How should American universities respond to the loss of computer science jobs to India and China?
American universities should respond the way Georgia Tech is responding, which is to not continue to educate computer science students in the areas that are being commoditized. When Thomas Friedman talked about the threads program in his book “The World Is Flat,” he made the point that you’re not going to be able to outsource a great storyteller, a great author, a great poet or a great designer. We want to give the students the technical base so that they can perform at the right level and then give them a set of skills so that they will continue to add value to their employers. Those jobs will never be outsourced. What is the concept behind the Robotics and Intelligent Machines Center established by the College of Computing and College of Engineering? It is really part of the new face of computing. We’ve always had a great robotics group here at Georgia Tech, not just in the College of Computing but also in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering — across the campus really.
