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Neumont a CIO Bold 100 Winner
CIO Magazine recently honored Utah’s Neumont University as a “Bold 100” winner. Neumont used to be called Northface until Northface clothing decided that people couldn’t keep clothing and education straight and asked them to rename themselves. They’re a for-profit college that focuses graduating software developers. In a recent email, CEO Scott McKinley wrote the following:
With our first graduates hitting the market next spring, we are seeing a lot of momentum building among potential employers, including IBM and others. That first group of graduates will shock a number of people in the IT industry – our freshmen are working on technologies that the seniors at many traditional high end universities do not have exposure to. The senior class members are walking/talking more like professionals who have been in the industry for 3 – 5 years…a direct result of the immersive, year-round, project based learning approach that we have engineered.
I think Neumont is an interesting experiment. Scott says “our freshmen are working on technologies that the seniors at many traditional high end universities do not have exposure to” with an assumption that that is a good thing. I think most of my colleagues would respond that they don’t think students need exposure to those technologies at any level—that that’s not what universities are for. There are clear philosophical differences between what Neumont is doing and what traditional universities do. At the same time, there are clearly market forces at work here and I think they will be the final arbiters.
One big concern I have is that I think the jobs that Neumont is preparing their graduates for, software developer working for a big company in a big software development shop, are the most at risk for outsourcing to India. Over the past several years, I’ve determined that I’m no longer convinced that software engineering, at least as it’s commonly discussed and taught, is what I want to prepare students to do. I try to focus them on being innovative, entrepreneurial, and working with dynamic languages on networked applications.
I think Neumont would protest that they’re students are being prepared to be all of that, and while I can’t argue that question, I can look at who Neumont’s customers are—where they get their money—and it’s from companies that want to hire software developers by the bushel basketful.
Even, so I wish Neumont success. I’m hoping to learn from their efforts. I’ve followed these guys from the time this was just an idea and one thing I can say: they push through obstacles and get things done. I’d never be one to count them out.
Posted by windley on September 28, 2005 1:13 PM
Comment from Aaron Barlow at September 29, 2005 12:00 PM
I'm wondering if you could comment a bit further on how "focus them[your students] on being innovative, entrepreneurial, and working with dynamic languages on networked applications" would be an effective career objective. How might that prevent your tasks from being outsourced? What might a future career be like?
Comment from Scott McKinley at September 29, 2005 6:31 PM
Phil:
I appreciate your comments and thougths re: Neumont University. I think your insights are quite interesting, although I would point out that at least a third of our students are interested in heading into early to mid-stage companies, not the 1 – 2,000 person large enterprise shops. Yes, IBM and other major players are engaging, but we don’t see the education and skill set we are focused on just being limited to that group of customers. As just one data point, 4 of the 5 “Enterprise Projects” (external market drive projects) that students will be working on this fall are for relatively young, emerging companies. Only one is for IBM. I’m not certain if this qualifies for your suggsted “focus…on being innovative, entrepreneurial, and working with dynamic languages on networked applications” but I think it does. One of the companies, LingoTek, is being supported by Novell at the Open Source Technology Center in Provo. Another is emerging as an intersting player in the Voice XML arena.
Fortunately, in this discussion, there will be no obvious “winners” or “losers”. With CS enrollments down 60% across the country between 2000 and '04, demand is a certainty for graduates of all CS programs. Market forces, as you say, will ultimately predominate and some students will be very well served by the traditional 4 – 5 year approach to CS education and others will be better served by the accelerated, project based, immersive and industry leaning approach of Neumont. I think both can comfortably co-exist, particularly for students who know where they want to go – research leaning future PhDs should head to Carnegie Mellon. Folks who want to be professionals and make the big bucks should come our way! You’re kind to say not to “count us out” but the “experiment” ends next spring – real grads, real jobs, real salaries, real value to employers large and small.
Scott
Comment from Jimmy Nemo at October 4, 2005 9:05 AM
Where is the prudent balance between Computer Science education vs. IT vocational training?
Computer Science graduates need marketable skills, while vocational trainees need underlying principles which will serve over the course of a career--or do they?
Why should CS majors expect their discipline is the highway to a lucrative career any more than Philosophy majors have the same expectation of theirs?
On the other hand, why shouldn't IT vocational trainees expect to return for educational retooling when their targeted skills become obsolete?
Comment from Chui Tey at October 6, 2005 6:41 PM
I disagree. Too many university graduates are taught the abstract before moving on to the concrete. While some may argue that the abstracts convey more general concepts, the concrete form should be taught first. We don't teach toddlers the definition of a flower. We point out what one flower looks like. Then we point out another one. After a while, we can generalize.
At the University of Queensland, mechanical engineers were taught fabrication processes. Students must have an idea out certain shapes are bent, hammered out of a piece of metal. This provides a certain level of grounding, and gives a sense of scale and importance of various factors which has to be considered when designing machines.
Just as a teacher of Middle English may despair that their students may never learn to enjoy English as it is meant to be, if they stuck with Mad magazines and Harry Potter, a CS lecturer may despair their students will never appreciate Lisp, or recursion. But people do eventually come round in their later years, taking Don Box as an example.
As for the risk of jobs being outsourced. Well, even teaching can be outsourced, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't train teachers. Having operational knowledge and experience offers better job security prospects than having a raw CS degree. No one is saying that learning stops when one leaves the university. As anyone in IT realizes, learning is constant.
Having said that, I'm sure astute software companies are always on the look out for people who knows more than just languages with curly braces. But bread and butter skills are good too.