Bill Gates' Back-To-School Tour
Posted on Sep 8, 2005 at 07:49 PM by Aaron Ricadela
Bill Gates is getting ready to go back to school. The second week in October, Microsoft's chairman sets out on a six-campus swing through the East Coast and Midwest to talk up the value of computer science to university students and faculty. "It's a great opportunity for me to talk about breakthroughs to come and the opportunities to work on those," Gates said during an interview with me last week. "There's a lot of learning I get out of that."
Microsoft won't disclose which campuses its chairman will visit during his three-day jaunt--they don't want people breaking down the doors a month in advance, the company's PR agency says. But they'll be different than the colleges Gates graced a year and a half ago, when he swung through the University of Illinois, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, MIT, and Harvard.
Gates' timing looks good--computer-science enrollment among incoming college freshmen has taken a nosedive--down 60% in the last four years, according to one study. Gates bemoaned that fact and lampooned some the faster-growing college majors--phys ed, for example--during a talk at a Microsoft Research conference in July. It's making it tougher for Microsoft to find good people. My blog entry on that is here.
While computer-science rolls drop in the States, they're booming in China and India. That presents a problem for Microsoft, since it does the vast majority of its software engineering here at home. In the Sept. 2 interview with InformationWeek, Gates said he wants college kids to understand not only the value a of computer-science education, but the opportunities at Microsoft. "I maybe have a bias, but I think these are the most interesting jobs in the world," he said. "If the trends don't start going in the other direction, though, it will make it tough for anybody like us whose plan is to do the vast majority of their work here in this country."
Will Bill Gates' college tour help pump up interest in computer technology on your campus? Are Microsoft's jobs still the most appealing in techdom? Post a comment and let us know.
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