White Paper for NSF Northeast Workshop on Integrative Computing Education and Research (ICER)

Daniel D. McCracken, City College, City University of New York (October 22, 2005)

 The biggest challenges facing me as a CS educator preparing students for computing careers is the pace of change. Almost nothing I am now teaching had been invented a dozen years ago. Much of it was not widely taught at the beginning of this century. I spent all of last summer studying the subject matter of my courses this fall, and I still find myself challenging the students to learn a lot of things on their own.

Perhaps that last is not all bad. In fact, we may need to make a virtue of necessity, and enlist students in a joint educational venture. We are urged to inculcate the importance of life-long learning; I tell students that that starts with the next homework assignment. I look at the resume of a student who graduated in 2000, and no more than 10% of the subjects listed are things she learned with us. Of the things she learned on her own or in continuing education, about half are now in our curriculum, in some form.

Part of the difficulty in deciding how to revise curriculum is in knowing just how close to the cutting edge it is wise to be. We would not want to track the latest trends in software development too closely; even if we could do it, which we can’t; that would amount to vocational training. How does one find the balance?

Another major difficulty, as I see it from a vantage point in a large metropolitan area, is knowing what employers want. There are many thousands of employers in the New York City area; no one of them hires more than one or two of our graduates per year, and it is not always the same companies. Employer surveys have produced almost no useful data. About the best we can do is conduct exit interviews with graduating seniors: they at least can tell us what they learned in job hunting and interviews.

What they tell us, of course, is that there are hardly any jobs out there. They presumably tell this to their younger siblings—who decide not to major in CS. The decline in our enrolments, by CS majors, is alarming. There are reports of improvement, but at my school the freshman CS numbers are still dropping. Perhaps this is the usual lag between reality and perception, on the part of high school seniors. Let us hope so.

I assume that what I call “commodity program development” will move to lower-cost locations abroad, as communications costs drop nearly to zero and as other countries accelerate the preparation of computing professionals who know both the fundamentals and the latest technology. I think part of the answer to this tectonic change is in the saying, “You can’t outsource a haircut.” That is, the jobs that stay here will be the ones that require face-to-face contact. That, in turn, means greatly increased emphasis on interpersonal skills, and verbal and written communications skills. These are notoriously difficult things to teach; doing so is extremely labor-intensive for faculty, and it is very difficult to convince some students that any of it matters. Then after they graduate they complain that we didn’t tell them how important writing and speaking are!

The challenges, in summary:

·       Knowing what latest technologies to teach, and what to drop to make room for new things.

·       Knowing what skills—technical and otherwise—employers are going to be demanding two-to-five years from now.

·       Finding or creating the time and incentives for faculty to constantly retool.

·       Possibly changing our approach, and embracing a model in which faculty and students learn together.

·       Finding ways to teach the “soft skills”: interpersonal relations, team functioning, oral and written communications.

·       Surviving a period of greatly reduced enrolments, either waiting for demand to return, or changing our offerings to meet demands that didn’t exist ten years ago.

In terms of the Continuum shown in the workshop guidelines, some of these issues would be usefully addressed by a shift of academic Computer Science somewhat in the direction of Information Systems.