[Edu-sig] Low Enrollments

[Arthur]

> > From: edu-sig-bounces at python.org [mailto:edu-sig-bounces at python.org] On
> > Behalf Of Peter Bowyer
> > Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2005 3:57 AM
> > To: edu-sig at python.org
> > Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Low Enrollments
> >
> >
> > Could it also be because Engineering is never advertised as being
> > creative?  Certainly when I was looking at doing civil &
> > environmental engineering it was sold as "You get to direct large
> > machines, follow someone else's plans, and make sure the concrete is
> > poured in the right place".  OK a bit of an overexaggeration, but no
> > creativity or innovation appeared in the description.

It seems to me the issues here are all tied together quite neatly with some
of the discussion of the previous thread - small business vs. large
business, the impact of companies like Microsoft (well maybe mostly just
Microsoft)  in the marketplace and on traditional notions of the
relationship of large companies to educational institutions, etc.

Though, unfortunately, I don't see a way to make these tie-ins in a few
words.

Suffice it to say that there is zero question, none -  that Microsoft's
tactics over the last 15 years have had the effect of stifling the impetus
of smaller players to direct efforts towards innovation in a very wide
swatch of the potential area for such innovation.  This isn't a quirky,
iconoclastic view of things.  The fact is certainly getting noticed in very
mainstream industry analysis. And at Microsoft, I'm sure. The days of the
creative, innovative, entrepreneurial developer allowing themselves to spend
their energies to become the uncompensated market research department of a
Microsoft are over. A whole vibrant market segment has simply dried up and
gone away.

Which doesn't yet touch on Microsoft's ability to influence agendas in
academic settings.

I could go for pages, talking to a good degree from a personal frame of
reference, talking about circumstances that I have been close enough to
observe where Microsoft has seen fit to assert its clout, and managed to
move mountains that by the charters and mission statements of the
organizations involved should have been quite unmovable.

To the extent that the CS departments have allowed, and continue to allow,
themselves to be company towns for the major industry players, they deserve
what they get.  And if what they get is a lack of interest, maybe that is
saying something optimistic about who our kids are today.

Art