<p>You will find a lot of argument about what constitute useless major here.</p>
<p>I think he has an agenda of some sort - perhaps selling the article or driving traffic to his website. </p>
<p>Anyway, the follow quotes from the article demonstrates much of what is wrong with his premise…</p>
<p>"My degree was supposed to make me qualified as a programmer, but by the time I left school, all of the software and programming languages I’d learned had been obsolete for years.</p>
<p>1) An MIS degree is not intended to make you qualified as a programmer. As a programmer with an MBA, I can safely say I learned nothing about programming in business school. What I learned in business school what how to communicate with programmers (and accountants, marketing people, etc).</p>
<p>2) No (programming) degree can make you proficient in the software that will be cutting edge after you graduate. The best you can hope for is to learn the skills that will allow you to learn new tools quickly. One thing he should have learned with his MIS degree is that technology moves quickly.</p>
<p>“To find real work, I had to teach myself new technologies and skills outside of class, and it wasn’t easy.”</p>
<p>3) Maybe he did learn something after all. Most degrees are not trades, they are rather an education that hopefully gives you the tools to do something with your life.</p>
<p>But if programming is part of MIS curriculum, then maybe programmer is a possible career track for MIS graduates? It sounds like he had taken the programming courses he thought would “make him qualified as a programmer”. What he said wouldn’t make any sense if he hadn’t. Not only that, he also mentioned his experience with some software (too lazy to go back to check the article). There was apparently some disconnection between what the program sells and the reality of what employers need, big enough to the effect of a “wake up call”. </p>
<p>I just checked the recommended schedule and there are no programming courses required in the MIS program there. It is not that kind of course sequence. There are a couple of classes where students do a little programming. I don’t know where the student got the idea that he was being trained as a programmer, but there is no doubt in my mind that there was never any intent to train him as a programmer.</p>
<p>Beyond that, most people cannot learn to program in a one or two course sequence, it just isn’t possible. At best you can learn to read code and write little routines.</p>
<p>This is the PSU description of the MIS major.</p>
<p>“The Management Information Systems (MIS) major focuses on technology-supported techniques for exploring, analyzing, integrating, and reporting business data to facilitate fact-based decision-making and enterprise-wide management. MIS students develop proficiency in business analytics, competency in systems analysis and design, and mastery of core business processes.”</p>
<p>Contrast this with the description of the CS major…</p>
<p>"The computer science curriculum is organized with two goals in mind. First, upon graduation a student must be prepared to meet immediate demands in solving computational problems. Second, a student must have sufficient understanding of basic principles and concepts in computer science to avoid technological obsolescence in the rapidly changing information technology environment.</p>
<p>This program is intended to produce computer science professionals and not merely technicians with some training in computer programming. Success requires a strong aptitude in mathematics."</p>
<p>Notice the ironic mention of “sufficient understanding of basic principles and concepts in computer science to avoid technological obsolescence”</p>
<p>The wake up call is for everyone who thinks there is a golden ticket. There is no major, no curriculum, no guarantee that you’re going to waltz into a good job with good benefits and a secure future.</p>
<p>none. And all the articles about nursing or STEM or IT… they’ve all got an agenda.</p>
<p>Learn to learn. Learn to adapt. But don’t expect a guarantee.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s really the student’s job to learn how to learn. A top CS program is going to expect you to eventually learn how to do that. Who cares what language or what package you used in school. When you get out there, they are not going to send you to a course to learn every trivial thing. People hiring computer scientists expect you to be able to learn on your own. </p>
<p>With MIS however, I think there is much less forward thinking in employment. I think employers hire “skills” which could be trivial to learn, but if you haven’t learned them you are in the reject pile. So to the author of the article, learn the languages and packages that you need to learn and put them on your resume. I mean really. </p>
<p>Kids expect to be spoon fed everything. That does not prepare them for the future where things change. </p>
<p>I get annoyed when colleges offer a whole class in MATLAB for example. MATLAB takes about an hour to learn. What you need to learn is good programming practices and using abstraction to control complexity. MATLAB may be a fine language to do that in for engineers, but the course is not about MATLAB. </p>
<p>@ClassicRockerDad :</p>
<p>LOL. Indeed. A CS major would be able to pick up Matlab (well, any language) with a book. Learning how to learn is indeed what good CS programs teach their students.</p>
<p>In fact, I could probably teach Matlab with an hour-long tutorial:
- Here’s the syntax.
- Here are the packages.
- Here’s how you run a regression.</p>
<p>The End</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus :</p>
<p>I’ve seen other (non-CS) quantitative majors and one econ major produce decent production-quality code (the other econ major I had to work with wrote awful spaghetti code), but never any art/history/“soft” majors (I’m not counting stuff like scripting websites). The software-focused shops I’ve worked in had something like >90% CS majors working on their software, in any case.</p>
<p>Well, I was an English major, and I ended up working as a technical writer for a systems software company. Just because of general interest, and because that was what the programmers at our company used, I took a couple of assembler 360 courses at NYU. Received As. I worked closely with developers. The rather cranky development manager I worked with the most allowed as how I could have been a programmer if I wanted to. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to spend my time reading dumps. 
I had my own skill set, that served the users and the company well.</p>
<p>Hi @Consolation, I’m a technical writer, too. I specialize in writing for programmers (and some scientists). My degree is in journalism–I guess that’s why I fact-checked the author’s degree. </p>
<p>My first technical writing job (many years ago) involved documenting SQL tools and C APIs, so I took 4 classes in Pascal, Data Structures, C, and C++ at a local college. The languages I’ve learned since then have been self-taught, so I think that once you’ve learned language concepts, new languages aren’t that difficult. But, if all the MIS-grad author learned was things like HTML5 and web-based scripting, he’s not going to have the background to grow on his own. </p>
<p>I certainly wouldn’t consider myself nearly as well-trained as a CS grad–all I took were year 1 and 2 courses. I write code examples, not entire products from scratch. I’m currently thinking of taking an assembly course, since I’m now writing compiler and assembler manuals. I “get” compilers and can self-educate about the various optimizations they perform, but I don’t really feel like I have a handle on the various assemblers I write about, even though I’m modifying some code examples. I have written some JavaScript w/ jQuery for use in a client’s products and occasionally write some code to automate a tedious writing task, but I agree that technical writing is more interesting to me than full-time coding would be.</p>
<p>(S17 may end up going into CS. He was surprised last year when he decided to learn UNIX and discovered that I knew most of the answers to his questions.)</p>
<p>The need to teach yourself new technologies in order to stay current is not a new thing, and I’m not sure why a college grad wouldn’t have enough historical perspective to realize that folks in the computer fields who went to college before about 1994 have had to learn a whole bunch of new technology to stay current. I’m certainly not using WordStar, WordPerfect, and Ventura Publisher anymore.</p>
<p>And guess what- ask a surgical nurse with 20 years experience if the procedures are the same as what he or she learned in school. Ask a cardiologist if “book learning” and a residency were adequate preparation for day to day life now with interventions and technologies that didn’t even exist back then. Heck- ask the person who services your car at the dealer’s if they covered half the stuff that exists in a Prius when he or she was getting trained. And the manager of your bank didn’t know what the Patriot Act was, and the HR person at your company didn’t have to wade through a deck on Obama Care or learn E-verify before onboarding a new employee just a few years ago.</p>
<p>The attitude that college is going to teach you a complete and discrete set of facts which you will then go and apply to every professional situation is nuts.</p>
<p>And I think the author’s reading comprehension skills are sorely compromised if he majored in MIS and mistakenly thought he was going to come out the other end as a computer scientist.</p>
<p>@Ynotgo, your technical background surpasses mine, since I stopped working in the field a long time ago. But what you describe about your ongoing learning process perfectly illustrates something that drove me bananas about HR-driven hiring of technical writers: they SO often list knowing whatever word processing/document makeup software the company happens to be using at the moment as a major qualification. Really, people? You don’t think that if a person has learned to use two or three other packages they can’t quickly pick up yours? And if the people you are hiring are too dumb to learn a new package, how in hell do you expect them to learn the software you sell???</p>
<p>@blossom, I agree. That’s why “lifelong learning” is a popular term for training after college. The pace of change is far faster and the amount of information out there is far more than even Alvin Toffler could have imagined in 1970 when he wrote “Future Shock”. </p>
<p>@Consolation, yes that is a problem. Resumes don’t get found by HR unless they have all the right keywords. Luckily, I’m an independent consultant and usually get in through word-of-mouth rather than having to go through the HR barricade. But, I know that it is a problem for lots of people.</p>