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You make a number of good points but I want to respond to one thing - the failure of education. I think it may not be so much a failure of education as so much

by allenp 15y ago

You make a number of good points but I want to respond to one thing - the failure of education. I think it may not be so much a failure of education as so much the economics of education. The use of a single curriculum reduces complexity and administrative overhead (teacher time) which at the professor level is expensive. If the computer science courses were designed to use multiple methods you could indeed better educate a variety of students but at an increased cost. In my mind the question then is whether or not it is worth the money to educate those that can't succeed with the current teaching method. The entire CS department would need to charge students more per class in order to have more successful students and in order to justify this cost there would need to be a corresponding beneficial pressure for the student to pay those costs (increased demand or higher pay for programmers).

Zikes 15y ago
Wouldn't increasing the success rate by 30-60% pay for itself? If that much of the class fails out after the first course, that's tuition lost for the remainder of the courses, is it not?
- allenp 15y ago
  Possibly, but only if the subsequent classes do not also have the increased staffing costs. I guess my point is that just because this group learns how to assign variables doesn't mean they'll be able to program recursively, understand how a compiler works, or be able to debug the stack and they will need just as much help in those classes as they did at the onset.
- Symmetry 15y ago
  Not really. STEM professors generally get most of their money through grants, so they don't really care about the tuition that students bring in. Plus, teaching uses up resources (both professor time and grad students) that could be used on research that could bring in more grants. But the students who flunk out of CS or other STEM fields usually don't go away, they end up in the humanities instead. There, professors aren't getting a lot of money based on their research, and they usually have a surplus of grad students that they need to put to use somehow. And the college gets the same tuition either way.

by allenp 15y ago

Zikes 15y ago

Wouldn't increasing the success rate by 30-60% pay for itself? If that much of the class fails out after the first course, that's tuition lost for the remainder of the courses, is it not?

allenp 15y ago
Possibly, but only if the subsequent classes do not also have the increased staffing costs. I guess my point is that just because this group learns how to assign variables doesn't mean they'll be able to program recursively, understand how a compiler works, or be able to debug the stack and they will need just as much help in those classes as they did at the onset.
Symmetry 15y ago
Not really. STEM professors generally get most of their money through grants, so they don't really care about the tuition that students bring in. Plus, teaching uses up resources (both professor time and grad students) that could be used on research that could bring in more grants. But the students who flunk out of CS or other STEM fields usually don't go away, they end up in the humanities instead. There, professors aren't getting a lot of money based on their research, and they usually have a surplus of grad students that they need to put to use somehow. And the college gets the same tuition either way.