A worthless degree? Betsy DeVos wants to change rules

A worthless degree? Betsy DeVos wants to change rules for which colleges stay open, close.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/worthless-degree-betsy-devos-wants-155459589.html

 

The problem, in my humble opinion, is that colleges are terrible predictors and reactors to labor needs. Colleges respond to only 1 thing: enrollment. It is student demand that drives the development and sustainability of a program.

 

I would like the idea a lot better if colleges had a better track record in that regard. I've seen colleges create more useless programs or play catch-up to the market, trying to install programs that the market already needed years before.

My issue is this: sometimes it's necessary for their to be a considerable evaluation period by an accreditor. Sometimes a school needs more time to prepare the program, and the accreditor needs more time to review it. Accelerating may cause more issues than it does serve as a positive.

 

I think Professional and Specialty accreditation is more in tune with industry trends and needs.
And usually, programs that are professionally or specialty accredited are closer to the needs of the profession they accredit.
Be it Social Work, Engineering, IT, Rabbinical or Medical professions, the accreditors have industry and academic representation.

So I think what remains is all the degrees that are not required to be professionally accredited. Even schools with DEAC accreditation have programs that are professionally or specialty accredited.
But many of the specialized or professional accreditation boards are not requiring DoE recognition, they are usually recognized by CHEA. As in almost all the cases with an exception of few, they accredit programs at already institutionally accredited universities.

So I think an important path to success is educating the public about the additional level of accreditation, such as Professional and Specialty, occupational, etc.

 

I'm glad you picked the examples you did because it actually highlights the problem with specialty accreditation as well.

The Association of Advanced Rabbinical and Talmudic Schools is a recognized accreditor. It's also super Orthodox. The schools they accredit are the sort that adhere to only the strictest Orthodox interpretation. Reform and Conservative Judaism, which comprise about 80% of Jews who affiliate, would never meet their programmatic standards because they have very different focuses. So we could say that Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College are all diploma mills then, right? After all, there is a recognized accreditor and we know that they would never meet those standards.

My point is that while specialty accreditors are, like you said, more in tune with industry trends and needs the industries are seldom as homogeneous as we would like to believe. ABET would like us to think that they are simply the ruling council of anything with the word "engineer" in the title. The result has been a massive push from the traditional engineering programs into CS and Software Engineering program accreditation. Their progress there, however, is a lot spottier. Software Engineers don't pursue licensure (and often, don't even qualify as PEs) the same way their fellow engineers do. So the ABET accreditation offers far less utility.

The vast world of "IT" is also much less lockstep than engineering, in my experience, in terms of what credentials are accepted and what people consider to be a quality education in that space. The traits that HR at Google looks for are very very different than what we are looking for at my company. Electrical engineers? Yeah, ABET has a lock on that. Software developers? It's too new of a field relative to engineering. In many ways, it's still the wild west.

I say this mainly because I feel like it's really tempting to just rush down an accreditation rabbit hole here.

Used to be accreditation versus not. Then it was RA or the highway. Then it was programmatic is an added feather in the cap. Then it was, well, some programmatic accreditors are legit and the others offer nothing and are just this side of being a scam.

Accreditation is a super expensive way of determining whether a program is "legit" or "quality." And as we keep adding new layers and new requirements, that expense adds up and makes education even less affordable. That will invariably drive the rush for enrollment as well. Worse, I'd argue it can stifle innovation. A school has every reason to just get by and maintain accreditation and focus efforts on enrollment. Trying to think outside the box could jeopardize accreditation in many instances. Years ago, there were many experimental colleges along the lines of UIU. Most failed eventually. Some merged into other schools. The few that remain have mainly gone mainstream, like UIU.

Colleges aren't great at predicting labor needs. And programmatic accreditors, along with professional associations, aren't really any better. They ARE good at putting up barriers to entry to try to prop up wages and keep demand for their members high. They have a vested interest in doing that.

Perhaps we need to look toward a system where the players don't actually have so much skin in the game. Because right now it's like putting lobbyists in charge of quality control.

 

It's great allowing universities to be more "agile" if that's what really happens. My concern is that they just begin to pump out a bunch of crappy degree programs because it's cheap, popular and sounds good.

 

As opposed to our present system of cranking out crappy degree programs because they're popular and sound good but are horribly expensive and bury students in debt?

 

Yes, exactly.

 

I don't see the point in being so concerned, really.

There are high schools cranking out worthless high school diplomas. Students leaving after 12 years of education who lack basic literacy. The availability of education is there. Anyone can sign up for a degree program at any time. Even geography isn't a factor anymore. You'll pay for it, though.

If we allow experimentation and drive the cost down then yeah, there may be low quality programs out there. But there already are, they're just accredited. It used to be that you picked a school based on faculty or the reputation of a particular program. How many MS in HR programs are currently offered through Bisk right now? Same curriculum. Guaranteed to appease your accreditor. Students really just pick which name they want on their diploma. The education is already crap. It's just insanely expensive.

We have degrees in machine learning that don't teach machine learning because they don't have the prereq requirements to even touch the subject. We have nutrition degrees that don't actually teach nutrition but instead some vague sense of "wellness." Schools are already cranking out cheap programs that sound good. They just cost a lot of money. Who has the money to play? Well established schools and private equity firms that want to get into for profit education.

Reduce the barriers and we might get more professors who have a novel idea about returning to a more socratic method or a handful of lawyers who feel they can run a really good, small scale law school part-time and give students the benefit of all practicing lawyers teaching them. Maybe some of it works. Maybe it doesn't. But the quality might not suffer so badly. The price inflation will, however.

We already have the condition you fear this change would bring about. Just we get to hide behind a big price tag and tell ourselves that it must be good because it's so expensive.

 

Many professional engineers fume at even hearing the words software engineering.
While some are for grandfathering certain professions, but not for those misappropriating the titles. Keep in mind, much of this was done during the 90s when managers (non-engineering) wanted to give flashy titles to their army of coders to make them feel special.
So they appropriated engineering titles and those of the architecture profession. PE's nailed the 'Quality Engineers' to the wall with the CQE name etc. but they still think that pushback should have been stronger. PE's state that now we have an army of people who could not do engineering if their lives depended on it but they can move lines of C++ around. Woo Hoo. Imagine if we called some translators SpanishEngineers (TM) who could write Spanish. Same analogy there.
The view is that engineering has to do with the manipulation of the laws of physics. It's that simple. Software developers move code. They write. Not too much different from composing music actually with a little bit of math thrown in.

There needs to be a definite line drawn on the continuum. It's too easy these days to keep redefining words to mean things they are not and this applies to Rabbinical accreditation as well as ABET.
A software engineer writes code that interacts with the physical world. We can't make planes without real software engineers making code that make the planes fly. But someone writing code to make a video game or move pixels around or crunch numbers. That's coding. So for that CS degree maybe professionally accredited but not by the same commission that accredits engineering degrees.

 

I've never worked on programming planes (I realize there is difficulty to it), but I did work on a few AAA games. With many AAA games costing as much as 150 Million dollars to produce with incredible complexity, animation, artificial intelligence, logic, millions of lines of code, and everything needing to work near-perfect or it crashes, it takes a tremendous amount of skill and ability to pull these games off. I truly believe that a good programmer at the AAA level could be a monster programming in any other industry, provided he/she can learn the language being used (which is likely for a talented AAA programmer).

 

I get your point, however, I think the anger toward software engineering is not only misplaced but is at least a decade past its expiration date.

Yes, it started when managers wanted to give employees flashier titles. And yes, there are some titles out there that include "engineer" where there is no engineering at all. My own company eliminated "sales engineers" for that reason. It actually caused confusion because we had people who worked in sales/service roles who were engineers. Sales engineers, on the other hand, were people who "engineered sales," a role that was, for sure, heavily data driven but was not engineering by any accepted definition of that word. The workplace descendants of those individuals have largely been integrated into our business intelligence and market analysis groups.

I say it's dated because Computer Science has worked its way not just into our workplace but into highly ranked schools of engineering. Locally (ish) you can earn an M.Eng. in CompSci at Cornell University's College of Engineering. While many schools just began throwing the word around, when respected engineering programs begin doing the same, it means a shift has occurred irrespective of the opinions of PEs. At MIT, Computer Science is a combined unit with Electrical Engineering.

Anecdotally, I have seen engineers cease these protestations and repent on the spot when they actually spend time with a software engineer. Not some random self-taught programmer but an honest to God, went to engineering school for software, engineer. The word may have been thrown together a lot. But the people coming out of these programs are engineers. They do engineering. They just do it with code.

The thing is, if you have a software engineer doing front end work for your website you're probably not seeing that.

Our software engineers are writing programming for robots. They're engineers. One of our engineering managers, a PE and formerly a "software engineers are not real engineers" devotee converted when he realized the level and complexity of what they were doing at our company. I'm talking a full on St. Paul level conversion. They aren't "just moving around lines of C++." They're into machine learning, AI and making machines do things that, when this engineering manager first went to engineering school, were thought to be purely science fiction. To show how complete his reversal on this was, and he does not change his mind easily, he recently wrote up a fresh out of school level 1 engineer for making a disparaging remark about software engineering. Jointly with HR, we sent him to work with the SE's for two weeks. His attitude has changed though it's impossible to say how much of that was just for show so his boss stops hammering him.

My point is, I'm not going to speak for all persons claiming the software engineering title. However, to say that software engineering isn't engineering at all, anywhere under any circumstances? That's just false. Maybe we don't apply the title to the kid writing an app to help you find the fluffiest towels locally. But we definitely need to apply it to the man or woman working as part of a team of fellow engineers to make robots do what robots do.

 

The difference is the software 'engineer' writing code for the airplane is somewhat knowledgeable of the workings of the airplane. He probably understands physics, mechanics. The same for robotics. An engineer of any type has to make things that interact with the physical world. By definition.
Maybe Computer Scientist is more appropriate for some advanced software professionals.? Use a gamer or someone writing banking code to write code for an airplane. If they are the same level of expertise the plane should be ok?
I was mostly responding to the professional and specialty accreditation as the second layer of QA that is more industry related. APA for Psychology, AMA for the medical field, Nursing has their own, Social work has its own acreditor.
I think if Computer Science programs is ABET accredited its a big plus. Currently, only four states with no ABET accredited Computer Science programs in Hawaii, Vermont, Delaware, and Rhode Island.
A school that achieved professional accreditation in computer networking or computer security based on its curriculum, faculty experience, and other factors such as industry representation in professional accreditation boards may graduate better-prepared students.
So yes I grew more supportive in the direction of professional and specialty accreditation. I made sure my children graduated from such programs.

 

ABET accreditation:

• Ensures that graduates have met the educational requirements necessary to enter the profession
• Provides opportunities for the industry to guide the educational process to reflect current and future needs
• Enhances the mobility of professional
• Is based on “learning outcomes,” rather than “teaching inputs.”
• Can more easily determine the acceptability of transfer credits.
• Supports your entry to a technical profession through licensure, registration, and certification—all of which often require graduation from an ABET-accredited program as a minimum qualification.

ABET Member Societies

• Provide the expert base of over 2,200 professionals who conduct the hands-on work of accreditation.

https://www.abet.org/about-abet/member-societies/

A long list of professional societies whose members serves on accreditation boards.

 

No, these aren't traditional engineers who know how to write code. These are people who went to school specifically for software engineering. I didn't say airplane so I'm not sure where that comes from. Though, I will say, that one of the software engineers who writes code for our robots came to us from a place where he wrote code for aircraft systems. But his entire education is software engineering. He's not an expert in physics or mechanics. He's a software engineer.

Projects like this takes teams of engineers from various specialties to come together and collaborate on getting stuff done. The software engineer needs to know software very well, no mechanics. That's why we have a mechanical engineer on the project. Neither need to be experts in electrical systems because we have electrical engineers for that.

Ultimately it comes down to career goals. Many people with engineering degrees are using them in fields where they aren't actually doing engineering work. You can make the stretch that it works for that role or that industry, but the quick answer is that they are just not working in their field of study. That happens in software as well. You have degrees in Software Engineering, CS and IT. You have people with degrees in each of those taking roles in the other areas. Having a degree in IT, generally, does not qualify you to be programming. Yet, there are people with IT degrees who are competent coders. Likewise, having a degree in CS doesn't necessarily qualify you to manage a database. And yet there are people from a CS background who become DB administrators.

I don't want to downplay anybody's work here. I'm sure that many traditional software packages are highly complex and require quite a bit of expertise. And maybe, as they work through the inevitable problems they face, we can rightfully call that engineering. I'm just saying that if you work on a team of engineers on an engineering project and you have a special, unique and co-equal skillset to the other engineers, you're an engineer. There is no reason to say that, of a team of five engineers that the guy writing the code for it has to be called something else because some engineers don't like sharing their title.

The problem is that worlds like CS are very broad. I doubt they will ever be as easily defined, traditionally at least, as engineering. I just wanted to jump in when I saw software engineers somehow getting relegated to second class in the engineering world. If packaging engineers get to sit at the table so should their software buddies.

 

Good points.
My friend who graduated from the University of Maryland with a Masters degree in Aeronautics in the 90s ended up working in IT most of his career. He is a DBA.
And I worked with an engineer who had a degree in music.

 

This might help - What is the difference between Software Engineering and Software Development?

https://www.computersciencedegreehub.com/faq/what-is-the-difference-between-software-engineering-and-software/

 

Just keep in mind that physics is an indispensable part of game development, so a game programmer actually does have to have a working knowledge of physics to be competent. We went from simple pre-determined physics systems, to full-on real-time physics systems (like Havok and Euphoria) that has objects react to collision and behave based on real-world physics calculations.