This is all wrong. The purpose of Universities is to uphold, expand and disseminate human culture, not to prepare people for a career in the industry. Big tech should not be allowed to piggyback on the reputation of educational institutions to push their products and the latest fads at the expense of the fundamentals.
>>The purpose of Universities is to uphold, expand and disseminate human culture, not to prepare people for a career in the industry.
Like, I personally agree with you, but then I also think that we don't have the right to define it as such. There's plenty of people who think that the main goal of a university(at least in scientific/engineering fields) should be to prepare people for working in the industry.
Equally, I see nothing wrong with courses which are specifically designed for this. I myself have finished a "Games Engineering" masters which boasted about close links to the industry, and over 90% hire rate in the industry after - and I got exactly what was promised. I don't see any issue with that personally. I also have friends who had their entire PhDs funded by companies like Red Hat, because they were researching things done in collaboration with them. Also don't have any issue here, and that made sure that my friends not only paid nothing for their PhDs, they were actually pretty well compensated throughout.
I think the perspective changes when you have to pay for university. My sister has a degree in film making from a British university, which she paid nealy £60k(!!!!) for, and her chances of employment in the industry are nearly zero. Where I'm from(Poland)_all higher education is free, and then I have no problem with degrees not correlating with employment(but then maybe on the other hand, as a Polish tax payer, maybe I would prefer that they did, otherwise why are we paying these people to study with no employment prospects afterwards. Again, I don't really think that but I know many people do).
> should be to prepare people for working in the industry.
There used to be a system of education here in the UK called vocational colleges (or sometimes courses) where you would do exactly this, prepare for work in the industry - and industry would be involved in helping shape the curriculum, giving students work experience etc.
This has fallen out of favour a lot, it still exists for trades activities like plumbing, electrician, bricklaying/building etc. but you won't find a software engineering course
Students today have become quite reliant on Google Docs essentially putting almost all of their classwork out on the web. What if it were to fail? That’s different than it used to be when each student needed to handwrite or type up a paper without SAAS that could break, and those students aren’t prepping to work for Google.
And I’m pretty happy that students use nowadays google docs. Sure, it’s propiertary and can break at any point, but man if it does not make collaboration easier.
So: total reliance on someone giving something away for free that could break or be taken away at any time and you have no privacy- that’s ok, even if they’re not going to hire you later?
At any time, you can download your google docs data and have it locally. You can convert it to word/excel formats.
This makes anything you are trying to argue completely irrelevant.
If they basically forced you to keep your data in their proprietary format online-only, then maybe you have an argument.. but since this is not true you are grasping at straws here.
isn't that the price you pay for using any online sharing thingy? you gain easy sharing+access (because it's "on someone else's computer"), but lose control. if it makes information easily accessible (contrast with xeroxing paper docs), i think it's a decent trade-off.
it'd be nice if we weren't reliant on one service provider, but idk any good alternatives.
> those students aren’t prepping to work for Google.
i don't get this part. would you criticize the widespread usage of MS Office as "those people aren't prepping to work for Microsoft"?
I'm not sure I understand what you are asking for to be honest. It's not like the role of every university in the world is quantifiable or that we have some central authority figure who could say one way or another. Plenty of people because clearly there is a push from both universities and from the industry to craft courses that are oriented more towards work than academia. Plenty of people, because enough students seek out courses which guarantee employment, not research, that this is a shifting focus for many places of study. If you have someone you suggest we should ask or whose opinion you would respect, then name them.
Too many students than can be supported in the educational commons from interested society.
It is in the interest of society as a whole to have a better-educated population. That means support for individuals being educated must come from all members of society -- in other words, it's a government domain funded through taxes. Absent common support, the interests of specific groups, mostly corporate shareholders expecting fat quarterly results, will come to dominate.
That is your opinion, not a fact. Meanwhile in NL we have to import carpenter/plumber/drywall laborers, because ... we discourage choosing such a career for our own population and don't provide the education anymore. In the not so distant past, we did.
What a lot of software 'engineers' in NL rather don't see is that you can make a very very healthy living as a 'drywaller' ( not a native speaker, can't find the word ). You can easily make more than as a software dev.
The general population just is not as malleable ( Dutch: maakbaar? ) as boomers would like to believe. So at the bottom we have an entire cohort who used to work in factories or the building industry, who rely on financial support.
The first 'food bank' in NL was started in 2000. Why?
Wasn't his suggestion that you should look for jobs that are actually in demand (someone still has to do physical labor) and don't necessarily require higher education?
It is in the interest of "society" because a better educated population can pay more taxes than a non educated population. If you do not have increased job prospects after successfully going to university then you are actually a net negative to society because not only was your education expensive, it also took away 5 working years from you.
If a more educated population was better then we would keep accumulating more degrees until we die instead of working.
I would argue that universities have two tasks:
1. Do research to expand knowledge.
2. Educate new researchers.
Big tech just wants highly skilled researchers in their workforce, but there only N students graduating every year. So it is only logical for them to "help" (can be good or bad) the university so n+m students graduate. But the bad thing is that the push for more education can negativly impact the available research time professors have.
> Big tech just wants highly skilled researchers in their workforce
Are you really sure that big tech wants these people in their workforce? At least the typical tech job interview process tests for quite different skills.
That was the purpose of universities when the student populations were smaller, wealthier, and more focused on actually learning about the world. But decades ago the US culture shifted to "everyone must go to college as a prerequisite for getting a job", so now the focus of most programs had damn well better be preparing students to actually get a job or else the absurd cost and student debt incurred is simply not worth it.
My universities tech department had strong contacts to large industry players (not for software, but military applications for example).
Advantage was that we had very modern equipment (electrics, robotics, measuring instruments, ...) that would otherwise have crashed the budget of the university.
It wasn't a secret that industry tried to influence the curriculum to get students to be trained in technologies and tools they themselves use. It is clear they tried to poach students.
I understand the objection though and other departments constantly berated this closeness and they certainly had a point because the generality of education was endangered.
With big-tech in software there are some additional risks in my opinion.
That said, there is merit of feedback from industry to university. It is especially helpful to not let students learn about outdated approaches and tech and keep academia in the know.
But that has to be a transparent forum without some maybe not so moral gifts from industries.
You are right your supposed to learn the theory at UNI Tech companies want to avoid the cost of training / career development - to many MBA/Accountants.
>> The purpose of Universities is to uphold, expand and disseminate human culture, not to prepare people for a career in the industry.
Well, speak for yourself. The majority of people in my classes absolutely had in mind going to industry after their studies. There's nothing wrong with that. Those two goals, being prepared for industry AND science aren't mutually exclusive.
Respectfully, you can't tell universities what their purpose is unless you're prepared to fund it. When these places got the majority of their funding from the state, the state could expect high minded ideals and social outcomes. But now their not, universities need to cater to their customers. Their customers are students, they expect a degree, an "experience" and a job at the end. Universities either need to provide that, or close.
That's because money is king in the US, but in many other countries universities are affordable for everybody. And I am indeed very happy that my taxes go to universities after I myself benefited from it.
The big problem in the US is the older population who paid $20k and up for their college tends to get upset at the idea of free college because they had to “work for that $20k.” This, of course, ignores the ridiculous inflation rate of college tuition.
It’s also why many people are upset at the idea of forgiving student loans. “I spent $20k for my degree, but Person X got into med school and is $250k in debt on their own will. Make them pay for it!”
There’s some parallels between making college/university free and the free K-12 education mandates decades ago. (Yes, it’s not “free free” but “taxed to be free”, but that’s beside the point)
Also, people don’t want their taxes raised when there’s no benefit to them. If one’s kids have all graduated, you see no reason to pay more money and get nothing in return.
Don't forget about all the big whale donors too. Universities really enjoy receiving millions of dollars for endowments, scholarships, and capital projects. So they may cater to the needs and desires of those constituents.
Pretty much all schooling in the modern world is basically a means by which corporations externalize job training. The general public is not blameless either, having equated schooling with job prospects for a long, long time. Consequently, almost no actual education occurs at school. I have a friend who tells a story about meeting a 4.0 student from one of the highest rated high schools in the country who honestly wasn't sure which side the US fought on in WWII.
Given the hiring practices in FAANG where you are expected to present academic background rather than practical engineering skills, I'd say this is not a new phenomenon.
You're spot on. My alma mater has had Google and the likes come to the campus for over a decade now.
Also, I see nothing wrong with that, at the same time there was plenty of room for "pure research" into even the most obscure corners of theoretical CS and maths.
This is the preferred way to fix the “pipeline problem” for more inclusion
Recruit directly at a broader range of schools and make the curriculum more relevant
Big Tech largely ignores Tier 2 and Tier 3 schools for on campus recruiting, while imagining that the intelligence community has better developers (which does recruit from tier 2 and tier 3 schools on campus)
Since neither of them have figured out how to screen for competent or trainable developers better its clear big tech should be expanding how they recruit. Desirable because big tech is the one with the inclusion problem and pays better.
> Big Tech largely ignores Tier 2 and Tier 3 schools for on campus recruiting, while imagining that the intelligence community has better developers
I don't think the general consensus is that intelligence organizations have better developers than big tech. I think the rule of thumb is the better the pay, the better the quality.
I'm pretty sure intelligence agencies often have a better effort:pay ratio. This is due to the high barrier to entry of needing a TS (or even higher) clearance.
It would be a waste of time and money to recruit from ten lower ranking colleges for not so great students wouldn’t it? Even if they get like, one good one?
Yeah, I have no specific example in mind, but lot of time I stumble on insanely cool project and the guy that made it have a relatively modest education and was content working a simple dev jobs that allowed him to work on his hobby project in the first place.
'Cozy'? They're snugging it under the table during meetings. They eat lunch together in Big Tech's office and lock the door. This relationship is like a 30 year nonstop honeymoon in the interstices of decency.
A company I work for spent the majority of their budget and then some on things that they didn’t need, much without any forethought or planning. It’s either because of kickbacks or because it seemed enterprise-y; there’s no rational explanation other than incompetence or corruption. An adequate IT director / CTO would be able to make their case for use of better and cheaper ToC of best-of-class open-source solutions.
Whether it’s kickbacks or just enjoying bragging about the Ferrari of webscalers we just bought or brandname IAAS we use, it’s wrong.
As a professor in a computer science department at a state run university (that has one of the oldest CS departments in the nation), I actually am far more afraid of the book publishers than "big tech". They are going down the road of "who needs uni, just use our text, our online learning aids, our online _courses_"... With each new ad from the textbook publishing company, I see a push to have learners just use their material... the large problem is the university expects you to use books from well known publishers, so they have leverage to get you to use the book+material.
Big tech giving software and courses is one thing, but those come and go... it is like learning to use any tool, hey do you use a DeWalt or Milwaukee? Each are the same but different. In 10 years, you might use a completely different tool, but the tool was just that, it is the ideas and concepts that you are supposed to learn in (and outside of) the classroom. It is my job to teach you _how_ to solve problems, perhaps using the DeWalt or the Milwaukee or both.
Eh, as others have noted, companies have been donating for years, we could argue that grants shape our research too, but as long as professors keep the goal in mind (how do I get students to effectively and efficiently solve problems using available tools of the day), I think our future will be alright.
Maybe it is a better way to learn independently, with regular, e.g. monthly or quarterly check-ins with an experienced mentor?
Would solve quite a few problems altogether - people getting more independent and following their interests. You would still have competition, but that would be moderated by actual needs, both in the private and public sector.
Not sure an end to the classic higher-ed system would be a bad thing.
> the large problem is the university expects you to use books from well known publishers
Interesting, and disturbing.
I am a math professor at a US state university, and thankfully I haven't observed any of this at all. For lower-level classes such as calculus we all use the same book, decided upon by the department as a whole, but when teaching upper-level classes I generally choose as I see fit.
I am curious, what form does this expectation/pressure take? At my university, if administrators tried to do this, my colleagues (at least the tenure-track/tenured ones) would briefly chuckle, delete the email, and not remember it five minutes later.
Why can't the books be able to teach about "how" as well? I'm from a mediocre country where I went to the best CS college and 99% of the things I learned there was from powerpoint presentations, pdf scripts or books full of math exercises. I still got into FAMANG as my first full time job and so did many other people from there. I just never saw the value in our professors. They mostly repeated stuff from text books, had 10 year old lab assignments and similar exams for 20 years. And I don't think it's that bad. It teaches you enough of the basics for average programming job or as basis for you to expand into what's more interesting to you specifically. The only thing missing was cool projects like having your college develop GHC or stuff like that.
Point being, I think college professors overestimate their impact a bit when regarding bachelors/masters topics. All that is too basic to really need some expert domain knowledge and is knowledge which hasn't really changed that much the last 20 years. SVM's were invented in the 90s. Linear algebra some time before that. The rest is industry or postdoc stuff.
I get the "teaching" part but if you are "teaching" a room of 50 student's it isn't really that different from watching a youtube video for them.
You need positive teaching and negative teaching. Positive teaches how, negative teaches how not to. Without negative teaching people will accumulate a lot of bad or right out wrong beliefs and patterns as they study. A book cannot provide negative teaching, it can only teach you how to do things.
I would humbly submit that you aren't using very good books. I read all my text books during my CS degree, and there was plenty of negative teaching in there. A well written book or tutorial covers common pitfalls and equips you to recognize bad as well as good.
I do think there is a ton of value in getting feedback from a professor or colleague, but you can get pretty far with a book.
I’m reminded of Ben Eater’s tutorials on YouTube. Even though he knows what he’s writing won’t work, he writes the naive form and acts confused when it doesn’t work. Then he explains why it didn’t work. Compare that to basically every tutorial that just says “do this” without explaining why.
- books can partially teach you the "how" and also partially the "why".
- at university, you are being taught how to teach yourself, not necessarily how to perform practical things. Age of the exercise is therefore less relevant.
- ideally, teaching a room full of 50 students is easy better than an online class with 50, which easily should beat a video. Not all classes are like this which is a shame.
What is really meant by “being taught how to teach yourself” or “learning to learn”?
Why does this have to be done in a university setting? Is this explicitly conveyed or is this an outcome of going through classes and it’s what it takes to succeed?
Personally, when I was studying at a pretty strong university in terms of global rankings, I didn’t really “learn to learn” from the classes. The most helpful to me was Cal Newport’s blog (from his grad student days), Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange soft questions, hn discussions about learning and studying, and office hours when I explicitly asked Profs how they study, learn, and solve problems.
When I took what I learned from those sources and stopped going to class to instead work through the textbook/course material at my own pace, my grades improved significantly. If I am able to get an “A” without going to class, does that mean the Prof / university successfully taught me the material or whatever lesson(s) were to be learned?
Sorry for the rant, but I feel the default shouldn’t be to go through higher education to learn to learn. (I’m not saying you are saying that.) So, how can these lessons be made available more widely available?
Most people don’t spend tens of thousands of dollars on education to be better citizen of the world. They want to support their habit of needing food and shelter.
I’m doing a CS degree now, mostly lower level classes now. I find that teaching well does make a difference. Interestingly, when my professors use slides provided to them by the textbook company, I generally find it much harder to be engaged by watching their lecture. Compare to professors who make custom material and truly have some skill in presenting it.
Professors who choose to use the full suite of textbook, plus textbook provided slides, plus electronic auto graded homework might save themselves some time, but definitely are less effective educators, in my limited experiences.
Just to add another anecdote: I'm also a CS professor at a well-known state university. We are free to choose whatever books we want for classes. To the best of my knowledge, these choices are not even reviewed. We are also free to use no textbook and just hand out lecture notes or whatever.
This lack of restriction does lead to the professor using a book they wrote themselves. So to take their class, you need to buy their book as well. I understand why they do that, but it just feels wrong. Obviously there’s some textbooks written by teachers that are quite amazing (The Art of Electronics for example), but not all are like that.
Just to add, there is a flip side to this. As a grad student who did research and TA work, I've actually discussed this with fellow grad students and professors in the past and it comes down to the following...
A professor would rather spend their time teaching students and finding the best existing book (less expensive if possible, but better quality is more important) so they can use it for teaching.
I'm sure there are professors who have been thinking of writing their own textbook and getting students to buy them ... the downside is apparently writing technical books and textbooks earns less than minimum wage, and that's if you are lucky because of the way revenue split works with textbooks. So they have to charge exorbitant rates on the textbooks to make even a little bit of money. So most professors don't bother and instead use an existing good quality textbook. Not to say there aren't others who would try to write and sell their own.
Those publishers are so predatory and user-hostile, I wonder if they will actually be able to restrain themselves long enough to establish a market. As it is, very few people are stupid enough to buy a "textbook" that comes with auto-self-destruct DRM that renders it unusable at the end of the semester.
Of course many college kids are just kids fresh out of highschool with no financial skills or haggling skills so I guess I take back what I said about there not being enough dumb-dumbs to fuel a market for DRM "textbooks". People do still take out loans to finance their English major, after all.
The auto-self-destruct DRM isn't the textbook, it's the mandatory online quizzes provided by the publishers that require an active login. If you don't pay ~$60+ for the login, which only lasts a semester, you can't take the quizzes. If you can't take the quizzes, you fail the class.
My CS department formed an "industry partnership" with Microsoft (circa 2015).
All of a sudden, we were made to spend time learning Azure, we were given Surface Tablets for building apps, there were guest lectures by Microsoft employees, we were prompted to apply for MS internships, etc.
What the department intended to be a harmless collaboration, turned out to be an aggressive marketing push by Microsoft for hearts and minds of the students.
Thankfully, a backlash from the student body prompted a dampening of the relationship, but the experience showed that barriers to entry for corporations pushing their own agenda into academia can be low.
Managed properly, these sorts of relationships can be win-win, but there's a clear limit and universities should be conscious and forthright of where the line is.
Hardware, training and bloody faang internships offered and the student body revolted? Jesus, if they did that where I was a student I would have celebrated.
My main grumble was the distinct lack of choice; we were _made_ to use Microsoft products and services. I didn't pay however much money to be wrapped up in an MS marketing/recruiting campaign that I couldn't opt out of.
The academy is supposed to be its own free-standing institution with its own values and its own agenda. There are intelligent people who don't want to work with people who build mass surveillance systems, provide IT services to scary government agencies, crush competition, etc. Having Microsoft at a university should be like having ROTC at a university. You can opt in if you want, or avoid it if you want.
Didn't Hinton go to Canada so he didn't have to take DoD money?
I don't know if you're confused - it's not a job fair, they're collaborating on academics. And I presume they're academics giving lectures on academic topics, not just Microsoft-specific IT technology topics.
Very interesting to read how so many people are OK with corporations dictating what to learn, when to learn it, how to learn it and with what it should be learned, but go on to talk about rights and freedoms or even academic integrity.
Isn't that a little contradicting? And where do you draw the line?
How are you going to judge the company influencing education? By its public image?
Do you think companies will just provide everything for education and nothing more? No agenda will be followed and the situation will not be taken advantage of for more?
Have proponents of this really thought of the likely or possible outcomes?
This is nothing new. Oracle has been giving away licences to universities for decades to get students familiar with oracle products, so that when they move to workplaces they will lean towards the familiar.
6 or 7 years ago my university did a partnership with Samsung.
Students had to work on projects where they develop apps for Tizen OS[0] and even publish it to the samsung store. (And waiving the rights/revenue of their apps to the university)
I still cringe thinking about all those wasted student effort/time..
And meanwhile, the law governing the good, state-funded and controlled university system in Bavaria, Germany is modernized: "removing all the shackles from universities in their way of expenditure and earning money" (state guarantees any debt though).
Some bon-mots:
- Universities can change themselves to be governed like a foundation
- no limit on pay of professors and administrator
- no limit on fees, though they have to take in EU-students for free (but I guess, a suitable "test" can change that easily)
- no more political student bodies allowed. If you want to have a say, please be apolitical or shut up and be happy that corporations and corruptions need you educated.
Nice, how politicians are selling out this public good, while every press outlet covers people's stupidity in handling the coronavirus.
They should just open their own vocational school (or open up their own internal training center if they have one), you could say that they risk losing the students to other companies but if they focus on their own need and technology, inertia will go a long way keeping the student.
For the student that just want the training for a good paying job (no shame in that, there is still the internet and the various edx-like program to supplement teaching) a highly-focused, low cost and fast degree could be a perfect solution.
Another advantage for the company, we all know that while CS are good to teach strong theoretical background, all the tooling is usually learned on the go. Take microsoft for example, imagine how efficient it would be to have a student learn in a completely integrated environnement and perfectly use microsoft tools (mastering visual studio is an art in itself) at the end of the training.
I have no idea why anyone thinks this is new, it's been done forever, because it's effective. The article tries to make it seem like only altruistic donations existed in the past, but that's very wrong.
Back when I was in college 20 years ago, Microsoft had a program to do this.
Part of it was doing things like :
1. Hiring students as liaisons to represent and advocate for MS stuff at the school.
2. Giving away free copies of software away to CS departments and students in exchange.
3. Try to help get these things on the curriculum/etc (often in conjunction with #2)
4. Find opportunities for MS to donate computer labs and other meaningful things in exchange for people being taught visual studio/etc.
(How far they would go depended on where in the top-N programs it was, etc)
This is the genesis of a number of the Microsoft-named computer labs in US universities.
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[ 0.35 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadFor example if Google decides that something doesn't exist, 90+% of connected people won't see it.
This is scary.
Like, I personally agree with you, but then I also think that we don't have the right to define it as such. There's plenty of people who think that the main goal of a university(at least in scientific/engineering fields) should be to prepare people for working in the industry.
Equally, I see nothing wrong with courses which are specifically designed for this. I myself have finished a "Games Engineering" masters which boasted about close links to the industry, and over 90% hire rate in the industry after - and I got exactly what was promised. I don't see any issue with that personally. I also have friends who had their entire PhDs funded by companies like Red Hat, because they were researching things done in collaboration with them. Also don't have any issue here, and that made sure that my friends not only paid nothing for their PhDs, they were actually pretty well compensated throughout.
I think the perspective changes when you have to pay for university. My sister has a degree in film making from a British university, which she paid nealy £60k(!!!!) for, and her chances of employment in the industry are nearly zero. Where I'm from(Poland)_all higher education is free, and then I have no problem with degrees not correlating with employment(but then maybe on the other hand, as a Polish tax payer, maybe I would prefer that they did, otherwise why are we paying these people to study with no employment prospects afterwards. Again, I don't really think that but I know many people do).
There used to be a system of education here in the UK called vocational colleges (or sometimes courses) where you would do exactly this, prepare for work in the industry - and industry would be involved in helping shape the curriculum, giving students work experience etc.
This has fallen out of favour a lot, it still exists for trades activities like plumbing, electrician, bricklaying/building etc. but you won't find a software engineering course
Recently the government tried to bring back "apprenticeships" but this was abused very hard by retailers to pay shelf stackers 1/2 the minimum wage.
At any time, you can download your google docs data and have it locally. You can convert it to word/excel formats.
This makes anything you are trying to argue completely irrelevant.
If they basically forced you to keep your data in their proprietary format online-only, then maybe you have an argument.. but since this is not true you are grasping at straws here.
isn't that the price you pay for using any online sharing thingy? you gain easy sharing+access (because it's "on someone else's computer"), but lose control. if it makes information easily accessible (contrast with xeroxing paper docs), i think it's a decent trade-off.
it'd be nice if we weren't reliant on one service provider, but idk any good alternatives.
> those students aren’t prepping to work for Google.
i don't get this part. would you criticize the widespread usage of MS Office as "those people aren't prepping to work for Microsoft"?
One of the reasons is there are just too many students. How this came to be is another rabbithole though.
It is in the interest of society as a whole to have a better-educated population. That means support for individuals being educated must come from all members of society -- in other words, it's a government domain funded through taxes. Absent common support, the interests of specific groups, mostly corporate shareholders expecting fat quarterly results, will come to dominate.
What a lot of software 'engineers' in NL rather don't see is that you can make a very very healthy living as a 'drywaller' ( not a native speaker, can't find the word ). You can easily make more than as a software dev.
The general population just is not as malleable ( Dutch: maakbaar? ) as boomers would like to believe. So at the bottom we have an entire cohort who used to work in factories or the building industry, who rely on financial support.
The first 'food bank' in NL was started in 2000. Why?
It's hard to do this kind of job when you're 50 or 60 and with physical work the risk of death or injury is also higher.
Plus it's harder to move up the financial and social ladder.
It's pretty much universal that people appreciate some kinds of work and look down on others.
We should not forget their predicament is in their own making after all. It definitely sleeps better.
If a more educated population was better then we would keep accumulating more degrees until we die instead of working.
Also, don't confuse a degree with education. Apprenticeships and technical training are also education.
Are you really sure that big tech wants these people in their workforce? At least the typical tech job interview process tests for quite different skills.
Advantage was that we had very modern equipment (electrics, robotics, measuring instruments, ...) that would otherwise have crashed the budget of the university.
It wasn't a secret that industry tried to influence the curriculum to get students to be trained in technologies and tools they themselves use. It is clear they tried to poach students.
I understand the objection though and other departments constantly berated this closeness and they certainly had a point because the generality of education was endangered.
With big-tech in software there are some additional risks in my opinion.
That said, there is merit of feedback from industry to university. It is especially helpful to not let students learn about outdated approaches and tech and keep academia in the know.
But that has to be a transparent forum without some maybe not so moral gifts from industries.
You are right your supposed to learn the theory at UNI Tech companies want to avoid the cost of training / career development - to many MBA/Accountants.
Well, speak for yourself. The majority of people in my classes absolutely had in mind going to industry after their studies. There's nothing wrong with that. Those two goals, being prepared for industry AND science aren't mutually exclusive.
It’s also why many people are upset at the idea of forgiving student loans. “I spent $20k for my degree, but Person X got into med school and is $250k in debt on their own will. Make them pay for it!”
There’s some parallels between making college/university free and the free K-12 education mandates decades ago. (Yes, it’s not “free free” but “taxed to be free”, but that’s beside the point)
Also, people don’t want their taxes raised when there’s no benefit to them. If one’s kids have all graduated, you see no reason to pay more money and get nothing in return.
Don't forget about all the big whale donors too. Universities really enjoy receiving millions of dollars for endowments, scholarships, and capital projects. So they may cater to the needs and desires of those constituents.
Also, I see nothing wrong with that, at the same time there was plenty of room for "pure research" into even the most obscure corners of theoretical CS and maths.
Recruit directly at a broader range of schools and make the curriculum more relevant
Big Tech largely ignores Tier 2 and Tier 3 schools for on campus recruiting, while imagining that the intelligence community has better developers (which does recruit from tier 2 and tier 3 schools on campus)
Since neither of them have figured out how to screen for competent or trainable developers better its clear big tech should be expanding how they recruit. Desirable because big tech is the one with the inclusion problem and pays better.
I don't think the general consensus is that intelligence organizations have better developers than big tech. I think the rule of thumb is the better the pay, the better the quality.
I think after various leaks that idea did evaporate a lot
Am I reading elitist bs or can you elaborate?
A company I work for spent the majority of their budget and then some on things that they didn’t need, much without any forethought or planning. It’s either because of kickbacks or because it seemed enterprise-y; there’s no rational explanation other than incompetence or corruption. An adequate IT director / CTO would be able to make their case for use of better and cheaper ToC of best-of-class open-source solutions.
Whether it’s kickbacks or just enjoying bragging about the Ferrari of webscalers we just bought or brandname IAAS we use, it’s wrong.
Big tech giving software and courses is one thing, but those come and go... it is like learning to use any tool, hey do you use a DeWalt or Milwaukee? Each are the same but different. In 10 years, you might use a completely different tool, but the tool was just that, it is the ideas and concepts that you are supposed to learn in (and outside of) the classroom. It is my job to teach you _how_ to solve problems, perhaps using the DeWalt or the Milwaukee or both.
Eh, as others have noted, companies have been donating for years, we could argue that grants shape our research too, but as long as professors keep the goal in mind (how do I get students to effectively and efficiently solve problems using available tools of the day), I think our future will be alright.
Would solve quite a few problems altogether - people getting more independent and following their interests. You would still have competition, but that would be moderated by actual needs, both in the private and public sector.
Not sure an end to the classic higher-ed system would be a bad thing.
Interesting, and disturbing.
I am a math professor at a US state university, and thankfully I haven't observed any of this at all. For lower-level classes such as calculus we all use the same book, decided upon by the department as a whole, but when teaching upper-level classes I generally choose as I see fit.
I am curious, what form does this expectation/pressure take? At my university, if administrators tried to do this, my colleagues (at least the tenure-track/tenured ones) would briefly chuckle, delete the email, and not remember it five minutes later.
Point being, I think college professors overestimate their impact a bit when regarding bachelors/masters topics. All that is too basic to really need some expert domain knowledge and is knowledge which hasn't really changed that much the last 20 years. SVM's were invented in the 90s. Linear algebra some time before that. The rest is industry or postdoc stuff.
I get the "teaching" part but if you are "teaching" a room of 50 student's it isn't really that different from watching a youtube video for them.
I do think there is a ton of value in getting feedback from a professor or colleague, but you can get pretty far with a book.
- books can partially teach you the "how" and also partially the "why".
- at university, you are being taught how to teach yourself, not necessarily how to perform practical things. Age of the exercise is therefore less relevant.
- ideally, teaching a room full of 50 students is easy better than an online class with 50, which easily should beat a video. Not all classes are like this which is a shame.
vs getting a self-taught junior role early and not being $100k in debt?
Why does this have to be done in a university setting? Is this explicitly conveyed or is this an outcome of going through classes and it’s what it takes to succeed?
Personally, when I was studying at a pretty strong university in terms of global rankings, I didn’t really “learn to learn” from the classes. The most helpful to me was Cal Newport’s blog (from his grad student days), Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange soft questions, hn discussions about learning and studying, and office hours when I explicitly asked Profs how they study, learn, and solve problems.
When I took what I learned from those sources and stopped going to class to instead work through the textbook/course material at my own pace, my grades improved significantly. If I am able to get an “A” without going to class, does that mean the Prof / university successfully taught me the material or whatever lesson(s) were to be learned?
Sorry for the rant, but I feel the default shouldn’t be to go through higher education to learn to learn. (I’m not saying you are saying that.) So, how can these lessons be made available more widely available?
Professors who choose to use the full suite of textbook, plus textbook provided slides, plus electronic auto graded homework might save themselves some time, but definitely are less effective educators, in my limited experiences.
A professor would rather spend their time teaching students and finding the best existing book (less expensive if possible, but better quality is more important) so they can use it for teaching.
I'm sure there are professors who have been thinking of writing their own textbook and getting students to buy them ... the downside is apparently writing technical books and textbooks earns less than minimum wage, and that's if you are lucky because of the way revenue split works with textbooks. So they have to charge exorbitant rates on the textbooks to make even a little bit of money. So most professors don't bother and instead use an existing good quality textbook. Not to say there aren't others who would try to write and sell their own.
To a large extent it’s a political institution, with outdated historical baubles forced upon it (administrative nightmare).
We’re at a hinge point in social evolution where perhaps a university is generally unnecessary.
Accurate information discovery, storage, and retrieval is what a university was built for conceptually.
It’s a matter of human history it is mired in old political speech and social construct. Not necessity to execute its purpose.
You have skills to teach people. Teach them. Dispose of the pretense of teaching “in politically normalized settings”.
Go teach. Really historically you’re teaching people who paid the political price. How free.
Of course many college kids are just kids fresh out of highschool with no financial skills or haggling skills so I guess I take back what I said about there not being enough dumb-dumbs to fuel a market for DRM "textbooks". People do still take out loans to finance their English major, after all.
All of a sudden, we were made to spend time learning Azure, we were given Surface Tablets for building apps, there were guest lectures by Microsoft employees, we were prompted to apply for MS internships, etc.
What the department intended to be a harmless collaboration, turned out to be an aggressive marketing push by Microsoft for hearts and minds of the students.
Thankfully, a backlash from the student body prompted a dampening of the relationship, but the experience showed that barriers to entry for corporations pushing their own agenda into academia can be low.
Managed properly, these sorts of relationships can be win-win, but there's a clear limit and universities should be conscious and forthright of where the line is.
Given that MS employs some seriously world-leading computer science academics, isn't this a great thing? I wish I got lectures from people like this!
The academy is supposed to be its own free-standing institution with its own values and its own agenda. There are intelligent people who don't want to work with people who build mass surveillance systems, provide IT services to scary government agencies, crush competition, etc. Having Microsoft at a university should be like having ROTC at a university. You can opt in if you want, or avoid it if you want.
Didn't Hinton go to Canada so he didn't have to take DoD money?
Archimedes worked for the military.
Feynman built an atomic bomb.
Isn't that a little contradicting? And where do you draw the line?
How are you going to judge the company influencing education? By its public image?
Do you think companies will just provide everything for education and nothing more? No agenda will be followed and the situation will not be taken advantage of for more?
Have proponents of this really thought of the likely or possible outcomes?
Students had to work on projects where they develop apps for Tizen OS[0] and even publish it to the samsung store. (And waiving the rights/revenue of their apps to the university)
I still cringe thinking about all those wasted student effort/time..
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen
Some bon-mots: - Universities can change themselves to be governed like a foundation - no limit on pay of professors and administrator - no limit on fees, though they have to take in EU-students for free (but I guess, a suitable "test" can change that easily) - no more political student bodies allowed. If you want to have a say, please be apolitical or shut up and be happy that corporations and corruptions need you educated.
Nice, how politicians are selling out this public good, while every press outlet covers people's stupidity in handling the coronavirus.
For the student that just want the training for a good paying job (no shame in that, there is still the internet and the various edx-like program to supplement teaching) a highly-focused, low cost and fast degree could be a perfect solution.
Another advantage for the company, we all know that while CS are good to teach strong theoretical background, all the tooling is usually learned on the go. Take microsoft for example, imagine how efficient it would be to have a student learn in a completely integrated environnement and perfectly use microsoft tools (mastering visual studio is an art in itself) at the end of the training.
Back when I was in college 20 years ago, Microsoft had a program to do this.
Part of it was doing things like :
1. Hiring students as liaisons to represent and advocate for MS stuff at the school.
2. Giving away free copies of software away to CS departments and students in exchange.
3. Try to help get these things on the curriculum/etc (often in conjunction with #2)
4. Find opportunities for MS to donate computer labs and other meaningful things in exchange for people being taught visual studio/etc.
(How far they would go depended on where in the top-N programs it was, etc)
This is the genesis of a number of the Microsoft-named computer labs in US universities.