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The New York Times Business
June 25, 1998

Computer Industry Luring Students Into Dropping Out
By ETHAN BRONNER

The high-tech field, the fastest growing of the United States' economy, has become so voracious in its hiring that computer science departments across the country are losing graduate students and, in growing numbers, undergraduates to an industry fueled by vast sums of money.

Faculty positions in computer science are going unfilled and doctoral programs have seen a big drop-off in applications. Moreover, students working toward master's and bachelor's degrees are increasingly abandoning their studies for well-paying jobs in a field whose wealthy stars, like Bill Gates, famously dropped out of college.
“A degree is just a piece of paper with a gold stamp on it.”

Jonah Blossom, 20

Many experts fear that fundamental research will decline and that the next generation of American computer scientists will be stunted.

"I'm afraid we're eating our seed corn," said Peter J. Denning, vice provost of George Mason University in Virginia.

For many young people, a job paying from $30,000 to $60,000 a year seems far more appealing than pursuing a degree whose value is unclear.

"A degree is just a piece of paper with a gold stamp on it," said Jonah Blossom, 20, who left Santa Barbara City College after one year to take a full-time, $30,000-a-year job as a computer specialist at a nearby concern where a number of his bosses and colleagues did not finish their studies. "That paper isn't going to help you find bugs in a system or create compelling Web sites. That depends on your ability. My employers are not interested in certificates or where I've been to school."

While other academic fields over the years have witnessed shifts in talent away from universities -- it happened in biotechnology in the 1980s -- there is no precedent to what is happening today in computers both in the scale and in the challenge it poses to the discipline. It is as if every college student with any athletic ability suddenly faced the realistic prospect of a career with a professional sports team.


Credit: Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Money and workplace informality are attracting younger people to the high-tech field. Jonah Blossom, who left college to become an an online specialist at Metacreations, on a break from a Web design show in San Francisco.
"Without wanting to sound hysterical, this is really changing the shape of education in a fundamental way," said Guy Smith, who runs the multimedia laboratory at Santa Barbara City College. "You hear of kids leaving high school and making almost six figures. Recently we brought in 30 computer information officers and asked them about entry-level skills. I didn't hear the word 'degree' come up very often."

Joseph A. Liemandt dropped out of Stanford after his junior year and founded the Trilogy Development Group, a hugely successful software marketing company in Austin, Texas, in 1989. Liemandt says his company, like many others, simply does not care about an applicant's university credentials.

"If we interview two people and one has a 4.0 from MIT in computer science and doesn't impress us in the interview," Liemandt said, "and the other dropped out of some small college and impressed us, we'd always hire the second guy.

Computer science professors, in something of a state of shock, are sharply divided over what is happening and over how to respond.

Most are warning that when the overheated market for programmers and Web-site designers cools or shifts in emphasis, those who have left their studies will be, in essence, laid-off blue-collar workers without credentials, like telephone operators after digital switching or auto workers after robotics.

"Our message is, make sure you aim to get yourself a career and not just a first job," said Ellen F. Hartigan, vice president of student affairs at Polytechnic University in New York who says her students are being recruited for full-time jobs before getting their degrees.

"Many of our students are the first generation in their family to go to college and they don't have the parental support that encourages them to stay on and finish and go to graduate school," Ms. Hartigan said. "These offers are very tempting. So we are now much more proactive, teaching freshmen about career preparation."

At Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla., Richard Newman, associate dean of engineering, says his institution is trying to compromise with corporate raiders by urging cooperative ventures whereby the companies pay for students to complete their studies while they work.

"We even had two or three freshmen go off to take jobs setting up Web pages," Newman said. "We're trying to find a solution to end the competition between us and industry."

But some computer experts say that universities have failed to keep computer science curriculums up to date.

"Universities have done such a bad job of providing what you need to know that a B.A. in computer science is almost considered worthless," asserted Allen Holub, an author and computer design consultant in San Francisco. "Many tenured professors came out of math departments. Mathematicians make lousy programmers. They focus on algorithms which are the underlying rules of some programs. But the vast majority of programs today are not algorithm-based but data-based."

Kenneth E. Martin, a professor of computer and information sciences at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, and a member of the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board, acknowledges that the gap between theory and practice has grown dangerously large.

This is partly because of the growth of sophisticated new computer languages, like Java, with which programmers can draw on a prepackaged set of formulas and tools and simply plug them in, without a need for understanding the underlying theory of computer language.

"Curriculums are going to have to change. There is no question about it," Martin said. "Right now, we can't compete. You can legitimately ask whether what we teach is as important as it used to be.

"Today, it is more of a hacker's world, and it is less obvious that students need to know the fundamentals to function at a high level. With the arrival of Java, they don't program in the same way as in older languages." "After a semester learning Java, a student can already do an incredible amount," he continued. "My colleagues see their former students with a B.S. and stock options. Maybe that's better than an M.S."

The existence of well-paid, creative work without full academic credentials in an exciting field is the result both of economic and cultural factors.

The American computer industry is exploding. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 108 percent increase in the need for systems analysts, engineers and computer scientists from now until 2006.

Today there are an estimated 933,000 jobs in the these fields, and by 2006, the bureau estimates, that will rise to 1.9 million. Yet the nation's computer science programs each year are graduating only 25,000 students with bachelor's degrees.

This projected gap is borne out by the experience of those in career services.

"If every one of the 1,600 students graduating this year from Northeastern were computer majors, they would all have jobs," said Carol S. Lyons, dean of career services at Northeastern University in Boston. "We're seeing signing bonuses of $7,000 to $9,000, relocation offers, stock options and starting salaries in the high 30s to low 50s."

Avram Cheaney, 22, who grew up in West Virginia, quit Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and moved out to California's Silicon Valley several months ago. He posted his resume on the internet through a temporary computer employment agency and got 25 calls. Today he earns $40 an hour.

"I feel like I can work anywhere," Cheaney said. "Any company that has computers needs people and with my experience I am light-years ahead of many people still in school. Two years' experience is all that is needed. You can't say 'I've been a Web-page designer for 10 years' because the field hasn't been around that long. The younger generation can get a jump on things."

Another attraction is the anti-conventional nature of an industry, many of whose giants -- Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the founders of Apple computers, in addition to Gates, -- are college dropouts. Job opportunities at computer companies often emphasize loose dress codes and strange hours as well as the financial possibilities.

Here, for example, is how Trilogy, the Austin-based software company, describes its "company culture" on its Web site:

"What matters at Trilogy? Results, results, results. The focus is not on how many meetings you attend or that you show up for work at 7 in the morning every day. What's more important is the value you add to Trilogy and the experience you bring. As for work hours, Trilogy believes in flexibility. It makes the most sense that people work when they are most productive, and only you know when that is."

It says that some employees dress fancy for work because they want to while others "wear a clean T-shirt and shoes when they want to dress up," adding: "Some work from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., others don't believe in the cruel and unusual abuse of alarm clocks and never show their faces before lunch time." There is further talk of huge bonuses and "company boats, spontaneous trips to Las Vegas, nights out on the town, trips to Hawaii, fully stocked kitchens."

Many of those who left school to take jobs say they want to go back to school, either part-time soon or full-time later, both for long-term job security and the satisfaction of completing their degrees. But their elders worry that by the time those former students feel the need to return, it will be too late.

James L. Beug, chairman of computer sciences at Cal Tech, put it this way: "I have students from 10 years ago saying, 'Oh Jim, my company just folded and I don't have my degree to make a new job search.' Meanwhile, our curriculum has changed vastly from 10 years ago.

"My fear is that these kids who haven't finished will last about seven years on the job market. If they haven't learned to learn and can't go sideways into management, what happens to them?"

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