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Graduates in computer science are so inarticulate as to be unemployable. So says a consortium of prospective employers. The Higher Education Statistics Agency agrees. This week it put computing top for unemployability, along with maths, engineering and media studies. Students should switch from geek to chic.
But maybe that because, as the article later claims, 'Two-thirds of new jobs are in services, notably the much-derided "hospitality sector"' rather than being in science, technology, engineering, and maths. (The author deserves bonus irony points for sneeringly dismissing service sector jobs a mere handful of paragraphs after sneeringly dismissing the STEM sector)
The concept of "subjects", like the methods of teaching and testing them, are little changed from a century ago. So, too, is the claim that those of strictly specialist use – maths or, previously, Latin – are to “train the mind”.
One suspects that maths is only specialist in the sense that it underpins every aspect of modern life, where modern life is defined as the start of the 17th century...
In the 50s and 60s the best and most widespread science education was in Soviet Russia. It got Russia first into space, but led on to social and political collapse.
Correlation (and not even that really, given that the 1950s and 60s are not the 1990s) equals causation — drink!
We learned today from Ofcom that six-year-olds are more computer literate than grown-ups. They may need topping up with coding and security, but essentially they teach themselves. So why not spend school time helping them with what appears to be holding them back in the jobs market – and in life in general?
Yes, because a six year-old able to use a browser and send a text message is precisely equivalent to a computer scientist trying to determine why they are seeing increased levels of communication in an advection routine of fluid dynamics simulation when the problem is decomposed over thousands of tasks rather than hundreds...
ETA: I'm not alone in my views. The Good Doctor was so appalled that he lamented his lack of a physical edition of the Graun — he's switched to the digital version — to fling across the room in disgust...
