this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Universities aren't there to teach marketable skills, and they never have been.
In fact they get quite snotty about the distinction; they're not some trade school, ugh.
They go and market themselves as employment-enablers, because that drives enrolments which drives funding, but a large percentage of adademics see undergrads as a vexing and demeaning distraction from their real work of writing grant proposals. Which to be fair is what their whole career (and the existence of their employer) depends and is judged on, so...
The other thing is that there's two skillsets involved here: learning to use a specific set of tools and techniques to produce a desired outcome (the trade part), and learning to wrestle large, unwieldly and interconnected tasks in general, while picking up the required specific knowledge along the way (the adademic part).
Teaching just the trade part gets you people who are competent in narrowly-defined roles for now, but it doesn't necessarily get you adaptable, resilient, bigger-picture people with common sense and a strategic outlook. Teaching just the academic part gets you people who aren't necessarily productive right now, but have a lot of potential wherever you put them.
Employers would like to hire people who are both. They're also lazy and cheap, and will use anything they can get their hands on as a resume-filter because they aren't willing to put time and money into usefully evaluating someone's potential usefulness as an employee. If they can farm that off to the universities to do (and the students to pay for), they're happy to let a degree stand in as a not-chaff marker they can require of all their candidates. It's like bad video game designers using bullet sponges to 'increase the difficulty'.
Teaching CS is important and useful, but the benefits only really pay off longterm - apart from the bullet-sponge factor.
Teaching programming is important and useful, but the benefits can be short-term and dead-end.
If you only pick one... depends on whether you can afford to eat while those nebulous long-term benefits slowly kick in.
Universities should communicate these things better, and employers should be incentivised to stop using junk degree-requirements to offset their laziness and incompetence. Make it so for every position they require a degree for, they're taxed the tuition fees for that degree every year.
Agree agree
It used to be that working was working, and it prepared you for making a living, and education was education, and it prepared you for picking your head up above the melee and seeing what was coming and what needed to happen and adjusting (and adjusting your society) accordingly. That system worked well.
Then we entered into a little closed feedback loop of "degrees make money" -> "holy shit, I want a degree" -> "we need people to give all these thirsty people degrees" -> "well we gotta make it easier to get one then" -> "open more schools" -> "pump em in pump em out get those stacks, yay tuition" -> "more tuition" -> "student loans" -> "hey now we can REALLY charge tuition" -> "argh this degree doesn't even help me with my job which was the purpose" -> "fuck these loans are six figures and I still don't have a job" -> SYSTEM ERROR REDO FROM START
At this point, aside from some outliers which still attempt to provide a good education, the majority of undergrad programs are as far as I can tell just like a big young adult day-care program and a fairly ineffective job-training center. The educational purpose is still there depending on the professor but the wider system only cares about it every now and then, by accident.
System is fucked
It is bothersome, because actual education is actually really important. Especially in the US we really need it right now.
So well said, up vote wasn't enough.
I attended three different institutions at various points of my life and still didn't see some of the soft skills and basic business etiquette taught. I see young career people come into business with no idea how to attend meetings, answer phones, deal with expectations, etc. I'm not saying those can't be learned on the job and added on top of an education that was meant to empower people to learn things on their own, but when they're also tens of thousands in dept and can't do basic professional tasks, makes me question what right looks like.