A golden age for computing frontiers, a dark age for computing education?

Abstract

There is no doubt that the body of knowledge spanned by the computing disciplines has gone through an unprecedented expansion, both in depth and breadth, over the last century. In this position paper, we argue that this expansion has led to a crisis in computing education: quite literally the vast majority of the topics of interest of this conference are not taught at the undergraduate level and most graduate courses will only scratch the surface of a few selected topics. But alas, industry is increasingly expecting students to be familiar with emerging topics, such as neuromorphic, probabilistic, and quantum computing, AI, and deep learning. We provide evidence for the rapid growth of emerging topics, highlight the decline of traditional areas, muse about the failure of higher education to adapt quickly, and delineate possible ways to avert the crisis by looking at how the field of physics dealt with significant expansions over the last centuries.