The case for continued Cobol education

Many educators are reexamining their curricula´s content and scope to more successfully market graduates from their information systems programs. Meanwhile, business and industry IS managers have similar concerns about the continued need to maintain the large inventory of legacy code while also developing new systems. Cobol applications and mainframe computing continue to dominate a large segment of the business community in which conventional data- and transaction-processing requirements still drive major applications. The requirement to maintain existing Cobol applications supports continued demand for new Cobol programmers. Furthermore, e-commerce applications will require linking existing mainframe applications to the Internet, occupying much of the IS activity for the foreseeable future. In accessing the IS manager´s view and the academic´s view of Cobol´s future, the survey presented found that 95% of its academic respondents and 90% of the IS managers polled want the IS curricula to continue offering Cobol instruction. Also, nearly 90% of IS managers indicate that Cobol instruction in colleges should cover both Cobol´s OO and Web based features