Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science [pdf]

Implicit in what you've written is the idea that humanity has reached some kind of end state in contemporary modernity. Yet given the accelerating pace of change, when the humans of 200 years from now look back on us, they'll undoubtedly see us as even more primitive and different than humans from the 1800s do to us today. Future-humans might even lament how poor and stuck we all were, perhaps in large part because so few of us could program.

Illiterate societies indeed tend to not progress, and humanity at the moment has massive problems that it shows little evidence of being able to contend with. You're completely right that existing professions, as currently practiced, benefit little from adding to them an ability to program. Yet we're seeing a massive trend away from many current professions, as currently practiced. Many jobs are getting automated out of existence[1]. The chief culprit? Software.

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21594298-effect-todays...

> write that software, and sell it into the industry

I hope by this you mean start a collective open standards FOSS project to fill the need, rather than write proprietary software that every single firm will redundantly reproduce because nobody wants to embrace the information age. That is the same kind of backwards redundancy that highlights why "everyone coding" is a bad idea.

> I would hope they choose the later

Medicine is rapidly being transformed by AI, robotics, and automation. In decades we should see the complete replacement of human labor in many surgical procedures, since a programmed machine can be much more precise and interpret the bodies signals and vitals in much greater clarity. But do you want doctors, the experts on performing these procedures, writing the code, or do you you want programmers who know to ironlad it against unexpected behavior to write the code? (trick question, we want both, but the doctors need to be computer literate and the programmers medically literate, but usually the later is more true than the former).

I think there is a misnomer equating computer literacy with writing software. The latter can give the former, but it doesn't always happen - I know many SEs who can't point out a hard drive from RAM, and couldn't make heads or tails of problems out of their niche domain. That isn't really computer literacy either, even if they live in a deep crevase within it.

I think computer literacy, as others in this thread have pointed out, should be its own course - just like English literature. You want to convey the macroscopic concepts and motivations and overarching conventions, rather than the minute details. The analogy would be do you care about sentence structure, word density, and subliminal messaging in Lit 101 - well, no, you care about overarching plot and meaning.

Any computer literacy class should have a cirriculum teaching its students what code is, but that doesn't mean they need to know how to write it. They should just understand how the machines in their day to day lives work, and how to control them if they want to from there. Because so many people are misinformed or just ignorant about what these magical glowy screens of letters and pictures actually are to begin with. It is the difference between being able to appreciate literature and being able to write world class novels.

>Certainly the trade-school mentality helps the economy grow.

It helps people to eat.

>Helping populate our country with thoughtful, well-informed citizens leading desirable lives, not so much.

Is a college education at an average cost of $19K/year ($33K for private colleges) and rising the only way to become a "thoughtful, well-informed citizen"? Is it even an efficient way to achieve that goal?

And it's difficult to have any kind of life, let alone a desirable one, when one cannot feed himself or provide for his basic needs.

Higher education itself sends an ambiguous message. "Give us $100K+ and we'll prepare you to participate in the economy and we'll make you a well-rounded citizen". So, which is it? Because these two goals are increasingly at odds. And, how many takers do you think they'd have at $100K for the "well-rounded" bit alone? How many for the "learn an employable skill" bit?

Right. So let's unbundle them and give people a choice.

Look, I'm the first to agree that the manner by which our current economy assigns value and subsequently allocates rewards is terribly skewed. If it wasn't, then college would be free for everyone and we wouldn't be having this discussion. But, unless and until the glorious day comes when we are provided with basic incomes and/or we are financially rewarded for being "thoughtful and well-informed", we need to stop doing our kids (and their parents) a disservice and prepare them for the real world that they'll actually be facing on graduation day+1. This, instead of breaking their backs with debt, only to have them unable to sustain themselves.

It is so important to foster and support the growth of the CS curriculm, at all levels but at the university level especially. We need these classes to be well taught, and well funded. If 1000 students all want to learn the same thing, that's a lot of funding to do some really interesting and amazing things. This is not about provisioning more lecture halls!

The way students pick classes is a lot different from the way that a consumer spends money. You're already committed to spending a certain amount, especially if it's not impacting your major, class selection is a different set of variables. But I'm sure the surge in CS enrollment is at least partially mirrored in a broad increase of CSed spending overall.

What leaves me nervous is, I wonder if the tool set is really ready for mass adoption. The most direct effect of massively increased enrollment, and massively increased class size, will be overall more people who know how to code, which would be great, but also significantly lower median coder ability. Which will have a large impact over time.

This type of thing is very unsettling to me as a second year CS major. I might be one of the highest achievers in my college, but how am I supposed to compete with the thousands of kids graduating from MIT, Stanford, and Harvard? really scares me.