I Feel Sorry For Computer Science Departments

There's a popular meme that it takes ten years of effortful study to become an expert at something. I'm sure that in reality, the number of years varies a bit from subject to subject and from one individual to the next, but one thing is clear – expertise takes time.

Therein lies the problem. Most students who enter college and decide to take computer science have minimal, if any, prior exposure to computer science. Colleges have 4 years to try to instill some meaningful level of expertise in students, but that's simply not enough time. Compounding the problem, many students are hoping to go out and get internships after their first year. This leads to a series of unfortunate, yet inevitable compromises.

CS departments are forced to choose: do we focus on foundational skills and the big picture of what computer science is all about, or do we focus on technical training to try to produce graduates who have skills with immediate appeal to companies? Talk to any CS professor and you'll hear plenty of stories of bitter, divisive debates about this very issue within departments and across the entire community of computer science educators.

The very best schools are constantly reassessing this question and retooling their program. Matt Might published a great wishlist of topics that every computer science student should know. I also have a special admiration for Carnegie Mellon in this regard. Despite being consistently ranked as one of the very top universities for computer science in the country, they refused to rest on their laurels and recently did a complete overhaul of their introductory classes.

My own two cents on the topic is that if a choice has to be made, it is better to err on the side of teaching foundational subjects. I admire curricula such as Program by Design, which takes a bold stand, teaching introductory classes in a non-mainstream programming language (Racket, a dialect of Scheme). They do this because the language is a particularly good choice for teaching design and program construction at a deep level. Knowledge of this language isn't likely to be immediately useful for a summer internship, but colleges who use this curriculum report that down the road, their students come out much stronger and much more sought after by companies.

But the sad truth is that no matter how many times CS departments debate this issue and retool, there are no good answers. Four years is simply not enough time to become an expert in computer science. Colleges are stuck between a rock and a hard place and it's a bad situation all around. Companies are distinctly unimpressed and disappointed with the vast majority of graduates that colleges are producing. Ideally, companies want to hire someone with the exact skills for a given job (one can argue that this is a bad hiring strategy for long-term growth, but often, it's what makes the most short-term economic sense). However, there aren't enough of those to go around, so companies try to make the best of the situation by just trying to find the smartest students they can, figuring the smart ones can hopefully compensate for their lack of experience by picking things up quickly on the job. More often than not, the knowledge gained from a CS education is viewed by companies as being so insufficient as to be almost irrelevant – nevertheless, graduating from a well-known school can be seen as a kind of proxy for the kind of drive and innate smarts they really are looking for.

Flipping this around and looking at it from the perspective of students, many graduating students are finding out the hard way that they lack the real-world skills companies are seeking. If they can get that first job, sometimes they discover that they lack the background necessary to keep up with the tectonic shifts in the industry; when that first job goes away, it can be very tricky to make the transition to something new. If you don't have the exact skills companies are looking for, and you're no longer in that bucket of entry-level, fresh-out-of-school applicants that companies might be willing to take a chance on, hunting for that second job can be especially tough.

How do other departments solve this problem? Well, many domains are able to leverage the significant number of years that students have already invested in grade school in English, math, and science. For example, most students who go into mechanical engineering have already had the opportunity to learn math up through calculus and have learned physics as well. Imagine how many years it would take to become a mechanical engineer with absolutely no prior math or science instruction, and you'll begin to appreciate the problem that CS departments face. Also, many other disciplines require significant post-graduate study and apprenticeships in a way that computer science does not. Arguably, computer science has one of the greatest disparities between the demand for expertise, and the level of expertise that is actually attained before one goes into the business.

But wait a second... computer science is an engineering discipline. Shouldn't computer science benefit from kids' math and science education as much as any other science/tech subject? Unfortunately, no. Calculus, the pinnacle of grade school math education as it is currently structured, is the least relevant type of math for computer scientists. Computer scientists need a strong background in Discrete Math and these topics are poorly covered in grade school, if at all.

To further illustrate the point, there is not a single programming class offered in the elementary and middle schools near my home. At the closest high school, most of the tech ed classes are about how to use Microsoft Office and Powerpoint to write reports; programming offerings are fairly lightweight. Keep in mind that I live in a part of the country that is fairly rich with tech companies, less than 30 miles from Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Nintendo, and Boeing. Despite my complaints about the meager offerings in my school district, there's no doubt in my mind that most places probably have it much worse in terms of providing kids with early exposure to programming.

So for the most part, computer science curricula start from scratch. However, Program by Design, the intro CS curriculum I mentioned earlier, stands out from the pack. Unlike most other approaches to teaching CS, they intentionally try to leverage students' existing math knowledge by portraying programming as a kind of executable algebra. This is a clever strategy for trying to maximize how far students can get towards expertise in just four years of college.

Once the problem has been laid bare like this – four years provides insufficient preparation for a career in computer science – it is obvious that there are only a couple long-term solutions. One possibility is to extend the duration of CS education, another possibility is to incorporate more CS topics and exposure to programming into the grade school curriculum.

I think a strong case can be made that our society would benefit from more CS in grade school, so that's the direction I would be inclined to go. Programming is rapidly becoming a foundational skill that has value across a wide range of disciplines. An understanding of data, functions, and algorithms can play an important role, right alongside mathematics and the scientific method, for developing problem-solving skills that are essential in our modern world.

Another helpful change would be to incorporate more discrete math into the grade school curriculum. A stronger background in discrete math would make it much more feasible for computer science students to make rapid progress in just four years of college. Why should we make a change in the math curricula that just benefits future computer science students? Well, the short answer is that it wouldn't just benefit future computer science students. Arthur Benjamin makes the case in his TED talk that discrete math (logic, statistics, etc.) is far more relevant to most walks of life than, say, calculus.

So in the abstract sense, it's relatively clear what needs to change in order to solve the problem. But we all know that implementing such a solution may well be intractable. Even if grade schools were motivated to incorporate more discrete math and programming into their classes, how do you go about finding and recruiting qualified teachers?

Therefore, this is likely to remain a problem for a long time to come. In the meantime, I feel sorry for college CS departments, I feel sorry for CS students, I feel sorry for the people who would love programming but never get exposed to it, and I feel a sense of loss that there's so much more our society could achieve if we could narrow the gap between supply and demand in computer science expertise. My hat's off to everyone who works hard at making the best out of this bad situation.