Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University

http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm?

by edw519 • 17 years ago

124 118 17 years ago

jlees2• 17 years ago

A really interesting read and very much echoes some of the reasons I chose not to pursue a career in academia. When you realise you're at a fork in the road, and down one route lies being a supervisor's paper-churning-out slave, researching something that doesn't even interest you so the department can get more funding...grnnnh.

Edit: To clarify, this was my problem, as a PhD student with a PhD supervisor (not sure what the US term is; adviser?) who was forcing me to do the wrong thing all in the name of academia.

brent2• 17 years ago

I wouldn't say that is an entirely accurate characterization. I don't know anyone in my department doing research that doesn't interest them. Students generally love the research they are doing and are probably a bit more autonomous than your comment seems to imply. I've taken both directions (industry then academia) and in industry I was a code-churning-out slave working on something that barely interested me. Now I work on my own on a topic that really interests me!

amichail7• 17 years ago

Wouldn't you say that pursuing a startup is better than both industry and academia?

jlees2• 17 years ago

At the university I studied at, I wasn't the only student facing years of working on my supervisor's pet project in the name of funding. Some people stuck it out, some of us looked elsewhere for academic gratification, some switched supervisor; generally we all ended up doing something we loved, but the general situation at the university wasn't exactly set up to maximise student happiness from the get-go; instead, it maximised publication numbers and grants.

ggchappell2• 17 years ago

It seems to me that you have it exactly backwards.

First, as a university professor (in the U.S.), I don't have a supervisor in the sense the term is used in business. Yes, my department has a chair, but this is a "first among equals" position, periodically elected from among the members of the department. Governance is mostly collegial in nature, and much of the evaluation & promotion process is handled by committees. (Note: all this varies a fair amount from one university to another.)

Second, I do whatever research I want; no one tells me what to research. My work needs to be able to get through a peer-review process and be published, but that is not much of a restriction on topics.

Certainly academia has its downside; things like political nastiness, low pay and other budgetary woes, and excessive paperwork are often cited, along with various troubles with the tenure system. More related to what the article is talking about, there is the question of the value of research. If research topics are chosen on the basis of interest, then there is not much incentive to do something that makes the world a better place, generates money for someone, or anything like that.

amichail7• 17 years ago

You don't have a supervisor. You have many and they hide behind anonymity -- namely your peers who evaluate your papers, grant proposals, etc.

In a way this is much worse than having a supervisor in industry. At least your supervisor wants you to succeed. Your peers not so much unless it suits their agenda.

The freedom you have is only an illusion. What good is this freedom if your grant proposals / papers get rejected?

Moreover, your freedom is severely restricted by the scientific approach demanded by computer science. It is hard to fund/publish novel ideas that are not easy to evaluate.

In startups, you can more easily explore novel ideas and change them without worrying about evaluation methodology. Ultimately, your criteria for success are simple: how many users do you have? how much money are you making? etc.

ivanyv• 17 years ago

That was very interesting.

I live in what you'd call a 3d world country (Mexico), and this stuff makes me think about why empires fall and others rise...

The rising stars get to watch how an empire falls ;-)

One of my dreams is to open a school that's much better than most of the schools in Mexico, using the good and bad examples of schools in countries like the US and the UK. My 2 cents to leave to the world.

jacquesm6• 17 years ago

Your dreams are definitely worth pursuing!

dangoldin3• 17 years ago

And probably a lot easier in the modern day as more and more people get access to the web. I'm very interested in web learning and am trying to put something together for it too.

Locke16899• 17 years ago

In that case, you should look more closely to elite schools in the US (I have no idea how Cambridge and Oxford changed in the UK). Most of the top 15-20 schools in the United States have succeeded in continuing to graduate competent students.

gaius4• 17 years ago

All of the elite universities in the UK are under sustained attack by the government in the name of "equality". Oxford and Cambridge in particular are under intense pressure to take substandard students from failing State comprehensive schools.

The Russell Group should take the plunge and break away from government control altogether.

quantumhobbit• 17 years ago

That is a dream I share, as a disillusioned graduate student in the US. I'm sure a lot of people, students and junior faculty especially, have the same dream.

bkovitz3• 17 years ago

Certainly, there's loads of stupid "research" in academia—cranking out papers that interest no one, in order to justify tenure and more grants.

However, "90% of everything is crap". The relevant question, before you throw out the entire institution, is: Are there real opportunities to do good work?

Good work takes two main forms in academia: research and teaching. Is good research work being done? Is good teaching being done?

jerf• 17 years ago

"The relevant question, before you throw out the entire institution, is: Are there real opportunities to do good work?"

I disagree. The relevant question is, "What is the best possible way to do good work, including practical concerns taking into account the behavior of real people and not just theoretical people, and is that what we have? If not, how can we get there?"

The way you ask the question is basically the same thing as the sunk cost fallacy. Yes, we've got a lot of investment in the current system, but if it isn't working, it's time to change it to something that will. Whatever that may be. And, again, the question is whether it is working with real people, not hypothetical people who are custom-designed to work with the system you want to be ideal.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

The best is the enemy of the good. I'd shorten the question to "Can we do better?"

bkovitz3• 17 years ago

Indeed, comparison with other opportunities is most important. I didn't make that clear. If you can do better teaching and/or better research outside the university, then go for it. (I am wrestling with this decision right now.) That would be a good reason to resign professorship, not the fact that a lot of university people are doing mediocre work.

My understanding, BTW, is that there is lots and lots of fantastic research being done in universities. You have to find it and hang around with the right crowd. Dr. Tarver's problem may simply be that he didn't find the opportunities.

imack• 17 years ago

To be fair to the time, in 1999, there was the dot-com bubble going on and a lot of students were going into CS for the wrong reasons so there could have been more at play than government objectives. I suspect there were a lot of CS students who did not enjoy programming in such programs, thus accounting for seniors who couldn't do projects. I know CS and programming are not the same, but I liken it to studying Shakespeare and not enjoying reading or writing.

Our school (UWaterloo) noticed a huge drop in CS enrollment soon after that, between 2002 and 2004 (roughly). At which point business programs saw a spike in enrollment. I wonder if this professor had stuck around whether he would have noticed an improvement once the stories of 24 year old billionaires were removed from the headlines.

karanbhangui2• 17 years ago

w00t for UW (CEng student here). pew pew.

christofd2• 17 years ago

pew pew. we have lazerz :)

christofd2• 17 years ago

no, you guys don't get the background story, regarding University of Waterloo's new logo.

Locke16899• 17 years ago

I am an American, so forgive me, but I was under the impression that UWaterloo was also regarded as one of, if not the best, CS schools in Canada. I would argue that many of the more elite universities have managed to beat back this trend for the most part, as I do not believe that Stanford or MIT are graduating substandard computer science students.

0wned2• 17 years ago

I agree with this statement. Other schools (perhaps not as highly regarded as the ones you mentioned) such as Texas A&M do hardcore, low-level C++ courses, compiler stuff, etc. for both CS and CE students as core requirements. They lightened the requirements several years back to compete with other schools, but changed back to them when they realized how soft their students had become. Of course, Bjarne Stroustrup is the chair of the CoE CS program at TAMU... so that may have a lot to do with it.

javanix5• 17 years ago

And here we have the reason why just about every single CS department in the US teaches Java instead of C or Scheme.

amichail7• 17 years ago

Java is an improvement though, especially under Eclipse.

Even better would be using Python followed by Scala.

Perhaps the issue is that too much class time is spent teaching details of a language and its libraries.

javanix5• 17 years ago

Yes, the hours upon hours of instruction in basic CS courses that were devoted to the various mundanities of Java abstractions drove me nuts.

I'd much rather have spent that time learning the more-useful mundanities of memory management in C.

Locke16899• 17 years ago

No. Java and Python and Scala are not improvements. Why? They're too easy. Pointers are hard (relatively). Compiler design is hard. Complexity theory is hard. A loss in any one of these sections is a loss to the degree as a whole. The ACM ICPC helps a little in promoting intelligent problem solving (every CS student should be able to write a program to use Dijkstra's algorithm in under 20 minutes from memory), but it's the university's fault in the end. Fortunately in the United States, some of our top universities seem to have (thus far) escaped the treatment that other ones did. Stanford, Yale, Caltech, MIT, CMU, et al. all continue to teach very much the same curriculum that they taught intro CS students 10 years ago. Systems is a required course and taught in C. Intro programming is a required course and taught in Scheme/LISP. Unfortunately, many schools did not fair so easily and now teach Java or some-such exclusively. I think that this is partially to blame for the number of unfortunately bad computer science students with degrees. How to change this, I have no idea.

thras• 17 years ago

I'd rather see C taught than Scheme. Hardware matters, and a good CS-education should be centered in languages that recognize that.

Software engineering, on the other hand is too important a subject to be left to the schools. Let them learn Scheme on their own. They'll appreciate it more that way.

javanix5• 17 years ago

C would be my first preference as well, but I also appreciate that Scheme (or another functional language) would provide better opportunities than C or Java for students to learn more "advanced" algorithmic techniques such as recursion.

The problem with Java (and C, to a lesser extent) in basic problem solving is that you can almost brute-force-code and get a working solution that will get full credit, but after writing it a more elegant (and efficient) solution isn't always obvious. In functional languages, that "more correct" solution almost always seems to stand out more, at least to me.

Locke16899• 17 years ago

They should learn both. Any CS student who does not understand simple hardware concepts such as page faults does not deserve a degree. Similarly, every CS student should learn functional and imperative programming. Period.

tybris3• 17 years ago

The real failure here is the words "instead of". It's really not hard to learn both and especially good to learn when to use which.

javanix5• 17 years ago

You make a good point - I was thinking that Java shouldn't be taught in introductory CS classes for people planning to be a CS major, but obviously didn't get that across.

It would be fairly easy for someone to learn Java once they've been taught C. Professors should not have to spend time going over pointers and memory management in an OS class, however.

omail• 17 years ago

At my university, Intro to Prog. is in C and C++ (yes, both), and the course that immediately follows is in Scheme, some made up language (we had to build an interpreter for that language in Scheme) and Haskell (for the motivated students).

scott_s6• 17 years ago

I think comments like there are border-line trolls in a community like HN.

The languages used in various parts of a CS curriculum are one component to the whole. Holding up that component as the reason that the sky is falling is, at best, disingenuous. I can construct terrible CS curriculums that start with C, and terrific ones that start with Java.

If those who construct the curriculum want the beginning courses to focus on algorithmic thinking, I think it's fair to use a language that abstracts away much of the physical machine. The abstractions can be peeled away in later courses.

If, instead, they want the beginning courses to focus on the realities and difficulties of dealing with computer systems, it makes sense to start with something like C. They can then introduce the abstractions that let people manage those difficulties in later courses.

I think both approaches are valid, as long as a student gets a view of the important points of the field. I can even see arguments why one approach might be better than the other. But claiming that one approach represents the failure of our CS academic system is zealotry.

gaius4• 17 years ago

You have to meta it one level. The reason C was taught was because it was close to the machine without actually being assembly language. That's pedagogically useful because it exposes the student to all the properties of the Turing machine without having to be too specific about implementation (not that MIPS assembly isn't also a good choice). Similarly, the reason to teach Smalltalk is to teach OO, the reason to teach Lisp is to teach Lambda Calculus. The only reason Java is taught is because students demand it because they've heard that if you know Java you can get a good job.

Now, that doesn't imply that Java shouldn't ever be taught. But the reasons for choosing any language should be academic reasons. Particularly, it is bizarre to see academia trailing industry in language adoption.

philwelch4• 17 years ago

"If those who construct the curriculum want the beginning courses to focus on algorithmic thinking, I think it's fair to use a language that abstracts away much of the physical machine. The abstractions can be peeled away in later courses."

I don't know that Java does this all the much better than C. The problem with C for a beginning student isn't so much that you have to manage memory manually--it generally takes a few weeks to even get to malloc() in a C-based introductory course--but that C gets in your way with explicit typing, #includes, etc. Java does away with some of that but introduces its own OO scaffolding to get in your way too. Instead of having to write main()s and #include's, the Java student has to enclose their functions in a class and so forth. Let's compare Hello World in C, Java, and C#.

  #include <stdio.h>

  int main(void)
  {
    printf("Hello, World!\n");
    return 0;
  }

Java:

  class HelloWorldApp
  {
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
      System.out.println("Hello World!"); // Display the string
    }
  }

C#:

  class Hello 
  {
     static void Main() 
     {
        System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
     }
  }

The Java and C# examples are even more cluttered than the C example when it comes to superfluous tokens: it has a class declaration, the method signature is more unnecessarily elaborate, and the print command has like three levels of object-drilldown in it. When you get to the simple procedural programs that a beginning student will write, this mysterious crud remains unresolved for longer. It's not enough to explain typing as you would in C or Pascal, but you have to talk about object-oriented programming before you get into problems complex enough to justify that level of abstraction.

If you really want an abstract language to enforce algorithmic thinking, pick one that doesn't have all that extra mental burden when you first approach it.

Perl 5.8

  print "Hello World!\n"

Perl 5.10

  say "Hello World!"

Python

  print "Hello World!"

Ruby

  print "Hello World!"

The cool thing is that these languages still have subroutines and classes and so forth, but they don't force you to declare a class, declare a subroutine, and call an object method just to code "hello world".

Java has advantages over C. These advantages don't include "letting beginning programmers focus on algorithmic thinking by using high level abstractions". Java's higher level than C in that it protects you from naked pointers and lets you do OOP, but that's not the type of high-level abstraction that helps a beginning programmer, especially not when it comes at the cost of forcing them to put everything in classes and methods.

If those who construct the curriculum want the beginning courses to focus on algorithmic thinking, I think it's fair to use a language that abstracts away as much as possible. We have no shortage of good interpreted languages to accomplish this.

DrJokepu• 17 years ago

I had very similar experiences as a Computer Science undergraduate not many years ago at a prestigious British university. The expectations were so low that eventually I stopped attending lectures and got a full-time programming job and I still kept getting quite good grades. The problem is so widespread that it's not just about undergraduates; as an undergraduate I have met several PhD students who struggled with even basic programming or mathematical concepts.

Still, in a class of 300 people, there are still about 10 very talented and bright students who'd rather be (and not afraid of) writing Prolog interpreters and doing similarly interesting and cool stuff. There should be a way these students could learn advanced concepts with while being mentored by professors.

edw519• 17 years ago

Graduating computer-illiterate students who had to do a project in computer science was more of a headache.

For whom, you or those of us you have to work with them?

sketerpot2• 17 years ago

Everyone. Although, really, this goes beyond being just a large headache for everybody involved; it's more of a startling clusterfuck. I mean, honestly, how does a system get to be so broken that they graduate CS students who can't program a computer? Or simply stop offering core classes like compilers?

0wned2• 17 years ago

We can't generalize. Not all students are like the ones described in this article. I work with CS and CE graduate students 40 hours a week. I help them conduct research. The best of these students have an eagerness and desire to learn. They work on projects at home in their spare time, they learn new languages (just for the sake of learning them), etc. They want to learn C and C++. They love it.

Since I work directly with these kids and have seen dozens come and go, it's easy for me to quickly pick out the good ones. They are the most fun to work with too as they teach me as much or more as I teach them.

I see the average/bad ones too. The ones who do just barely enough to get by. The ones who "code by Google". They are far more common than the good ones. Their work speaks for itself. Poorly written, plagiarized and seldom delivered on time.

Hopefully employers have methods in place to weed out the bad and average kids. And incentives to hire and more importantly keep the best ones.

Just my 2 cents.

sasamat• 17 years ago

I can't comment on the US experience, but as a student in the UK in the 80s and Canada in the 90s I concur with Mark Tarver.

This is not just a CS issue, it's universal and the real damage is being done in the second tier establishments where grade inflation and dumbed-down courses are endemic. The tier one establishments (Oxbrige, Ivy League etc) can still use their own screening methodologies for aptitude and smarts to minimize the problem. As a result---and to continue Tarver's analogy of the Cultural Revolution---the 'party' is looking after its own whilst the rest goes to rot.

cabalamat2• 17 years ago

> This is not just a CS issue, it's universal and the real damage is being done in the second tier establishments where grade inflation and dumbed-down courses are endemic.

It's worse that that, because the dumbing down doesn't just effect universities. Secondary school science education has also been badly hit. The links that follow contain actual questions from GCSE science exams (note for non-British people: a GCSE is an exam typically taken by 16 year olds).

For example, in a biology exam, a question asked whether you see with your eye, ears, nose or mouth -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-yo...

Here's a physics exam, that's not quite as absurd -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-d...

IsaacL3• 17 years ago

"For example, in a biology exam, a question asked whether you see with your eye, ears, nose or mouth -- "

No it doesn't. The question is "which organ contains light receptors?", which although simple, does requires some knowledge of scientific jargon. And this is on the foundation paper, for which the maximum mark is a C - IIRC, the intermediate and higher papers don't include questions this easy.

This type of question is not for A-Level candidates, it's for distinguishing between the weaker students. Of course it's worthwhile keeping track of what kind of questions appear in exams as a benchmark of educational standards, but only looking at the worst examples you can find does not give a clear snapshot.

blasdel• 17 years ago

Just yesterday he announced that he's quitting his Lisp dialect, computing in general, and Britain: http://groups.google.com/group/Qilang/browse_thread/thread/5...

tybris3• 17 years ago

> By pre-1990 standards about 20% of the students should have been failed.

Interesting, I find that number quite low.

The failure rates for most CS courses at my BSc/MSc university (VU Amsterdam) usually hovered around 50% in the post-00s era, especially for the hard-line courses such as computer networks, finite fields and data structures. We were allowed to do an unlimited number of retrials (6 months in between), but still over a third of the students would drop out before completing their BSc.

When I started my PhD at a British university I was obliged to do some MSc courses. Basically every course started with: No one will fail this course. At first that seemed like a comfortable idea since I didn't want to be distracted from my research. Soon I learned that actually means the course is going to be boring as hell.

I don't believe the Dutch system works better than the British one. We've had our share of choice fanatics. Despite Andy Tanenbaum raking in millions, my current department is also a whole lot better funded than the VU.

I think it has more to do with attitude than politics. Tanenbaum basically created the department with his bare hands, writing Minix and his well-known books in the process. He's no longer actively involved in teaching, but he created a culture of outstanding education. There's still an enormous amount of attention on making courses more interesting, challenging and up-to-date. It's easy to get lazy and lower your standards, but not impossible to say no and become a better university.

BrentRitterbeck2• 17 years ago

This is the result of the university becoming more of a business than anything else. If you start flunking people out, you lose revenue.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

This would be true if the business were selling degrees.

If the business were selling an education, then it would actually result in increased revenue, since students would have to stay around longer to learn required materials.

Lots of business sell education instead of certifications. The problem here is the government stepping in and mucking around with standards, creating financial incentives that looked good in theory but don't work in the real world.

This happens a lot with well-meaning politicians trying to "help"

I_got_fifty• 17 years ago

It might be the socialist in me, but schools should always be public. No business should be involved in educating the next generation.

I think of universities more like a R&D department for the general public. (which also is why I think all software developed in universities should be Free)

idiopathic• 17 years ago

I don't understand the value of failing students in this way. At medical school I failed some exams but was allowed to retake them, and received coaching for one of the re-takes. (Relax, I had to prove I'd learned the material before I could work with patients.)

At my brother's economics PhD, however, the school (can you guess which it is) took pride in failing 50% of the class. Why? And when the students are going into so much debt, why is this appropriate? Pick students who can pass your exams in reasonable numbers, reject those who cannot, and then invest in teaching the ones you chose.

Bravado over failing students to demonstrate how difficult your course is is a waste of human talent.

tybris3• 17 years ago

It's not about failing students. Sure, students could be failing because your education is poor. That was not the case. It's about challenging students to the point where those with the intellectual prowess and discipline and the rest go on to study something that more closely matches their abilities (and the university should help them with that).

Debt is never a serious problem in the Netherlands. The government interest rates are so low that if you loan the maximum and put the money in bonds or a high interest savings account you'll actually turn a profit.

b-man• 17 years ago

I think most people are missing the point here. What he is saying is that CS (and the university model itself) has stopped being a correct vehicle for preparing students for a technical society.

I happen to agree with the guy. The model is broken, and we should move on to something much more libertarian, where the individual is in control of its own learning.

bkovitz3• 17 years ago

As a completely self-taught software engineer, I'm inclined to agree. Except for one big doubt: A large percentage of people do not excel on their own. They rely on social standards to specify what counts as "good enough" and to provide them a roadmap through the learning process.

Of course, that's what vocational schools are for, not universities. Universities got confused when they started pretending to offer job training.

alanthonyc• 17 years ago

" the counterfeit academic Mozarts are common and a contributory cause to global warming and deforestation."

A gem of a quote, and a worthwhile read.

springcoil• 17 years ago

Yeah I worry about the fact that this discussion became an emotional discussion in regards programming languages. There is a lot of evidence that students learn Java, because of the job market. I've worked in a school as Physics Teaching Assistant for a year (while at grad school) and the huge problem in Ireland, the UK and the USA is that people assume that students know best about choice etc. The fact is students are rubbish at telling what they'll enjoy, and most students will shirk away from thp the harder sciences etc. But the responsibility is to keep up the standards of academic rigor. Some wise young Cambridge scholar said to me recently 'When u audit something you change the standards, and the aims of it. League tables made schools focus on results, modularization make students focus on results, the job market makes people look for certain skills' and that is true. My most useful course in Philosophy at University, was a course I despised at the time. Perhaps we need to just let professors set the courses, or we get to the scenario that scares me the most when I get Physics graduates who don't understand what a Partial Derivative is. A CS graduate who doesn't know what the Lambda calculus is, is perhaps the same?

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

He does have a point, but something is missing in most such lamentations of watered down academic standards. It's that education, in the past, was not meant to be vocational training and therefore the eoconomic case for broadening access just wasn't there.

Knowing classic literature was not (functionally) why upper class kids of past times went on to earn much more than their lower class peers. It was just part of the symbolic glue that allowed members of that class to recognise each other.

Throughout history, access to good education was by birth, not by talent.

Most analyses featuring Mozart are flawed. It's probably because nobody is quite sure whether the purpose of education systems is to find those rare individuals with innate genius, or rather to teach a large number of reasonably intelligent people something so they are more capable of solving particular problems as a result. I don't think there is one approach that is suitable for doing both.

Mozart is often introduced into the debate by those demanding more stringent standards of admission. However, if it's about finding the Mozarts of the world, radical and indiscriminate broadening of access must be the top priority.

It's the nature of innate genius that it occurs just as likely in illiterate african street kids as in the offspring of english professors. Taking on a large number of totally unprepared kids and exposing them to interesting stuff is probably the most beneficial approach to finding the Mozarts. Demanding good preparation and high entry standards is a social filter, not a talent filter.

So I think, universities must commit themselves to actually teaching students something instead of whining about low entry standards. I fully understand that the author of the article does more than that, and I agree with his other points.

But let's face it, universities are there to bring as many people as possible onto a high level of knowledge and skill. The goals are largely economic ones and that should not be lamented. They are no longer the kind of upper class culture club they once were, and they are not primarily an endeavour to find the Mozarts and Einsteins.

Goladus4• 17 years ago

There are lots of problems with the Mozart analogy. For one, Mozart was trained by his Father. His education in music began at a very young age (which is common among many if not most of the highly successful classical concert musicians in the world).

For another, despite the fact that Mozart's music was creative (I've loved every Mozart piece I've ever heard performed well and most of those that haven't), from a superficial perspective many of them are also remarkably similar. If you aren't ready to appreciate subtle differences you aren't ready to appreciate Mozart for many of the reasons his music remained popular for 200 years after his death.

Which brings me to the next point, which is that he talks about Mozart's music existing in a sort of historical vacuum, and doesn't bother to compare Mozart's work to the work of his contemporaries [1]. Most of his contemporaries have been forgotten by the mainstream, for various reasons, but while they were alive they still produced a lot of music.

Finally, while there is creativity in science and one can take a scientific approach to creating (or "discovering") music, it's difficult to argue that the importance of scientific rigor is not more important in a paper about Algorithms for Mesh Analysis than in a Piano Concerto in Eb Major.

[1] Wikipedia lists 64 composers in Mozart's era: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Classical_era_composers...

Goladus4• 17 years ago

It's probably worth noting that the point of the article doesn't rely much on the Mozart analogy.

IsaacL3• 17 years ago

Should be "The Decline and Fall of a British University".

The only thing this article tells us is the quality of the students that study at Leeds. It's a bit of a stretch to extrapolate from experience of one department in one university to claim that the same is happening everywhere.

gaius4• 17 years ago

It's up to you to show that central government's national policy only applies to one university...

incandescant• 17 years ago

No, he's right. I've experienced this first hand during my undergraduate and second hand through friends at different Universities.

It's the sad truth of (the majority*) of British CS education...

I'm led to believe Cambridge, Oxford, York and probably a few others still teach good CS courses to strong students, but on the whole ...

coolestuk• 17 years ago

His experience at Leeds is not uncommon.

I originally graduated from one of the better known universities in 1983, and returned to post-graduate study and teaching in 1989. I experienced an even worse scenario then he - teaching as a part-time temporary lecturer at several of the 3rd tier universities (polytechnics).

Even when students turned in work that was totally incoherent (unfinished sentences and half the size of the minimum word count), I wasn't allowed to fail them. This was on modular degree courses, were most (if not all) of the assessment was of such submitted work.

For years I witnessed half the students turn up to class with no recriminations against the non-attendees, and with only half of the actual attendees having read the 1 or 2 articles which were required reading for that class (photocopies of which they had been given previously, so they didn't have to find the original journals themselves).

The overall level of education and comprehension was appalling. I realised that pursuing such a career was a path to frustration.

In 1997 I decided I couldn't be part of this sham any more. I have friends who had gone through the same experiences as I, and they too decided to quit and find new careers. The story of one of them was even written up in a national newspaper ten years ago.

I have other friends who teach only at post-graduate level. They are shocked by the lack of basic maths, basic grammar and basic essay-writing skills of the graduates they teach. And in their institutions they too provide the students with all the reading matter, so that these post-graduate students don't have to find their way round a library or find out anything for themselves.

Degrees from UK universities were now meaningless, and it was only a matter of time before the wider world found out. What will probably happen is that employers and/or students will realise that in the majority of work-related degrees the degree itself doesn't indicate anything in terms of skills or competencies.

Several of my neices and nephews have gone to university. Whilst I went there to study, their principal purpose is to party.

My partner is Thai, and I know several of his family and friends who graduated from Thai universities. Some have completed post-graduate qualifications. Yet they would never read a book that was more complex than Harry Potter (even in Thai). Nor would they ever go to a museum or art gallery.

Degrees have just become something that most people do either as a way to move out of home safely and/or a stepping stone to a job. For most graduates there is no sense of education being important in itself.

IsaacL3• 17 years ago

Thanks for the reply.

Just looked up at Leeds on Wikipedia - I'd assumed it was a fairly mid-range institution (and so I thought there'd be other institutions the same or worse, but many which were better). Just found out it's in the Russell Group. Christ. I (partially) retract my earlier respones.

I study CS (just finished first year) in the UK at a institution that usually places in the top 10... now you mention it, a lot of students do match those described by you and others. However, it's easy to ignore these people, since they never go to lectures (I have friends on other courses who say they attend on average 1 lecture a term...) It's trite, but with university, I feel you get out what you put in.

The opportunity to mix with the people who are bright and motivated (and they do exist) is great, as is having a library full of free programming books. For every student who only goes to party, there's one in the CS building late at night writing a Scheme parser in Haskell. (OK, the ratio's probably more like 3:1, but you get my drift).

On the other hand, I feel like I've learned about as much from pursuing independent projects than I have from my course, though the resources on campus make such projects easier.

BTW, a large part of me is thinking about dropping out of university at some stage and startup a startup - read too much pg - so I've been thinking about the value of university lately.

CS is a bit of an odd subject in this regard - with a lot of subjects^, I'd guess a majority of students don't expect their degree to be useful in their future careers (how many history grads become history teachers?), so it's understandable that many would just see their degree as a career ticket. I do actually hope to learn useful stuff on my course, but I'm not sure if I'd learn more by dropping out and starting up.

*Exceptions I can think of - Law, Medicine, and possibly foreign languages, Engineering, and Economics. Also more 'vocational' subjects like Nursing.

teeja• 17 years ago

The gentleman is right on; in the US too it's far from a new story. The decline started in secondary and then spread up through higher education.

But does the fault really start with the students, as he claims, or is that blaming the victim? Certainly noone wants to work as hard as people used to ... that's a fact. The old culture (50 to 100 years ago) also supported a much lower population, and there were many more resources - many trees to chop, dams to build, necessities to invent ... all that's now paved over.

Many more people wanted to attend college to get 'the good jobs'. Only,there was only such much demand on the high-end. You wind up with an over-educated population, deep in debt, with Great Expectations that just won't be happening. Those who can't be anaesthetized with TV or video games or web-surfing inevitably turn their frustrated analytical skills upon the powers-that-be.

So, well, here we are. Clearly colleges are in for a deep re-organization. We need to recreate eduction - but to what end? what future will we re-tool to create?. And how will we provide opportunities for all that 'computing power' waiting to be harnessed!

Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University

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