I tend to agree with 99% of what Mr. Boyes said. However, the educational responsibility needs to be placed more upon academia. For them to teach UNIX / Linux is a given ability. The lack of educators with mainframe skills and knowledge along with their respective teaching tools limit in today's schools.
I think another problem with the current approach is that IBM and others approach the problem with a prepared curriculum that they want to have taught. This approach works pretty well with technical and vocational schools, but I think it misses the mark with the 4 year schools because it's not easy to get new curriculum added to a true university program, and most of those organizations have a difficult time accepting classes they have to rely on remote resources to teach. There's a contractual obligation there that IBM has partially addressed with donating hardware to some schools, but expecting pre-prepared materials to go into place is a hard sell when competing with other areas. I think another interesting observation has been the fleeing of students from CS of any kind over the last few years. Many of them were going into finance or business - I wonder if that will continue? If not, then there may be some interesting opportunities to capture those students as they try to change course midstream.
