The Washington Post just published an article from a kid claiming he graduated at the top of his class at Penn State in Computer Science but couldn’t find a job. But his description of Computer Science classes is completely disconnected from reality. Turns out, he graduated with a degree in Management Information Systems (a business degree) and not from the Penn State any reasonable person would assume, but rather a satellite campus. All this info is right on the dude’s own LinkedIn page and a previous version of the article from Sept. 2013. Washington Post, Take Down This Article!

[This was initially publicly posted on Facebook here:
https://www.facebook.com/EmeryBerger/posts/10102236661609092]

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Update – I wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post. They did not choose to print it, though they did partially correct the article.

 

Dear Editor:

A recent op-ed article by Casey Ark (“I studied computer science, not English. I still can’t find a job.”, August 31) is deceptive and misleading. Ark says he graduated at the top of his class at Penn State in Computer Science but found himself unable to find a job. All of these claims are false. An accurate headline would read “I studied business, not English. I had job opportunities, but I turned them down.”

Ark’s descriptions of his class experiences — non-rigorous, memorization-based, and non-technical — sound nothing like a Computer Science degree, and here’s why. A visit to his LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/pub/casey-ark/23/194/668) shows that he graduated with a degree in Management Information Systems, a non-technical business degree that has little to do with Computer Science and is decidedly not a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) field.

Ark also fails to mention that he attended a satellite campus rather than the more prestigious flagship University Park campus of Penn State, a fact included in an earlier version of this article that appeared on PennLive in September 2013
(http://www.pennlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/09/heres_why_why_more_and_more_college_grads_are_tossing_aside_their_resumes_and_embracing_entrepreneur.html). Regardless of its quality, leaving out the location leads readers to believe he graduated from the main campus.

In this earlier article, Ark describes having chosen to not take two entry-level job options, but instead deciding to become an entrepreneur.

I am surprised and chagrined that this op-ed made it through whatever fact-checking mechanisms exist at Washington Post, when a few moments with Google sufficed to discredit the central claims of the article.

Professor Emery Berger
School of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst

ADDITIONAL SIGNATURES

Professor Stephen A. Edwards
Department of Computer Science
Columbia University in the City of New York

Asst. Professor Brandon Lucia
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University

Associate Professor Daniel A. Jiménez
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Texas A&M University

Assistant Professor David Van Horn
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland, College Park

Assistant Professor Santosh Nagarakatte
Department of Computer Science
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick

Assistant Professor Swarat Chaudhuri
Department of Computer Science
Rice University

Associate Professor Dan Grossman
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Washington

Professor Michael Hicks (B.S. Computer Science, Penn State ‘93)
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland

Associate Professor Matthew Hertz
Department of Computer Science
Canisius College

Associate Professor Landon Cox
Department of Computer Science
Duke University

Associate Professor Benjamin Liblit (B.S. Computer Science, Penn State ‘93)
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin–Madison

Associate Professor John Regehr
School of Computing
University of Utah

Professor Jeff Foster
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland, College Park

Kaushik Veeraraghavan
Facebook

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Some comments from the Facebook thread posted by my fellow Computer Science colleagues:

Daniel Ángel Jiménez This kind of garbage causes lots of confusion. At my last job, almost all of the complaints from local industry about our CS graduates turned out to actually be about morons from the business school.

Shriram Krishnamurthi “Correction: An earlier version of this story’s headline misidentified what the author studied. It has been corrected.” They changed “engineering” to “computer science”. Thanks, WaPo!

Rob Ennals It seems that whenever I read a media article about something I actually know about, there is something fundamentally wrong with their understanding of the situation. This makes me worry about the accuracy of the information I’m getting about things I’m not knowledgable about.

Emery Berger He laments “they’re looking for employees who can actually do things – like build iPhone apps…. I wish I’d been taught how to do those things in school, but my college had something different in mind.”

PSU offers CMPSC 475, WHICH TEACHES iOS PROGRAMMING.
http://bulletins.psu.edu/und…/courses/C/CMPSC/475/201314SP

Tao Xie Another very important piece of information (from the original earlier post: http://www.pennlive.com/…/heres_why_why_more_and_more…), “When I graduated from PSU’s Harrisburg campus in May, ….” This kid graduated from PSU Harrisburg Campus, **NOT** the State College campus!! There are 24 campuses of PSU (http://www.psu.edu/academics/campuses). Note that the Washington Post article (carefully?) “rephrased” the above quoted sentence to be “When I graduated from Penn State a year ago, …” smh..

Stephen A. Edwards Breathtaking naivete on display in this column. I have no idea what he was studying: any CS graduate shouldn’t have any idea about the difference between advertising and marketing. His lament about all the programming languages and tools I learned were years out of date is also laughable. Of course they’re out of date: everything in CS is more-or-less instantly. The thing is to make sure you understand the basic concepts so you can learn the new stuff faster. But I really got a chuckle about his suggestion that we be more lax about academic standards and hire better businesspeople. Absolutely that will improve the quality of your education, no question.