Inside Higher Ed reports on a new trend: universities creating programs that combine two academic programs. This might not seem particularly new to anyone who attended college in the last fifty years, but it is spiced with a bit of novelty now. The emphasis this time is on combining any of the various subjects with a garnish of computer science (CS).
The idea is plain enough. Instead of the English major waiting until after graduation to discover his dismal job prospects and only then enrolling in a crash program in “how to code,” he can pick up the basics along the way while still majoring in the works of post-colonial graphic novels of the Caribbean diaspora. Maybe that is an extreme case.
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Northeastern University long ago pioneered the failsafe “Do you want a side of computer science with your Big Mac?” approach. It offers 270 “combined majors: under the rubric “CS + X.” A Northeastern student seemingly can major in anything and get a CS combo.
But other universities are now emulating this approach. The IHE article mentions Cleveland State, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Minnesota, among others. Is this trend worrisome?
Not for universities. Faced with a declining pool of students in the pipeline to college and intensifying challenges to retaining those who do enroll, it makes good sense that colleges and universities would add programs that appear to boost the marketability of liberal arts degrees. Add a little technê to the arts and bask in the assurance that in four years you won’t end up in your parents’ basement and earning minimum wage at a drive-in.
Will it really work that way? Perhaps, but I have doubts about how well this will work for the students.
Northeastern, with its famous co-op program, can probably count on most of its graduates moving on to well-paying jobs in which the CS + X formula works out well. But many liberal arts students are more likely to find that the CS sauce adds little to their resumes. They will be competing with other graduates who took their CS neat. And they will have sacrificed a significant part of what rigor liberal arts programs can offer.
The attempt to jazz up liberal arts degrees for American students by adding an explicit component of digital proficiency faces another obstacle that has been much in the news for the last month. That is that many American companies are prioritizing lower-cost, foreign labor—predominantly from India—to fill positions that require technical competence. The trend shows no sign of slowing despite ferocious complaints by America’s home-grown engineers and scientists. Indeed, universities are deeply implicated in the influx of foreign talent. Many fill a high proportion of their seats with foreign students from India and China.
I don’t know, but suspect that few of these international students in the tech fields are filling their class schedules with soft courses in the humanities and social sciences, let alone signing up for the new programs that “integrate” CS with LGBTQ Studies or Welfare State Apologetics. The American students who opt for CS + X programs will have difficulty competing for tech jobs with their Indian and Chinese classmates who manage to convert their student visas into H-1Bs.
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Interdisciplinary studies has entranced undergraduate as well as graduate students for a very long time. Some can carry it off, but more often, such students fall into a vague middle between two benches. They fail to achieve any reasonable depth in either of their two undertakings. A program that combines philosophy and literature may sound reasonable. Literature often involves philosophy, and philosophy sometimes returns the favor, but generally, it is better for the student to aim at the mastery of one and acquaintance with the other rather than ménage à trois.
Sometimes, these collisions work out. Biology has fruitfully given birth to biochemistry, computational biology, bio-informatics, bio-mechanical engineering, and so on. But those are a long way from CS + X.
Follow the National Association of Scholars on X.
Image of Computer Science Professors and Students by UC Davis College of Engineering on Flickr
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
