I agree most people around 1999 applied for IT courses because they were thinking about big bucks, but there are plenty of people that would be happy to work for 19-21k. Not everyone can be a lawyer or accoutant and I’d rather be a programmer than a liar or a pencil pusher.

There is no escaping the science aspect of the course, but there are ways to present it better.

As a graduate of Computer Science in Ireland in the last few years, your experience of the “joys” of console programming is familiar. But the reality is that a well-designed Computer Science (not IT or Software Development) course is going to cover the fundamentals (maths, algorithms, data structures) before moving on to more interesting topics. Medical students do not dissect cadavers in their first week; engineers don’t build elaborate structures before learning fundamental mechanics and chemistry. If people expected to be developing web sites and designing games, then obviously they had been mis-informed. Like your course, more than half of my year dropped out. But that was mainly because people had made their CAO choice under the assumption that they would easily complete the course, and immediately land a well-paid job. When the jobs markets changed and people actually realised what was involved in Compute Science, many of my classmates moved to other courses in which they were genuinely interested. Six years ago, every guidance teacher in the country was recommending IT as an easy option to anyone who was unsure about their future. Now the situation is reversed, with IT being seen as a dead-end.

As for Video Game Design courses, the link to gaming is always going to be easy to market, but it’s a niche area. Engineering and accountancy courses are typically run by “nerds” and are not particularly exciting. Yet nobody suggests changing the fundamental content of these courses just to make them more marketable. You need only look at this year’s CAO points for these courses in UCD and TCD to see that there must be some other motivation for their popularity. The reality is that Computer Science is not about playing games or designing web sites - there’s no escaping the “science” aspect of it.

Personally, I always doubted these scare stories put out by the industry. At the end of the last decade, the current government was forecasting the apocalypse if Ireland did not produce enough IT graduates. As a result we produced too many, with many of my classmates having graduated and gone into other careers. I’ve paid close attention to the IT jobs market over the last two years, and the current “problem” seems to be that there is a lack of *experienced* candidates who are prepared to work for below-par salaries. If large IT companies are expecting graduates with experience to work for 19-21K, is it any wonder that students are choosing accountancy or law instead?

The reality is that most people are not going to find Computer Science interesting, and IT, as a career, is hardly to be recommended these days. To pretend otherwise is just being disingenuous - you’ll just have more people dropping out with disappointed expectations.