How our young colleagues are being educated....

Javier J javier at advancedmachines.us
Mon Dec 22 09:13:42 UTC 2014


Dear NANOG Members,

It has come to my attention, that higher learning institutions in North
America are doing our young future colleagues a disservice.

I recently ran into a student of Southern New Hampshire University enrolled
in the Networking/Telecom Management course and was shocked by what I
learned.

Not only are they skimming over new technologies such as BGP, MPLS and the
fundamentals of TCP/IP that run the internet and the networks of the world,
they were focusing on ATM , Frame Relay and other technologies that are on
their way out the door and will probably be extinct by the time this
student graduates. They are teaching classful routing and skimming over
CIDR. Is this indicative of the state of our education system as a whole?
How is it this student doesn't know about OSPF and has never heard of RIP?

If your network hardware is so old you need a crossover cable, it's time to
upgrade. In this case, it’s time to upgrade our education system.

I didn't write this email on the sole experience of my conversation with
one student, I wrote this email because I have noticed a pattern emerging
over the years with other university students at other schools across the
country. It’s just the countless times I have crossed paths with a young IT
professional and was literally in shock listening to the things they were
being taught. Teaching old technologies instead of teaching what is
currently being used benefits no one. Teaching classful and skipping CIDR
is another thing that really gets my blood boiling.

Are colleges teaching what an RFC is? Are colleges teaching what IPv6 is?

What about unicast and multicast? I confirmed with one student half way
through their studies that they were not properly taught how DNS works, and
had no clue what the term “root servers” meant.

Am I crazy? Am I ranting? Doesn't this need to be addressed? …..and if not
by us, then by whom? How can we fix this?



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