[VLM]

This is downstream of publish-or-perish.

My point is the people in charge of curriculum and education are all $200K+/yr tenured professors in the style of CS is Knuth and Knuth is CS and that's the end of the convo, so no great surprise that CS curricula are mostly weed-out classes mixed with mathematical theory classes, because the old generation will always tutor the new generation in its own image.

You have to notice that everyone in the author's list of notables is very interesting but has ZERO soft power and none of them are tenured profs or administrative department heads at uni.

My gut level guess of where this is all going by my grandkids generation is there are about 1000 framing carpenters for every 100 general contractors and about 1 structural engineer (your locale may vary, ours has weird snow load problems). So in my grandkids generation "front end" "UI" people will likely come from apprenticeships or 2-year community college at most, whereas you want a "back-end" guy who can do some architecture he's going to have a very technical 4-year, and every company will have maybe one programmer with a classic CS background who does architecture and algo optimization all day.

When I was a young guy, everyone who graduated with a CS degree had to write a language using lex and yacc, maybe not much of a language but you had to get something to compile at minimum. Now I enjoyed that class immensely and it was one of my favorites and I've never used any of the skills since then, but that class is kinda dumb if 95%+ of jobs now will be front end javascript level work.

[dorchadas]

> but that class is kinda dumb if 95%+ of jobs now will be front end javascript level work.

I think this sentence sums it up more than relating it to publish-or-perish. It comes down to what is the purpose of university. Is it job training, as companies want it to be (because why should they train their employees when they can outsource it; this has led students to expect it to be job training too), or is it actually about learning the fundamentals of why things work, in preparation to go further on in said field. Or just about learning about 'humanity' in general (as universities were more in the past; humanities oriented). I think this is the root issue. To me, university should be (2) and (3), not (1). But companies want it to be (1), and students expect it to be (1), whereas professors want (2) and (3) depending on field, and that's where part of the problem lies.

[jackcosgrove]

Let's be careful about conflating the history of university curricula with the purpose of universities. The humanities are much older fields of study than the sciences, and younger still are the applied sciences and engineering. Universities in the 1600s had a mostly humanities focus because that was where the sum of human knowledge pointed us.

[dorchadas]

It depends on what you think the 'purpose of universities' is. To me, it's either preparing someone for further research in a field or to understand the human nature, so something more along the lines with what the history of university was. Universities should not be for vocational training -- that should either be trade school or on the job learning. But a lot of companies have realized they can outsource some stuff they used to teach on the job to universities, and students thus expect universities to cater towards that. It's a problem, imo.