Campus College of Letters and Science plans to limit high-demand majors
dailycal.org
dailycal.org
I took CS classes because I wanted something fun to do outside of what I was officially studying. About the time I finished up, UCB was already limiting upper division classes to CS majors only. And this was thirty years ago.
I ended up in my career because I married the thing I thought I wanted to do (chem) with the thing I really enjoyed and was good at (programming). I met a lot of grad students who wanted help programming and I got to do a lot of cool work with different research groups in chem/phys/bio that did protein folding, data visualization, etc. I ended up getting a job at Industrial Light and Magic because I had a lot of experience programming OpenGL on Irix(SGI).
Where is the room for that kind of experience now? You need to test into the major before you even enter campus? I guess the college experience is getting a piece of paper stating that you can jump through a set of hoops.
This is disappointing. I've been fortunate enough to work in an industry that combines art and tech and know the benefits of working with people who come from a variety of backgrounds and expertise. I want to live and work in a world where you don't need to match an algorithm to have a chance. And unfortunately, many people conflate a university degree with that chance.
That's how it works in Germany and I believe a majority of other European countries as well. You don't apply to a given school, you apply to get into a specific program at a given school.
On other hand even to get into university you probably need to know where you are generally aiming at beginning of High School.
Ideally, you want to figure out what you want to do with your life /before/ you saddle yourself with debt going into college (assuming your dreams take you that way).
If the tides are turning such that you need to have a decent idea about your life's prospects before entering university, I say that is a very good thing.
Once you figure out what your life goal is, /then/ see about going to college if that's on the way to achieving your goal.
The widespread notion that everyone must go to college, including for no good reason, is nonsense. College isn't the end all be all to life.
I went to berkeley in the 90's. Tuition was ~$2k (usd) per semester. I lived in a shared house for $300/month. I paid for everything out of pocket by working for a campus job (which paid $8/hour vs $5/hour minimum wage). So I was lucky and walked away with no debt.
I feel for the current generation that will need to take on debt if they feel they need a college education, and I know the amount I've been saving for my kids.
I can't change anything about the monetary policy that allowed student loans to be so large. But I do try my best to do outreach and recruiting from candidates with non-standard backgrounds and who didn't come from one of the big CS schools.
This is how it works in most of the world. There is no major/minor system, you just study one thing at university for ~3 years.
Also I feel like it creates a new opportunity for some other entities to help students “test their major” without incurring the same costs.
I graduated this past May, and let me tell you that TAs are struggling, pulling 40-60 hour weeks of pure TA work plus whatever classes they need to be taking to handle the sheer scale of these CS classes (800-2000 students). 15% of the undergraduate population (32,000 students) is graduating CS or EECS. You can't just keep scaling up class sizes and undergraduate populations forever, and the fact that Cal is getting this criticism for doing it at a level far above any other top CS university is surprising honestly.
As an EECS major of roughly the same period...yes? The Cal engineering majors have been direct admit for ages, precisely because demand is always higher than capacity. In our day, the CS path was neglected because most incoming CS kids wanted the EECS guarantee. Once demand rose and the L&S admission advantage obviously outweighed the value of the EECS major guarantee, it was all over. The "backdoor" IEOR major (ORMS) has the same issue and is also going "high demand."
That said, the last plan-of-record I have seen involves a "discovery" path that will take a few undeclared L&S majors each year. So today's you would still have a chance. But you would be ineligible for the "discovery" path if you had declared "intended CS" during admission (i.e., were actually rejected from the direct admit path).
https://www.dailycal.org/2022/04/08/a-personal-view-of-uc-be...
Ten years ago, the department graduated roughly 400 students with Bachelor’s degrees in EECS or computer science. This year, the number will probably be 1400, or roughly 15%, of all undergraduates. Almost all of that growth is in the College of Letters and Science CS major.
and more specifically:
The campus provides departments $50 per student-credit per hour to pay for both lecturers and TAs. A student in a 4-unit class contributes roughly $200 out of the student’s overall tuition for these expenses. Yet the actual cost to a department is more than $350 per student for that 4-unit class, forcing departments to find additional funds to cover the upward of $150 per student gap. [...] The EECS department is running an annual deficit of nearly $5 million.
At a high level, this problem is "growing pains" rather than "falling backwards". Computer science is booming at Berkeley, and they can't hire enough TAs to keep up when they are paying so badly. I hope they simply start paying CS TAs better.
Impossible. Students definitely don't pay more than $50 per credit hour in tuition, so there's nowhere for the university to get the additional funds from.
Edit: This was sarcastic
Tuition is $14,000 for in-state and and a laughable $44,000 for out-of-state. And they can’t find an extra $150 per student? Fire one worthless administrator and the $150 gap is completely covered. Voila!
And a personal insight, as a former uGSI (TA) in the department, the problem isn’t paying TAs enough. The pay is actually quite high for a student job (especially when you factor in the fact that in-state tuition is paid for). But the course budgets simply aren’t high enough to hire the sheer quantity of TAs that would be required to handle all of the students who want to take the classes.
I was involved in hiring some semesters, and there were always more people we wanted to hire than the budget would allow. I believe the situation has only gotten worse since I left.
You are also correct that the author is a former lecturer. Too bad it's too late for me to edit the comment.
A 20 hour TA is paid ~$2250/mo for approximately 4.5 months per semester, plus ~$7000/semester in tuition remission (so ~$17k). $350 is the total cost for the whole semester per student. 17k/350 is about 50 students per TA, which sounds about right (and even that is a higher than ideal ratio). There are other costs too, but these are the some of the highest.
(u)GSIs at Berkeley are paid particularly well compared to other schools, I think in large part due to the TA union (UAW 2865).
For tuition remission, it’s only the in-state amount, even if you’re out of state.
Some significant costs come from the massive scales the classes are taught at. This semester, the first required CS lower division class has 1800 students (https://classes.berkeley.edu/content/2022-fall-compsci-61a-0...) and an upper division DBs class has 600 students. (https://classes.berkeley.edu/content/2022-fall-compsci-186-0...).
It takes a lot of TAs to handle student support, which doesn't scale well in practice. The class I teach publishes lots of videos and documentation about how to do the labs, projects, and homeworks, and we also have a forum where students can (to a reasonable extent) help each other out with common questions. However, the classes teach a lot of stuff really fast and you need a lot of TAs doing things like office hours to help students who didn't understand the speedy lecture, or have a particularly nasty time trying to debug an error.
One particularly difficult thing about this scaling is that students typically need TA help all at once. Office hours right before midterms and project deadlines have many students and more bodies are needed just to have good handling of "peak" times
Another aspect of TA cost is that TAs are paid significant amounts of tuition remission for their work, and the department has somewhat of a mandate to ensure any graduate student who wants to TA can get full tuition remission from a 10 hour position or higher (I'm guessing this is somewhat of a symptom of skyrocketing tuition and inadequate aid being foisted on the department to deal with). The department used to get around this by hiring tons of undergrads at an 8 hour level so they wouldn't get remission, but they were sued and paid out millions in backpay as well as paying all TAs a scaled remission based on their hour count. (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/01/16/arbitrator-sa...). Generally an 8-hour TA gets paid around $40 an hour after remission and a 20-hour TA gets paid around $50 an hour. [very rough math read the other comment for harder numbers]
-Am a TA, speaking for myself
Each has their own downfalls - higher enrollment requirements limit lower socioeconomic students, retraining programs cost money and can produce subpar instructors (2 month retraining PD vs a 2 year), and increased teaching loads make becoming an instructor unattractive. It doesn't help that CS PhDs are highly sought after by large tech corporations, pay MUCH more, and with less work (maybe).
We haven't really solved how to teach CS, problem solving is still a difficult thing for humans to learn and we don't really have a better way to teach it. Even if we include all the current "soft skills", at the end of the day problem solving is the trait many companies want.
If history repeats itself, the CS bubble will burst. Not necessarily plummeting, but new students seeking STEM careers will pick programs without as many barriers of entry or low quality instruction. I don't really have a solution to the problem, just acknowledging that the issues the domain will face as enrollment continues to increase.
Maybe that’s part of the problem.
https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2022-23...
The overall budget gets weird with medical centers and something called “Sales and Support”, but in any case California tax payers put in more money then students. I don’t think that’s a problem, but it’s definitely subsidized.
But for subjects like Civil, Electrical, sciences like Physics, Biology, I suspect the story is quite different.
I can speak to Biology; most undergrads are left with little opportunity as most roles require a graduate degree to do anything meaningful when the economy is actually favorable, and often seek roles outside of their field when it's not. As a undergrad that was lucky enough to enter the field in the wake of the GFC long enough to just pay off my student debt I've met so many biologists/biochemists who either couldn't find anything in their field, or simply gave up trying and sought the highest paid and somewhat stable role they could get 'that required a degree.' It's quite clear that the system has failed, and the system is designed to onboard more STEM grads as it sounds as their are ever-growing holders of degrees chasing so n amount of open roles.
Tech in unique in that it is one of those few Industries where the barrier of entry is rather low, but the attrition and competence level vets for viable candidates almost entirely on it's own--the gatekeeping interview process is still an unnecessary hurdle.
Personally, for all the controversy Eric Weinstein has made directly and indirectly of his own actions, the concept of Embedded Growth Obligations was incredibly well researched and consistent with what we have seen as outlined since 2005 and then solidified itself in the financial collapse of 2008 [0]:
> Embedded Growth Obligations are the way in which institutions plan their future predicated on legacies of growth. And since the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the early 70s had such an unusually beautiful growth regime, many of our institutions became predicated upon low-variance technology-led, stable, broadly distributed growth. Now, this is a world we have not seen in an organic way since the early 1970s, and yet, because it was embedded in our institutions, what we have is a world in which the expectation is still present in the form of an embedded growth obligation. That is, the pension plans, the corporate ladders, are all still built very much around a world that has long since vanished.
We have effectively become a Growth Cargo Cult. That is, once upon a time, planes used to land in the Pacific, let's say, during World War II, and Indigenous people looked at the air strips and the behavior of the air traffic controllers, and they've been mimicking those behaviors in the years since as ritual, but the planes no longer land. Well, in large measure, our institutions are built for a world in which growth doesn't happen in the same way anymore.
(Incidentally, I think CS is a very good place to invest, precisely because there’s a lot of demand, start up cost for self employment is low, and applicability is super broad)
Many people would argue that linguistics is one of those useless studies compared to comp sci, but it shares deep connections to research in logic and by extension type theory (see handbook for logic and languages)
unless youn disagree with the laws of supply and demand, it seems the market consensus at this moment is that compsci majors are far more useful than any fundamental research (which still remains undefined).
Even if the market was wrong and fundamental research could somehow be valuable, why would you not trust the primary beneficiaries oj making that decision, vs some bureaucrat that has no stake in the outcome?
A great video about open-endedness (warning - very long) with Kenneth Stanley, author of the book "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned"
Would it perhaps be prudent to cap the number of participants in those departments to match the number of real-world vacancies available?
According to 'The Master Plan', UCs are designed for research and post-grad work and some professional careers. Only the UCs give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). CSUs are designed for professional and teacher education and cannot give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). So, as an undergrad thinking of grad school, a UC is a better place to go to as they have the grad labs and classes on campus, while the CSUs mostly do not. Your chances of getting into grad school are a bit higher.
Berkeley, being a UC, is more geared toward research than Chico, a CSU. I mean, Cal even has a nobel prize parking lot.
https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...
What a sad way to categorize people.
https://twitter.com/benmschmidt/status/1562212497272279041
(Weird that psychology is growing, all the psych degree people I know work in HR and I don't think that's what they dreamed of.)
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/interactive_embed/car...
My personal take is that humanities departments should be aggressively courting 2nd majors (somewhat egotistical, I was a double major). As much as we might want to believe that the purpose of education is to give person a fuller life, increased earnings potential is an undeniable part of there reason people go to university. Selling a line like “the CS department will teach you how to make money. We’ll help you live the rest of your life” or “engineering got me in on the ground floor. Clarity of thought and speech got me to the top floor” seems like it could open up more demand than trying to go it alone.
My N of one experience suggests it might be effective. I thought I was just getting a vanity politics degree on top of my CS degree because I liked it. After 10 years in career I think I refer to lessons and skills learned in those humanities classes as much as the ones in my CS classes.
I would figure that the whole point of getting a psychology degree (as opposed to taking some psychology courses as part of your main degree) is to work as a psychologist? Why are all these people failing to get their psychologist qualifications?
Where I live, I've never met or heard of anyone who went for a psychology degree without the intention of becoming a psychologist. Sure, not everybody makes it to the end, and few end up doing research instead, but the whole goal of the degree is to produce qualified psychologists.
(I'm oversimplifying a little. There are 6 accredited programs, but there are 10 undergrad universities that produce psych majors, so the numbers probably look worse overall.)
You're right that the goal is to become a qualified psychologist, but the training pipeline doesn't match that goal. Crudely, there are training spots for less than 1% of psych undergrads (maybe 2% if you include research psychologists). There are alternative programs for counseling, but it's not the same license. The cost of these counseling programs is also astronomical for Canada. I know people who went that route and have $150k loans to pay back. If you're competitive enough to get into one of the clinical programs, they are funded (with students given stipends ranging from $30-$40k/year), but even if they aren't tuition is under $7k/year.
What reason do you have to believe that you aren't doing the same thing with the majors you're judging societally unproductive?
It seems so, since it's hard for people to admit that an average STEM graduate is much more useful than an average humanities graduate. It's not that the humanities aren't useful, they are, but to succeed and actually have an impact on society, you need to be one of the best humanities graduates.
We don't need more psych bachelors grads who took on 10-20x their future annual income in student loans, only to file paperwork in an office for the rest of their lives. There are much better ways for them and for society to spend that money than subsidizing/bailing them out.
Your average STEM grad is not having the impact on society like what you describe here.
We also don’t need more CS bachelor grads churning out CRUD apps for adtech companies.
Some majors are actually unproductive and a waste of both the student's and taxpayer's money, and should not be subsidized.
But many humanities that often get binned this way are actually civically productive, and they're only economically unproductive because of significant market failure. The benefits to society aren't priced properly. Such majors, and that is the social sciences, should arguably be subsidized by the government, because they are technically public goods.
What the last few years has taught us is how much damage an electorate can do who isn't educated. If they don't understand anything about economic systems, political systems, sociology, history, psychology, then their mind can be taken over too easily by propaganda, which can have catastrophic consequences, all the way up to the death of democracy.
Who probably proceeds to go into zero or negative-sum trading, or negative sum ad targeting intelligence.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/what...
Tangent rant - Some time ago I was rejected 4 times from CSE, ended up getting admitted to EE. Which hilariously, now has changed its name to… ECE, electrical and computer engineering. They offer an different Computer Engineering degree now!!! The buildings are literally linked floor by floor and they won’t work together, haha. Got a great education in computer engineering even without the name.
After you accept that fact, 96% of rising sophomores in the College of Engineering got their first or second choice of major and only 4 majors had to reject anyone who wanted it as their first choice. If you took your first year seriously, you are almost certainly exactly where you hoped to be when you first applied coming out of HS.
My son just got accepted into the new ECE program. He plans to follow a path that gets him closest to the Allen school degree while adding in some additional hardware knowledge that those students don't necessarily get.
Goodluck to your son though with the new ECE program! It was a great program even before the name change with a lot of very good professors and lecturers. I especially recommend any class by Scott Hauck.
A CS major couldn't take any engineering classes; a ECE student might be allowed to take some CS classes, but there weren't any in mine, and realistically they were probably too busy anyways.
The only teams that can pull it off have people who are really talented in the company's native language, and computer programming, and communicating with non-native language people. Those people are super rare and are not paid nearly enough to encourage more people to seek out that niche.
How come they can't afford to put students in a lecture room and pay TAs a few hours of work?
So they were clearly not optimizing for weed-out.
* High school GPA of 2.5, so obviously university was out of the question :)
* Enroll into local Junior college
* Couldn't balance jr. college classes with no car, full time work (+ freelancing when primary job didn't cover rent) -- also didn't make sense to pay for material I already knew, and the CS department wouldn't let me test out [1].
* Already knew programming & CS fundamentals from pure curiosity
* Enrolled into Hatchways :) [2]
* Now work as full time SWE
[1] From my understanding, California actually made required prerequisites illegal (limited to Math and English only), not for bogus CS prerequisites which is a shame. Prerequisites are courses that are required but do not count towards major/degree/program satisfaction.