Big Tech is getting cozy with computer science departments

My universities tech department had strong contacts to large industry players (not for software, but military applications for example).

Advantage was that we had very modern equipment (electrics, robotics, measuring instruments, ...) that would otherwise have crashed the budget of the university.

It wasn't a secret that industry tried to influence the curriculum to get students to be trained in technologies and tools they themselves use. It is clear they tried to poach students.

I understand the objection though and other departments constantly berated this closeness and they certainly had a point because the generality of education was endangered.

With big-tech in software there are some additional risks in my opinion.

That said, there is merit of feedback from industry to university. It is especially helpful to not let students learn about outdated approaches and tech and keep academia in the know.

But that has to be a transparent forum without some maybe not so moral gifts from industries.

My CS department formed an "industry partnership" with Microsoft (circa 2015).

All of a sudden, we were made to spend time learning Azure, we were given Surface Tablets for building apps, there were guest lectures by Microsoft employees, we were prompted to apply for MS internships, etc.

What the department intended to be a harmless collaboration, turned out to be an aggressive marketing push by Microsoft for hearts and minds of the students.

Thankfully, a backlash from the student body prompted a dampening of the relationship, but the experience showed that barriers to entry for corporations pushing their own agenda into academia can be low.

Managed properly, these sorts of relationships can be win-win, but there's a clear limit and universities should be conscious and forthright of where the line is.

Maybe it is a better way to learn independently, with regular, e.g. monthly or quarterly check-ins with an experienced mentor?

Would solve quite a few problems altogether - people getting more independent and following their interests. You would still have competition, but that would be moderated by actual needs, both in the private and public sector.

Not sure an end to the classic higher-ed system would be a bad thing.

> the large problem is the university expects you to use books from well known publishers

Interesting, and disturbing.

I am a math professor at a US state university, and thankfully I haven't observed any of this at all. For lower-level classes such as calculus we all use the same book, decided upon by the department as a whole, but when teaching upper-level classes I generally choose as I see fit.

I am curious, what form does this expectation/pressure take? At my university, if administrators tried to do this, my colleagues (at least the tenure-track/tenured ones) would briefly chuckle, delete the email, and not remember it five minutes later.

Why can't the books be able to teach about "how" as well? I'm from a mediocre country where I went to the best CS college and 99% of the things I learned there was from powerpoint presentations, pdf scripts or books full of math exercises. I still got into FAMANG as my first full time job and so did many other people from there. I just never saw the value in our professors. They mostly repeated stuff from text books, had 10 year old lab assignments and similar exams for 20 years. And I don't think it's that bad. It teaches you enough of the basics for average programming job or as basis for you to expand into what's more interesting to you specifically. The only thing missing was cool projects like having your college develop GHC or stuff like that.

Point being, I think college professors overestimate their impact a bit when regarding bachelors/masters topics. All that is too basic to really need some expert domain knowledge and is knowledge which hasn't really changed that much the last 20 years. SVM's were invented in the 90s. Linear algebra some time before that. The rest is industry or postdoc stuff.

I get the "teaching" part but if you are "teaching" a room of 50 student's it isn't really that different from watching a youtube video for them.