CMU's Response to Off-shoring

Posted by: Steve Hamm on July 10

Some of America’s university computer science programs have been devastated by off-shoring of IT work. Smart youngsters feared that software programming jobs would move off-shore or the wages would be depressed, and they chose other majors. The elite institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University, still attract plenty of computer science majors, but Pradeep Khosla, dean of CMU’s college of engineering, isn’t complacent. He aims to transform the undergraduate curriculum for all of the engineering disciplines.

Rather than just training engineers, he says, “I’m educating technical leaders who understand the process of enabling, managing, and deploying innovation.” The idea is that CMU engineering grads won’t be the ones who lose their jobs and careers to the globalization of work because they’ll be managing the innovation process—from R&D, to product development, to sales and marketing.

Khosla thinks this is the right model for America, too. In the past, the United States has keep ahead of the game, economically speaking, by pioneering the newer industries and technologies even while surrendering older industries to lower-cost countries. In software, the United States need only give up the basic programming jobs. "Our 70,000 engineers should be managing their 700,000 engineers," he says.

At CMU, Khosla has already established a masters of science in innovation. Next year he plans on offering a undergraduate minor in innovation management. Then, by 2010, we wants to offer the major across the board in all of the engineering disciplines.

Hopefully, once he gets these programs going, he'll have a flood of degree candidates. This kind of shift is key to the country's competitiveness as professional-level work goes global.

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