Mixed signs on the state of IT education

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the story of a reader’s daughter who received a degree in data processing (who knew anyone even used that phrase anymore?) without ever having had to write a single line of code.

Part of the specific problem was the use of group assignments, which meant that so long as roughly a fourth of the students could write code, the rest could perform other project work. Like real-world teams, these academic ones were built on specialization, which would be convincing except that classrooms are supposed to make sure everyone who passes a course demonstrates a minimum level of knowledge in the curriculum.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Bob opened the floodgates when he asked about the seemingly sorry state of IT education — find out what the readers had to say on the topic. | Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld’s Advice Line newsletter. ]

That’s the specifics. I asked readers with recent experience in computer-related education to share it. Here’s a summary:

• If you want a degree that indicates you know something about computers without having to actually know very much about computers, you can get one. Education is a marketplace, and if you have the money and want to buy, you can find someone willing to sell. This isn’t new, by the way. Back when I entered college 40 years ago, if all a student wanted was a piece of paper, plenty of diploma mills were willing to provide one.
• If you want a degree that teaches you a great deal about computers, how they work, and what you have to know and do to succeed in IT as a profession, you can get one of those, too. You can’t graduate from some schools without demonstrating a great deal of competence. Others are less stringent — you’ll take out of your education what you decide to put into it.
• There’s a school of thought that says actual programming shouldn’t be a required skill anymore, because that work is no longer conducted in the United States — it’s all sent offshore. Opinion: This is both misleading (if you’re going to offer a degree in computing, graduates should know how to compute) and shows a serious misreading of the actual marketplace.

While there’s no question that a lot of programming has moved offshore, the big trend in application development is agile. As agile development requires high levels of not just interaction but also rapport with end-users, it’s devilishly hard to move offshore. There’s plenty of work for developers here in the United States, evidenced by the relatively low unemployment rate within the trade; the numbers I’ve seen suggest unemployment in IT peaked just above 4 percent in an economy with an overall unemployment rate more than twice that.

In some cases, unsurprisingly, bad metrics are a root cause of dysfunctional results. Some schools advertise (advertise!) their success in graduating 95 percent of their students. When the graduation rate is your measure of success, the outcome is as predictable as it is idiotic. Since many of these are business degrees, it leads to a larger question: In classes that teach metrics, what are the students learning? My guess: They’re learning terrible ideas, and after graduation, they will apply those ideas in ways that wreck more than one business.

If you’re looking for an IT-related degree that means something, due diligence is called for to make sure the program you’re entering will provide proper instruction. And if you’re hiring someone with an impressive-sounding IT-related degree, due diligence is even more imperative — bad hires are expensive.

– Bob

This story, “Mixed signs on the state of IT education,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com.