[dagw]

I think CS departments are at least partially responsible for this development. They know that most of the students applying care nothing about Computer Science, have no interest in Computer Science and will never learn Computer Science, yet they keep accepting (and graduating) them. If CS departments actually wanted to teach CS, then they would advocate for setting up a new series of departments/degrees with names like Software Development and Engineering or Application Design and UX, and send most of the students there. Then those who want to learn/teach Computer Science can learn/teach Computer Science without having to deal with a classroom full of people who really don't want to be there.

[paxys]

When education becomes a business students become your customers. And the last thing you want to do is piss off your customers by failing them.

[dagw]

But if you can sell those customers a better product at the same price, then perhaps everybody will be happier. As it is now no one is happy. CS staff are annoyed that the students don't want to learn CS, and the students are annoyed since most of the CS they are forced to learning isn't relevant for the web developer job they want to apply after graduation.

[ghaff]

There's an argument that a huge amount of the specific engineering theory that students learn never gets applied in a lot of jobs. I used some for a few years in mechanical engineering but not really a whole lot. A lot more was sense in managing projects. And, while I took a programming course (wouldn't call is CS), it probably didn't really help me in my job a lot more than the limited programming I took in high school did.

[paxys]

Well according to the linked data 94%+ of CS graduates have well paying jobs in the industry, so not sure if "no one is happy" is accurate.

[_aavaa_]

University departments do not always have the kind of autonomy your post implies. It is common for the university’s central administration to dictate how many students they must let it, how much money they get per student, and hence how many they can fail without going into the red.

[pintxo]

What could possibly go wrong making education a for-profit business? /s

[_aavaa_]

None of this has to be for-profit. It just requires the university administration to put its wants, priorities, and head count (!) above the interests of the individual departments and of the students.

Making the whole thing a non-profit or a charity won’t solve this.