CS Education In Future

A better education for next generation

In the spring of 2030, my son has decided to take the computer science as his major after finishing his secondary school. He has successfully got the offers from two universities, Google University and Facebook University. Both are the top two CS institutes in the world. He finally chose the CS department of Google University because he considers to join Google instead of Facebook after graduation.

He will spend the next 4 years with the Google, which is an internet company but also an education institute. Different from our generation in CS, the university study has become totally different:

1. Companies own and run their own education institutes. According to the talent requirements, they setup their curriculum for different roles: data scientist, web developer, mobile developer etc. Using the tuition fee paid by the enrolled students, they allocate resources e.g. manpower to run the institute.
2. Employees of the companies form the faculty of the institute. They are not “pure” professors, but the engineers with the hands-on experience. Everyday, they take care of their daily job e.g. their projects or research, but also teach and learn with their students.
3. Students, who are accepted by the company institutes, attend the courses about different topics, participate in different real-world projects. They practice together with the engineers (their mentors) on solving the real problems using the knowledge and skills they learned in the classes.

What’s the difference between this future and our current CS education? My personal opinion, the future is a win-win-win solution for three parties: Company, employee and student.

• Company’s win: they can discover and train their future talent. They embrace the students with the right skill set, the right culture and get students involved into the work they need them to do ASAP. Of course, the company need to spend the money and resources to run its education institute,but the tuition fee paid by students will compensate this (at least partially) and the students during their study is helping the real projects the company is pursuing. It is like one step forward from the internship program.
• Employee’s win: teaching in the company institute helps employees to develop their careers. Teach what they love to do to the younger generation will be a joy to them and will also make them better. For example, they will improve their communication skills by teaching, which they will use in their daily job as well. Answering students’ questions can also improve their understanding of the knowledge they teach.
• Student’s win: you can learn from a world-class engineer, who keeps learning cutting-edge technology. Your assignment is not just an assignment. It is a real project which can change millions of people’s live. You can work together with your teacher on the project. Your teacher also develops with hands-on experience. What’s more, you learn with the motivation. After graduation, the better you learn more possible you will join the company to do what you love to do.

This is huge! It is a luxury that my generation (especially in Asia) cannot imagine. Most of the professors (> 90%) teaching in the Asia universities are those who already give up learning long time ago. They chose academia just because it is a kind of safe job with freedom, but not because they love teaching. I don’t think undergraduate students can learn more from them compared to self-learning on the Internet. They treat the graduate students as their paper generation machine. What a shame of that!