You just can’t get the help…
I’m working on a piece that should run in the Telegraph on September 13 alongside the listing of new BCS Fellows. And the thing everyone wants to talk about (which has become the subject of the piece, and I hope my editor likes it) is the dropping numbers of kids going into IT. Of course, this has been true for women for a decade now - the numbers of women have been increasing in many sciences, but not computer science. But what I’m hearing now is that this is a much wider problem; there’s a variety of reasons and I’ll have numbers in the piece itself, but the short version is that we can look forward to a serious skills shortage in about ten years because the drop-off rate from GCSEs to A-level IT, to computer science in university, to PhDs is considerable at every stage of that progression. Kids are taught in school to be computer literate, but what that means to most teachers is that kids know how to use Word or Excel; not that they know anything about how they actually work inside (the much more fun bit).
Plus, kids get a really negative impression from ”The IT Crowd”.
The implications of this are wider than just “Who will fix the NHS network?” The economy depends on innovation; innovation in all sectors depends on IT; IT innovation depends on education (computer science) instead of training (how to program in Java). But also: who will update the NHS computer system, the banking financial models, the climate change models?
wg
September 4th, 2007 at 7:17 am
What I find almost equally depressing is that university enrolment has grown from 200,000 in 1961 to 2.3 million today. How many marketing graduates and graphic designers do we really need? And the market for higher education is easy to influence for good or ill. When the latest craze for books, films and television series about forensic science began, the number of (mostly female) students studying forensics skyrocketed, and UK Universities are graduating about 1,000 of forensic scientists each year–to compete for about 40 new jobs annually. The only marketing IT ever got (before that TV series that started this year) was Revenge of the Nerds…
September 4th, 2007 at 7:52 am
I think the dropping number of undergraduate computer scientists is a big problem. It’s important though that high school students realise you don’t need a GCSE or A-level in comp. sci. to study for a CS degree - universities teach the subject from scratch. And it is still possible for non-CS graduates to essentially get a CS degree in a year through a Masters conversion course in the subject, as UCL and many other universities provide.
Teaching primary school children Logo in their maths lessons would probably do more to build teenage enthusiasm for computing than say a compulsory GCSE in the subject. I know it did for me
September 4th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I think, Tom, that you don’t go to enough movies. IT people feature in many, many media vehicles these days, although they are generally depicted as somewhat antisocial, male, etc.
However, for counterexamples I offer Willow in BTVS/Angel, Mac in Veronica Mars.
There are, actually, plenty of other movies and TV shows featuring IT people (Freaks and Geeks, Dweebs). It’s just that almost all of them are either 1) amateurs; 2) sidekicks; 3) villains.
wg
September 4th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Hmm. Makes me want to sign up… I don’t watch enough TV, although I do go to quite a few movies, which reminds me that in Die Hard 4.0 the IT dweeb a) survives, b) kills a bad guy and c) gets the girl. So sign me up!
September 5th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
There’s a huge amount to unpack here and I very much look forward to your article, Wendy.
One of the dynamics may be that the IT/CS field has become a little like engineering in the public mind - high profile, big bucks internet & media-type plays grab most of the attention, while the more fundamentally interesting and important stuff (e.g. digital identity, which *should* inform stuff like the NHS upgrade) remains largely hidden or is covered as if only accessible to a geek elite. Is the CS student now equivalent to the pocket protector-wearing, slide rule-carrying engineering student of the 60s and 70s?
Surely, though, we’ve been heading this way for years? Kids coming to computers for the first time no longer have to struggle with microprocessor assembly language or programming to ‘get something back’. ‘The computer’ is buried under so many layers of abstraction that it takes a certain sort of mindset to even want to understand it - and most are encouraged not even to bother: “Don’t learn HTML, just download another Facebook app.”
I tend to agree with Ian - if we want to encourage innovation and educate our kids about IT then we need to expose ‘em to more of the ‘mysteries’ while their imaginations are still unrepressed. Genuine enthusiasm comes from play, not examinations! And we must accept that only a proportion will ever catch the bug. Alan Kay and the folks at Xerox PARC discovered this back in the 70s, and I’m sure it holds true.
N.B. re. banking and climate change models, I think that’s a different issue. Given a suitable driving problem there will always be those who’ll learn (teach themselves) enough to come up with solutions, whether IT-based or not. Computer modelling as science is still a *relatively* new discipline, but is much less likely to be a problem in 10 years than the lack of plumbers or their IT equivalent…
September 5th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
That last is probably true. (Climate modelling, at least, has a lot of drive behind it atm.) As for pocket protector-wearing engineers in the 1970s, I was in college in the early 1970s, and sure, engineers were seen as a bit nerdy, but everyone also knew there were good jobs in engineering and interesting work (at least, they did at Cornell, where the Engineering school is a pretty big deal). They certainly were not held in contempt, or at least not by the people I knew. I think the UK has always had less regard for the people who actually build things and make things than the US has.
wg