The bachelor's and master's computer science graduate

Abstract

This paper deals with a survey of the bachelor's and master ' s degree graduates from the Department of Computer and Information Science at Th e Ohio State Univers i ty conducted during 1975 . The purpose of the survey was (1) to determine wha t positions the graduates held, (2) to determine ho w effective the curricula had been, (3) to obtain an evaluation of these curricula, (4) to determine possible improvements, and (5) to see if ther e were distinctions between bachelor's and master' s degree recipients . Some of the results about th e bachelor's degree graduates have already been reported in Kalmey [74] . As of August 1974, th e Department had conferred about 600 Bachelors, 28 0 Masters and 17 Ph .D . degrees . QUESTIONNAIRE SThe questionnaire was sent to all the bachelor's and master ' s degree graduates . In all bu t 20% of both the graduates responded . In addition, the results of a study of master ' s graduates of Pennsylvania State University , Gotterer [73], are included for comparisons a s appropriate .EMPLOYMENT DATA Type of Employer sAs expected, there is a distinct differenc e between the types of employers of bachelor ' s an d master's graduates . The leading employers o f bachelor ' s graduates are the service (22%) and manufacturing (17%) industries whereas the larges t class of employers of master ' s graduates is, a s expected, the computer industry itself (33%) .The data also indicate there has been a change in the second ranking class of master' s employers . Educational institutions followed th e computer industry in the Penn State survey, whereas our survey indicates the second leading employe r of master ' s graduates are the service industrie s (17%) and research and development firms (13%) .Job Titl e Job titles further distinguish betwee n bachelor ' s and master ' s graduates . The former ar e most often application programmers (65%) . The latte r are application programmers (32%), system programmers (30%) or system analysts (18%), EDUCATION Course sBoth the bachelor ' s and master ' s graduate s were asked how well they were prepared in variou s areas of computer and information science . Somewhat similar data was collected in the Pennsylvania State University study of the usefullnes s of various courses . The data collected lead t o several surprising as well as expected conclusions . The biggest surprise is the large number o f graduates who thought they needed to know mor e about simulation and modeling . Ohio State ha s courses in this area, but they have not bee n required . The second surprise is that th e bachelor ' s graduates and to some extent th e master ' s graduates would have liked more course s in business . The difference in response ratin g between bachelor's and master's graduates is probably due to the higher percentage of the forme r holding jobs as " commercial programmer/analysts " .Both master ' s and bachelor ' s graduates wante d more emphasis on file structures, and data management probably reflecting an increased use of dat a bases . An information storage...