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Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates
(www.newsweek.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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You are looking at Universities^0 all wrong. Predicting the markets are not their job or role in society.
The primary purpose of a University is research. That research output comes from three primary sources: the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Naturally undergrads don’t tend to come into the University knowing how to do proper research, so there is a teaching component involved to bring them up to the necessary standards so they can contribute to research — but ultimately, that’s what they exist for.
What a University is not is a job training centre. That’s not its purpose, nor should it be. A University education is the gold standard in our society so many corporations and individuals will either prefer or require University training in exchange for employment — but that’s not the Universities that are enforcing that requirement. That’s all on private enterprise to decide what they want. All the University ultimately cares about is research output.
Hence, if there is valuable research output to be made (and inputs in the form of grants) in the field of “Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” (yes, I’m making that up!), and they have access to faculty to lead suitable research AND they have students that want to study it, they’ll run it as a programme. It makes no difference whether or not there is any industry demand for “ Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” — if it results in grants and attracts researchers and students, a University could decide to offer it as a degree programme.
We have a LOT of degree programmes with more graduates than jobs available. Personally, I’m glad for that. If I have some great interest in a subject, why shouldn’t I be allowed to study it? Why should I be forced to take it if and only if there is industry demand for that field? If that were the case, we’d have nearly no English language or Philosophy students — and likely a lot fewer Math and Theoretical Physics students as well. But that’s not the point of a University. It never has been, and it never should be.
I’ve been an undergraduate, a graduate, and a University instructor in Computer Science. I’ve seen some argue in the past that the faculty should teach XYZ because it’s what industry needs at a given moment — but that’s not its purpose or its role. If industry needs a specific skill, it either needs to teach it itself, or rely on more practical community colleges and apprenticeship programmes which are designed around training for work.
[0] — I’m going to use the Canadian terminology here, which differentiates between “Universities” and “Colleges”, with the former being centres of research education that grant degrees and the latter referring to schools that are often primarily trade and skill focussed that offer more diploma programmes. American common parlance tends to throw all of the above into the bucket of “College” in one way or another which makes differentiating between them more complicated.
So coding trade schools need to be created.
It's not honestly a job more complex than many trades. Treating it as different is a relict from the time when most programmers came from backgrounds in some cutting edge defense research or fundamental science. And honestly not all of them did, some learned it as a trade when it was a new thing, and advanced is like a trade, and themselves treated it like a trade, and wrote books about it like about a trade. Unfortunately later there was that hype over tech and Silicon Valley and crap.
Today's programmers sometimes have problems with deep enough understanding of algorithms and data structures they use, while this is about similar in complexity to the knowledge an electrician possesses.
In USSR there was a program of "programming being the second literacy", with Pascal and C being studied in schools and schools getting computers (probably the most expensive things in there), PDP-11 clones looking like PCs, and a few other kinds of machines. Unfortunately, the USSR itself was on the path to collapse. Honestly if only it existed for a bit longer, and reformed and liberalized more gently, maybe that program would have brought fruit (I mean, it did, just for other countries where people would emigrate).
BTW, Soviet trade schools ("primary technical school" that was called) prepared programmers among other things. University degrees related to cybernetics were more about architecture of mass service systems, of program systems, of production lines, industrial optimization, - all things that people deciding on those learning programs could imagine as being useful. Writing code wasn't considered that important. And honestly that was right, except the Internet blew up, and with it - the completely unregulated and scams and bubbles driven tech industry.
Honestly the longer I live, the more nostalgic I become for that country which failed 5 years before I was born. Yeah, people remembering it also remember that feeling of "we can live like this no longer", and that nothing was real or functional, but perhaps they misjudged and didn't see the parts which were real and functional, treating them as given. It was indeed a catastrophe, not a liberation.
What you describe might be true for Canada, but it doesn't apply to all universities. Many universities have two primary tasks: research and education. These are two separate tasks with overlap.
I do find it understandable if publicly funded universities place restrictions on how many students they accept per program as it's their duty to give back go society.
Speaking for the US, major universities may be there for research, but they are a small portion of the mass of schools across the country.
People have mostly been getting degrees to get a good job since at least shortly after WW2. It’s silly to pretend people are going massively in debt without the expectation of a return on that investment.
Nothing against people learning for the joy of learning, but I absolutely hold schools accountable for not making job prospects clear when most of the students are both young and ignorant of the world.
they don't want to scare people away form an impacted majors, they probably lose money if they arnt butts in the seat, if people arnt willing to pay for a major with no jobs the uni lose money and they probably have to shut that program down. it seems state uni around here on care about putting as much butts in seats of undergrads as possible so they can have thier cash cow, they dont care what happens to those 3-4years in, just push them through like they are in high school.
biotech is another one i bring up on other forums, its one of those it looks likes in demand, but they really arnt keen on hiring people. its gatekeeped at the scientist level, unless a student is aware that labs exists in thier universities they are out of luck. and state unis here do a good job of not telling or hiding the labs under an obscure category. Professors are very reluctant to even talk about thier labs at all; some have an ego issue(they dont want students to ruin thier reputation, eventhough we arnt even a threat thier field, as we arnt in grad school, i had a professor like this) and labs are usually filled up, so theres very little chance to get into lab if your lucky. CCs dont have labs. that is the part that universities dont warn students about, if you had labs in your unis all this time, isnt ir prudent to look for these labs, although i suspect they dont want the PIs to get inundated with students requesting to get into thier labs, thats why they are very hush hush about it.
i also think bio unemployment is skewed towards health too, because a significant amount of them are held by women, who are likely to be employed in the field over men, first its likely they are going into NURSING, dieticians, PHYSICAL therapy where all the jobs are, plus CLS which is a niche grad job. on the research side its the same for women ive only seen a majority are in the labs volunteering(apparently at my uni some of them only wanted women because lab manager/PI was being a creep), otherwise the biotech side have a pretty large unemployment, but its lumped in with all bio majors.
That's not what I meant in that paragraph. I am not saying that universities are merely job training facilities. That was simply an example from my life where these types of professionals have come out of. I'm not making a judgement on universities as a whole. They just so happen to produce the vast majority of software engineers and finance professionals in Canada. That's why I mentioned the university. If I was talking about electricians, I'd have said trades school, or college, etc. I am absolutely aware of the larger role of universities and you won't catch me claiming they're professional training factories.