When my stepson attended university a few years ago, I took a look at the CS curriculum. At the time most of the kids were saying, "stay out of CS, they're shipping the jobs overseas", so enrollments in the department were down to an all time low.
The curriculum hadn't really changed in the 20 years since I'd been in school. They had added Java to the curriculum but just covered basic syntax, didn't cover the libraries, and all of the assignments had to be done with notepad and the command line. A friend of mine said that the professors are more interested in their own research than keeping current with the latest developments. And I suppose I agree with that assessment. The upshot of all of this was that they were graduating kids that weren't qualified for entry-level jobs. You need to know enough of the basics to be able to create a web app, and know how to use a version control system, in addition to the basics of problem analysis and design and working on a team. A few months after talking with my friend about the curriculum, I was asked to help design a computational biology curriculum. I was one of the few with industry experience, so I knew what would be required of graduates. The only problem was that the creation of a new curriculum requires years to go through the approval process, so it was likely to be out of date by the time it was actually put into use. I guess that explains the inertia when it comes to the curriculum. Cheers, Mark card.ly: <http://card.ly/phidias51> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
