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When I was a student representative on the Computer Science curriculum committee (over ten years ago now, at an engineering college, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst

When I was a student representative on the Computer Science curriculum committee (over ten years ago now, at an engineering college, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) the concerns were not about how we can ensure students learn more about database systems or concurrent programming. They were solely based around an almost exasperated set of older professors who were shocked that new students didn't seem to know what they knew before, and were unable to handle the curriculum as it had been. For example several first year students not only had no familiarity with calculus, many were having a hard time with algebraic concepts. Concern was around finding some way to add a remedial math course before Calc 1. This pushed everything else out farther. CS grads may lack foundational knowledge simply because high school grads lack foundational knowledge. What it took to "pass" high school 30-50 years ago seems substantially more rigorous than today. The administration didn't care. They didn't even care if the students dropped out. Butts in seats = more money. That's it.

thwayunion 4y ago
This is it -- colleges and universities are desperate for butts in seats ~> admissions standards slip ~> first year is remedial ~> lots of stuff gets dropped in later years. Another major consideration: "CS degree" is a misnomer in the US. We have thousands of colleges and universities that vary from "best in the world" the "literally fraudulent". I've even come across a few small colleges where the CS department is staffed entirely by people with a few years of industry experience and an MS, who likely wouldn't even clear the bar for a senior eng role.
- ben7799 4y ago
  This is definitely not a US problem either. Foreign CS degrees are extremely variable in their quality as well.
ben7799 4y ago
I went to Rensselaer as well, graduated 24 years ago. I am mostly shocked at the stuff it is obvious other schools are not interested in teaching these days in terms of core computer science curriculum. Maybe the issues around high school math are part of it, but this was kind of obvious in the 1990s as well, I remember sharing a cube as an intern with a graduate student at another well known school and they were taking graduate classes in the summer and were using the same book for a supposed graduate class that I had for a class my freshman year at RPI. I think RPI's core program requiring Data Structures & Analysis, Fundamentals of CS/Models of Computation, Programming Language Design, study of Grammars, etc.. is an outlier for undergraduate CS curriculum. It seems rare I come across someone who can analyze the complexity of an algorithm, check if something can be parsed by a Regular Expression, really understands recursive algorithms, etc.. unless they went to graduate school, and the industry doesn't seem to expect people to understand this stuff. But you can't necessarily generalize. Not all high schools are the same and they never were. And old professors at RPI are just mirroring the historical reputation of RPI as a tough school. In the past they probably just had more freedom to fail all those students out of the school.

thwayunion 4y ago

This is it -- colleges and universities are desperate for butts in seats ~> admissions standards slip ~> first year is remedial ~> lots of stuff gets dropped in later years. Another major consideration: "CS degree" is a misnomer in the US. We have thousands of colleges and universities that vary from "best in the world" the "literally fraudulent". I've even come across a few small colleges where the CS department is staffed entirely by people with a few years of industry experience and an MS, who likely wouldn't even clear the bar for a senior eng role.

ben7799 4y ago
This is definitely not a US problem either. Foreign CS degrees are extremely variable in their quality as well.

ben7799 4y ago

I went to Rensselaer as well, graduated 24 years ago. I am mostly shocked at the stuff it is obvious other schools are not interested in teaching these days in terms of core computer science curriculum. Maybe the issues around high school math are part of it, but this was kind of obvious in the 1990s as well, I remember sharing a cube as an intern with a graduate student at another well known school and they were taking graduate classes in the summer and were using the same book for a supposed graduate class that I had for a class my freshman year at RPI. I think RPI's core program requiring Data Structures & Analysis, Fundamentals of CS/Models of Computation, Programming Language Design, study of Grammars, etc.. is an outlier for undergraduate CS curriculum. It seems rare I come across someone who can analyze the complexity of an algorithm, check if something can be parsed by a Regular Expression, really understands recursive algorithms, etc.. unless they went to graduate school, and the industry doesn't seem to expect people to understand this stuff. But you can't necessarily generalize. Not all high schools are the same and they never were. And old professors at RPI are just mirroring the historical reputation of RPI as a tough school. In the past they probably just had more freedom to fail all those students out of the school.