Not too long ago, I took advantage of my large, corporate employer's training benefit and took a week off for hands-on Hadoop/Hive/Hbase training. My company required I get a cert as part of the benefit, so I went and bit the bullet to take a cert test.
The location of the cert test was at a local Westwood College campus. Westwood is a for-profit institution. This particular campus earns extra money by acting as a testing center for certifications.
The first thing I noticed was the staff was overly-numerous and hugely, unbelievably unprofessional. Despite an appointment made two months in advance, the staff member in charge of administering the tests was nowhere to be found. The staff member present simply told me "She hasn't called. She was here but she went to get lunch." This meant that I had to wait in the admissions office waiting room for an hour. What I saw deeply disturbed me.
Person after person was shepherded in, and guided through the entire student loan application process. The awful part was how completely, utterly unprepared and unequipped these folks were for any kind of academic learning. A young man came in desperately begging the receptionist for help with his Metro fare, telling her that he "had to jump the turnstile" because he couldn't afford to pay for the fare. He was in his 20s and was profoundly ignorant and juvenile in his behavior, at a level one would expect from a middle schooler.
I saw a lot of that. This institution has zero consequences if the hundreds of students walking around that campus are unable to get jobs with the skills taught to them. No, the burden is entirely on the student and the US taxpayer. These for-profit institutions have no admissions requirements. They are nothing more than a giant machine designed to pump subsidized student loan money into their coffers. And in the grand fashion of "iron triangle" style politics in the US, they have huge swarms of lobbyists crawling DC (financed with government loan moeny) to ensure they keep getting the government loan money.
There are many low quality non-profit colleges as well, with negligible admission requirements, and no consequences when students fail. Why do we obsessively focus on the for-profits while giving the non-profits a pass?
Good point. I agree. I recall something being proposed in the state of Oregon: students don't pay tuition up front. Instead, a fixed percentage of a student's income for a designated time period after graduation is paid to the institution. I think this would have some amusingly rapid effects on ALL colleges. You wouldn't see schools like the University of Florida which recently axed their CS program in favor of expanding their English and History programs. My university is a decent one, but efforts to help graduating students get jobs were minimal and token: job fairs? I've attended your school for year, paying tons of money, and your best effort at job placement is a fucking job fair? And let's not forget the out of touch, tenured professors teaching out-dated skills. I'm looking at you, Virginia Tech, for continuing to teach your Introduction to Computer Science class with C++, while MIT and Harvard use Python. Students leave THEIR classes having learned to build things. They leave your shit C++ class having learned to build nothing other than homework solutions that have zero applicability in the real world.
I think this would have some amusingly rapid effects on ALL colleges
Undoubtedly, but would they be positive? Universities are not vocational schools, nor do I think they should be. Their goal should be to give you deep theoretical and philosophical understanding of your field of interest. The practical stuff you can pick up on the job or on your own.
If you don't want that, but rather want to learn the current industry best practice in how to build web apps in Rails, then you should go to a vocational school.
I'm not saying the current system is perfect or even very good, and there is much universities can do to improve. But forcing them to focus 100% on getting their students jobs is not the answer. The answer in my opinion is to stop demanding university degrees for every job, focus a lot more on creating industry specific 1-2 year trade schools for those who just want to learn a useful skill, and let universities be for people who enjoy a heavier focus on theory, research and pushing the state of the art.
Of course not. It's just that its a god-awful way to introduce a general student population to Computer Science. Maybe its ok for CS majors, but even then I'm not sold. I think it should be reserved for a few semesters in, once students have an idea of what they CAN do, then focus on C++ in the sense that its where the real deal performance and mission critical stuff is built.
I assumed that he meant that the kind of homeworks that you can realistically give students in C++ is going to be restricted to very elementary things that are not very representative of the "real" software that people encounter in the "real" world.
I have met at lest a couple of very sharp folks who came out of VT. One recent graduate, the son of an acquaintance immediately started working on air control simulation software.
WTF is someone with an 840 of 2400 on the SAT even doing in college, much less engineering (and the kid has an inflated 3.6 GPA in high school)? 20+ years ago an 840 wouldn't even get you into college, and back then the maximum score was 1600. I think this explains why they flunk out.
I'm all for cracking down on for-profit colleges that have low graduation rates and offer poor career prospects.
However, that's only one aspect of the problem. There are also students who are well prepared and go to good schools but still manage to rack up crippling debt. There are a lot of people who have gone into a lot of debt to get, say, a law degree but their earnings aren't nearly sufficient to handle their debt.
