Feature

Lorelei Millund sits in the middle row of a 200-person lecture hall, multicolored fineliner pens splayed across the half-empty page of a meticulously color-coded computer science notebook. She pulls out her phone and starts scrolling through Twitter as the instructor struggles with his laptop, his 130-lines of demo code projected onto three large screens at the front of the room. “This will only take a moment,” he tells the class, frantically scrolling through the program in search of whatever error is causing his demo to crash.

The culprit is a typo on line 25, but Millund doesn’t raise her hand to point this out. Instead, she pulls up popular coding advice site Stackoverflow and searches for key terms related to the class’s next major assignment. As a biology student taking her first Computer Science course, she quickly learned that free online resources are often better teachers than her lecturers.

Millund is one of 384 students paying upwards of a thousand dollars for an introduction to Oregon State University’s ABET accredited Computer Science program this term. In CS 161, she has begun to question whether such classes are worth the cost.

Especially in tech-related fields, where industry experience can often serve as a substitute for a relevant degree, no one path exists to enable a worker to enter their chosen field. Rising tuition prices turn the choice to purchase a college education into a gambit. Many have chosen to take advantage of online resources or training bootcamps to gain entry-level skills rather than follow traditional academic paths at universities.

There is a logic to this approach. The 2018 McGraw-Hill Future Workforce Survey found that less than half of both graduating students and potential employers feel that colleges are teaching students the skills they need to graduate job-ready.

And yet, higher education remains one of the top attributes tech employers look for in capable job candidates.

As Associate Information Technology Officer at Portland State University, Ellen Weeks is experienced in hiring from technological fields. Generally, she says, new hires enter her department with about 50 percent of the skills they need for the work they have been hired to do. She doesn’t expect recent graduates to walk through her door with a complete understanding of the tool she’s using that month. In the rapidly changing field of IT, constant learning and problem-solving skills are far more important than specific tech knowledge.

According to Mike Bailey, professor of Computer Science at OSU, this is where universities stand apart from other education options. “I’ve talked to companies who have hired bootcamp graduates, and the programming bootcamps – they’re good, but they turn you into a programmer.”

Given a coding task, university and bootcamp graduates may perform at the same level. But the gap in skill becomes apparent when workers are given a problem to solve rather than a set of direct instructions.

Online courses and short term training camps teach entry-level skills. University programs drill students in applying those skills to a problem statement. The result is graduates with more versatility and independence than those without their educational experience.

“There’s a place for both,” says Bailey, “but I think if you really want to get into the creative aspects of design and solving problems, then it’s a computer science degree.”

But as Millund learned in CS 161, universities don’t necessarily teach these problem-solving skills so much as they force students to develop them on their own.

“I’ve talked to more people in this class than I’ve ever talked to people in classes before because we’re desperately trying to build some kind of support network,” she says. “It’s not structured into the class.”

Part of the difficulty in teaching introductory tech classes stems from the availability of outside education sources. Many students bring independently learned coding skills to their intro CS classes, while others come from backgrounds with limited access to any kind of technical education before college.

Though her course was meant to be introductory, Millund felt that it prioritized students who had entered the class with previous experience. “They launched right into the code without any sort of introduction, like I had already been taking coding classes.”

This approach may contribute to the high drop rate of first-year computer science students. Given that access to and encouragement towards tech opportunities early in life is disproportionately offered to upper-class white men, it also serves to reinforce the lack of diversity present in most CS classrooms.

Tech education isn’t standardized in the same way as math or writing. The first college degree program in Computer Science wasn’t established until the early 60s. Since then, the field has evolved rapidly. Teaching materials on emergent technologies aren’t always available for instructors to use in lesson planning. When they do exist, they quickly become outdated.

Todd Kesterson, professor of New Media Communications at OSU, is constantly revising and reworking his classes on digital animation and technological storytelling. “I don’t find there is a standard. I base it off of my experience, and off students who give me feedback. All my classes are always trying stuff. Sometimes I push too hard, sometimes projects need clarification, but I try to figure what would produce something tangible.”

Kesterson is one of many instructors caught in an infinite loop of designing and redesigning tech-centric courses. “Honestly, it’s never-ending. Because tools are changing, I’m always trying to adjust.”

As an instructor of largely standalone classes, he has the creative freedom to design his courses as he wishes.

This isn’t the case for all classes. College programs build off of other courses. Instructors rely on each other to teach students the necessary skills in prerequisite classes. As Bailey puts it, “If there’s a course downstream that’s depending on this material, then we’re pretty adamant about ‘you don’t screw people up in the next course’.”

Because of this, keeping technological programs up to date can be a daunting task.

The Chronicle of Education’s Alexandra Logue describes the curriculum reform process as data-heavy, relying on both quantitative and qualitative evidence to convince university administration to adopt a change.

For a field that is constantly innovating, finding and presenting such data can stall the education process significantly. Declining enrollment rates and steadily decreasing public funding for universities make such inefficiencies dangerous. If universities continue to struggle with teaching technological subjects, they could be outpaced by more affordable forms of credentialing.

Plowing through her coding homework on a Wednesday afternoon, Millund reflects on the manner with which Computer Science was introduced to her. “The second they told me there was a high drop rate, I went ‘you’re a bad professor, and I don’t want to be here’.” Despite this, Millund will be attending her next CS class this coming fall. Her university course may not have taught her to do the work it assigned her, but it did force her to develop the independent study skills she’ll need to keep up in tech. She plans to keep up her coding skills over the summer by practicing with friends.