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this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Well, it's very hard for me to have a discussion about philosophical merits of education when the context is the USA where education is so fundamentally fucked. It might as well be that the best course of action for the well-being of students is to make sure they at least get bang for their buck, but that's a systemic problem one level below what I'm talking about even. I don't want to discount this as a reality for actual people on the ground - I think then the correct position is not my waxing philosophical about contents of courses, but rather nailing everyone against free public education in the US government to a fucking wall.
This is, I think, a symptom of this push-and-pull between industry and academia. The industry would want to have a CS degree mean that they're getting engineers ready to patch up their legacy code, because they would much rather have the state (or the students themselves in the USA case) pay for that training than having to train their employees themselves. But I suggest that the correct default response to industry's wants is "NO." unless they have some really good points. Google can pay for their employees to learn C++, but they won't pay a dime to teach you something they don't need for their profit margins. Which is precisely the point of public education, teaching you stuff because it's philosophically justified to have a population that knows things, not because they lead to $$$.
Yeah, that’s a huge problem with private education. If it’s expensive to the student, they want a profit. If the uni is expensive to run and privately funded, they want rich alumni. (And sadly, even in public universities in the US, the funders have a horrifically profit motivated view: the purpose of public education is to produce a highly trained body of workers. The crisis in American higher ed is deep right now; lawmakers and academic administrators fundamentally don’t believe in the humanities.)
Still, part of this is CS’s fault as a field. You mentioned to David the difference between engineering and physics, and in most places, those are different academic fields of study. Both valuable, but different. Why shouldn’t CS do the same?
I’ve found that most of the best working application programmers I’ve worked with have a liberal arts background with a humanities focus, because the training leads to a more holistic view of complex systems, and a better ability to work with potential user needs, and for programming closer to the user in a chaotic system, that can be more useful than understanding NP completeness and context free grammars.
Tl;dr I think we’re violently agreeing with one another. US universities shouldn’t be so aggressively focused on turning out graduates who will become productive, rich worker bees, and using an academic field of study to do so is corrupting the academic field & not ideal for the students.