I think the author is conflating vocational education with university curriculum.<p>It is often the case that universities offer courses that are much more theoretical than the practical application, even medical studies to some extent begin with very high level concepts and theories; the reason for this is because they’re attempting to optimise for better understanding of the underlying foundations of the discipline than for any particular job.<p>Vocational qualifications are extremely handy, but they have a bit of a bad reputation these days. Code academies are not seen as prestigious, despite being the authors ideal. The game assembly (TGA) is one such vocational studies program in southern Sweden with an excellent reputation in the local community for churning out quality (junior) game devs that are ready to work, but suffers with backend programming sections still; since most people who do game dev do not enter to be in the backend.<p>I would be extremely happy to return to apprenticeships, I would have killed for one going into this industry, but given that employers only care about getting new mid-levels or seniors and not investing in what they already have: it’s always going to be a losing battle as the invested talent atrophies and leaves to go to other places.
A lot of folks here seem to have a real rose-tinted idea of what CS degrees are actually like. If you took CS more than 10, 15 years ago, you might remember it as a scrappy, fringey degree program, maybe splintered off from Electrical Engineering, a refuge for mathematically-minded nerds to find beauty in the cold algorithmic elegance of computation. That is not what it is anymore, not now that everyone knows you can make six figures right out of college with a CS degree on your CV. At the college I went to, CS is the second largest program, on track to be the largest in the next few years, and Intro to CS is the single most popular class on campus. They cannot hire professors fast enough. They're launching their own coding bootcamp just to keep up with demand. A lot of people are getting this education, and we need to look at what we're teaching them.<p>And what's on the curriculum? Some good hard math, but also a fair bit of nonsense. Some people in this thread seem to think colleges have been taken over by javascript, and that may be true in some places, but I wish they'd taught us JS, because what they taught me was Java Swing, because a decade ago the ivory-tower tenured professor who wrote that course thought it would be useful for getting us a job and never touched it again. They could've replaced that course with underwater basketweaving and nothing of value would've been lost, let alone any of the excellent humanities topics the author mentions in her post. There is plenty of space in the curriculum to clear out enterprise-driven cruft from fifteen years ago and replace it with some of the useful things the author mentions, without touching any of the core mathematics we all love.<p>In fact I would go a step further: Having a lot of people who are very good at programming but who don't know anything else is a bad thing for society. This is unique to programming as a discipline - programmers have historically unprecedented power to turn fuzzy, implicit ideas into concrete reality that affects people at massive scale. It's totally ok to let mathematicians, for example, go off and study just mathematics, because mathematicians are harmless. Programmers are dangerous. Without perspective, we will calculate ourselves right into dystopia - we're doing it right now! What good is it going to do any of us to write systems that strip away all our civil liberties with perfect big-O complexity?
There is a branch of computer science, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), where exactly the ideas in this article have been playing out for a few decades already.<p>Earlier this year I wrote about HCI as the intersection of technical craft and social sciences: <a href="https://www.designdisciplin.com/hci-profession/" rel="nofollow">https://www.designdisciplin.com/hci-profession/</a><p>Interestingly the responses I got from people in the HCI field was the inverse of the sentiment in this article. Here it seems that the author is arguing to increase social sciences in CS, and getting pushback. One of my arguments was to increase tech/eng competences in HCI, and I got pushback on that too.
I think we should leave comp sci as what it is.<p>> The bulk of software work today is about integrating computation into human driven tasks, predicting and anticipating how people think, what they need, how they react to new communication and work methods<p>Sure. But that is not what comp sci is about. If one wants better programmers then those aspect should be put in a different, more job focused, degrees like Software Engineering.<p>It’s should be a choice. If people want to focus on maths and computers, then let them focus on maths and computers without other fields. Degrees aren’t just about jobs.
Yes, but not as the author describes it. The author has a very narrow and circumscribed view of liberal arts. Going back to the beginnings:
The “liberal” in Liberal Arts comes from liberate. The arts that free the soul. In its original formulation it had the trivium (rhetoric, grammar, logic) and the quadrivium (geometry, astronomy, music, arithmetic). People like the author commonly associate the whole project with a narrow subset. Well rounded does not just mean we eliminated math from the ciriculum. It should be obvious to most people here that computer science is essential for this in the modern age.
Clickbait. Article says it <i>should</i> be. To which I say: the fuck it should. Is a law degree a liberal arts degree? If universities decide CS needs to include some instruction in the human side, they can offer those classes without reclassifying CS as some bullshit.
Application development is a blended skill and computer science is not the only discipline involved.<p>CS is a mathematical science, not a liberal arts topic. This author is way off base.
This is downstream of publish-or-perish.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Not entirely related here, but fwiw historically most European CS split from the math department and in the US most were split off from the electrical engineering department.<p>Every now and then you notice it in what people do and do not know.
CS is liberal arts because software is used by humans? By that standard pretty much any degree qualifies as liberal arts, including medicine, engineering, law,...<p>Tbf, that kind of thinking actually goes back to the origins of medieval universities, so there is some case to be made (a lot of universities still award BAs for pretty much every subject). But I guess the true intention here is to lower the barrier in technical terms for claiming CS degrees and SE salaries.
Social Science, Ergonomics and Psychology aren't liberal arts subjects. Mediaeval History, French Literature and (arguably) Architecture are examples of liberal arts.<p>I think there's an argument to be made that computer scientists benefit from studying liberal arts; but I think the author fails to make that argument (let alone that CS is actually liberal arts, as per the subject).
Ah yes the software developer jack of all trades now needs to add more skills to their bow. Or just hire people in the role of UX design as a specific profession
CS is <i>not</i> a science, certainly not mathematics, it is not about 'seeking the deeper beauty of our [for mathematics: <i>any</i>] reality'.<p>CS is <i>not</i> engineering, not much actual science or working principles get applied for most of the work done.<p>CS <i>is</i> design, but design of a 4D artifact, something that moves in time and space, not just 3D. To make things more tractable, we do this in discreet space, not continuous space, which brings its own qualities and issues (e.g. non-locality - there is no underlying strata based on <i>nearness</i>).<p>Design is concerned also with the who and the why, rather than just the what and the how. Hence a broad education is helpful.
<i>If the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software (and that assertion is debatable!)</i><p>There's a lot of heavy lifting being done by that parenthetical. I don't think the point of a CS education is to prepare people to work in software. It's to teach them the theoretical groundings of computation and how to engage in abstract reasoning about it. It always felt a lot more similar to applied mathematics to me than anything else.<p>I sense an is/ought conflation from the author. I could agree that software engineering as a profession could benefit from more practitioners with a liberal arts background.<p>The thing is, I just don't know if that is necessary for more than a self selecting group. A liberal arts degree has more to do with going to a liberal arts institution with a common core curriculum that teaches one how to read, write, and interact critically with great books and history. I had such an undergraduate experience and I felt like a benefitted from it significantly.<p>It's hard to get into a good liberal arts college, just like it's hard to get into an Ivy League institution. I don't think one can democratize the intrinsically elitist aspects of a holistic liberal arts education because the vast majority of people are simply not interested in it and will never be. The only way I could see that changing is with a vast fundamental overhaul of the K-12 education system that actually prepares citizens from childhood to adulthood for such an education; in which case I think it is then perfectly fine and reasonable to expect the entire adult populous to be prepared to get such an education.<p>It seems like this is how it works in many European countries. But it's not how it works in the USA, where I live.
Pretty much any four-year college degree that could have a BS attached to it could equally well have a BA attached to it, depending on the course work required. Mathematics with a focus on the history of mathematics and the social / cultural aspects of mathematics, educational in mathematics, etc. would maybe be a BA. Generally, the difference will be something like BS degree students take twice as many calculus and differential equations courses as BA students do.<p>As to whether one feels better about having a BA vs a BS, in reality most people don't care too much about things like that. A BA may leave more room for classes in other subjects, which can be beneficial. A BS might be better preparation for a grad program in that subject, otherwise your grad program might require a year of in-subject coursework.
This is the direction things have been going in Sweden over the last 15 years, but I think it’s a shame and a waste of human potential.<p>Why would you need a university CS degree to do UX design and write some JavaScript? There should be other degrees for that to be honest.<p>I’m hoping this trend will now reverse and “real” software engineers will reclaim their profession, despite now being in the “minority”.<p>Personally I’ve started calling myself a “deep tech software engineering entrepreneur” to try and distance myself from this “majority” of overeducated JavaScript fiddlers.
Skimmed the article but it doesn’t have that much content? I’m a developer without a “traditional” CS background (my degree is in bio engineering) but the points mentioned in the article don’t strike me as novel.<p>Isn’t this why STEM acronym has evolved to incorporate Art, and is now called STEAM?<p>The post says “but liberal arts is about critical thinking, logic, picking apart complex problems, and ethics.” and I would say the same applies to a technical education.
Yes it is a liberal arts degree: no humans - no need for computation. Understanding ourselves and our needs is necessary for inventing; improving or sustaining any technology.<p>Yes it is a STEM degree: no rigor - no computation. Understanding how the universe works is necessary in order to exploit matter and convince it to do computations for us.<p>Everything humans do (STEM included) is for humans; and by humans.<p>This bipartisan view of universities and faux-conflict isn’t useful.
Computer Science is classified as a liberal arts degree at William & Mary: <a href="https://catalog.wm.edu/content.php?catoid=24&navoid=3884" rel="nofollow">https://catalog.wm.edu/content.php?catoid=24&navoid=3884</a>.
What would be the/a consequence of CS being labelled a liberal arts degree ... ? What would be the benefit ?<p>There doesn't even seem to be an agreed upon definition of what liberal arts truly are in 2022 so this whole discussion seems quite pointless to me.
So CS has some special need for academic cross-pollination that math and engineering don't share.<p>If so, I'm shocked. Bellotti asserted this several times without anything to substantiate the claim.<p>Kill It with Fire was on my reading list. I think I want to read more reviews now.
So vegan Computer Science lmao Why do these type of people like to co-opt and not create something new? Then say something is wrong with these people if they don't like this new "vegan" version.
Two things<p>1) This is ass backwards. We don't need CS who know about accounting, hr, etc. Jobs of the future will be automated. Dev is an essential skill, the same way English or maths used to be. We need these professionals to learn how to code to "gain one level up", and make the computer do whatever devs are building for them now.
2) Market has needs for a lot of people who know how to program using high level frameworks. CS programs have evolved accordingly. 20y ago, it was a room full of geeks (with the original meaning), coding on freebsd. Program had electronics, assembler, C, you learned to build a compiler from scratch, a virtual machine, a shell, stdio, etc. There was a lot of tinkering with dark bsd flavors. Programs today are at a much higher level, learning how to use react, and frameworks built by others. To the point where I see devs who don't know what OSI means and don't even know how to reinstall windows themselves. I don't think it's bad, I think the need for CS has remained somewhat similar, what we need today is app developers which is very different. You don't need a tech genius to build an accounting app. You need someone who can understand these needs and transfer them into relatively straight forward code over all the abstraction levels built by these tech geniuses.<p>So I think the claim that CS is a liberal art is preposterous. I think that what people call CS has evolved into two things, CS and App dev, the latter which should start moving to other professionals, and that people didn't realize it yet.