Two points: first, even if "solid" universities are right to run away from this (and IMO they don't run away from it, they just move the IT program into the business school where you don't see it any more) there are still many other universities pumping out students into a dead career field, which should be concerning. Second, this is not just about IT programs. Computer science programs are impacted to. From the OP:
> But instead of five backend developers and three ops people and a DBA to keep the lights on for your line-of-business app, now you maybe need two people total.
All nine of those people would probably have been CS graduates, or at least many of the backend developers would be (and perhaps the DBA). Or they would be people that thought of themselves as "developers" and not "IT" for whatever that distinction is worth now.
Except that there are more developers than ever developing more software than ever. Instead of one business app with five backend developers and three ops people and a DBA you have five business apps each with two developers.
Don't generalize. Are you interviewing graduates from the top 10-15 programs or lesser-tier?
I think this is a big error people make. Some colleges are great. Others are horrible. It's very hard to say, "College is a waste" or "college is great".
It's not even a matter of tiers. There are plenty of great candidates coming out of lower rated schools, although the hit rate is lower.
In general interviewers just have unrealistic expectations for entry level candidates. They forget how incompetent they were at the same age. Or they have ridiculous notions that everyone should know how to write a quicksort algorithm or whatever, when some students may have focused their studies on other (but equally challenging) topics.
I expect you to know fundamentals about things like TCP networking and how to install, configure and manage Linux Distributions.
I find many people who can install Ubuntu and run the canned commands or curl foo.sh | sudo bash or docker / k8s scripts they download, think they know what they are doing.
They dont.
Its getting to the point someone who can install windows is more technical than someone who can install linux
Your expectations are unrealistic and counterproductive. Bachelor's degree programs shouldn't be teaching students how to install Linux. That's just job training, not education.
My community college has two different departments: CIS and CIT. CIS is more akin to "computer science", and heavily covers various programming languages and has a game development sub-program. CIT includes hardware troubleshooting and repair, certification classes for Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware, network administration, and has a subprogram in cybersecurity. Much like in the business world, academics now do treat development and IT as two separate fields.
The community college also has an automotive repair program. You’d be hard pressed to find a decent school with an IT or any other of these vocational programs at their main campuses.
That’s because it trains for the job, not for the field. While you’d probably get up and running easier with an IT degree since you know the current tooling, you’d be worse off than someone with the conceptual knowledge that comes with a more general CS degree, and you’d therefore have a tougher time adapting to whatever new technology that didn’t exist in your IT program but was touched on conceptually in the CS coursework.
My community college is extremely "decent", thank you. In most cases, other than needing to check of the "have a bachelor's degree" box for job application purposes, most people will probably get more bang for their buck in a community college than they ever will in a fancier school. Depending on what your local community college offers, there's a good chance that for a fraction of the cost, you can pick up nearly anything you'd want to know (or just like to learn, at that price).
As someone whose taken a fair number of IT degree classes, I'd say there's a fair bit of conceptual knowledge involved. And in the case of networking, for example, most of the standards and protocols you're being taught how to work with have been around since the mid-80s, and aren't showing significant signs of going away any time soon.
I'd say the CS vs. IT split would probably surprise you. I have gone up to the bachelor's level in a game programming degree, and it was amazing how poorly people who were proficient in writing C++ couldn't handle basic PC troubleshooting, it's a different skill set entirely.
I went through community college over a decade ago, I've spent a depressing amount of time since teaching people with CompSci degrees about CompSci concepts.
I've also run internships with CompSci graduates and have to say they're basically unemployable when they graduate, they might know some theory but they can't build anything. Community College teaches you to build things, so you come out with skills relevant to the workplace and you can fill in the CompSci stuff later.
My son currently is enrolled in CS and his first 2 years of school are filled with humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses all to keep some profs employed. His next two years will be filled with more useless courses and by the time it's all over will have cost 50k + (he lives at home and goes to a State School).
I feel like he could have taken a 6 week Java/Python/whatever and got more out of it. Add a CCNA/CCNP for the Networking knowledge, Linux Cert,Security Cert from SANS, and some self study and he would know more than a 4 year degree and be bettered prepared for the working world.
Universities in the US are all about making money, supporting football and athletics, tenure for the profs, and finally accreditation for 50k+?.
Meanwhile, 10's of 1000's of H1B's are needed because our kids know nothing and are being taught shit.
Two areas that need major change and disruption, Education and Healthcare, everything else can wait.
I went to a state school. Their curriculum is easily and readily available online. It's nothing like what you describe. On top of that, you could have seen that and known it was the case before you sent him there. I'd really like to see the curriculum for the school you describe, I have a hard time believing it could be quite that different.
I understand some of your concerns, but at the same time, as you point out yourself, that's why there are choices available:
1. If you want a very specific skillset to do a very specific job, there are more opportunities and options today than ever before. Self-study, MOOC, bootcamps, certs, etc. Pros: fast, efficient, focused, practical, immediate. Cons: the specific/narrow focus may leave you with gaps you won't even be able to appreciate until too late.
2. If you want a more general education, Universities are there to provide. You'll get not just immediate hands-on-keyboard skills, but math and CS-theory background, and also also communication skills, discipline, diligence, social networking, perspective to be a team lead one day, etc.
Now, I do believe universities have a LOT of optimizations to make; a student's life tends to be sucky in many ways it doesn't need to. I've repeatedly found and heard of the difference in attitude between a college/bootcamp of "You're the paying customer, we'll provide knowledge", and university attitude of "you are irrelevant, be grateful, and jump through the hoops jump for the privilege" - whether from the ever-increasing admin/bureaucracy cohort (sometimes helpful, often power-blinded), the obscure rules and difficult processes, or some of the tenured professors. But again, the information is out there, the choices are available - and overall there's never ever been a better and easier time to acquire knowledge.
>humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses all to keep some profs employed
Full transparency, I hear this from nearly every 1st year college student every fall semester - either the CS, CHEM, or Engineering students exclusively. "Why do I have to take English, I'm just going to work with [chemicals] [computers] [software] [roads] [whatever else]"
Not sure how this opinion will fly on this site, but I'm not sure what you expected. It sounds like you have an ax to grind with a specific institution and you needed to do more research about the system of universities overall. They were and are designed to make a modern version of a renaissance wo/man - good or knowledgeable about everything being the idea. Making citizens who are more than just 1 skill cogs. Teaching critical thinking and higher order thought processing. They were not, and are not job placement agencies.
If you were looking for nothing but the certs and technical skills, you should've sent him to a technical/trade school or community college. That's why those exist.
There is a massive difference between being job task ready - like just finishing the certs would make you. And being life ready - like a liberal education makes you in theory. Giving a student a liberal education is literally why universities were designed. Why was that a surprise?
I genuinely don't understand why being good at things that are outside of your expertise, or at least knowing enough about them to sound like an educated person in conversation, is 'irrelevant'. I don't get it and never have.
>Meanwhile, 10's of 1000's of H1B's are needed because our kids know nothing and are being taught shit.
My experience has taught me that whenever an employer says "we can't find the workers" and use H1B's, what they really mean is "we can't find the workers at the wage we're willing to pay". Those are two different things.
THAT BEING SAID, the costs of education are out of hand. Living inside the beast, I can tell you that many administrators are just flat blind to the storm coming.
In the 90's, the message was go to college, go to college, go to college - relying on the past 40 years of if you went to college, everything else just sort of fell into place.
Well, now we have so many 'extra' services students expect, so many expenses, and less state/federal dollars. So students pay for it.
NOW the message is that you need to go to college only if it furthers your career goals. They're working in kindergarten with my child on that. It's frightening, honestly.
I think the pendulum will swing the other direction and we'll see a glut of skilled trades-people in the next 10 years.
> My son currently is enrolled in CS and his first 2 years of school are filled with humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses all to keep some profs employed.
I suspect, if you aren't just being hyperbolic, you mean, “because he chose to a seek a degree from a liberal arts institution rather than an engineering one (which would have some, but less, general ed) or a vocational certificate program or career-focussed bootcamp.”
> My son currently is enrolled in CS and his first 2 years of school are filled with humanities, history and a few more irrelevant courses
Yeah god forbid he enrich his mind and develop lateral thinking skills, empathy, perspective and wisdom instead of focusing exclusively on how he can best serve capital.
Who says he shouldn't be doing these things? That's what secondary education is for, in most of the developed world. Apparently, college is the new high school - in a quite literal sense!
> But instead of five backend developers and three ops people and a DBA to keep the lights on for your line-of-business app, now you maybe need two people total.
All nine of those people would probably have been CS graduates, or at least many of the backend developers would be (and perhaps the DBA). Or they would be people that thought of themselves as "developers" and not "IT" for whatever that distinction is worth now.