Making Higher Education Relevant to the Real World: Neumont University

The U.S. has a big problem. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts it needs 135,000 new computer professionals each year. But between the dot-com crash and a misperception that all the good tech jobs are going overseas, fewer undergraduates have been majoring in computer science. U.S. universities are churning out only 49,000 grads a year. And many of those U.S. grads require additional training before they can function on the job.

Source.

Salt Lake City's Neumont University is a for-profit school for training software engineers and computer scientists. The emphasis is on providing what employers want in the real world. When a student leaves Neumont U., he is ready for employment at high wages, and top-ranked employers understand this very well.

At elite liberal arts colleges, the profs disdain practical skills and pontificate about theoretical topics suited to their academic journals. Not here. At Neumont students spend only 30% of their time on theory and 70% learning the newest technology, mostly working in groups on projects. That's the way complex software is written today, in groups. Source.

Even in technical courses of study such as Computer Science, professors in universities too often wander onto their own areas of personal interests, and neglect the teaching of some of the most important skills that employers need. University professors often express their indifference to the world of commerce in this way--and the students are the ones who pay the price.

Not surprisingly, the 250 students who have enrolled so far are a pragmatic and career driven bunch. Some have quit full-time jobs for the chance to gain new, higher-paid skills. Scott Baldwin, 28, a straight-A student in Neumont's first graduating class, left a secure job developing Web sites to spend two years at the school. After earning his degree, he got five job offers and opted to move his wife and two daughters to Austin, Tex. for a position at IBM. Source.

If schools are willing to orient their courses of study to more appropriately prepare students for the job marketplace, students will make the transition to steady employment much more readily.

Doxey [Neumont President and founder] aims foremost to please employers--not students, not parents and certainly not the educational establishment. Produce what business needs, he figures, and graduates will win good jobs, which will in turn attract more paying students.

He's onto something. The school's first batch of 27 graduates this past spring all had jobs waiting, with an average starting salary of $61,000--some 20% more than the average computer science grad and 50% more than DeVry University graduates' starting pay. After a year Neumont's graduates should be able to command $70,000 to $90,000, predicts Joshua Steimle, chief executive of Salt Lake City Web design firm MWI, which hired two grads. "Neumont students can jump right into projects," says Steimle. "It would be the first place I'd go to hire more developers." Source.

Serious students can achieve their degree at an accelerated pace at Neumont. Classes are run from 8 to 5, year round. Students can test out of the introductory classes, if they demonstrate the aptitude. Professors at Neumont are full time computer science professors with excellent backgrounds, including one from Microsoft Corp. Having professors with backgrounds in industry allows Neumont to focus its preparation specifically to computer industry bound graduates.

Eve Andersson, Neumont's academic head, predicts Neumont students will be better prepared when they land in corporate America than those produced by MIT. "Our guys may be their bosses," says Doxey. Forbes.

Eventually, more parents are going to start demanding that universities prepare their kids for the workplace, not the party place. A parent can easily mortgage a family's future on a top ranked university education for a child, then discover that the child has not been prepared for any job but minimum wage level entries. It happens every summer, this crashing despairing awareness of having made a bad choice, despite all the accolades society heaps upon the top schools.

Most universities today do more indoctrinating than educating. No wonder so many students seek escape in parties and binge drinking. Their expensive classroom experiences are not preparing them for a decent future, and many of them know it. But you cannot expect a student at that age to fully comprehend the implications of the monumental waste of his time and his parents' money. That is something the parents should have researched ahead of time.

Universities such as Neumont are merely specialised niche schools. But they are carefully targeted on the future of the marketplace, and how their graduates can help important employers. As more such niche colleges form, due to demand for efficacious education, is it too much to hope that mainstream education might wake up? Indoctrination into obsolete and counter-productive philosophies is a luxury that society cannot afford. Your students deserve better.

Update 7-16: Also see the post "Leapfrog University", for a brave proposal from scholars at the University of Minnesota to re-vamp a traditional university, to make it relevant.