University of Florida guts computer science department in budget-cutting move | Hacker News Reader

University of Florida guts computer science department in budget-cutting move

arstechnica.com

39 pointsevo_950 comments

Even more so than free healthcare, the one thing that separates the US from the "rest of the world" is the availability of free higher education. Of course, the caveat is that most of the rest of the world is far more restrictive of who may attend university.

In the past, this was always touted as an advantage of the US system. Sure, you have to pay for college, but you don't have to stress over a placement exam that will determine your fate at an early age. Anyone with the motivation can get a higher education.

Except, that's not how things have turned out. It seems that attaining a college degree has become an obligation in the US, for no good reason. People like to talk about the ever increasing proportion of the population that hold college degrees, but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with college degrees matches the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees?

Instead, the US seems to have a death-grip on the notion that "more college graduates = more better jobs". So, instead of scaling back college acceptance rates and spending limited funds to provide an excellent education to a few, the US will water down college education until its as filling as the beer its college students will spend most of their 4 years drinking, only to emerge with a degree in underwater basket weaving.

> but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with college degrees matches the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees?

I think the imbalance is actually in the other direction, if you ask it that way: the fraction of the population with college degrees is considerably lower than the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees. Unemployment among people who don't have college degrees is very high, suggesting that there aren't enough no-degree-required jobs. And when no-degree-required jobs do come on the market, they get massively over-applied for, like when McDonald's announced 50,000 job openings and received a million applicants.

Now whether those jobs should require college degrees is another story. For better or worse, employers demand degrees for a wide range of jobs, and you often won't even get past an automated HR screen if you don't have one. Until employers start offering more jobs to people without degrees, people will continue to feel that they need one, so they can qualify for those openings.

Well, are you assuming that no one applying for the McDonald's job has a degree? I think the situation has probably gotten to the point that there are so many "useless" degrees on the market, that it no longer even makes sense to talk about "fraction with degrees". So, let's try rewording it:

> but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with a particular type of college degree matches the fraction of available jobs requiring that type of college degree?

As an interesting aside, one advantage of providing a free university education is that you only need to provide it for as many students as you need to attain a certain degree. Need more doctors? Then provide more free slots for premed students. Need fewer lawyers? Then this year there aren't as many prelaw slots available.

Such a system may seem rather sanguine, but it's also worth noting that the rest of the world does not seem to equate career success with a happy life in the same way the US does.

It's hard to reliably infer causation from the correlation, but from the statistics I can find, even holders of "useless" degrees have significantly lower unemployment rates and higher wages than people who hold no degree at all.

In fact from what I can find the employment/wage gap between degreed and non-degreed people is actually larger in non-STEM fields. You can get work as a no-degree-having programmer or statistics guru, but if you're not technical, having no degree is a much bigger problem. Among miscellaneous jobs that often advertise that you need a degree: store manager, social worker, high-school teacher, most white-collar clerical positions in large companies, etc.

Sometimes any degree will do. It's not like IBM hiring an office assistant with "B.A./B.S. strongly preferred" is deeply interested in the content of a university literature curriculum, but they use it as a generic screen for some minimum threshold of literacy and maybe diligence. Companies seem to have no way of doing that screening themselves, so they outsource the job to universities, hoping that universities screen out the worst candidates.

True, but this is wasteful signalling and should be discouraged.

The degree advantages you describe are merely a way of redistributing jobs from those without the signal to those with it. No value is created, and some is lost due to the cost of giving people useless educations. The world would be a better place if no one had these useless educations, since employers would no longer be able to discriminate against those lacking the signal.

I have a technical degree, but I tend to disagree. There is a good deal of pure signaling involved, but graduates of humanities programs on average can write and research better after they graduate then previously. Heck, most can read or write better than my CS-degree-having colleagues. I also think there's considerable value to society produced.

In any case, it's easy for companies to solve that problem, if they see an inefficiency. If IBM thinks people without degrees are an underutilized/undervalued labor pool, they'll start hiring them. And if the market stops demanding degrees, people will stop getting them. Until then, it looks like a demand-side problem to me.

I'm confused what you disagree on - do you disagree that signalling is wasteful, or that the skills gained (and later forgotten) in "any degree, we don't care which one" are economically valuable?

By the way, a great way to test whether education is human capital formation or signalling is to consider the consequences of failing and forgetting. If you flunked out of college, would you have the same economic outcome as if you passed and then forgot what you learned? If so, then college is human capital, otherwise it is wasteful signalling. (Hat tip: Bryan Caplan.)

If IBM thinks people without degrees are an underutilized/undervalued labor pool, they'll start hiring them.

Unfortunately, in big companies, this is tricky due to agency costs. The hiring agent has different incentives than the company as a whole - if he does something non-standard, he will receive disproportionate blame if it fails, while the company will gain most of the benefits if it succeeds. If he conforms to the standard procedure he can avoid such risks.

This is a fairly well known problem in the economics of large organizations.

FYI, I ignore degrees when I hire. But if I worked at IBM, I might not.

I think the mistake you're making is you assume it's the skills (gained and later forgotten) that the employers care about, but in reality the college degree is just a filter, not unlike an IQ test. Sure, it sucks that it takes four years and costs $100k, but hey it's not the employers that pay so what do they care. (That's why degrees are less important for engineers, since you can filter eng candidates by asking them a few coding questions.)

(Not that this makes the situation any less deplorable.)

It's very interesting to read your second paragraph and then follow it up by reading about Hungry Academy: http://hungryacademy.com/

Essentially, Living Social has done just this. They decided that the talent pool was thin, and the usual means of finding new hires weren't cutting it, so they mixed a bit of unconventional hiring with a dash of unconventional education and came up with the Hungry Academy. It will be interesting to see if this is a continuing trend, though I can't say I exactly relish the idea of corporate sponsored higher education as the new norm.

> available jobs that require college degrees

It seems to me that a large number of jobs that list a degree as a requirement don't gain much by requiring a degree, except a smaller stack of resumes to dig through.

Why does a secretary position require a bachelor's degree? Especially when it's any bachelor's degree, regardless of major?

> It seems to me that a large number of jobs that list a degree as a requirement don't gain much by requiring a degree, except a smaller stack of resumes to dig through.

Yes, the stack of resumes is smaller. However, I think the key here is that the employer believes the stack of resumes is likely to have a higher ratio of "good" candidates to "bad" candidates.

In economics this is called "signaling". The degree may not endow the person with any particular skill necessary to do the job, but it indicates ("signals") to the employer that the person has certain characteristics that allowed them to earn their degree.

In this case, they can show up on time, complete assignments in a timely manner and use a computer (along with some other things, I'm sure). These are (in theory) qualities that are required to earn a college degree. They are also required for almost all jobs, including fairly menial ones.

The idea is that you can create a pool that is richer in the desired characteristics by limiting it based on the signal.

So, let's pretend 50% of the general population and 75% of the college-graduate population can, say, complete assignments on time (just an example, no "lazy college student" anecdotes please). If you allow anyone to apply for a given job, 50% of the people in your hiring pool will be able to complete assignments on time. But if you limit the applicant pool to just the college graduates, you get to choose (semi-randomly in the case of job interviews) from a pool in which 50% more of the people (75%) can complete assignments on time. This means you are more likely, all else being equal, to end up with a person who can complete assignments on time.

Of course the usefulness of this sort of signal is dependent on whether the assumed characteristics are in fact required to earn a college degree, YMMV. But this is why employers require college degrees for jobs that don't seem like they should require one.

I know. My question was rhetorical, and mostly kvetching due to my fiance trying to find a job and being stymied by the fact that she doesn't have her degree yet.

The problem with those numbers is that we have no idea what % of the general population can complete an assignment in time, especially when you consider that as a hypothetical employer I don't care about the general population - I only care about the percentage of the population that's applying for my job. Again, this is all personal and highly biased, but if I had to pick a random person from my college classes and my fiance to complete some given office task, I'd give it to her, hands down. (But of course, not everyone is marrying her. Luckily for me!)

I agree that this sort of broad-strokes signalling is probably highly ineffective. However, given the difficulty of hiring, employers are likely to seize upon anything that can ease the process even slightly.

There have been interesting ideas in the tech sector, the StackOverflow jobs site for one. It would be interesting to see if anything can be done outside of tech to make hiring more effective.

Good luck to your fiance!

Because people with a 5th grade reading level can have a highschool degree.

Based on my experience, they can have a bachelor's degree, too.

Are all college educations equal? I suspect not. I attended a lower tier institution, and I'm pretty sure that someone graduating from MIT or Stanford probably had a more rigorous education than I did (if for no other reason than the quality of the peers was so much higher).

So I'd argue that we haven't watered down the collegiate experience, particularly on the high end. We've simply opened the doors to higher education on the lower end and made that attainable to a lot more students.

I can't imagine that more education for a greater number people is a bad thing. I think it's a very good thing. If I have to choose between a secretary with a degree and one without, give me the one who has the degree. I know that they probably have the capacity to learn quickly at the very least. That's what a bachelors degree really is in my view, a certification that you know how to learn more than anything else.

It's important to note that this isn't a budget issue. The CS dept was cut by $1.7M, but the athletic department had their funding raised by $2M (total athletic budget is $99M).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/04/22/univer...

Interestingly, the state government seems very supportive of STEM and has thrown $49M at the creation of Florida Polytechnic University. It seems it's merely the university administration that wants to cut it.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/scott-approves-state...

The athletic department's budget comes out of the athletic department's revenue. This is very much a budget issue. The reason why UF needs to cut this money is precisely because of this creation of a new University. Even less state funding is now being divided among even more universities.

http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2012/04/blog-generat...

It's one pool of money under the control of the university. What prevents UF from funneling some of the athletic dept's revenue to subsidize the rest of the university?

I realize that the university might be motivated to implement budget cuts in ways that harm voters (in order to make voters angry about it), but it's hardly clear that UF doesn't have $1.7M worth of waste. Nor is it clear that the $2M increase in the athletic budget will result in a > $2M increase in revenue.

This argument rings hollow at every university where I've encountered it. Universities are educational institutions and athletics are great but if they produce surplus it has an obligation to fund academic activities first and foremost. Phrased for people who react emotionally to this argument: educational institutions ought to increase their brand licensing fees to their for-profit football team subsidiaries.

The athletics department funds itself and is entirely separate from the academics budget.

Not really, if they spend less money on athletics they can spend it on anything else they want.

Comparing the CS department to the athletic department is fallacious; the athletic departments at schools like UF make much more than they spend.

Big discussion yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876564

This article DOES NOT PROVIDE ENOUGH INFORMATION on why this restructuring has taken place. Is it really just a ham-fisted budget cutting move or is there something more subtle going on? It looks like the university also had an ECE department that it was able to consolidate into, at least to some extent. It also does not provide any information on the numbers related to the research of the Computer Science Department. How much money were they bringing in in grants? How many papers were they writing? How many students were moving through the department? If these numbers don't make enough sense, or they don't stack up to other departments when a cut has to be made, then it really just boils down to something like this.

It seems completely absurd that a thriving research department would be shuttered because of budget reasons, which is what the Forbes article (and I use that term loosely, "post" is probably a better word) seems to imply, and this may be the case, but I'm quite skeptical.

Sometimes, if you have a bad set of faculty that create a stagnant department (no research, bad teaching, all tenured, and all resisting hiring good new faculty to maintain the status quo) you have to take dramatic steps to get rid of them so you can trim back on your budget (tenured faculty make a lot more than new faculty) and breath new life into a program. In some cases, the only option to reboot a department may be to scrap it entirely, offer zombie profs new spots in a similar department, and bin the rest you don't like or offer them much-less-cush teaching jobs where they have to work for dinner. Later on the department can be restarted and reconstructed from new and preexisting good faculty. I'm not saying this is the case here. What I am saying is that there can be real reasons to scrap an entire CS department this day in age when you have budget problems, or even if you DON'T have them. I don't know the particulars here, but it sure would be nice if people weren't so self-righteous with these postings and gave us more facts so we could understand how crazy the situation actually is instead of hearing about (unrelated) athletic budgets.

All the Forbes post is really doing is engaging in sensationalism by co-opting the notion of American decline via self-sabotage that's so popular right now. I wish we could hear some more about the real issues.

I see a future where more and more Universities start doing this. The University of Florida had many more issues than this but Universities just can't keep up with how much the field of Computer Science changes. They were built around books and static resources that you come in and study and get a job after four to six years where that information is still relevant.

Four to six years in Computer Science is an insane amount of time, so much changes in the world of CS in this amount of time that basically your information is outdated by the time your graduate.

Most of my CS friends have dropped out after 2-3 years and gotten great jobs. (Albeit they all went in with a solid working knowledge of programming and work experience to begin with.) People who go to college to learn CS to get a good job in the field tend to leave getting a corporate Java programming job which just doesn't interest the majority of programmers/potential programmers anymore.

Wow, that's a lot of generalizations in one comment.

First, yes, if you're the type who wants to start a YC-funded startup... you're going to skip college and do that. That's a small, small percentage of the number of CS grads though - say 1%. 1 in 100 young people interested in Computer Science will found a startup in the United States.

If you think its the "majority" that do that, you have to get out of San Francisco and visit a place like Florida.

But that still leaves 99% who would love to go to college, get a degree, and get a good job doing interesting things. And even if they get a CS degree, they may not even go into programming after college. That happens quite a bit.

I think what this move portends is that Universities can no longer fund research. They get a shrinking amount of money, and they have to focus on teaching.

By the way, the fundamentals of programming do NOT change all that much. You know what Android runs? Java. You know when Java was invented? 1994. Do you know how long it takes to learn Android or iPhone programming if you have a solid understanding of Object Oriented programming? Days. So a 3 year degree in CompSci still has a lot of relevance and value.

Unless your dream is to start a startup, in which case, go do that.

Wow, are you wrong.

First off, at any decent school the CS curriculum focuses on theory and other things that are relatively slow changing. Big O theory, language parsing, etc are absolutely just as relevant now as they were 10 years ago.

Second, it is asinine to suggest that people with CS degrees don't get interesting jobs. In the end, people with good degrees just have access to a superset of the jobs available to someone who skipped school. Both can be hackers who make cool web apps, or iPhone apps, etc. But only one has the ability to go to Google or Facebook and work with machine learning algorithms. Or go to Apple and work on the iOS platform. Or go to Pixar and build the guts of their rendering engine. That's the value of a degree - there are a lot of really awesome jobs that are very likely out of reach for you having never gone to school for CS.

I don't believe the poster is wrong per say, I believe that their perspective may be colored by their experience. There are a lot of schools out their teaching their CS and IT degrees like an expensive vocational school. Sure the top schools with research centers are teaching theory that stands the test of time, but many of the lesser schools are teaching Intro to Java and Business Math for Programming. For these schools the poster is correct, a 6 month vocational course would be cheaper and would probably put a student in the market, better equipped, than a 4 year degree that started out with a mid-lifecycle language to start.

CS != IT. I think a lot of people have begun to think that it is. The core difference is that the foundations of CS change at about the same pace as a discipline like Formal Logic from Philosophy/Mathematics (that's where CS has a lot of formal roots). IT's core varies a lot more, as it's a younger discipline with less formal and more varied roots than Computer Science. Granted, this is all ideals, there are bad CS programs that teach you the wrong stuff, and there are stellar IT programs that teach you to change with the times, but, ideally speaking the two are quite dissimilar in their foundations.

I apologize if it appears that I implied that it was, that was not my intent. My intent was to highlight that their are bad CS and IT programs out there, and that may be what is coloring the perspective of the original poster.

Nah, consider it "supporting-commentary" to you. It was more about the original post referring to the shelf-life of programs.

My University basically taught The Art of Computer Programming. I remember one C++ class (an elective), one assembly class (required, I think), and the rest was just math. That stuff never goes out of style (not that I remember any of it...). I think I'd be much worse off if I was just taught the latest hotness. Node.js 101!

In a few areas that's true, but there are wide swathes of computer science that change more slowly, and not only in the Java enterprise space. Machine learning changes year to year, but undergrad-level foundational material from 2000 serves you reasonably well today; you still need to know what a loss function is, what cross-validation is, etc. Architectures change, but you should still know what registers are, what an instruction pipeline is, all the basic material, enhanced with some advanced stuff. As far as PLs, a grounding in all the major programming paradigms---functional, object-oriented, procedural, etc.---is still useful to have. And so on.

The big-data space is increasingly important within CS, and I don't see a big move away from academic content there. Whether you learn it in an actual academic program or self-teach, you'll need a solid mathematical background.

If you're interested in how little programming languages change over 40 years check out The Next 700 Programming Languages[1], from 1966. Sure, it's easy to point out advances like ATP or modern concurrent, generational GC, but the underlying ideas are relatively constant.

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf

Four to six years in Computer Science is an insane amount of time, so much changes in the world of CS in this amount of time that basically your information is outdated by the time your graduate.

I'm going to re-phrase what others have already said: You do not understand what "Computer Science" is.

Computer Science changes very little in 4-6 years. Computer programming might change - but if that was true then nobody would still be programming 3years after graduating because everything would have changed.

The reason for schools dropping CS is market forces. In the late 90s everyone wanted to do CS because that's where the jobs where, the market crashed and nobody wanted to do CS, then the market picked up and there were no CS grads, so wages went up, so people enrolled, then the market dipped .... Unfortunately there is a 3-4 lag in the system.

Of course if the schools taught CS rather than programming this wouldn't matter as much.

If you really want to get worried, check out how many schools still teach chemistry. Google/Facebook/etc can get by with self-taught programmers. The rest of industry can't get by with self-taught chemists.

No, Google/Facebook can NOT get by with self-taught programmers. Much of what they do is the realm of highly educated people with a PhD or Masters in CS. Look at one of Google's highest visibility projects - the self driving car. I highly doubt you're going to find anyone associated with that project that doesn't have a degree, and rightly so. There's more to CS than making fun jQuery hacks.

Most "computer-science" graduate jobs are jQuery hacks.

The self driving car would do perfectly well built by a group of physics + maths PhDs who were self-taught programmers. We managed to build self-driving flights to the moon that way.

That is also crazy wrong.

Google and Facebook, between them, employ somewhere in the range of 15,000-20,000 engineers. Look at the entirety of the two companies' web presence (ie their jQuery hacker designed stuff) - that's work that could be done by a very small percentage of those 15,000 people.

The real challenge for both those companies is scalability and algorithmic complexity. They both do things like tweak well-established open source packages, implement machine learning, build programming languages/operating systems, influence technical web standards, etc. Stuff that decidedly is NOT the realm of your average hacker who decided to skip college because the curriculum wasn't "revelant".

If you don't believe me, feel free to try to get hired at either company without a college degree. Unless you've done something VERY notable, it's not gonna happen.

You seem to equate their requiring a degree with a person being able to perform the task. Just because they require a degree as a filter it does not mean that it is a constant that a person must hold degree X to perform task Y. This is not the case, what is the case is that Google requires a degree as a filter, nothing more nothing less. There are many people lacking degrees or degrees in that specialty that can competently perform the task.

For example I can hack a Bosch Common Rail onto an older diesel engine and build a custom ECU for it. I have no formal experience in EE or Mechanical Engineering but I am confident that I could work on the self driving cars at Google. Would they hire me, no because I don't have a degree in that field, does that mean that I cannot do it, no. I am confident that I could get a job tomorrow with a performance diesel product vendor, that is doing just as complicated development in their niche, should I chose to. Some companies, specifically smaller companies have the time to deeply investigate the candidates, larger companies on the other hand many times have to rely on filters. But don't mistake those filters as an indication of quality or superiority, they are rather administrative processes, nothing more nothing less.

excuse-me is just saying that you don't need a CS degree in order to be employable in the field. Which is true, even at places like Google and Facebook - I know plenty of people with math, physics, and other science degrees, and most of them have never had any trouble finding programming jobs.

Especially if you go after jobs that actually involve your area of expertise. When a company needs a programmer that's awesome at statistics, they're going to choose the math major that can code over the CS major that can do math, all else being equal...

I agree the education system is completly broken more so for comp sci than anywhere. There is no need for 4 years of school. Why do you need bio and comunication. Before anyone say that grammer and english help you in a career look back at your college career did you honestly take those classes seriously. I have comp sci course I've past and haven't retain one word.

I don't know how to say this without being offensive, but your entire comment is evidence that people should be taking those courses seriously. You may be an extremely competent programmer, but when I see the spelling mistakes and inability to communicate effectively, I would be hard-pressed to take you seriously in any way.

I know it is not your intent and I have tried my best to not take offense to your comment but their are a lot of issues that can affects ones ability to communicate in a particular medium. In this particular one (written) dyslexia can be almost debilitating, if a person has dyslexia, the are no more or less incompetent than any given person they just strive to overcome a disability in the way they their mind works. If the parent poster happens to have dyslexia then your post is the equivalent of walking up to a person on the street with a speech impediment and telling them it is hard to take them serious because of how they talk. I know that was not you intent, which is why I do not take it personal, but I did want to draw the parallel. That being said, I do disagree with the contents of the original post. I think their is a lot of value in a good CS program.

The reason that his ability to communicate is relevant is that he specifically questioned the value of a communications class.

From the grandparent post: but when I see the spelling mistakes . I don't disagree with the conclusion that the original poster did not present a compelling argument, even if it where spelled correctly, but spelling has very little to do with ones ability to reason. All too often people use it as an indicator of intellect in other areas of reasoning, when doing the same thing in public to a person with speaking difficulties would be out of the question. It is roughly the same offense, but for some reason it is far more acceptable in written communication, this causes a lot of long harbored issues for those that suffer from the affliction.

I think it really comes down to two things: 1. It is (generally) obvious if someone has a speech/language disability when you interact with them face to face. 2. Sheer probability dictates that it would be ridiculous to ignore a metric (written communication skills) that I find useful in evaluating people for fear of offending a VAST minority of cases. What percent of the time do you think that someone exhibiting incorrect spelling or grammar online is doing so because of dyslexia or another disability, as opposed to simply being lazy or unprofessional?

I would never knowingly ridicule someone who suffered from dyslexia or a similar disability, but I think we have to be careful of becoming so politically correct that we are afraid to criticize or hold anyone accountable for anything.

It's pretty prevalent 1 in 10 people (at the top end) that you interact with has dyslexia of some form. Among people in the arts it is much much higher, I am making an assumption here, but I would assume it is significantly higher on HN given that their is a population of designers that frequent the site. It is far more prevalent that speech related disabilities, but less recognized because people are embarrasses about having it, some of that embarrassment comes from the fact that unlike a speech condition it is acceptable to highlight their disability, many times to discredit their argument.

as opposed to simply being lazy or unprofessional?

I can't begin to help you understand how many times I have been called lazy for not being able to spell, and how frustrating that is. That is the problem, you assume the majority are lazy people that cannot spell and don't want to learn, so you immediately assume someone is in the majority, because well you set up the odds that they are. But if 1 in 10 suffer from it, and the prevalence of people on HN exhibit spelling mistakes at close to the same rate would in not be just as valid to assume that maybe those that do exhibit them, may be in that 1 in 10 population.

Skilled troll, or unintentionally funny?

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