The Mendicant Bug Wanderings into computational linguistics, science, social media and life…

Dan Reed has posted an interesting article both on his blog and on the Computing Research Policy Blog about the many problems in computing education. Ever since the dotcom bubble burst, computer science enrollment at universities has declined and even more so for women. So many ideas have been tossed around out there, trying to figure out just where we’re going wrong. Recently I wrote about Robert Dewar’s views on where CS education has failed. He made the case that graduates of most CS programs are incompetent and that employers have to go through a period of re-education. Whereas Dewar sees the problem more in the fact that core principles are not being taught to students, Dan Reed makes the case that core principles are really not necessary for everyone.

Both viewpoints are nuanced and so lumping them into polar categories like that results in major inaccuracies. Reed is not making the point that students shouldn’t be taught about operating systems and Dewar is not making the point that students must be taught assembly language. While many CS graduates are incompetent, learning about operating systems and compiler design is totally worthless to most programmers. Sure, there are certain skills that could applied to other areas and learning stuff like that will give you an appreciation for the various aspects of the field, but most programmers are never going to build a compiler or an operating system. As computer science is increasingly being applied to other fields (biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc), it is crucial for new software engineers to have specific skillsets that aren’t being taught (and I mean CS skills). Reed makes the point very clearly:

Like any entrenched system (bureaucracy), it is easy for computer science educators to fall prey to the lament that “CS grads these days are not like they used to be.” I’m going to go out on an anthropological limb and say that’s a human universal. The day will come (and I think it already has) when there is just too much core CS information to feed into our brains and to continue to try to cram that into young learners is going to result in spillover and disillusionment. There will always be people capable of soaking all of it up (though they will become rarer as the volume increases), but we must be aware of the futility of over-educating. Let me be clear, in a four year program, I believe it is more of a disservice to students to give them a shallow but broad understanding of the computing field (thereby making them incompetent) than it is to give them a deeper understanding of a subfield where they will be competent but lacking in other so-called core areas.

So I have a couple off-the-cuff ideas that need to be refined but which I want to put out there. All of these core principles can be boiled down into the true essentials, the things programmers actually need to know to do their jobs. Instead of having classes on computer architecture, operating systems, compilers, etc., combine those concepts into one or two classes with a name like “Core Computing Principles.” As Reed points out, the focus should be on teaching algorithmic problem solving skills and logic. From there, students can pursue different directions like theoretical CS, natural language processing, or large-scale systems. An undergraduate education that puts a stronger focus on statistical methods would have been hugely helpful for me. Having a broad range of options that are mapped out for students who really don’t have a clue how to get there, but know basically where they want to go, would be great.

In any case, there are many views and some will side with Dewar, some with Reed. Ultimately I think the field will settle closer to Reed’s side. I’m looking forward to hearing some of the ideas the CRA-E committee that Reed mentioned (pdf) will come up with.