University of Florida guts computer science department in budget-cutting move

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/university-of-florida-guts-computer-science-department-in-budget-cutting-move.ars

by evo_9 • 14 years ago

39 50 14 years ago

arstechnica.com

overshard• 14 years ago

I see a future where more and more Universities start doing this. The University of Florida had many more issues than this but Universities just can't keep up with how much the field of Computer Science changes. They were built around books and static resources that you come in and study and get a job after four to six years where that information is still relevant.

Four to six years in Computer Science is an insane amount of time, so much changes in the world of CS in this amount of time that basically your information is outdated by the time your graduate.

Most of my CS friends have dropped out after 2-3 years and gotten great jobs. (Albeit they all went in with a solid working knowledge of programming and work experience to begin with.) People who go to college to learn CS to get a good job in the field tend to leave getting a corporate Java programming job which just doesn't interest the majority of programmers/potential programmers anymore.

unreal37• 14 years ago

Wow, that's a lot of generalizations in one comment.

First, yes, if you're the type who wants to start a YC-funded startup... you're going to skip college and do that. That's a small, small percentage of the number of CS grads though - say 1%. 1 in 100 young people interested in Computer Science will found a startup in the United States.

If you think its the "majority" that do that, you have to get out of San Francisco and visit a place like Florida.

But that still leaves 99% who would love to go to college, get a degree, and get a good job doing interesting things. And even if they get a CS degree, they may not even go into programming after college. That happens quite a bit.

I think what this move portends is that Universities can no longer fund research. They get a shrinking amount of money, and they have to focus on teaching.

By the way, the fundamentals of programming do NOT change all that much. You know what Android runs? Java. You know when Java was invented? 1994. Do you know how long it takes to learn Android or iPhone programming if you have a solid understanding of Object Oriented programming? Days. So a 3 year degree in CompSci still has a lot of relevance and value.

Unless your dream is to start a startup, in which case, go do that.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

In a few areas that's true, but there are wide swathes of computer science that change more slowly, and not only in the Java enterprise space. Machine learning changes year to year, but undergrad-level foundational material from 2000 serves you reasonably well today; you still need to know what a loss function is, what cross-validation is, etc. Architectures change, but you should still know what registers are, what an instruction pipeline is, all the basic material, enhanced with some advanced stuff. As far as PLs, a grounding in all the major programming paradigms---functional, object-oriented, procedural, etc.---is still useful to have. And so on.

The big-data space is increasingly important within CS, and I don't see a big move away from academic content there. Whether you learn it in an actual academic program or self-teach, you'll need a solid mathematical background.

Locke1689• 14 years ago

If you're interested in how little programming languages change over 40 years check out The Next 700 Programming Languages[1], from 1966. Sure, it's easy to point out advances like ATP or modern concurrent, generational GC, but the underlying ideas are relatively constant.

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf

Radzell• 14 years ago

I agree the education system is completly broken more so for comp sci than anywhere. There is no need for 4 years of school. Why do you need bio and comunication. Before anyone say that grammer and english help you in a career look back at your college career did you honestly take those classes seriously. I have comp sci course I've past and haven't retain one word.

jwoah122• 14 years ago

I don't know how to say this without being offensive, but your entire comment is evidence that people should be taking those courses seriously. You may be an extremely competent programmer, but when I see the spelling mistakes and inability to communicate effectively, I would be hard-pressed to take you seriously in any way.

robotresearcher• 14 years ago

Skilled troll, or unintentionally funny?

pkulak• 14 years ago

My University basically taught The Art of Computer Programming. I remember one C++ class (an elective), one assembly class (required, I think), and the rest was just math. That stuff never goes out of style (not that I remember any of it...). I think I'd be much worse off if I was just taught the latest hotness. Node.js 101!

excuse-me2• 14 years ago

Computer Science changes very little in 4-6 years. Computer programming might change - but if that was true then nobody would still be programming 3years after graduating because everything would have changed.

The reason for schools dropping CS is market forces. In the late 90s everyone wanted to do CS because that's where the jobs where, the market crashed and nobody wanted to do CS, then the market picked up and there were no CS grads, so wages went up, so people enrolled, then the market dipped .... Unfortunately there is a 3-4 lag in the system.

Of course if the schools taught CS rather than programming this wouldn't matter as much.

If you really want to get worried, check out how many schools still teach chemistry. Google/Facebook/etc can get by with self-taught programmers. The rest of industry can't get by with self-taught chemists.

balloot3• 14 years ago

No, Google/Facebook can NOT get by with self-taught programmers. Much of what they do is the realm of highly educated people with a PhD or Masters in CS. Look at one of Google's highest visibility projects - the self driving car. I highly doubt you're going to find anyone associated with that project that doesn't have a degree, and rightly so. There's more to CS than making fun jQuery hacks.

balloot3• 14 years ago

Wow, are you wrong.

First off, at any decent school the CS curriculum focuses on theory and other things that are relatively slow changing. Big O theory, language parsing, etc are absolutely just as relevant now as they were 10 years ago.

Second, it is asinine to suggest that people with CS degrees don't get interesting jobs. In the end, people with good degrees just have access to a superset of the jobs available to someone who skipped school. Both can be hackers who make cool web apps, or iPhone apps, etc. But only one has the ability to go to Google or Facebook and work with machine learning algorithms. Or go to Apple and work on the iOS platform. Or go to Pixar and build the guts of their rendering engine. That's the value of a degree - there are a lot of really awesome jobs that are very likely out of reach for you having never gone to school for CS.

kls6• 14 years ago

I don't believe the poster is wrong per say, I believe that their perspective may be colored by their experience. There are a lot of schools out their teaching their CS and IT degrees like an expensive vocational school. Sure the top schools with research centers are teaching theory that stands the test of time, but many of the lesser schools are teaching Intro to Java and Business Math for Programming. For these schools the poster is correct, a 6 month vocational course would be cheaper and would probably put a student in the market, better equipped, than a 4 year degree that started out with a mid-lifecycle language to start.

scott_s2• 14 years ago

Four to six years in Computer Science is an insane amount of time, so much changes in the world of CS in this amount of time that basically your information is outdated by the time your graduate.

I'm going to re-phrase what others have already said: You do not understand what "Computer Science" is.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

Big discussion yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876564

jballanc3• 14 years ago

Even more so than free healthcare, the one thing that separates the US from the "rest of the world" is the availability of free higher education. Of course, the caveat is that most of the rest of the world is far more restrictive of who may attend university.

In the past, this was always touted as an advantage of the US system. Sure, you have to pay for college, but you don't have to stress over a placement exam that will determine your fate at an early age. Anyone with the motivation can get a higher education.

Except, that's not how things have turned out. It seems that attaining a college degree has become an obligation in the US, for no good reason. People like to talk about the ever increasing proportion of the population that hold college degrees, but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with college degrees matches the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees?

Instead, the US seems to have a death-grip on the notion that "more college graduates = more better jobs". So, instead of scaling back college acceptance rates and spending limited funds to provide an excellent education to a few, the US will water down college education until its as filling as the beer its college students will spend most of their 4 years drinking, only to emerge with a degree in underwater basket weaving.

_delirium5• 14 years ago

> but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with college degrees matches the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees?

I think the imbalance is actually in the other direction, if you ask it that way: the fraction of the population with college degrees is considerably lower than the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees. Unemployment among people who don't have college degrees is very high, suggesting that there aren't enough no-degree-required jobs. And when no-degree-required jobs do come on the market, they get massively over-applied for, like when McDonald's announced 50,000 job openings and received a million applicants.

Now whether those jobs should require college degrees is another story. For better or worse, employers demand degrees for a wide range of jobs, and you often won't even get past an automated HR screen if you don't have one. Until employers start offering more jobs to people without degrees, people will continue to feel that they need one, so they can qualify for those openings.

jballanc3• 14 years ago

Well, are you assuming that no one applying for the McDonald's job has a degree? I think the situation has probably gotten to the point that there are so many "useless" degrees on the market, that it no longer even makes sense to talk about "fraction with degrees". So, let's try rewording it:

> but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with a particular type of college degree matches the fraction of available jobs requiring that type of college degree?

As an interesting aside, one advantage of providing a free university education is that you only need to provide it for as many students as you need to attain a certain degree. Need more doctors? Then provide more free slots for premed students. Need fewer lawyers? Then this year there aren't as many prelaw slots available.

Such a system may seem rather sanguine, but it's also worth noting that the rest of the world does not seem to equate career success with a happy life in the same way the US does.

pavel_lishin3• 14 years ago

> available jobs that require college degrees

It seems to me that a large number of jobs that list a degree as a requirement don't gain much by requiring a degree, except a smaller stack of resumes to dig through.

Why does a secretary position require a bachelor's degree? Especially when it's any bachelor's degree, regardless of major?

enjo• 14 years ago

Are all college educations equal? I suspect not. I attended a lower tier institution, and I'm pretty sure that someone graduating from MIT or Stanford probably had a more rigorous education than I did (if for no other reason than the quality of the peers was so much higher).

So I'd argue that we haven't watered down the collegiate experience, particularly on the high end. We've simply opened the doors to higher education on the lower end and made that attainable to a lot more students.

I can't imagine that more education for a greater number people is a bad thing. I think it's a very good thing. If I have to choose between a secretary with a degree and one without, give me the one who has the degree. I know that they probably have the capacity to learn quickly at the very least. That's what a bachelors degree really is in my view, a certification that you know how to learn more than anything else.

yummyfajitas4• 14 years ago

It's important to note that this isn't a budget issue. The CS dept was cut by $1.7M, but the athletic department had their funding raised by $2M (total athletic budget is $99M).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/04/22/univer...

Interestingly, the state government seems very supportive of STEM and has thrown $49M at the creation of Florida Polytechnic University. It seems it's merely the university administration that wants to cut it.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/scott-approves-state...

jmduke• 14 years ago

Comparing the CS department to the athletic department is fallacious; the athletic departments at schools like UF make much more than they spend.

petroica• 14 years ago

The athletics department funds itself and is entirely separate from the academics budget.

Retric2• 14 years ago

Not really, if they spend less money on athletics they can spend it on anything else they want.

khuey• 14 years ago

The athletic department's budget comes out of the athletic department's revenue. This is very much a budget issue. The reason why UF needs to cut this money is precisely because of this creation of a new University. Even less state funding is now being divided among even more universities.

http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2012/04/blog-generat...

yummyfajitas4• 14 years ago

It's one pool of money under the control of the university. What prevents UF from funneling some of the athletic dept's revenue to subsidize the rest of the university?

I realize that the university might be motivated to implement budget cuts in ways that harm voters (in order to make voters angry about it), but it's hardly clear that UF doesn't have $1.7M worth of waste. Nor is it clear that the $2M increase in the athletic budget will result in a > $2M increase in revenue.

thwest• 14 years ago

This argument rings hollow at every university where I've encountered it. Universities are educational institutions and athletics are great but if they produce surplus it has an obligation to fund academic activities first and foremost. Phrased for people who react emotionally to this argument: educational institutions ought to increase their brand licensing fees to their for-profit football team subsidiaries.

cantankerous3• 14 years ago

This article DOES NOT PROVIDE ENOUGH INFORMATION on why this restructuring has taken place. Is it really just a ham-fisted budget cutting move or is there something more subtle going on? It looks like the university also had an ECE department that it was able to consolidate into, at least to some extent. It also does not provide any information on the numbers related to the research of the Computer Science Department. How much money were they bringing in in grants? How many papers were they writing? How many students were moving through the department? If these numbers don't make enough sense, or they don't stack up to other departments when a cut has to be made, then it really just boils down to something like this.

It seems completely absurd that a thriving research department would be shuttered because of budget reasons, which is what the Forbes article (and I use that term loosely, "post" is probably a better word) seems to imply, and this may be the case, but I'm quite skeptical.

Sometimes, if you have a bad set of faculty that create a stagnant department (no research, bad teaching, all tenured, and all resisting hiring good new faculty to maintain the status quo) you have to take dramatic steps to get rid of them so you can trim back on your budget (tenured faculty make a lot more than new faculty) and breath new life into a program. In some cases, the only option to reboot a department may be to scrap it entirely, offer zombie profs new spots in a similar department, and bin the rest you don't like or offer them much-less-cush teaching jobs where they have to work for dinner. Later on the department can be restarted and reconstructed from new and preexisting good faculty. I'm not saying this is the case here. What I am saying is that there can be real reasons to scrap an entire CS department this day in age when you have budget problems, or even if you DON'T have them. I don't know the particulars here, but it sure would be nice if people weren't so self-righteous with these postings and gave us more facts so we could understand how crazy the situation actually is instead of hearing about (unrelated) athletic budgets.

All the Forbes post is really doing is engaging in sensationalism by co-opting the notion of American decline via self-sabotage that's so popular right now. I wish we could hear some more about the real issues.

University of Florida guts computer science department in budget-cutting move

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