This past week the University of Florida decided that they no longer need to teach their customers (let’s be realistic with decisions like this, colleges don’t have students anymore they have customers) Computer Science. This is doing a major disservice to the customers of the University of Florida. Computer Sciences (and STEM in general) are the future of the American economy. Without offering Customer Science as a major many of the students won’t be able to compete in the work force.
What makes this even more insane is that this only saved about $1.7M and the University of Florida then decided to increase the athletic budget by more than $2M. This just goes to show that the University of Florida doesn’t give a damn about their customers and they only care about making more money to put into their big pile of money. If this wasn’t the case they money would be getting put into something that didn’t make a profit (like teaching students) instead of things that do make a profit (like football).
Now I’m not against sports, let me get that out there before I start getting hate mail from people. And while sports is fun and a great way to get publicity for the school, if the school is really, really lucky one of the guys on the football team per year will be drafted into the NFL, while everyone with a CS degree will end up working somewhere doing something with computers. Based on those numbers alone you would think that the Computer Science department would be worth spending a few dollars on.
Now I received a couple of replies on Twitter when this first came out saying that the University of Florida didn’t have a very good Computer Science program. And frankly with an annual budget of $1.9M I’m not that surprised. With needing to keep software refreshed, paying teachers, etc. $1.9M doesn’t exactly go all that far. If they were sick of having a really poor Computer Sciences department maybe they should have found a way to raise the budget for the department and brought in some industry professionals as guest speakers to try and breathe some life into the department instead of just shutting the doors on the department and being done with it.
I’m done ranting. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Denny
