Will writes about the new Trump University which, as the name suggests, was funded by Donal Trump.

• He has 4 professors and all appear credible at first glance.
• Prices are reasonable (it seems): $300 a course.
• There are no degrees offered and the number of courses is currently limited (I see 3 online courses).
• Posting boards and other technologies are used to put the students in touch with each other and with instructors.

Well, there you have it. I can’t really criticize this in any way, I think. If they granted degrees, I could wonder whether they are credible, but they don’t. If they had no credible Ph.D.-holding professors, I could wonder whether they are credible, but they do. If they only sold static content (like books or access to a static web site), I could wonder whether this isn’t a bookstore in disguise, but they actually put students in touch, so they qualify as a virtual campus in my mind.

So, best of luck to you Donald!

Update: I just read Schank’s reply to the media. Indeed, how do we know it won’t be a good school?

Suresh jumps into the Do we really need more students in CS ? debate. He concludes:

On the one hand, you can make a degree program produce graduates that are more employable, but you veer dangerously close to the ‘vocational training’ edge of the cliff, or you make a degree program more grounded in rigorous training, (essentially what we have now), and continue to lose students to other programs because the CS degree they could get is not ‘marketable’.

Actually, Suresh, I think that this already happened: the CS programs might not become more marketable, but new programs are created.

Solution 1: Offer engineering degrees

The engineering side of computer science has been growing stronger. At least in Canada, there is now a large number of software engineering degrees. Even tiny schools now offer both the CS and software engineering degree. UQÀM has a dual degree (CS and software engineering).

Solution 2: Offer IT degrees

The other solution, at the other hand of the spectrum, is to push IT degrees. Companies will not outsource all critical IT functions: companies will always want to get a competitive edge by using some home grown solution, even if it is built almost entirely from existing software. Even if the grunt work is done in Asia, you need people who can draw a database schema and understand where the data is at all times. You need people who can hook web services together. You need people who can talk effectively about IT to the rest of the company. The guy who aced algorithms but can’t give a good talk or listen to a user, he is useless for such a job.

This is were I haven’t seen much growth. It is plagued by many problems in universities… who want to say he is an “IT professor”? And what does the phrase mean? I don’t know. There are many IT programs out there, some of them very good, but most were built out of scrap from other programs (CS and business), or they feel like it.

So, Suresh, I think you are right. We are at the end of the beginning. New programs, such as IT and software engineering, will grow stronger in the coming years. It seems likely that CS degrees will evolve much like mathematics… attracting students interested in teaching CS or doing research in CS… but I don’t think CS will ever grow back to where it was. CS courses will be service courses for IT and software engineering programs.

(My predictions, as always, are worth the paper they are printed on.)

Expert Opinion talks about whether the current drop in enrollment is a tragedy or not

From an employee’s perspective, fewer people seeking jobs is a good thing. And, frankly, while having lots of graduate students to shovel code may help some university research, I’m not convinced that most of the system building that results is truly significant. Interesting, yes, even neat. But not likely to have any significant impact. University faculty should have their students’ interests in mind when talking or writing about the job market, and I’m not sure we do when we talk of declining enrollment as a bad thing, or, even worse, a crisis. Declining enrollment is a rational response on the part of students to a significant drop in the job market.

There are many interesting bits in his posts. For one thing, he shows that the decline comes, in large part, because females have completly left the field now. I think he nails the real reasons why females have left:

I have a radical idea: how about Microsoft leading the way in instituting a real 40-hour work week? How about Microsoft getting rid of the practice of hiring “temporary” technical staff?

Yes, that’s right. Jobs where you are required to work 90 hours a week for an average salary are not going to attract women. Men are macho and stupid, we don’t mind dying at 50 of a heart attact away from our love ones; women aren’t so silly and they require time with their family.

Second of all, he clearly states that fewer graduate students is not going to really hurt research. This is very important. I’ve said it again and again on this blog: stop claiming that we urgently need more graduate students.The lie is everywhere around us, so much so that we can’t see it anymore.

Java is a complicated mess. I just wasted 3 hours figuring out how to use XPath expressions in Java 1.5 without loading the external DTD. Thanks to the absence of any worthy documentation, I had to guess, and guess again, until I came up with this.

DocumentBuilderFactory dbfact = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
dbfact.setAttribute(“http: // apache.org / xml / features / nonvalidating / load-external-dtd”,false);
DocumentBuilder builder = dbfact.newDocumentBuilder();
Document indexname_input = builder.parse(someinputstream);
XPathFactory fact = XPathFactory.newInstance();
XPath xpath = fact.newXPath();
String title = xpath.evaluate(“string(//frontmatter/titlepage/title)”, indexname_input);

Tim Bray suggests that Atom might be the new XML:

I find myself pitching Atom to all sorts of different people. What’s different is, instead of me pushing at them, I’m getting asked “Tell me about this Atom stuff.” What’s the same is that pretty well everyone I pitch to says “I could use something like that for…” and what comes after the dots either isn’t bloggy at all, or is some weird syndication angle I hadn’t thought of.

Ok. I’ve written software using RSS and Atom before. To me, Atom appears like a rewrite of RSS. They annoyingly changed the name of some elements that have the same function, but for the most part, I see no progress here.

Can anyone tell me why Atom is such a substantial step forward given that we already had RSS?

A search on “why is atom better” in google gives me one result. The author basically claims that Atom is better because RSS is tag soup.

I don’t see this. Compare my atom feed with my RSS feed. Tell me where they differ so much?

Beside, even if Atom is technically superior, I could still think that the real innovation was RSS.

Trouble is, Tim Bray is a smart man. So, what does he see?