people who think that the main goal of a university(at least in scientific/engineering fields) should be to prepare people for working in the industry.

Equally, I see nothing wrong with courses which are specifically designed for this. I myself have finished a "Games Engineering" masters which boasted about close links to the industry, and over 90% hire rate in the industry after - and I got exactly what was promised. I don't see any issue with that personally. I also have friends who had their entire PhDs funded by companies like Red Hat, because they were researching things done in collaboration with them. Also don't have any issue here, and that made sure that my friends not only paid nothing for their PhDs, they were actually pretty well compensated throughout.

I think the perspective changes when you have to pay for university. My sister has a degree in film making from a British university, which she paid nealy £60k(!!!!) for, and her chances of employment in the industry are nearly zero. Where I'm from(Poland)_all higher education is free, and then I have no problem with degrees not correlating with employment(but then maybe on the other hand, as a Polish tax payer, maybe I would prefer that they did, otherwise why are we paying these people to study with no employment prospects afterwards. Again, I don't really think that but I know many people do).

Uhh, this has been happening for over 25 years now.

One of the reasons is there are just too many students. How this came to be is another rabbithole though.

I would argue that universities have two tasks: 1. Do research to expand knowledge. 2. Educate new researchers. Big tech just wants highly skilled researchers in their workforce, but there only N students graduating every year. So it is only logical for them to "help" (can be good or bad) the university so n+m students graduate. But the bad thing is that the push for more education can negativly impact the available research time professors have.

That was the purpose of universities when the student populations were smaller, wealthier, and more focused on actually learning about the world. But decades ago the US culture shifted to "everyone must go to college as a prerequisite for getting a job", so now the focus of most programs had damn well better be preparing students to actually get a job or else the absurd cost and student debt incurred is simply not worth it.

My universities tech department had strong contacts to large industry players (not for software, but military applications for example).

Advantage was that we had very modern equipment (electrics, robotics, measuring instruments, ...) that would otherwise have crashed the budget of the university.

It wasn't a secret that industry tried to influence the curriculum to get students to be trained in technologies and tools they themselves use. It is clear they tried to poach students.

I understand the objection though and other departments constantly berated this closeness and they certainly had a point because the generality of education was endangered.

With big-tech in software there are some additional risks in my opinion.

That said, there is merit of feedback from industry to university. It is especially helpful to not let students learn about outdated approaches and tech and keep academia in the know.

But that has to be a transparent forum without some maybe not so moral gifts from industries.

Originally it was to train the Clergy :-)

You are right your supposed to learn the theory at UNI Tech companies want to avoid the cost of training / career development - to many MBA/Accountants.

>> The purpose of Universities is to uphold, expand and disseminate human culture, not to prepare people for a career in the industry.

Well, speak for yourself. The majority of people in my classes absolutely had in mind going to industry after their studies. There's nothing wrong with that. Those two goals, being prepared for industry AND science aren't mutually exclusive.

Respectfully, you can't tell universities what their purpose is unless you're prepared to fund it. When these places got the majority of their funding from the state, the state could expect high minded ideals and social outcomes. But now their not, universities need to cater to their customers. Their customers are students, they expect a degree, an "experience" and a job at the end. Universities either need to provide that, or close.

Pretty much all schooling in the modern world is basically a means by which corporations externalize job training. The general public is not blameless either, having equated schooling with job prospects for a long, long time. Consequently, almost no actual education occurs at school. I have a friend who tells a story about meeting a 4.0 student from one of the highest rated high schools in the country who honestly wasn't sure which side the US fought on in WWII.

Hardware, training and bloody faang internships offered and the student body revolted? Jesus, if they did that where I was a student I would have celebrated.

> there were guest lectures by Microsoft employees

Given that MS employs some seriously world-leading computer science academics, isn't this a great thing? I wish I got lectures from people like this!

It’s probably not just universities either.

A company I work for spent the majority of their budget and then some on things that they didn’t need, much without any forethought or planning. It’s either because of kickbacks or because it seemed enterprise-y; there’s no rational explanation other than incompetence or corruption. An adequate IT director / CTO would be able to make their case for use of better and cheaper ToC of best-of-class open-source solutions.

Whether it’s kickbacks or just enjoying bragging about the Ferrari of webscalers we just bought or brandname IAAS we use, it’s wrong.

You're spot on. My alma mater has had Google and the likes come to the campus for over a decade now.

Also, I see nothing wrong with that, at the same time there was plenty of room for "pure research" into even the most obscure corners of theoretical CS and maths.

So, US solutions :-(

> Big Tech largely ignores Tier 2 and Tier 3 schools for on campus recruiting, while imagining that the intelligence community has better developers

I don't think the general consensus is that intelligence organizations have better developers than big tech. I think the rule of thumb is the better the pay, the better the quality.

It would be a waste of time and money to recruit from ten lower ranking colleges for not so great students wouldn’t it? Even if they get like, one good one?