BOCC: quality of IT education? Discuss.

There’s lots of discussion currently on the Belfast Open Coffee mailing list on

• are university degrees worth the bother?
• are universities correctly servicing the IT industry (and specifically the games dev market) with skills, knowledge, toolsets?
• why have IT graduates decreased from 1900 in 2004 to 600 in 2007?
• are we seeing a knock on effect from technology failures in the province, e.g. Nortel, Seagate
• with the improvement of toolsets, a lone hobbyist can create ‘flickr’ or ‘facebook’. Is this relevant?
• will we see an upsurge again with demand from Citigroup, Aepona, ATG etc?

And, at the moment, we have only questions and not a lot of answers.

[This was pointed out to me: the rise and fall of Kapooki, an Irish game company. I think they did amazingly well despite the end result.]

[Edit – thanks to SteveW for pointing out the escaped characters]