A great overview by Amy J. Ko of the deep problems with CS education right now, highlighting in particular racism, sexism, ableism, and elitism, which are amplified by a lack of pedagogical awareness.(context apparently is in response to the pandemic): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/15UxfJnjI8P0N33xGlTqY1A39SQdxBUwQ2jflkVMmF7Q/edit#slide=id.g89649ef0a6_0_164

Amy Ko's article is nonsense. She boldly claims that public university funding is in dramatic decline since Reagan. Here is a graph of the raw and inflation adjusted University of California budget. Do you see a decline lately? Nope, just keeps going up and up. Some UC administrators have 8 figure salaries, and fly in private jets. If anything, higher education in America is decadent, and out of touch with reality. All scientific evidence on education shows that the most bang for the buck happens before the age of 8, and that college, which used to be about learning to shoot pool and drink beer has never justified the outrageous funding it currently receives. She mentions all sorts of problems, without mentioning price/performance. Too busy pursuing social justice to measure if the universities' core mission, which is to educate people, is being done in an effective or frugal manner. Whatever happened to the concern for the quality of the graduates being produced? Shouldn't that be the #1 concern? I have deep reservations about the quality of programmers being produced in the schools. Some of them can't program their way out of a paper bag.

It has been well-observed that in many states, funding per student has been in decline for the past several decades.

i’m not a fan of the University of California (i literally participated in a wildcat strike against it because they don’t pay me enough to do my mostly-teaching job) but the problem isn’t excessive state funding. the problem is insufficient state funding leading to overreliance on tuition, which is transforming universities into businesses that sell degrees & lifestyle perks instead of public educational institutions. public university funding (i.e. funding of universities by the state and national government) has specifically declined, and tuition costs have ballooned in response. the University of California is one of the strongest examples of this trend – see e.g. https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-lost-decade-in-higher-education-funding you’re right about the outrageous rise in salaries for upper administrators – this is a widely recognized problem among university faculty, and is driven in large part by higher ed being treated more and more like a business rather than a public good. decent public funding (like they have in many other civilized countries) would also justify stronger public control over what the money gets spent on.

Some UC administrators have 8 figure salaries, and fly in private jets

That’s insane, holy shit.

Some of them can’t program their way out of a paper bag.

This is quite true. With the large influx of students interested in CS due to it being trendy, the degree meaning has degraded. I met many developers who are dipl. ing. and yet are junior level mindset because they learned to optimise for learning to pass the curriculum, not to learn. Coming from a country where higher education is free if you are a regular student and you “pay as you fail” - it is a great solution, but it yields a huge diploma inflation. Everyone has a university degree, most do optimised learning just to pass, colleges love it because they get more money from the gov and more students, students love it because they all get diplomas easily. The academy became a super-slow turtle where people join as they graduate for a “doctorate”, yielding them like 2.5x median salary and having them work on useless stuff with their mentors (like, we’re analyzing bitcoin transactions to see how much total volume there was last year). Dozens of them drip in per college year, rarely anyone returns to the private sector. Some professors have monetized it by having students work on stuff that is relevant to companies they partner/work with so students get hired there and teachers get a comission. In the end, the lack of quality graduates is showing in the industry. Re: Amy Ko’s article Totally agree, sexism and elitism are prevalent in CS. I’m glad to see more women in CS classrooms, because having just 2-3% of the classroom being women was causing a quite toxic culture. In the last 8-9ish years since I started/dropped college, worked, held talks on unis, I’ve seen quite an increase here and I can say that the working culture changed to waaaay better and way less “bro-like”. I cannot speak much about racism from experience since we have a really low percentage of non-white people in our country, but by looking at the outside world, I see why racism is quite in play. But yeah, Academia has a serious issues with gatekeeping - and it’s broken bottom up - not open for the most intellectualy curious, but reserved for those who can endure to finance themselves that long and who will gladly jump through the hoops and play politics. And the idea that we don’t need liberal arts is so self-absorbed - programming is an art and it impacts and changes our society quite a lot. I’d say we get quite a lot of problems due to engineering - engineers usually have more stricter and boundary/box making mindsets. Not saying it’s bad, but it doesn’t fit the artist culture of programming and now the culture is growing up and rejecting the engineer label