After several months of work, a new curriculum for computer science has been approved at Drew University. I’ve posted the proposal.
Computer science is an unusually broad discipline. Computer scientists practice in application areas ranging from art to hardware and from complexity theory to cognitive science. In preparing students for graduate school, the best learning we can make available is that of the process of innovation, so that students will be well-acquainted with looking at a problem space, evaluating what has yet to be done, designing, and implementing a solution. Having chosen a specific sub-specialty upon entering graduate school
they will select courses that provide the necessary foundational
material for that pursuit. Given that the overwhelming majority of students earning bachelor’s degrees in computer science choose to work in industry, an undergraduate curriculum must prepare students for careers in industry as well…perhaps as its primary focus.
NSF published a study last week that reports on what graduates from science and engineering programs were doing a year after graduation in 2003. Students who acquired a bachelor’s degree in 2001 and 2002 in fields that fall into computer and information sciences chose to go to industry rather than graduate school for the most part. Of approximately 45,000 people surveyed, 38,600 were employed in a science and engineering occupation. The average annual salary for these students was $45,000. The ratio of computing bachelor’s degree holders in industry to those in graduate school is striking (about 6:1) when compared to other sciences such as physics where the ratio is (about 1:3) or social sciences as a whole (about 1:4).
The full report is available here:
Characteristics of Recent Science and Engineering Graduates: 2003I’ve just begun a new position at Drew University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. In addition to teaching and research, I was hired to revise the CS curriculum and build the program.
Following is a woefully incomplete set of ideas at the very earliest stage of development…
At Drew, few of our undergraduate CS majors go on to graduate school.
Instead, most go directly into industry. In order to compete for jobs that are difficult to offshore, I believe our students need to have an understanding of the customers served by organizations for whom they work and an ability to innovate within those markets.
I’m considering a significant departure from traditional CS programs in a curriculum based on a small core that teaches algorithmic problem solving as a foundation and develops critical thinking through experience in one or more concentration areas. I believe the focus on innovation will also do a better job of preparing students for many graduate programs.
Specifically, I’m talking about core something like:
Grady Booch, responds to a Computer World article I cited on 2 May. In this article Gary Anthes interviewed several researcher/educators at leading computer science institutions. Topics in this article included, among other things, the future of IT/computer science/software engineering and what must be done to make these fields appealing once again to students. It strikes me that in critizing (albeit respectfully) the fact that each person interviewed talked about their own research area as the future of computing, Mr. Booch takes a similar stance from the perspective of a software engineer. He posits that exposing students to the beauty of software will lead them to pursue this discipline. A comment posted by Mark Guzdial of Georgia Tech. in response to this article is interesting. In this comment, Mr. Guzdial takes issue with Mr. Booch’s stance and states that, “The reason why students aren’t studying computer science anymore is because we teach it de-contextualized. Students come into an introductory computer science course because they’re excited about computing technology: iPods and the Web, cryptography and bioinformatics. Then we teach them about fibonacci numbers and towers of hanoi–and they justifiably feel gypped.” See Mr. Booch’s article and the resulting comments.