Big Tech’s Hot New Talent Incubator: Community College

You've somehow gotten strange ideas about the programs available at US high schools.

For instance, calculus is pretty widely available even if it isn't a diploma requirement.

I’m not saying it’s a good deal for anyone capable of getting a doctorate. It’s clearly superior to being an adjunct though. They’re low paid, insecure, highly qualified labour. Once you have a doctorate and you have two years on the job market without a tenure track job you’re done. You’re never getting a tenure track job and you’re better off getting the he’ll out. There are some exceptions but assuming you’ll beat the odds is a losing bet. Even those two years of adjuncting, doing teaching and research and hoping is a losing bet but it’s not an insane, fallacious waste. Sometimes people make it out. For all practical purposes no one makes it to tenured Professor, of whatever rank, after two years adjuncting.

Is there actually good evidence on the value of a "well-rounded education"?

But in any case, I don't think shoe-horning general education into what is basically jobs training is the right approach. We put kids through 12 years of "general education", if we haven't succeeded at that point, why would a few more college credits help?

As someone who's attended a community college both in my undergraduate career and again in preparation for grad school, this is something I think about quite a bit. Overall I'm pretty happy with my experiences studying at community college, and I'm of the mind that for most subjects, you can get a good education there. While I think it might be possible to get a decent education in preparation for a software development career at _some_ community colleges (like the technically-focused ones mentioned in the article), I suspect that's not the case generally. I think that has to do with two things:

One, part of the problem is that I've found "computer science" and "software development" get shoved under the umbrella of the "computer technology" departments of community colleges, rather than the math or engineering departments. Consequently there's a sense that software development is an extension of IT rather than an engineering practice. That might be true in a lot of settings (e.g. making VB widgets), but I'm not sure it's great for producing generalist developers. Frankly, I think it also lends to unqualified people leading departments, hiring instructors, and designing a curriculum. Anecdotally, one semester I took a discrete math class (through the math department) and a data structures class (through the CIS department); I ended up learning a lot more about data structures in the math class, and the programming project I did for the math class was much more instructive than any of the projects in the CIS class.

Two, across all institutions (boot camps, community colleges, universities) there doesn't seem to be a coherent curriculum on how to teach this stuff [1]. With math, english, economics, etc. the lower division classes are basically the same everywhere. Even if you think the way we teach subjects is kind of weird (as I do with math), everyone knows what "Calc II" means, or what's taught in an intro to microeconomics course. With software, there's no consensus on where to begin. Is it an infusion of theory and practice ala the SICP-based courses (MIT and Berkeley)? Intro to programming (Stanford)? A class where you learn how to use an office suite (a lot of community colleges)? Git and HTML/CSS (bootcamps)? [2] As a result, it's not surprising that individual classes don't line up. Maybe this is fine for the case where students will only ever study at one school, but for a lot of students indenting on transferring to a university (or anyone trying to evaluate a curriculum) it's quite cumbersome.

Not being an educator (and being mostly self-taught for software development), I'm not sure what the best approach is. Personally, I think a combination of theory/assignment based classes supplemented with longer-term project courses is probably the way to go. The former helps in presenting a general area or class or problems, and how to solve them, and the latter might help with exposure to the diversity of practical software development.

[1] I say "stuff" intentionally. Even the scope of "software development" is huge and hazy

[2] I could be wrong with the specifics on schools here :)

Adjunct is grafted onto the side of the regular academic ladder, which goes assistant —> associate -> full professor, and then perhaps a named chair or professsorship (e.g. Lucasian Professor of Mathematics)

The idea behind adjuncts was originally that you might hire someone on a temporary basis, either because of an unexpectedly large class or to offer a class on a special topic: a famous politician might offer a seminar about their time in office or an industrial researcher might offer something related to their work.

However, it’s become increasingly common to hire adjuncts to teach intro classes because they’re cheaper than professors (usually a flat fee per class and minimal benefits) and don’t involve much commitment (usually hired per semester), both of which have obvious short-term benefits to the administration.