To preface this, I am in my final year of a 4 year Computer Science program at a university in the southern U.S. Essentially, all CS students have to take a required senior design project class at the end of their degrees where they are grouped with “Sponsor” companies who come to the school and interact with the students throughout the semester to complete a software development/CS related project to get “real world experience”. The company that I have been paired with is having us build an integral part of their business function in a full-stack application. My group consists of myself, 4 other students, 2-3 employees(software engineers) from the company, and occasionally the CEO is in contact.
While in concept this class sounds like you could get some great experience and skills out of this class, I can't help but feel as though myself and the other students enrolled are being taken advantage of. Let me lay it out for you. First of all, it's a 4 credit hour class, of which I pay the full tuition for. There were 2 or 3 lectures at the beginning of the semester describing the class and essentially creating groups for the project. The “professors”(hard to call them professors because they haven't taught us anything, more on that later) basically do nothing throughout the entirety of the semester since there is no material to teach.
Here's where things get odd. Recall that there are several hundred students paying the university for 4 credit hours of a class that spans over the semester of approximately 4 months. Likewise, the sponsors supposedly pay the university ~$14,000 for each sponsored project at the school for the teams of students that will be building their applications. To give you an idea of what these project look like, my group has a project which consists of building a database schema mapper application with front and back ends (requires API calls, data parsing frameworks, etc). I work the front end, which is all inclusive of CSS libraries, React.js, Gatsby, multiple react component libraries, and several NPM packages. Back end uses non-relational databases, Python, Django, and other file parsing type technologies. I won't go into too much detail on the application specifics, but it is a full-scale application that is integral to the growth of the sponsor company's business, allowing for multiple businesses to upload product file catalogs to their database to be displayed on their website (the sponsor is an online shopping company). The final application will be implemented into their business and used/implemented on their actual website. What's important to consider is that NONE of these technologies have been taught at our school throughout our studies, so we are expected to teach ourselves via the internet. The professors do not do anything, they are basically just there to keep the peace between us and the sponsor companies (speaking on the behalf of students sometimes even). Essentially, myself and hundreds of other students are paying our university to teach ourselves full-stack technologies AND build full-stack applications for the sponsor companies for free(it's actually worse than free because we're paying to do labor).
So I asked myself, “What would the motivation be behind a sponsor company coming to a university with a bunch of dumb*** students to build an essential part of their application?” and I arrived at the conclusion of, well, because it would be much cheaper to pay a one time ~$14,000 for an entire application using outsourced workers versus paying 5 software engineering salaries over 4 months.
Either way, I feel as though myself and my peers are being taken advantage of. I am not keen on doing free labor (negative pay labor actually). Basically, I'm PAYING to teach myself full-stack technologies and implement business applications. The only reason I'm continuing to do it is because it's my last semester in college before I graduate.
Anyways, if you read all of this thanks for your time. If it fancies, I'd love to hear your thoughts on my situation. It is difficult for me to take orders from the sponsor company when it's a completely unbalanced/unfair relationship.
TL:DR – My school has a required class (paid) that forces students to teach themselves full-stack technologies and build business applications that will be used by the sponsor companies that come to the school to use the students as outsourced workers without any compensation for the students.