By Professor Doom
Even a casual
inspection of the want ads reveals incredible job demand for people with skill
with computers. Alternatively, the cost of hiring someone to fix your computer
when there’s a problem reveals that there’s clearly a shortage of people that know
what they’re doing with computers. Daily experience with computers would be
certain to create quite a few people curious to know what makes that $1,000
chunk of plastic, glass, and metal tick as well.
The entire
modern world runs on computers, and has for a generation now…surely the folks
running higher ed, with their fancy advanced degrees in Vision and Leadership,
knew there’d be a big demand for knowledge of computers, right? Since they had
to have seen it coming, higher ed should be well prepared for the increased
demand based on all the obvious factors I’ve identified.
Not a chance:
--CS is
short for “Computer Science,” and the number of majors has nearly quadrupled in
the last 10 years. That’s the majors, the non-major students interested in such
courses has at least tripled. I’ll be addressing other aspects of the report,
below.
I was a computer
science major, myself. I changed after taking semester after semester of
courses based on dead languages (Fortran, Lisp, and a few others I’ve long
forgotten), deciding instead to learn something relatively permanent like
mathematics. Hey, higher education is slow to adapt with the times.
Admin:
“Say, didn’t you take some computer science courses?”
Me: “Sure.”
Me: “Sure.”
Admin: “We
need someone qualified to teach the computer science courses, and we can’t hire
anyone willing to work for what we’re paying…”
---for
years, my fake community college struggled to find someone both competent to
teach and qualified to teach the Mickey Mouse courses for a computer science
program so feeble that our school wouldn’t hire our graduates for our deeply
understaffed IT department.
Higher ed is slow to adapt with the
times, but that sure didn’t stop the proliferation of Gender Studies and Ethnic
Studies courses on our campuses, or even Game of Thrones-related courses. Of
course, finding qualified teachers for these courses is pretty easy, since
there’s little demand for this kind of information in the real world…there’s no
place else that’ll hire people knowledgeable in this “material.”
One of the big
problems for higher education is finding people qualified to teach computer
science courses who are also willing
to work in higher ed. Demand for people with computer skills is so high that
working in higher ed would mean a huge pay cut and great loss of job security.
If we paid computer science teachers as much as administrators, the problem
would be cleared up overnight, of course, but admin won’t stand for that:
they’d immediately demand even more outrageous pay for their alleged service.
Admin’s primary purpose on campus is to spend as little as possible for education,
the better to secure their own salaries.
Many campuses
(including my old school) have actually closed down their computer science
departments, rather than pay an appropriate wage. Students just end up taking
another Gender Studies course or the like….not nearly so educational, but there
are golden parachutes to pay for, after all.
But what to do
about all the demand? Some places still have their computer science
departments, so what’s their response?
The report I’ve linked
above has some helpful pictures describing how schools are dealing with the
influx of demand:
Well over 80% of
schools have “significantly” increased class size. That word is so vague, I
remember when class sizes were “significantly” increased from 25 to 30
students…now we have class sizes in the hundreds quite regularly. It’s a great
deal for admin: my pay hasn’t increased, but I commonly teach classes 5 times
as large as anything I taught 30 years ago.
The second most
common response is to offer more sections of computer science courses. Who
teaches the extra sections? Another helpful picture answers that:
Having adjuncts
teach the courses is another great profit opportunity for admin. Adjuncts are
paid less than minimum wage (more bonuses for admin as they lower the per
student costs!) and garner no benefits. Similarly, using the grad students as
teachers works out well—nothing against grad students at all, but I do wonder
why we should charge full tuition when the teachers are trainees. Around 45% of
schools have responded to the huge increase in students by actually adding a
few full time faculty so that’s something, I guess.
It’s so funny to
hear admin talk about how they care so much, about everything. That caring
never seems to translate to caring about faculty. The larger classes and
heavier class loads represent extra work for the faculty. According to the
report, about 50% of institutions have told faculty “accept the increased load
as a fact of life.” Honest, ASU’s deal of “25% more
work for 0% more pay” doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it’s industry-wide for
admin to just pile on the work and tell faculty to suck it up.
Sadly, America is
all about identity politics today, so no report is complete without bemoaning
how terrible the lack of diversity is. No matter what, it’s always important to
represent things as negatively as possible, and this report says the news is “mixed.” The representation of women has been heading
up, though the report does what it can to say it’s just not enough…the numbers
are utterly irrelevant, however, because we have no result, theoretical or
empirical, saying what percent of women computer science majors is “best.”
Similarly, the
report notes that the number of “underrepresented minorities” has increased, as
well as the percentage…but what’s the baseline for calling something
“underrepresented”? There isn’t one, and no matter what we see in the data it
isn’t enough, for some reason. Despite the obvious flaws here the report
manages to insinuate that we really need to do more, as the same thing happens
here that happens in many other fields that eventually become very technical:
Our course data for
both female and URM students shows decreases in each year as the course level
increases. Further study is needed to determine whether a leaky pipeline
exists, or whether there is another explanation for this trend.
As you go higher
up, as the material becomes more difficult, those “underrepresented” folk that
are (viciously) lured into disciplines they would not have otherwise chosen
find out that they have a better idea what they want than college
administrators…we really need to stop applying identity politics to higher
education (and probably stop applying it everywhere else, as well).
Back to the point,
higher ed has seen a tremendous influx of students interested in computer
science, and the response has been abysmal: when programs aren’t shut down due
to lack of sufficient profit margins, they’re kept by increasing the class
sizes (i.e., lowering quality) and lowering the standards for teachers (i.e.,
lowering the quality)….the students are expected to pay more all the same, and,
similarly, faculty are expected to just stand by and watch admin reap the
benefits of more growth that has nothing to do with administrative ability.