Undergraduate Computer Science Curricula

There can be many conflicting goals for the design of a computer science curriculum, including: immediate employability in industry, preparation for long-term success in an ever-changing discipline, and preparation for graduate (that is, post-graduate) study. Emphasis on immediate employability may lead to prioritizing current tools and techniques at the expense of foundational and theoretical skills as well as broader liberal-arts studies that are crucial for long-term career success and graduate work. The implications of these conflicting goals include allocation of finite resources (time, courses in the curriculum), unwillingness of students to invest in the mathematics that they see as irrelevant to their immediate career goals, and reluctance of faculty to have their courses be driven by a continually evolving marketplace of tools and APIs. For example, if we ask graduates of computer science programs to reflect on the impact of their undergraduate education, explicitly focusing on short- and long-term impact, will there be enough meaningful data to significantly inform curricular design? A recent survey of industry professionals undertaken by the ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI 2023 Computer Science Curricular Task Force (CS2023)a points the way. This column presents one aspect of that survey--a focus on comparing short-term and long-term views--and calls for similar surveys of industry professionals to be conducted on an ongoing basis to refine our understanding of the role played by various elements of undergraduate computer science curricula in the success of graduates.