10 ms·

Dyson opens Britain’s first degree where students get paid

112 points by ollysmit 10y ago

qxt 10y ago
Call me skeptical but I'm looking for the gotcha. Nothing yet, but here's the FAQ https://www.dysoninstitute.com/faqs/ https://www.dysoninstitute.com/faqs/ If there's no clause about having to work for Dyson after the program, then it will be a no-brainer for engineering students. I wonder if the normal structures of career centers will still be present/emphasized, since I'm sure Dyson would not be interested in its grads seeking employment at competitors.
- RubenSandwich 10y ago
  One gotcha is that the degree might not be accredited. At least that is what I understand from this sentence in the article: "It’s a £15m project which, if successful, Dyson hopes to eventually gain university status and award its own degrees to up to 100 students a year." However I admire Dyson's efforts to train the people they need. Edit: Actually maybe it is accredited. From the Dyson Institute's FAQs: "What is the Dyson Institute of Technology? The Dyson Institute of Technology teaches high quality engineering degrees to the next generation of tech enthusiasts, alongside a full time role at Dyson. During this four year programme you’ll learn about engineering through hands-on experience in our Research and Development department with academic training provided by WMG, the University of Warwick. You'll graduate with a Bachelor of Engineering degree."
  - chrisseaton 10y ago
    I think a bachelor degree would be unusual for the UK. Aren't most engineering degrees in the UK undergraduate masters?
    - alexbilbie 10y ago
      Not necessarily; the University of Lincoln which has one of the newest engineering schools (in partnership with Siemens) offers undergraduate bachelor of engineering degrees - http://lincoln.ac.uk/home/engineering/undergraduate/ http://lincoln.ac.uk/home/engineering/undergraduate/
    - gadders 10y ago
      You normally do a Bachelor of Engineering - B.Eng.
      - chrisseaton 10y ago
        I think if you apply to any university they'll strongly recommend that you should be doing the MEng instead. The BEng isn't enough to even get chartered is it? So you'd need to do another degree anyway.
        paperpunk 10y ago
        If the unis I've looked at are any indication then many offer an integrated masters programme but most students will be on the bachelors route. At the institution where I work (Uni of York) many more BEng degrees are awarded than MEng.
        lol768 10y ago
        You don't need the Masters degree to be a chartered engineer as far as I know. If you graduate and gain enough experience on the job (probably more cost effective than being at uni for another year) to be considered to have an equivalent standard of education I believe you can become a CEng with a presentation.
  - prefect42 10y ago
    That last sentence is not a clear statement. Is that supposed to mean: that any accreditation by UofWarwick somehow applies to Dyson as well? The FAQ simply doesn't mention any accreditation whatsoever specifically for Dyson. Could be rather important, one way or the other.
    - nicoburns 10y ago
      It's fairly standard for non-academic teaching organisations to have their degrees sponsored by an established university. For example the Centre for Alternative Technology offers a number of masters courses without itself being a university [0]. This is probably more common for postgrad courses, but no reason why it couldn't work for undergrad too. https://gse.cat.org.uk https://gse.cat.org.uk
      - dbbk 10y ago
        It's actually also quite common for undergraduate courses in the media industries.
      - KJP191 10y ago
        Academic teaching organisations too, for that matter. It's quite common for a college to also offer some degree-level courses that are accredited by a local university. (Note to non-Brits: "college" in the UK is mostly for lower-level and vocational courses, it's not a synonym for university like in the US)
- tomarr 10y ago
  I would guess the 'gotcha' is it's only a course for 25 people, and more comparable to a scholarship rather than a new model for engineering teaching. It looks great, and I'm sure it will be a great education for the lucky few, but I am skeptical that it would scale to larger numbers. The incentives are there at the macro level but not the micro which would be needed to encourage a broad range of companies to participate.
- gghh 10y ago
  There is no need to look in the fine print for reasons why this model could not be all around beneficial. It's right there in the headline: private corporation finances education degree. Dyson have all the interests to do so, as it will attract talent and every drop of the student's time is devoted to learn material that will be 100% applicable to their day to day functions in the enterprise. In more general terms, if all education worked this way we'll only be studying the inner workings of vacuum cleaners (or computers, or anything else that is a commercial product) and not abstract math, theoretical physics or philosophy. It might work in this particular case, but a society should be vigilant in not selling out to commercial entities all means of education. Again, I am very happy of this particular project and hope it can reduce unemployment -- but wary of saying "Aha! Why don't we do this everywhere!?"
orcdork 10y ago
Dyson, the billionaire who backed Brexit, is worried that there aren't enough engineers in the UK. Hah.
- mobiuscog 10y ago
  Part of the reason we don't have the people is because we rely on 'Europe' to provide everything.
  - bildung 10y ago
    Why is that not a problem for the other EU member states?
  - Maken 10y ago
    And importing talent is bad because...
    - fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
      The UK has two problems: 1. We need lots of skilled people. 2. We have lots of people lacking skills. Importing talent solves problem (1) (and grows the economy and is generally and genuinely a good thing). But problem (2) remains. Why not try to solve both at once?
      - jackweirdy 10y ago
        We also have lots of skilled people missing work. All three problems are related, none are the root cause
        rahimnathwani 10y ago
        Skilled at what?
        jackweirdy 10y ago
mobiuscog 10y ago
Effectively he's bringing back apprenticeships the way they should be. It's far more useful than the current University arrangement, where 'everyone' gets to pay money to drink for 3 years (whilst studying) and then either drop back into the market looking for useful work, or go on to spend even more time making Academia seem worthwhile. We used to be world leaders in engineering and production in the UK - now we just have students everywhere, with no jobs to go to as we import pretty much everything. Okay - slightly over-dramatic, but at least Dyson is trying to do something useful.
- dbbk 10y ago
  > It's far more useful than the current University arrangement, where 'everyone' gets to pay money to drink for 3 years As shallow as it sounds though, it is bloody good fun.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    "pay money to drink for 3 years" Or 4 years here in Scotland - which reminds me that the university department where I studied and worked was in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh - which is an exceptional location for boozing.
  - fillskills 10y ago
    The begs a question- why cant we have as much fun without paying through the nose
    - arethuza 10y ago
      Oddly enough the current situation in Scotland is that people from the rest of the UK do pay fees when attending Scottish universities but people from Scotland and the rest of the EU don't.
    - dbbk 10y ago
      Well when you consider the student loan you're technically not paying for it, the government is loaning you the money to do it, with no expectation that you will pay them back.
EwanToo 10y ago
This does look interesting, but there's already degree apprentices out there doing essentially this in various employers, with an accredited degree at the end of the process. We have a couple working in our office, and I've been hugely impressed by them https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/apprenticeships/students/digital--technology-solutions/ https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/apprenticeships/students/digital--tec...
- benh14 10y ago
  As someone currently doing a very similar kind of thing(gap year working for company + part sponsorship through uni), I don't know why more companies don't do this - We're incredibly cost effective for the work we actually provide, even if its just doing work that noone else wants to.
stefantalpalaru 10y ago
Do they also provide training for breaking into sawmills, stealing industrial designs, applying them to vacuum cleaners and patenting them so you can accumulate wealth thanks to a state granted monopoly? http://machinedesign.com/news/industrial-design-design-dyson-way http://machinedesign.com/news/industrial-design-design-dyson... : > As it happened, Dyson was also having suction problems at the factory which made his Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow he invented that uses a ball instead of a wheel. There, overspray of an epoxy powder was collected on an 8 8-ft cloth screen in front of a gigantic fan with a three-phase motor — a sort-of giant vacuum cleaner. Production had to stop every hour to brush out the screen and gather the powder for reuse. Otherwise, the screen would clog and powder would fly all over the factory. > The spray-equipment maker said large industrial users collected airborne debris in a cyclone. The cyclone, it turned out, was a 30-ft-high cone that spun dust out of the air using centrifugal force — the kind of thing you might see on top of a saw mill. > Under cover of darkness, Dyson went to a nearby sawmill, climbed the fence, and “surveyed at close hand the gigantic symbol of my future.” He made some sketches and climbed all over it to learn how it worked, what its proportions were, and what it was made of. > The next day, Dyson and his workers welded a 30-ft cyclone together from sheets of steel and attached it to the roof. He “gleefully” tore the cloth screen from the opening of the duct and started the conveyor. The overspray “went straight into the gaping hole, up the [duct work] and around the walls at the top of the cyclone, spiraling down through the inverted cone to be collected by a bag at the bottom, while the air escaped into the sky. Production went on and on, with no stoppages until the end of the day,” says Dyson. > The similarity between ripping off the cloth filter and tossing out a vacuum-cleaner bag was obvious. It also occurred to him there was “no reason why it shouldn’t work in miniature, using a cyclone about the size of, say, a Perrier bottle.” That night, Dysonmodeled a foot-long version of the cyclone out of cardboard and duct tape. He covered the large end, leaving a hole in the top for the escaping air. Then, he attached a short length of hose to the discharge hole of the machine (where the bag had been) and connected it to the top of the cyclone, which was fixed to the shaft of the cleaner. The world’s only bagless vacuum cleaner worked flawlessly.
- abstractbeliefs 10y ago
  And what's specifically wrong with this, aside from the way the information was specifically acquired? In tech, we bemoan laws against technological breaking and entering with a view to learn about how things work (we call it reverse engineering), but applied to mechanical engineers this is not right? While I understand the law regarding trespass is different, this is just a means to an end. I think your argument would hold more weight if you could elaborate more on the patent and monopoly stuff, but instead you focus on the act and context of learning how the cyclone works.
partycoder 10y ago
Do they have a commitment to Dyson once they receive their degree? Because, if they do, Dyson might actually also have a strong influence over their salary and other forms of compensation and benefits once they do.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  In Germany they have "Berufsakademie". You get paid by a company while you go to school 6 months a year and are a sort of intern the other 6 months. and usually you are expected to work there but it's not enforced in any way. The starting salaries are the same as graduates from other colleges. It's a pretty good deal in my view.
  - jclos 10y ago
    We have the same in France, called "alternance" degrees. It's either like you describe 6 months studying, 6 months working or something more short term. You can get into something like that from your third year to your masters, and you get paid an increasing amount depending on the company and which year you are, starting with very little (just enough to survive, something like 500€/month) and ending with a reasonable stipend (around 1200€/month on average among my friends). For fields like software engineering I believe it is the best way to get a proper education.
wkoszek 10y ago
In Poland getting paid to study certain topics is quite popular. Very often companies will approach universities to open sponsored track. This happens when they're giving up on hiring and instead trying to raise the generation of people who know their industry. It happened on my university -- that's how we got "energy engineering" for several power plants around my city.
Futurebot 10y ago
How exactly does this square with the UK CS grad unemployment crisis? https://www.studyinternational.com/news/uk-computer-science-has-the-highest-rate-of-unemployed-graduates https://www.studyinternational.com/news/uk-computer-science-... http://blog.hefce.ac.uk/2015/07/08/unemployment-among-computer-science-graduates-what-does-the-data-say/ http://blog.hefce.ac.uk/2015/07/08/unemployment-among-comput... “For a long time we wondered why more people didn’t major in computer science,” Alex Aiken, chair of Stanford University’s Computer Science Department, told Times Higher Education. “Everyone in the field believed it was the future and that [it] represented an important way of thinking. Now the world believes us, and we have an overwhelming number of students.”
- ropiku 10y ago
  Simply because you have a CS degree doesn't mean you're qualified enough to be hired. Companies don't just hire based on a degree, they want demonstrable skills. I've seen 3rd year students unable to fix a basic java compilation error in their own program. No reasonable CS graduate I know is unemployed.
  - pvaldes 10y ago
    Demonstrable skills? Of course, here you are the results of my 100 exams, that I passed sucessfully. In an officially certified document, easy to authenticate. Its called curriculum, and is comfortably standardized for all students so you can find the best easily. Otherwise you would need to compare among random arbitrary sets of skills, different for each one of your candidates and this would be for companies basically like playing blind chicken to hire a candidate. You need still to show demonstrable skills is often a way to say "I expect you to work for free until you realize that this is the real game here. I will replace you with the next hungry guy in the queue". Is just a mean to obtain the same cheaper, or free.
    - rahimnathwani 10y ago
      A CS degree isn't 'comfortably standardised'. Each university has its own curriculum, its own exams, and its own standards. If I could prove to you that I was awarded a CS degree from a UK university, would that be sufficient for you to agree to employ me?
jlebrech 10y ago
I read about this, this morning and immediately thought of this Mark Cuban comment on building universities https://youtu.be/UgdNTzul27k?t=1m18s https://youtu.be/UgdNTzul27k?t=1m18s
sgt101 10y ago
Oh come on. http://www.btplc.com/Careercentre/Ourlocations/UK/Apprenticeships/OurProgrammes/TrainingAndDevelopment/index.htm http://www.btplc.com/Careercentre/Ourlocations/UK/Apprentice... And many other companies as well.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  I don't think this is meant to be an apprenticeship. This is more a tertiary education. There is a similar system in Germany which is called "Berufsfachschule", which could be translated with "university of cooperative education".
  - sgt101 10y ago
    But part of the apprenticeship scheme (the BT one at least) is a degree. - work in a high tech campus - work on projects for the company - go to lectures - get a degree - from a University I am all for the Dyson initiative, but people should be more aware that this is an option!
bcheung 10y ago
Finally people are starting to understand the value of an apprenticeship system. The student loan fiasco is something that doesn't need to exist.
chadcmulligan 10y ago
I'm in Australia, when I grew up degrees were free and the government paid an allowance if your family was poor or you were classed as independent - which means you worked for 2 years after school. So I ended up getting a degree after starting work as an apprentice. The days of an allowance are long gone, Uni degrees now cost here, but not as much as the folks across the pond seem to pay from what I can gather. Would I have gone to uni in todays conditions? probably. would I have finished - hard to say, 3 years of scrabbling for money would have perhaps changed things. The bit I can't figure out is why in the 70's and 80's we could afford that, but now we can't. I suspect it's peoples life style expectations, and the greed of those who earn money to not want to pay taxes. I don't like paying tax any more than the next person but if you want a functioning society taxes are necessary and the only way of redistributing wealth.

112 points by ollysmit 10y ago

qxt 10y ago

Call me skeptical but I'm looking for the gotcha. Nothing yet, but here's the FAQ https://www.dysoninstitute.com/faqs/ https://www.dysoninstitute.com/faqs/ If there's no clause about having to work for Dyson after the program, then it will be a no-brainer for engineering students. I wonder if the normal structures of career centers will still be present/emphasized, since I'm sure Dyson would not be interested in its grads seeking employment at competitors.

RubenSandwich 10y ago
One gotcha is that the degree might not be accredited. At least that is what I understand from this sentence in the article: "It’s a £15m project which, if successful, Dyson hopes to eventually gain university status and award its own degrees to up to 100 students a year." However I admire Dyson's efforts to train the people they need. Edit: Actually maybe it is accredited. From the Dyson Institute's FAQs: "What is the Dyson Institute of Technology? The Dyson Institute of Technology teaches high quality engineering degrees to the next generation of tech enthusiasts, alongside a full time role at Dyson. During this four year programme you’ll learn about engineering through hands-on experience in our Research and Development department with academic training provided by WMG, the University of Warwick. You'll graduate with a Bachelor of Engineering degree."
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  I think a bachelor degree would be unusual for the UK. Aren't most engineering degrees in the UK undergraduate masters?
  - alexbilbie 10y ago
    Not necessarily; the University of Lincoln which has one of the newest engineering schools (in partnership with Siemens) offers undergraduate bachelor of engineering degrees - http://lincoln.ac.uk/home/engineering/undergraduate/ http://lincoln.ac.uk/home/engineering/undergraduate/
  - gadders 10y ago
    You normally do a Bachelor of Engineering - B.Eng.
    - chrisseaton 10y ago
      I think if you apply to any university they'll strongly recommend that you should be doing the MEng instead. The BEng isn't enough to even get chartered is it? So you'd need to do another degree anyway.
      - paperpunk 10y ago
        If the unis I've looked at are any indication then many offer an integrated masters programme but most students will be on the bachelors route. At the institution where I work (Uni of York) many more BEng degrees are awarded than MEng.
      - lol768 10y ago
        You don't need the Masters degree to be a chartered engineer as far as I know. If you graduate and gain enough experience on the job (probably more cost effective than being at uni for another year) to be considered to have an equivalent standard of education I believe you can become a CEng with a presentation.
- prefect42 10y ago
  That last sentence is not a clear statement. Is that supposed to mean: that any accreditation by UofWarwick somehow applies to Dyson as well? The FAQ simply doesn't mention any accreditation whatsoever specifically for Dyson. Could be rather important, one way or the other.
  - nicoburns 10y ago
    It's fairly standard for non-academic teaching organisations to have their degrees sponsored by an established university. For example the Centre for Alternative Technology offers a number of masters courses without itself being a university [0]. This is probably more common for postgrad courses, but no reason why it couldn't work for undergrad too. https://gse.cat.org.uk https://gse.cat.org.uk
    - dbbk 10y ago
      It's actually also quite common for undergraduate courses in the media industries.
    - KJP191 10y ago
      Academic teaching organisations too, for that matter. It's quite common for a college to also offer some degree-level courses that are accredited by a local university. (Note to non-Brits: "college" in the UK is mostly for lower-level and vocational courses, it's not a synonym for university like in the US)
tomarr 10y ago
I would guess the 'gotcha' is it's only a course for 25 people, and more comparable to a scholarship rather than a new model for engineering teaching. It looks great, and I'm sure it will be a great education for the lucky few, but I am skeptical that it would scale to larger numbers. The incentives are there at the macro level but not the micro which would be needed to encourage a broad range of companies to participate.
gghh 10y ago
There is no need to look in the fine print for reasons why this model could not be all around beneficial. It's right there in the headline: private corporation finances education degree. Dyson have all the interests to do so, as it will attract talent and every drop of the student's time is devoted to learn material that will be 100% applicable to their day to day functions in the enterprise. In more general terms, if all education worked this way we'll only be studying the inner workings of vacuum cleaners (or computers, or anything else that is a commercial product) and not abstract math, theoretical physics or philosophy. It might work in this particular case, but a society should be vigilant in not selling out to commercial entities all means of education. Again, I am very happy of this particular project and hope it can reduce unemployment -- but wary of saying "Aha! Why don't we do this everywhere!?"

orcdork 10y ago

Dyson, the billionaire who backed Brexit, is worried that there aren't enough engineers in the UK. Hah.

mobiuscog 10y ago
Part of the reason we don't have the people is because we rely on 'Europe' to provide everything.
- bildung 10y ago
  Why is that not a problem for the other EU member states?
- Maken 10y ago
  And importing talent is bad because...
  - fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
    The UK has two problems: 1. We need lots of skilled people. 2. We have lots of people lacking skills. Importing talent solves problem (1) (and grows the economy and is generally and genuinely a good thing). But problem (2) remains. Why not try to solve both at once?
    - jackweirdy 10y ago
      We also have lots of skilled people missing work. All three problems are related, none are the root cause
      - rahimnathwani 10y ago
        Skilled at what?
        jackweirdy 10y ago

mobiuscog 10y ago

Effectively he's bringing back apprenticeships the way they should be. It's far more useful than the current University arrangement, where 'everyone' gets to pay money to drink for 3 years (whilst studying) and then either drop back into the market looking for useful work, or go on to spend even more time making Academia seem worthwhile. We used to be world leaders in engineering and production in the UK - now we just have students everywhere, with no jobs to go to as we import pretty much everything. Okay - slightly over-dramatic, but at least Dyson is trying to do something useful.

dbbk 10y ago
> It's far more useful than the current University arrangement, where 'everyone' gets to pay money to drink for 3 years As shallow as it sounds though, it is bloody good fun.
- arethuza 10y ago
  "pay money to drink for 3 years" Or 4 years here in Scotland - which reminds me that the university department where I studied and worked was in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh - which is an exceptional location for boozing.
- fillskills 10y ago
  The begs a question- why cant we have as much fun without paying through the nose
  - arethuza 10y ago
    Oddly enough the current situation in Scotland is that people from the rest of the UK do pay fees when attending Scottish universities but people from Scotland and the rest of the EU don't.
  - dbbk 10y ago
    Well when you consider the student loan you're technically not paying for it, the government is loaning you the money to do it, with no expectation that you will pay them back.

EwanToo 10y ago

This does look interesting, but there's already degree apprentices out there doing essentially this in various employers, with an accredited degree at the end of the process. We have a couple working in our office, and I've been hugely impressed by them https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/apprenticeships/students/digital--technology-solutions/ https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/apprenticeships/students/digital--tec...

benh14 10y ago
As someone currently doing a very similar kind of thing(gap year working for company + part sponsorship through uni), I don't know why more companies don't do this - We're incredibly cost effective for the work we actually provide, even if its just doing work that noone else wants to.

stefantalpalaru 10y ago

Do they also provide training for breaking into sawmills, stealing industrial designs, applying them to vacuum cleaners and patenting them so you can accumulate wealth thanks to a state granted monopoly? http://machinedesign.com/news/industrial-design-design-dyson-way http://machinedesign.com/news/industrial-design-design-dyson... : > As it happened, Dyson was also having suction problems at the factory which made his Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow he invented that uses a ball instead of a wheel. There, overspray of an epoxy powder was collected on an 8 8-ft cloth screen in front of a gigantic fan with a three-phase motor — a sort-of giant vacuum cleaner. Production had to stop every hour to brush out the screen and gather the powder for reuse. Otherwise, the screen would clog and powder would fly all over the factory. > The spray-equipment maker said large industrial users collected airborne debris in a cyclone. The cyclone, it turned out, was a 30-ft-high cone that spun dust out of the air using centrifugal force — the kind of thing you might see on top of a saw mill. > Under cover of darkness, Dyson went to a nearby sawmill, climbed the fence, and “surveyed at close hand the gigantic symbol of my future.” He made some sketches and climbed all over it to learn how it worked, what its proportions were, and what it was made of. > The next day, Dyson and his workers welded a 30-ft cyclone together from sheets of steel and attached it to the roof. He “gleefully” tore the cloth screen from the opening of the duct and started the conveyor. The overspray “went straight into the gaping hole, up the [duct work] and around the walls at the top of the cyclone, spiraling down through the inverted cone to be collected by a bag at the bottom, while the air escaped into the sky. Production went on and on, with no stoppages until the end of the day,” says Dyson. > The similarity between ripping off the cloth filter and tossing out a vacuum-cleaner bag was obvious. It also occurred to him there was “no reason why it shouldn’t work in miniature, using a cyclone about the size of, say, a Perrier bottle.” That night, Dysonmodeled a foot-long version of the cyclone out of cardboard and duct tape. He covered the large end, leaving a hole in the top for the escaping air. Then, he attached a short length of hose to the discharge hole of the machine (where the bag had been) and connected it to the top of the cyclone, which was fixed to the shaft of the cleaner. The world’s only bagless vacuum cleaner worked flawlessly.

abstractbeliefs 10y ago
And what's specifically wrong with this, aside from the way the information was specifically acquired? In tech, we bemoan laws against technological breaking and entering with a view to learn about how things work (we call it reverse engineering), but applied to mechanical engineers this is not right? While I understand the law regarding trespass is different, this is just a means to an end. I think your argument would hold more weight if you could elaborate more on the patent and monopoly stuff, but instead you focus on the act and context of learning how the cyclone works.

partycoder 10y ago

Do they have a commitment to Dyson once they receive their degree? Because, if they do, Dyson might actually also have a strong influence over their salary and other forms of compensation and benefits once they do.

maxxxxx 10y ago
In Germany they have "Berufsakademie". You get paid by a company while you go to school 6 months a year and are a sort of intern the other 6 months. and usually you are expected to work there but it's not enforced in any way. The starting salaries are the same as graduates from other colleges. It's a pretty good deal in my view.
- jclos 10y ago
  We have the same in France, called "alternance" degrees. It's either like you describe 6 months studying, 6 months working or something more short term. You can get into something like that from your third year to your masters, and you get paid an increasing amount depending on the company and which year you are, starting with very little (just enough to survive, something like 500€/month) and ending with a reasonable stipend (around 1200€/month on average among my friends). For fields like software engineering I believe it is the best way to get a proper education.

wkoszek 10y ago

In Poland getting paid to study certain topics is quite popular. Very often companies will approach universities to open sponsored track. This happens when they're giving up on hiring and instead trying to raise the generation of people who know their industry. It happened on my university -- that's how we got "energy engineering" for several power plants around my city.

Futurebot 10y ago

How exactly does this square with the UK CS grad unemployment crisis? https://www.studyinternational.com/news/uk-computer-science-has-the-highest-rate-of-unemployed-graduates https://www.studyinternational.com/news/uk-computer-science-... http://blog.hefce.ac.uk/2015/07/08/unemployment-among-computer-science-graduates-what-does-the-data-say/ http://blog.hefce.ac.uk/2015/07/08/unemployment-among-comput... “For a long time we wondered why more people didn’t major in computer science,” Alex Aiken, chair of Stanford University’s Computer Science Department, told Times Higher Education. “Everyone in the field believed it was the future and that [it] represented an important way of thinking. Now the world believes us, and we have an overwhelming number of students.”

ropiku 10y ago
Simply because you have a CS degree doesn't mean you're qualified enough to be hired. Companies don't just hire based on a degree, they want demonstrable skills. I've seen 3rd year students unable to fix a basic java compilation error in their own program. No reasonable CS graduate I know is unemployed.
- pvaldes 10y ago
  Demonstrable skills? Of course, here you are the results of my 100 exams, that I passed sucessfully. In an officially certified document, easy to authenticate. Its called curriculum, and is comfortably standardized for all students so you can find the best easily. Otherwise you would need to compare among random arbitrary sets of skills, different for each one of your candidates and this would be for companies basically like playing blind chicken to hire a candidate. You need still to show demonstrable skills is often a way to say "I expect you to work for free until you realize that this is the real game here. I will replace you with the next hungry guy in the queue". Is just a mean to obtain the same cheaper, or free.
  - rahimnathwani 10y ago
    A CS degree isn't 'comfortably standardised'. Each university has its own curriculum, its own exams, and its own standards. If I could prove to you that I was awarded a CS degree from a UK university, would that be sufficient for you to agree to employ me?

jlebrech 10y ago

I read about this, this morning and immediately thought of this Mark Cuban comment on building universities https://youtu.be/UgdNTzul27k?t=1m18s https://youtu.be/UgdNTzul27k?t=1m18s

sgt101 10y ago

Oh come on. http://www.btplc.com/Careercentre/Ourlocations/UK/Apprenticeships/OurProgrammes/TrainingAndDevelopment/index.htm http://www.btplc.com/Careercentre/Ourlocations/UK/Apprentice... And many other companies as well.

tobltobs 10y ago
I don't think this is meant to be an apprenticeship. This is more a tertiary education. There is a similar system in Germany which is called "Berufsfachschule", which could be translated with "university of cooperative education".
- sgt101 10y ago
  But part of the apprenticeship scheme (the BT one at least) is a degree. - work in a high tech campus - work on projects for the company - go to lectures - get a degree - from a University I am all for the Dyson initiative, but people should be more aware that this is an option!

bcheung 10y ago

Finally people are starting to understand the value of an apprenticeship system. The student loan fiasco is something that doesn't need to exist.

chadcmulligan 10y ago

I'm in Australia, when I grew up degrees were free and the government paid an allowance if your family was poor or you were classed as independent - which means you worked for 2 years after school. So I ended up getting a degree after starting work as an apprentice. The days of an allowance are long gone, Uni degrees now cost here, but not as much as the folks across the pond seem to pay from what I can gather. Would I have gone to uni in todays conditions? probably. would I have finished - hard to say, 3 years of scrabbling for money would have perhaps changed things. The bit I can't figure out is why in the 70's and 80's we could afford that, but now we can't. I suspect it's peoples life style expectations, and the greed of those who earn money to not want to pay taxes. I don't like paying tax any more than the next person but if you want a functioning society taxes are necessary and the only way of redistributing wealth.