Critique of Ivy League Computer Science Curriculum and Emphasis on Academic Over Practical Training

New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching 97 very idea that a Yale degree would make you capable of getting a good job as a programmer is frowned upon by the faculty. They are training computer science professors. This is the logical end result of subject- based training. Now, what Giamatti had in mind as the end goal of college, training for the mind, is a noble enough ideal, and a natural out- come of cognitive process-based education. The classic liberal arts view of education, one that a reader might think I am not in favor of, is actually a better model than the model that has evolved in the nation’s top universities. The idea that you should try thinking in a variety of fields is a better plan, and one more in line with what I am proposing here, than the model that exists on most universities’ campuses. The latter model, the one that makes students major in a subject and thus supposedly become prepared to work in that field, is really just a big lie. There is nothing unusual here. Here again, is a statement from the Ivy League professor whom I quoted earlier: There is an unspoken rule at places like my university that if you are really good, you do exactly what your teacher does. So what are these schools training students for? It could be only one thing—to become professors. There is no attempt to teach practical real-world applications of the ideas taught in classes, in part because the faculty themselves don’t know those applications. Here is the Big Ten computer science professor again: There are roughly 60 faculty members in computer science. They cover all the traditional areas of computer science. Ironically, software engineering, which is what 90% of the undergraduates do when they graduate, is not covered. It is not considered an intellectual or academic discipline. It is considered too practical. There is only one software engineering course and it is taught by an adjunct because no one really cares about it. This is a real problem because (the Big Ten professor again). . . There are hundreds of computer science majors here. The faculty doesn’t feel it needs to change because there are students HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023843