High Tech Majors for High Tech Times

You all remember Mr. McGuire's single word of advice to Dustin Hoffman in the Graduate, don't you? Well, these days, we've moved beyond "plastics." Today's' college majors are now more reflective of burgeoning industries and high tech is playing a big part in their formation.

Video Gaming: For those who've grown up joystick in hand, a number of colleges are offering degrees in videogaming. One of the newest and best gaming schools in the country may be Tempe, Arizona's The University of Advancing Technology where the whole place is devoted to gaming. Mt. Sierra College in California offers a bachelor's degree program in Game Arts and Design, as does The Art Institute of California, San Francisco, which offers two bachelor's degree programs in Game Art & Design and Visual & Game Programming. Continuing  beyond the B.A., University Business  reports that University of Southern California worked with Electronic Arts to create a new three-year MFA degree program in the School of Cinema-Television for interactive entertainment.

Robotics: While Carnegie Mellon and MIT (MIT has no undergraduate degree in robotics but there are plenty of courses to be had and lots of graduate paths) have a historical leg-up in robotics, other schools such as Colorado State and the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, are offering robotics, too.

Computer Forensics: Blame it on CSI, but dozens of schools are now offering this major, including the College of Washington and the University of Rhode Island to name a few. Computer forensics is all about the gathering of evidence (often as part of a criminal investigation) from computers and computer networks. Evidence needs to be gathered in a way that's admissible in a court of law and it takes a well-trained technical person to get it right.

Computer Security: While security is sometimes a track within a computer science degree, some schools, like Champlain College, are now starting to focus on security as a specific field of study. Why go down that specific route? Security is in high demand in our networked world; plus, says Champlain, security jobs are not likely to be outsourced, unlike some other IT professions. Sometimes the state colleges and two-year programs are ahead of the curve in this new field. The Texas State Technical Colleges, for example, offer A.S. programs in Network Security and Web Development/ ecommerce, for example.

Homeland security has spurred its share of academia, too. At Saint Louis University there's now a master's degree in biosecurity. And, at Western Carolina University there's an Emergency Management track.

BioTech: Mixing engineering and biology is helping to create other majors like MIT's biological engineering major,a fusion of molecular and cellular bioscience with engineering. At University of Miami, there's a medical informatics major for students who want to understand information needs in the medical environment. In the world of high-tech agriculture, The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University is offering new four-year undergraduate majors in viticulture (grape growing) and enology (winemaking).

What do you think of these new high-tech majors? Are you considering one?