Northface University - Computer Science in Half the Time? 666
prostoalex writes "Associated Press runs a nationwide story on Northface University. The school, founded by a pair of venture capitalists and former technology chief found a niche with its highly intensive curriculum and corporate software development specialization. For example, a BSCS degree can be completed in a little over 2 years, and it comes with IBM's WebSphere and Microsoft's MCSD certification. Northface is also promoting its corporate partnerships, which allow current students to feel more secure about future employment. Grady Booch from IBM is quoted to be 'jazzed up' about the program, although there are many who oppose such approaches to college education."
Everything will be half (Score:5, Interesting)
Half the money
Half the college experience.
Re:Everything will be half (Score:1, Interesting)
Accredited? (Score:5, Interesting)
CS = trade skill? (Score:4, Interesting)
On another note though, even a general understanding of history, politics, and a host of other subjects one meets in a more "liberal" education is very important and often lacking amongst the general population.
liberal arts may not be necessary after all (Score:2, Interesting)
i think with the right students liberal arts is not needed at university level. after all you forget that stuff after graduating that is if you haven't by graduation day.
brains are going to boil in that program. thats for surer
4 year (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Technical school? (Score:1, Interesting)
No "business minded" person would think those classes would give a good return of investment - not as much as teaching them Visual Basic or Websphere. Therefore, probably trimmed out of the ciriculum to stuff it into 2 years and took all the fun out of CS.
And I'm sure no established graduate school would accept a graduate from this program without more accredited classroom contact.
(CS PhD's need not worry!)
Re:it's a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the reason why many employers are requiring 4 year degress in the IT field is to see if you have what it takes to work through the boring stuff. If you are sick of school after only one year, how would you last 30+ years in the work force?
Re:Everything will be half (Score:3, Interesting)
i think you're wrong. that "well-roundedness" part is designed to provide the lubrication for the working machine. it's intended to provide a world-view context that makes you easier to get along with, less likely to start trouble, and put you on the same historical/psychological/behavioral/aesthetic plane as the other worker-bees with whom you work, and in whose midst you breed, consume, and produce.
i like the idea of compartmentalizing education. i'd rather spend two years concentrating on the skillset that i intend to employ professionally, and then, if i feel like it, educate myself on the other stuff.
true, it might make me less "employable" wrt "people skills" etc., but that's my problem. i don't think i'd like a job that depended heavily on that anyway, over the long run. just let me do my stuff and go home, without the water-cooler chit-chat and office politics.
Re:this is just a damn shame (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless, of course, you ask one of these little script kiddies / perl hackers on slashdot to define computer science. But I digress...
This may seem a bit harsh, but I think that these types of programs are one of the major reasons that the CS profession is advancing so slowly. There's tons of exciting research going on, but what do most people in this field spend their days doing? Sitting in front of a keyboard, typing. It doesn't get any more primitive than that. To top it off, it's not because we don't HAVE the capability to do it any other way - we do - but because people don't know since they think that computer science == programming, end of story.
I think there needs to be a stronger distinction of exactly what defines our field, similar to the distinctions made in some engineering fields (for example, the difference between a degree in EE and a degree in EET).
Finally, as an example of real CS work in action, check out this artical from the January issue of Computer magazine: http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/0104/Reg an/ [computer.org]
Re:Wow (Score:1, Interesting)
How many software architecture courses did you take? Data modeling?
Nothing scientific about it. (Score:2, Interesting)
There are trade schools who offer "degrees" in "Electronics Engineering Technology" and "Computer Technology" where, as far as I can tell, you learn to fix VCRs and install Exchange Server 2000.
Obviously this is beyond that level, but it's still vocational training.
OTOH, industry always needs a greater number of schleps than creative thinkers, and the American educational system has been morphing to suit industry's needs for a hundred years. The average CS grad is no great shakes. This school just formalizes and rationalizes the production of average CS grads. They won't be be any less competent than the others.
It's an interesting response to outsourcing: lower the standards of education so we can home-grow more workers.
Re:Everything will be half (Score:2, Interesting)
I also attended a community college (while in high school under MN's special program for that), a highly respected private university, so I can compare the education at the 3. The state school was right in the middle, but there's no way the private school was worth 3-4 times as much (which is the price difference).
during university time (Score:2, Interesting)
Thing is, there are some of us who do. I mean after 4-5 years of univ. time (for me it was 2 degrees - partially - in parallel, done in 7 years) you just prove one thing: you can keep up, can do your thing and still be able to concentrate on other matters that don't precisely relate to your major(s). That you can learn new things quickly and adapt to new challenges and requirements.
And on that I don't just mean learning a new programming language, but the ability to quickly familiarize yourself to new systems, concepts, designs and ideas. One can get a way of thinking and attitude that can't be picked up in 2 years of coders' crash-course.
And besides, it's not always the things you pick up on lectures that prove to be themost important, sometimes it's what you pick up between them. That also needs time (which 2 years can't possibly provide).
CS accreditations are worthless anyway. (Score:5, Interesting)
Since I graduated in 1995, tuition at the University of Iowa has tripled. It has done so because the school has locked itself into a number of expensive construction projects and is not able to reduce its cash flow needs to match the decreasing state revenue.
From what I can tell, the quality of instruction has not tripled since my graduation. Even moreso, students that I have advised to pursue Oracle DBA certification as technical electives have been repeatedly refused, even though the university listed Oracle certification as for-credit courses.
The CS departments of most universities have been bought off by Microsoft to the extent that they already spend over a year teaching Visual Basic. They do not use open tools, and their administrative structure reflects this close-minded and obsolete path.
IMHO, State Universities are run in a cartel system that has seen its fair share of waste and corruption. Any ideas for a system that could effectively compete with the public university cartel would be welcome indeed.
Re:Everything will be half (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that this is a worthy goal (and the primary goal of many schools), but most schools also teach you other things that end up holding people back later in life:
- Copying is cheating
- If you can't take a standardized test for it, then it isn't really knowledge
- Everyone starts with an A, and works their way backwards the less they conform
Every day the value of a college education goes down a bit (I suppose that's the point of the story). Every day the cost goes up a little. While having a degree may help a person become more inquisitive and learn to learn, every day it seems there is less and less value for the time & money in a college education. There are better ways to improve yourself. It is however, a pretty good way to improve a resume.
Re:Everything will be half (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, I've found it quite obvious that individuals who are predisposed to learn how to learn, will do so regardless of whether or not they went to University. Of course, this is a self-referential comment, but it is also a general observation that regardless off education type, learners will always be learners. Perhaps Universities help transform people who are on the cusp, but I do not believe that they can create them whole cloth and in fact I believe that they can have a very negative effect on those who are already well beyond what most Univesities can offer in terms of learning skills.
Now, back to the thread topic... I do believe that a program such as what is offered by Northface can be very beneficial to the right type of people, namely those who are natural learners who will round out their knowledge regardless of circumstance. Unfortunately, it will also attract many who are not of this type and thus has the potential to create yet more hyper-specialized, completely inflexible, educate idiots of which there were so many in the dotcom boom times, and that helped hasten the dotcom crash. I'd really like to avoid both situations once again.
Not the question that we should be asking... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a senior Computer Science major at a top-tier liberal arts institution, and have been through almost all of the major, and a lot of other courses in the process of completing my degree. Here's my main comment- I'm getting the broad-based knowledge that I consider to be extremely useful in terms of general employment, but what's notable is what I DON'T have as a result of this education. The ability to program well enough to get a job doing it.
A four-year CS major doesn't necessarily mean you know ANYTHING about proper programming practice, systems organization, or anything even remotely related to the workings of a computer. Virtually all of my knowledge of these things comes from my own efforts either before college or independant of anything curriculum-related.
Hell, most of the CS majors can't even fix their own computers, much less write software that won't break someone else's.
The issue, then, isn't with a shorter or longer curriculum, but with the individual programs... Certification doesn't seem to mean much, as far as I can tell.
Free Training. (Score:2, Interesting)
University of the Outsourced (Score:2, Interesting)
CompSci degree? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Everything will be half (Score:1, Interesting)
I mean good god whats this world coming to...
Not everyone cares about spending $60k+ on a "education" for something you can get in $20 worth of late fees at the public library.
I work hard for a living, and having worked my way to get there I have respect for those who are self taught and work with their hands in life.
Trade schools are a great fit for most of America and the world for that fact, College is only prop'd up by the viewpoint that it's how you determine who is white collar and who is blue collar.
The best workers I've ever met were self-taught, the best CEOs I've ever seen or met started the company with their own 2 hands and most never had a degree.
I left college due to the liberal arts requirements as I do not care about architectural history, and if I ever do, I'll gladly study it on my own time.
Re:As much as I hated those classes (Score:3, Interesting)
No need to care. If the trend that may be observed here (de) continues, she/he will be too old no matter what the degree looked like. Current standard-barrier is age 35.
CC.
Re:Everything will be half (Score:3, Interesting)
My experience is that (by and large) the people who are self-educated will learn more about a subject when their existing knowledge doesn't allow them to proceed with their task, learning enough to let them get back to being 'productive', and the people with formal education will attempt to aquire at least a cursory familiarity with as much about the task as possible in a predetermined time frame (couple of hours, day or two maybe) before performing it (having learned where to find complete details about whatever pops up during implementation.)
The practical examples of what happens next are things like
-Setting up security on a new machine - one guy will add his 5 users and grant all 5 of them the necessary security rights, where another guy will add his 5 users, add a group, add the users to that group, and assign the rights to that group.
-A coder will write the exact same (or a similar) statement 8 times in a row, but another coder will enclose the statement in a loop.
At the time of delivery, all those examples are 'the same' but in effect they are not 'the same' when you consider the long term ramifications (maintainability for example) of doing it one way over the other.
Note - I'm not bagging on the self-taught. I have a strong respect for the guys that have 5+ years of professional service in software programming, systems administration (network administration, hardware, deployments) in particular is full of great performers and guess what - they don't have 4 year degree plans for Sys/Admins. I'm just saying that I have seen two distinctly different approaches and I can often identify between the two who are who.
Re:Everything will be half (Score:4, Interesting)
The answer to this is, I think, a little more complicated. There are many universities out there which do not grant Ph.D. degrees. My experience has been that students from those colleges, on average, learn more than those students who attend a Ph.D. granting University.
The reason for this is that these colleges tend to attract instructors who are simply not driven to excel in the world of "publish or perish" but prefer to actually teach. I may be biased here: I attend a university with no Ph.D. program and I have a close relative who is a full professor at a non-Ph.D. granting university who left a tenure track position at a prestigious west coast university because she disliked the focus on research and total disregard for undergraduates.
I strongly feel that it is easy to get an excellent undergraduate education, you just have to go to a lesser known university. Of course this advice will likely come back and bite you if you don't go on to graduate school. At some point an employer is going to ask themselves "have I ever heard of this school? Is it accredited?"
Re:trade school (Score:3, Interesting)