High Unemployment for Recent Grads in Info Systems, Comp. Sci., and Engineering

Today’s USA Today has a good article on unemployment for recent grads. (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/30/tech-job-unemployment/2595669/)

I commented with my views.

“After spending over a quarter of a century as a college professor, this does not surprise me. It does sadden me.  We are seeing the observations of Clark Kerr (“…This shift from academic merit to student consumerism is one of the two greatest reversals of direction in the history of…higher education…”) and David Riesman (“…advantage can still be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions…”)  come true. For example, the “elite” institution where I decided to teach an important class at a level similar  to MIT wanted me to change the course to a “cookbook” course, so as not to “discourage” anyone.  I refused.  And my students did not end up like the student who took the “cookbook” course and wrote that he could not “…do many of the [MIT homework] problems…on almost every problem set. …and I made an A in [the cookbook] Differential Equations and I made an A in the next course…”  This is a disservice to the students and the employers who can’t tell which students are really decent engineers and which aren’t until they get experience – or go to MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, CalTech, or very few other schools that can be counted on to really educate their students.”