Today I participated in a focus group organised by IPENZ (Institute of Professional Engineers New Zealand) on the education of new graduates.
I’m not short of a few views on this area so I went along to speak my piece. The message I wanted to bring was Universities should focus on developing fundamental academic knowledge that can be applied in a variety of situations.
Happily, the focus group were all in accord with this and we all had the same reasoning – teach a man to fish, don’t give him one (sic). If you come to Ablaze Software for a job interview; I’ll be looking to see that you understand the core concepts of what you’ve learned and if you can apply those to new and unusual situations.
Last year, Ablaze Software was looking for an intern-developer and out of 42 applicants at 2nd and 3rd stage undergraduate degrees, 7 got interviews. Nearly all of those 7 had taken a paper called COMPSCI 280 Applications Programming from the University of Auckland. The outline for this paper says:
The course offers an introduction to graphical user interfaces, 3-tier architectures, and techniques for integrating applications with databases and the web/Internet.
By the end of the course students who succeed will be competent VB.NET Programmers.
Foolishly I used this information to ask questions to those who passed this paper like:
Me: Tell me what’s different about managed-code compared to non-managed.
Them: Uh,.. managed-code…., I don’t know what you mean
Me: What do you think is important when designing a GUI to interact with humans
Them: Uh, you need to make it look nice.
Me: So how did you integrate your application with database
Them: We used VB.NET. It can do that for you.
Me: I see you did an intro level paper in Java. What’s different about Java and VB.NET
Them: VB.NET has got colour coding.
This will do nothing except plunge our beautiful green country into something akin to Mordor – where we’ll be stoking the fires of Mt Doom. (a little poetic licence is allowed is it not?)
When universities can teach concepts and fundamentals properly, our economy will benefit – that’s what we agreed on in this focus group.
However, our government has set up universities to be much more dependant on the free-market model. “Bum’s on seats” seems to be the cry of the day. Because the more bum’s you have, the more money you get, the more research you can do, the more famous you are, the more staff you can get. Big departments can also afford the niceties of life such as waterproof toilet-paper. So when industry hints that it might be nice to have graduates able to do non-academic things like read and write with some semblance of intelligence then the head of department thinks like this:
Dr No – Head of Department (thinking): eh, what – read and write! Poppycock, they should learn that at school or be canned. Hmm, shouldn’t have abolished canning – did wonders for learning……But wait. Eureka! Reading and Writing 101 will be much easier than some other paper. Ahh, more interest from students. Ahhh (rubs hands) – more money. Now we can get that waterproof toilet-paper. Humpf. What course can it replace – something that no one likes too much and has too many people failing it. Hoo, what about Fundamentals of Concurrent Programming. Yes, we’ll rid ourselves of that.
And then the government of the day congratulates themselves on how well they’ve reformed the tertiary education sector.
I think that Bum’s on seats means exactly that – too many bum’s coming out of universities.
