Is Computer Science Dying?
Published August 17th, 2006 in MiscellaneousThe statistics do not lie, especially when they are repeated year after year. Computer Science faces a rocky future in Ireland. When other countries like India are pushing computer science in a big way, Ireland has seen numbers applying for computer science third-level courses in a freefall.
Yesterdays leaving certificate results show that, once again, the failure rates for mathematics and science are alarmingly high. They are so bad that we now have Minister for Education Mary Hanafin calling for third-level colleges to accept Foundation Level mathematics as a minimum requirement. There was a time when you needed an honour in higher level mathematics to get into many third-level courses.
Is it any wonder that numbers are falling in applications for computer science when more and more young people are lowering their aspirations in terms of mathematics achievement? If foundation level maths is accepted for the majority of third-level courses, where is the incentive for a student to study at pass level, let alone higher level? I can see students hedging their bets - dropping to foundation level maths because they have at least 6 other subjects to get their points from. Mathematics is fundamental to computer science and at a very minimum an honour at pass level should be accepted. If more and more people drop into foundation level maths - people that are capable of achieving more but are only using maths to calculate their final leaving cert points tally - then I do not see much of a future for computer science.
It may not be all doom and gloom though for the software industry in Ireland. Other courses that bridge the gap between business and computer science are proving to be popular. Courses in Business Information Systems (BIS) and Management Information Systems (MIS) do offer, over the course of a full undergraduate degree, a reasonable proportion of practical computer science subjects, such as programming, database management systems, operating systems and netwworking. That is welcome from an employers point of view, but can these graduates fill the research gap at a time when the government is pushing the notion of more PhD graduates?
Will we reach the point where we have lots of PhD computer science research programme places that cannot be filled by Irish graduates?
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If you are talking about more or less pure computer science, then yes, maths is very much a requirement. But if you are talking about computers as in an IT sense, then maths plays a very different role.
A few years ago I was tutoring the beginning class at UCC in Java and most of the students in the Computer Science department really wanted to be in the ‘BIS’ section, the IT of Computer Science but all the places were full and they took CS as the points were lower.
The Irish mind set as best I can determine is career orientated, science, in general, is believed to be a dead end, reserved for a few PhD ‘eggheads’ and teaching in the secondary schools. It’s not a money maker, and not glamorous. IT and computers is a career, and a job you can walk away from at the end of the day on the way to the sports club or pub. Science is a lifestyle.
I agree with what you say. For BIS, competence in maths is generally perfectly acceptable, as long as you can handle the stats / probability side of it, etc.
There is very much a trend away from Computer Science into BIS/MIS. I think people see BIS/MIS as being a more ’rounded’ education and offers more and better opportunities careerwise. And, to be honest, they are not wrong. My experience of computer science in UCC has been one very focused on 1’s and 0’s and very focused towards research, whereas BIS (under the Commerce faculty) is, like the department name suggests, very much business oriented.
To be fair to the Institutes of Technology, I think they have always tried to provide something in between computer science and BIS. I went down this road with CIT and found it very practical. I had just enough insight into the science aspects of computing, but it was practical enough that I could walk into a programming job (COBOL no less :)).
I recently found myself at a crossroads. I had to decide between research in CS or BIS. Because one of my goals is full-time lecturing, I chose a PhD in BIS. I start this in less than 4 weeks time and will be doing some part-time lecturing in a nuts and bolts type IT course for the commerce faculty. I played the percentages - CS is declining and BIS is flying ahead.