Back when I was in high school, Russia was going through some serious, and at times sporadic, reforms in education system. We used to have just schools, but suddenly half of them turned into gymnasiums, while another half turned into colleges. New and weird subjects were introduced, such as Latin, rhetoric and philosophy (high school, remember?). In order to fit these new subjects into curriculum, hours were cut from the rest of the regular subjects, such as English language and math. But there were not enough qualified personal to teach these subjects, and there were no teaching materials suitable for high-school level. With all these problems, the overall quality of education started to sink rapidly…
That’s why I got a bit worried when I learned that the number of universities in Cyprus just doubled. Now we have six universities (just to remind you, Cyprus population is under 1 million people).  Three private colleges got a status of university, including my alma mater – Intercollege.
The minister of education says that the new age of education is coming to Cyprus. That’s probably true. I’m sure six universities for less than a million heads in population will attract a lot of foreign students, money and all. But I’m not sure what will happen to the quality.
It’s been a while since I last visited Intercollege, even though I am still a student pursuing the bachelor degree (which I probably never get). But from the times when I was studing, I have to say that the quality was good enough for college level. By that I mean diploma, associate and bachelor degrees.
My wife, and a couple of friends, did their Masters’ in Intercollege. And that was already over their top. For example, all you needed to apply for Master’s degree was a Bachelor degree. And you didn’t have to have it in the same field. So, to start with Master of Business Administration one could have a Bachelor degree in Computer Science. That means that you could get a Master’s degree in the area where you almost no prior knowledge or experience, and you could do it in just two years…
For a number of courses, they had to bring faculty from outside the country and pack the studies into highly intensive summer semesters. While that was better than not having them at all, it wasn’t as good as having permanent faculty who could teach these courses.
I majored in Computer Science. I studied in Limassol campus. We had two Ph.D professors and one Master. The rest had Bachelor’s and were teaching the basic stuff, like Introduction to Computers and things like that. All three of those were really good at what they did. But all of them left the college long time ago. And I haven’t heard of any new good ones coming to replace them. Nicosia campus used to have more faculty, but I remember only one professor who was really good.  And from what I heard he left the college too…
Now that I’m working in the IT industry, I see how huge is the deficit of human resources. Finding programmers is hard. Finding good programmers is impossible. I’ve seen bachelors who confuse the programming language they are best at with another language altogether (Java has “void” in blue, while C++ has it in green). I’ve seen Masters of Computer Science who mistype the word “computer” three different ways in the same paragraph. I’ve seen web designers with a degree, who can’t name 10 HTML tags (Dreamweaver all the way). I’ve seen somebody who thinks AJAX works only over WiFi. I can go on…
I wish this could be changed. I wish these three new universities could help. I wish them all the best of luck and all. But I have my doubts…