Former professor says employers shouldn’t hire USC’s computer science graduates

A retired University of South Carolina professor and department chair blasted his own school’s computer science program and said employers should not hire its students.

“If asked, I would specifically recommend to potential employers that they NOT hire the students being produced by this department,” Duncan Buell said in early December in an email to multiple colleagues. Buell’s email — which bore the subject line “a rant that I need to tone down before sending” — was also sent to the office of the provost, a university’s top academic official.

Buell did not explain in the email or in an interview with The State what issues he feels caused the department’s inferior quality.

The allegations raise questions about the quality of education for which many students are assuming decades of debt and for which taxpayers provide millions of dollars per year.

Asked for a response, USC spokesman Jeff Stensland said, “All I would say is that we strongly disagree with Dr. Buell’s assessment.”

USC’s undergraduate computer science program ranked No. 121 (tie) in the country — of 481 schools ranked — by U.S. News & World Report, said Madeline Smanik, a spokeswoman for the media company, in an email.

USC’s computer science program has been accredited since 1993 by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, or ABET, a nonprofit, non-governmental organization, according to ABET spokeswoman Lisa Lance.

Since 2013, enrollment in USC’s computer science program has more than doubled, reaching 579 students in fall semester 2019, according to USC’s website. In that same time period, the number of degrees awarded in the program has quadrupled, from 26 in 2013 to 104 in 2019, according to USC’s website.

Buell, whose last day at USC was Dec. 31, did not comment further on the email in a brief interview with The State, saying he didn’t think anything would change if he spoke publicly. Buell voiced a similar opinion in the email.

“I have no illusions that anything will change, because I don’t think that there is any opinion that producing quality undergraduates has any merit in this college or this department” Buell wrote.

Buell also serves as the vice chair of Richland County’s Board of Voter Registration and Elections.

Typically, computer science majors can expect to earn $68,000 right out of college and nearly $114,000 at the middle of their careers, according to financial publication Kiplinger. Jobs are plentiful too, Kiplinger says. Each year, there are more available jobs for computer science majors than for nursing, electrical engineering and computer engineering, according to Kiplinger.

The Princeton Review agrees, listing computer science as its No. 1 college major.

USC’s computer science make more than the average, with a bachelor’s degree bringing in $73,278 for new graduates, Stensland said. What’s more, 88% of computer science graduates enroll in grad school or enter into the workforce, Stensland said. The top employer of USC’s computer science graduates is IBM, Stensland said.

Still, Buell argued the quality of graduates is not what it needs to be.

“One significant part of the work product of an academic department like ours is the set of graduates of the undergraduate programs. In this case, my assessment is that we are producing dreck, at least when it comes to the production of graduates who are appropriate for positions in software development,” Buell wrote. “Our soon-to-be graduates are not ready, and they don’t even have a clue that they are not ready.”

In a separate email obtained by The State, Buell implies USC is more focused on money than providing a quality education.

“No one cares if our undergraduates get an education. We are 99% focused on counting dollars,” Buell said in a separate email that was sent to colleagues and the provost’s office and obtained by The State. “Impact, quality, results, are all irrelevant.”

Buell alleged in the email that any faculty member who speaks out against the problems he alluded to could result in professional retaliation.

“At some point I have to assume...that there is someone else on the faculty who has a moral compass and who might care, even at the expense of their own career at this institution,” Buell said in one of the emails. “I have no doubt that caring about this sort of thing would be a detriment to one’s career path at this institution.”

This story was originally published January 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.