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Could it be that such priorities are a contributing factor to the high unemployment rate?
There's more to it. See HN's previous discussion, ten days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832685
Whoa! $1.7M for a computer science department and $90M+ for football? Whatever the funding sources may be, the comparison of the figures alone shows the general spending priorities pretty clearly. I bet the football team has no shortage of applicants either. Could it be that such priorities are a contributing factor to the high unemployment rate?
What I don't understand about U of F's decision is that computing is like mathematics in that it's a basic competency necessary for competence in many other disciplines. Shouldn't the graduates of the school's "Design, Construction, and Planning" school know something about programming so that they are not entirely intimidated by the idea of customizing the behavior of AutoCAD? The Education school -- how will it pro…
So I don't think it's weird at all for computer science to be thought of as less important, and certainly less popular. And I also don't think that's a bad thing; while I'd certainly think computers are cool, a computer science degree/programming knowledge is already unnecessary for almost all professions. As time goes on, the need to, say, customize AutoCAD, is only going to decrease: the computer itself will make the task easier.
This article misses the reason behind closing the CS department. Was it completely due to budgetary concerns? Or was the University having difficulty competing with other CS schools. The article mentions the Florida Polytechnical University, has the creation of this school meant that their aren't enough CS students to fill classrooms at both colleges? Though I, like most, was initially shocked that a CS school would…
The one they are cutting seems to be the only one that does non-hardware research and offers graduate degrees, so losing it is a loss. The other (or others) that deal with the non-hardware side of CS seem to be only teaching, not research, and aimed at undergraduates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The education budget is set by the state (mostly). Athletics gets money from donors, ticket revenues and private funding. This allows them to spend as they see fit.
At some schools the athletics program gets considerable tuition revenue as well (in the form of a tacked-on "athletics fee"). UF seems to have one of the lower fees ($57/yr), though when multiplied by 50,000 students, that still works out to a bit under $3m/yr. It appears (see sibling comment) that athletics contributes back some surplus to academics, though, so may be a net positive at UF. Not true at all schools, s…
Not so fast. UF has something like 3 or 4 departments that, to an outside observer, would appear to be CS. The College of Engineering has a couple, which appear to differ depending on whether they enphasize hardware or software, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has one, and I think there's another one out there somewhere. The one they are cutting seems to be the only one that does non-hardware research an…