What is a computer science degree for now?
Sam Madden of MIT spent an hour and a quarter at UW–Madison this month with Mike Swift, and it’s worth the time for anyone who teaches, hires, or is about to graduate.
His premise: the machine can now do essentially any assignment a CS department sets. So the question isn’t whether students will use it — it’s what is left to teach.
His answer is the part of the degree long relegated to capstone classes many students never reach. Specify what software must do. Verify it does. Read code you didn’t write. Reason about architecture and efficiency. Understand why a solution is the right one, not just that it runs.
He is equally direct about the social cost — quiet office hours, thinner study groups — and about what MIT is spending to respond.
