So, in some of the social platform discussion on my last post, the issue of the practicality of a college education came up. Should college teach practical job skills or should it be for some more abstract purpose - learning for learning sake or if one would be a bit presumptions learning how to think.

Way back when going to college was not the norm. Most went from HS to workforce and even in HS you might have the "academic" track that prepared you for college, "vocational" that was job prep like automotive or regular which was neither extreme. Sure, that system had a host of problems but since the end goal wasn't college for most, it freed college from the need for being practical. College could just be about learning non-useful stuff.

Nowadays kids don't have the luxury of not going to college. It's expected in our society. Spend 4 years and oodles of dollars to get the piece of paper and you can get a job that years ago only required the HS version of the paper.

This, of course, leads to many rather large and hairy questions none of which I will address here.

What I will address concerns my little CS corner of the world.

In commenting on my post, some people talked about college faculty they know and how those faculty members refuse to teach or use anything that might remotely be useful to kids in terms of career. They feel it's beneath them and that they serve a higher academic purpose. I don't doubt those comments - I know plenty of college faculty who feel this very way.

I'll agree that college shouldn't strictly be a jobs program but the nice thing about CS is that you can teach practical skills and job skills within the context of a traditional academic CS degree. Add in the reality that most CS majors don't want to go to grad school and you can redesign the major to do even more for the majority of students.

How about programming languages and tools. Why not use a couple of practical ones. This is not to say that the first language has to be C++, Java, Python or similar but there's no reason why a couple practical languages shouldn't be used. Sure, feel free to use an esoteric language or some professors pet project in a particular class and by all means use the intro language that makes the most sense for your situation but for a 4 year major, there's no reason why students shouldn't walk away with a couple of languages that are widely used in industry. Same for build tools and things like testing frameworks. I use git and doctest. I'm not teaching a class in git or doctest, I'm teaching software engineering techniques and testing as part of my CS1 classes. I have to use some tool as the platform on which to teach these things so why not tools that they can also use outside of school. It just makes sense. Sure, in terms of language, most colleges seem to cover at least one of C++, Python, and Java but lag in terms of the support concepts and tooling.

It reminds me about what I said in my earlier post about Intel Assembly. At Stuy back in the 90s I taught a systems elective. It wasn't a programming course about Intel assembly. If it was, I'd just do a bunch of random programming assignments in it. It was rather a course about how the computer worked at a low level and we used Intel assembly as the tool.

You can't do this everywhere in a CS curriculum but there are plenty of places where you can. Do this, make sure there are some required large project courses where students can learn to work in a group and integrate technologies, introduce a couple of new electives, and all of a sudden you can have a strong academic CS program that also does a great job preparing students for the tech world beyond academia.

Some places are already doing this and others are trying but too many are still caught in the past.