A 4 year cs degree dumps you into heavy math, physics, and intro CS + Data structures in your first year to weed people out who cant cut it.
Second year teaches fundamentals of CS (discrete math, concept of languages, understanding algorithms at least at a basic level).
Third year is filled with more practical fundamentals (OS, DB, computer architecture + field specific courses the student wants).
Finally the fourth year pieces everything together with more advanced versions of prior topics (algorithms for example) + repeated practical applications of all the concepts from years 1-3 to hopefully put the student on at least an 'ok' footing post graduation.
I guess you can try to make the first lecture or two in CS101 about the history but most students don't even know if they want to pursue this journey. Would talking about Alan Turing's history really be appropriate in that class? I don't know really.
That course has 28 credits in first year, 3 of which are spent on computer science (arguably 3 more on "Roadmap to Computing"). Second year has a little more. Third and fourth year are heavy on CS/SE topics, but still have some time allocated to others.
I don't disagree with students learning Calculus and Statistics and even Physics as part of a CS course, and I think it's excellent that they take at least two courses in English composition. But you can't look at that four-year curriculum and say nothing could possibly be cut (turned into an elective) in favour of a History of Computers module.
I could concede that the "History or Humanities" elective in the 4th year could include an option for history of computing but I think the rationality of including that course in the first place is partly due to politics and accreditation requirements.
Its also possible that the department wanted to round out the students education by providing something not related to STEM each semester.
Note: these reasons I listed are just a guess based on my experience with the university.
I still find it difficult to justify the placement of this course as a hard requirement because of how the rest of the STEM courses are structured. YWCC 307 is a very fluid course so maybe it can be squeezed in there? Anyway my point is that it is tough and I still feel that way.
> I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
Completely agree here. This would fall under the umbrella of liberal arts, which a lot of CS-only folks seem to find little to no value in.
Most concepts in computer science--especially when it comes to programming--are fairly easy to learn if you're good at learning. Reading something and understanding it to the point that you can write a proper college level essay about it trains that muscle, which is a different skill than rote memorization.
Women’s work: how Britain discarded its female computer programmers
Britain once led the world in electronic computing. But when the industry squeezed out female employees, it wrote its own epitaph.
In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. The top-secret codebreaking computers deployed by the British at Bletchley Park worked round the clock to ensure the success of D-Day and the Allies’ win in Europe. At a time when the best electronic computing technology in the United States was still only in its testing phase, British computers literally changed the world.
After the war, British computing breakthroughs continued, and British computers seemed poised to succeed across the board, competing with US technology on a global scale.
...
Even when electromechanical and then electronic computers came in, women continued to do computing work. They programmed, operated, troubleshooted, tested, and even assembled these new machines. In fact, IBM UK measured the manufacturing of computers in “girl hours” (which were less expensive than “man hours”) because the people who built the machines were nearly all women.
Meanwhile, the British government, the largest computer user in the nation, called their computer workers the “machine grades” and later, the “excluded grades”—excluded from equal pay measures brought into the Civil Service in the 1950s. Because their work was so feminised, the government declined to give them equal pay and raise their pay to the men’s rate on the basis that the men’s wage was almost never used. Therefore, the lower, women’s wage became the default market rate for the work. So concentrated in machine work were women that the majority of women working in government did not gain equal pay.
They were heavily involved, computing was seen as a female profession. The human computers we had before digital ones were women, and they were very heavily involved until computers became profitable.
Sure, if you don't use the standard definitions of common words you can argue false things. Children know that. It has no intellectual merit and you should stop playing silly word games to try and "win" an incorrect argument.
The computing industry does not refer to people sitting in rows doing calculations by hand.
Betty Snyder, Betty Jennings, Kathleen McNulty, and Grace Hopper were not doing calculations by hand.
I am obviously not saying that the human computers are the same as digital computers, that's your misinterpretation. I was explaining the context that digital computers grew out of, it was a female field. E.g. Mauchley and Eckert designed the ENIAC to be used for the same tasks as human computers were (firing table calculations), and as digital computers were used in this context, the workforce in the eventual digital computer industry reflected that of the human computer context. If you are interested in learning more, there are many books on the ENIAC project. Just pick one, it will mention the women involved. "ENIAC, the triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer" is a good general overview which you can read in a day, free online at https://archive.org/details/eniac00scot
Please read a post before you reply to it. Your reply is emotional and not constructive. Nobody is out to get you, I am only interested in weeding out misconceptions about computing history.
Perhaps the people teaching thec purses don't feel qualified to talk about the history?
I taught university-level computer science and I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination. I know something about the history and might mention things in passing but I don't think I could legitimately teach it to other people!
Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.
I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system.
Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a university, and the other is the cost that is paid by the student.
Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket. The US, OTOH, has been consistently reducing govt support for student tuition. Even worse, it's been pushing students into taking loans that unlike most other loans cannot be discharged during bankruptcy. And even though students aren't required to start paying back those loans until they graduate, they do start collecting interest from day 1, which means a student has picked up a significant burden simply from the interest on the loans they received to pay for their freshman tuition, when they graduate.
These are all issues with the US system of financing education as opposed to the actual liberal arts education system.
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades
The benefits of the U.S. university system aren’t generated by average people taking a debt-financed 4 year vacation. They are generated by the same subset of people who would still be attending university even in a scaled down system that sent far fewer people to college.
No, the benefits of university are from smart people who can earn enough during summers to pay reasonable tuition if schools weren't set up as four-year vacations with lavish amenities. When I went to Georgia Tech, in-state tuition was about $2,400 per semester, or about $20,000 over four years (in 2024 dollars). It was a spartan, 1970's experience--like European universities often are today--but it was quite affordable for students who could earn that much at summer internships. And it's not just for engineers. My wife put herself through the University of Iowa, studying business and german literature, in 5 semesters by nannying.
And do you know who is responsible for the increase in tuition at Georgia Tech? The legislature and governor of the state of Georgia. State appropriations for higher ed and the tuition rates at Georgia Tech are set exclusively by the state government and its appointees on the Board of Regents for the State University System, not by university administrators in any way.
It’s unpopular to say, but a disproportionate amount of value is of course derived from people who are both educated and have immediate access to resources to fully exploit that education as well as the risk tolerance to innovate in the process, and the social status to build strong trust and social bonds with other similarly prepared people…so although it pains me to say it, yes?
It is certainly plausible that the most benefit to society comes from people that are both educated and empowered.
Whether the cost of that empowerment > the burden outsourced to society, well, that is another discussion.
Perhaps more on point, because I definitely think we can find examples of this in practice, it’s perhaps more truthy and also more actionable to say that college provides its optimal outcomes when it serves people who have intrinsic gifts that are empowered by knowledge. Sometimes these gifts are resources, but often these gifts are cognitive brilliance. Either one is like oxidiser for the fuel of knowledge, but especially brilliance when given resources.
I’m pretty sure that for the majority of college graduates, aside from its social signalling value, the amount of their secondary education that directly benefits them in their life could fit in a couple of years of summer school or a year of community college.
A quarter million dollars in debt is a tragic price to pay for a couple thousand dollars of educational utility. A system that requires a social signal 100x more costly than the value it represents is externalising that cost onto everyone, and the only benefits flow to financiers and the moneyed class.
Aside from educational titles (as opposed to capabilities) society is generally sensible regarding the cost of symbols vs the reality they facade.
We recognise the ridiculousness of people owing $90,000 for a truck when they live in a dilapidated trailer on a rented lot. We understand that a man who lives hand to mouth but wears a half of kilogram of gold around his neck is probably not making the best life decisions. We ridicule the faux-intellectual with their ridiculously stilted props. But somehow, we are convinced to dress up our children like heirs to the crown and send them to finishing school for their jobs in retail. It’s a profound mis-investment.
It’s also worth noting that it is way more expensive to provide an education to the intellectual proles than it is to educate brilliant and hungry minds. We are shovelling money (distilled human effort) into a furnace of misery in the service of vanity.
> We recognise the ridiculousness of people owing $90,000 for a truck when they live in a dilapidated trailer on a rented lot. We understand that a man who lives hand to mouth but wears a half of kilogram of gold around his neck is probably not making the best life decisions. We ridicule the faux-intellectual with their ridiculously stilted props. But somehow, we are convinced to dress up our children like heirs to the crown and send them to finishing school for their jobs in retail. It’s a profound mis-investment. It’s also worth noting that it is way more expensive to provide an education to the intellectual proles than it is to educate brilliant and hungry minds. We are shovelling money (distilled human effort) into a furnace of misery in the service of vanity.
All of that said, if we don’t provide a solid foundational high school education that covers basic science, math through fundamental calculus, a decent overview of world history, literature, art and culture, then we are not only wasting the precious time of our children, we are also doomed to be an ignorant and brutish people.
As it is, high school education in the USA today only assures what used to be the 8th grade level when I was in school.
It’s ridiculous that we have bacslid to the point where we waste 4 years catering to the lowest common denominator.
Solid vocational education should be offered as an alternative to high school from grade 9 forward. We need to understand that for every professor there’s someone that will never be able to manage anything beyond rudimentary tasks. For every banker there will be someone who drives a broom.
We do those that are less gifted a disservice by failing to give them useful tools for their future too.
Envy of the world due to network effects and inertia, not due to any inherent superiority of our model. There are some good parts of our model, don't get me wrong, but they do not explain the status of the US system at all.
From European perspective US system is a joke. All built on even bigger joke of high school. Which fails to teach students what they need in general education. And thus you get some weird "general" education irrelevancy being part of degree. Not to even mention how Master's level is not the standard most aim towards.
University rankings have pretty much nothing to do with how well they teach students, only their research output. And good researchers aren’t automatically good teachers ( and vice versa).
I don’t know any such rankings which measure envy, I’m afraid. It’s all based on numbers of papers published, etc.
Do you think people in other countries envy the us college system based on rankings? If so I strongly recommend a trip abroad and striking up a few conversations with prospective or enrolled students. In my experience the topic of cost and non dischargeable student loans comes up often. Rankings very rarely.
In my country the only restriction for university is that you have a highschool diploma.
Getting into the medical faculty is harder because the government does pay for everything and training doctors is expensive- for those the university picks the best and brightest.
The government also has programs in place to send out students to Harvard and MIT as the future elite of the nation.
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? It's very easy to read uncharitably without further elaboration and reads pretty delusional as is.
The US made a big shift from public financing via grants to public financing via loans. During the same period there was a ton of information/propaganda disseminated about how much more lifetime income college grads made vs high school grads. The companies making these loans are doing very well.
If I believed in conspiracy theories I might think this was all planned.
I really wish the computer science degrees and even online courses spent like 30 mins on the history of computer science.
The entire existence of this field has been dependent on those non job-training liberal arts degrees.