[IP] Fixing a busted IT research system
Fixing a busted IT research system
By Ed Frauenheim
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
<http://news.com.com/Fixing+a+busted+IT+research+system/2008-1008_3
-5374992.html>
Story last modified September 21, 2004, 4:00 AM PDT
James Foley is worried.
As chairman of the Computing Research Association--a group made up of
academic departments, research centers and professional societies--his
job at CRA is to improve computing research and education. But Foley
sees troubling trends in the nation's system for nurturing and training
new information technology scientists.
The number of doctorate degrees awarded in the United States has
dropped not only in computer science and engineering, but also in
noncomputer science and engineering fields in general. And top U.S.
undergraduate computer science departments are seeing enrollments fall.
Some industry analysts argue that the country already has a glut of
Ph.D.s. But to Foley, also a professor at the Georgia Institute of
Technology College of Computing, the educational declines may very well
contribute to an economic malaise. He wants to excite youngsters about
computers, in part through better-trained teachers. Foley would also
pump up federal research funding and give young scholars independent
funding.
CNET News.com recently spoke with Foley about computer science
education, the flow of programming work offshore and how the computer
science profession in America can weather the trend toward offshoring.
Q: The number of science and engineering Ph.D.s awarded in the United
States has been falling, from 23,300 in 1998 down to 24,550 in 2002.
How big a deal is that decline?
A: One way to look at is in the context of what other countries are
doing. The per capita production of engineering students in the United
States is a lot lower than in other countries, including Korea and
Japan and China and Finland. The per capita data is a little dangerous
because we have different bases, and the U.S. has a big population
compared to Korea. But on the other hand, compared to China, our
population is small. So there is a larger base of smart people to draw
from than in the United States. That just says that there is going to
be a potential long-term issue.
A major part of our economy has been built on scientific
advancement--computers, telecommunications, planes, the whole Internet
and increasingly, the bio-world of medicine and life sciences and
genetics and genomics and all that. So if other countries are
increasingly stronger than we are in the technical base, the economic
results of the technical base are going to fall behind after a while.
So I think it's a big deal because of the potential threat to our
economic strength.
What about the argument that it's hard for a lot of Ph.D.s to get good
jobs these days, and also that there is a long period of time in which
science Ph.D.s aren't getting independent funding. Isn't that a sign
that the United States has a glut?
There is this kind of disconnect in life sciences, physics and
chemistry, in which you have to do a post-doc for three or six years
before you get a faculty position, which is not the case in computing.
In computer science and related fields, that hasn't been necessary,
because there has just been the demand for computer science professors.
I frankly cannot make sense of it, because there was a great ramp up in
funding for the National Institutes of Health--from seven years ago to
two years ago, it doubled--and a lot of that money goes into
universities for research. I've got to conclude that the money is
supporting lot of post-docs but is not supporting a lot of new faculty
positions.
Is that an unwise approach? The argument has also been made that we
aren't paying good-enough salaries for some of these federally
supported scientists. Do we need to have more fully funded scientists?
We need to provide direct funding to new graduates rather than having
them working under the wing of the more senior scientists. There are a
lot of benefits to having a senior mentor guide you. But that creative
urge and that thinking out of the box is particularly strong early on,
and we should be encouraging it by giving direct funding to new and
recent Ph.D.s--which does happen in computing, by the way.
The number of Ph.D. degrees awarded in computer science and computer
engineering in the United States and Canada, according to CRA's survey
for last year, totaled 877--up 3 percent from 2002 but was still the
second-lowest since 1989. What does that say to you?
During the boom days of the late 1990s, some students were being
distracted by dollar signs in their eyes. I think that we had this
phenomenon, in which fewer students were going to graduate school. If
you say the average time to get a Ph.D. is in the six to seven-year
range, that would go back to then--let's say '96 to '97, when the boom
was really starting up.
The good news is that the number of students passing their qualifying
exam, which is the first step toward a Ph.D., has been going up in the
last couple of years. So that's a positive sign for the future.
Numbers have been down in a time when computing and information
technology are more and more central to everything that we do, not just
in our everyday lives, but also in research.
In research spanning from computer sciences to life sciences,
medicine, physics, chemistry and health care, computers are more and
more central.
So here we are with a technology that has been recognized as
increasing productivity and therefore national economic
competitiveness. And what we are seeing is fewer Ph.D.s. So that's a
problem. And we are seeing a smaller or a flattened-out government
investment in computing research, and that's also a problem, given what
we know about the importance and centrality of computing to economic
competitiveness.
Let me ask you about a comment I heard from Peter Lee, associate dean
at Carnegie Mellon University. He said one of the problems in computer
science is that the field has been, in some ways, a victim of its
success. Computers have become so practical to daily life that the big
questions surrounding them have kind of taken a backseat. The field
hasn't promoted the idea that these machines can help us improve our
intelligence or move us ahead. Do you think the field has been
imaginative enough?
I think that we have, over the last five to 10 years, been too worried
about short-term things. And I am going to lay that back at the
doorstep of the review process of proposals at National Science
Foundation and also on the tenure process, which puts a lot of emphasis
on publications.
This fall, there are just less than 200 undergraduate majors in the
electrical engineering and computer science departments at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That's down from about 240 last
year and roughly 385 three years ago. Does that concern you? Could you
comment on what's happening at Georgia Tech along those lines?
It does concern me. At Georgia Tech, enrollments are up a few
percentage points, after in the past having had the same kinds of
declines. And I believe that at other schools, there is kind of a mixed
story. It's somewhere between beginning to see the end of the decline
and actually seeing the end of the decline.
So you expect an uptick in the future in undergraduate enrollment?
I think we will have an uptick.
Why?
We have had kind of a perfect storm in computing in a negative sense
over the last 3 years. We had the dot-com crash, we had 9/11 and we had
the big offshoring hullabaloo, all of which in one way or another have
had negative effects on enrollment in computing.
Is the 9/11 issue related to foreign students?
Yeah, that's mostly the foreign-student issue--students not being able
to get visas or choosing to go to other countries where they know there
is less of a hassle.
At the graduate level, you have mentioned that you hadn't been seeing
the quality of American student candidates that is needed to get into
these programs and succeed. Is that something related to not attracting
the best and the brightest of the American students, or is it something
about how Americans don't have the same proclivity or skill in computer
science as, say, people from India or China or Taiwan?
We do not get into computing or into technology as many of the best and
brightest as we need.
I don't think it's all about proclivity and skill. I think computing
is seen as a hard discipline, and I do believe that we do not get into
computing or into technology as many of the best and brightest as we
need. One reason is that technology has historically been, to some
extent, an upward-mobility path.
That's interesting. So it is tending to attract immigrants?
That's right. And, we don't have as many economically disadvantaged
folks in the United States as we once did. So that's one element,
though I don't think that's the whole story. Law, medicine and
business, in some ways, are seen as more interesting.
The other element of it goes back to education and high school--this
is a pretty well-documented problem--with having low-qualified science
and math teachers in high school. So if math and science are being
taught by individuals who are well-meaning but don't have enough of a
background, then they are not going to make it be as interesting and
exciting as it can be and as it is. The intellectual and emotional
excitement that helps kids decide to go to school in science and
technology won't be there. So that goes back to how we spend our money
with high-school education, incentives for teachers, pay for teachers
and all that.
Let me then ask about the offshoring issue, because a lot of people
would look at it and say, "It doesn't make sense to get into computer
science and then to become a programmer."
Right. It does not make sense to become a programmer. But there is a
lot more to computer science and computing than programming, and that's
part of our challenge. There is this stereotypical image that computer
science education leads to heads-down programming jobs, and it's those
heads-down, isolated-from-the-problem jobs that are going to some
extent offshore. I think the trend of pure programming jobs will
continue to go offshore, because in many ways, our computers and
communications technologies enable that to happen.
What are the kinds of computer science jobs that make sense for the
future--that are going to be, to some extent, offshore-proof?
The key is big-picture design--what you would call system architecture
or system design. It's understanding end-user needs and translating
them into the detailed specifications, designs and architectures that
can and will be shipped offshore.
It's what we call the user-facing, or customer-facing, aspects of
computing, which is sometimes characterized as "computing plus X." We
are emphasizing a lot more with our students that they need to
understand something besides computing--like business, biology,
chemistry, mapping, geography, information retrieval or history. Like
anything in addition to computing, because the big win with computing
is that you use computers to do things. And to be a creative computer
architect or computing systems architect, you need to understand "X" as
well as computing.
Taking the temperature of computer science and computer science
research, are you optimistic or are you pessimistic?
I am very optimistic. Wearing my hat as chair of CRA, I am seeing a
lot of universities understanding this needed change in emphasis, which
has been going on at some schools for quite a while.
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