[ILUG] crossover postgraduate IT courses

[Thomas Bibby]

Hello,

I have a (possibly very cheekily off-topic) question about 'crossover'
postgraduate IT courses.

My sister graduates from an arts undergrad course in UCC (Italian +
Maths) this summer.  She took comp. sci as a subject (which she really
enjoyed) but had to give it up because of subject restrictions.

She's looking at some postgrad cert/diploma courses in IT, and I was
wondering if anyone had any opinions as to the usefulness of these. 
In this context I'm talking about:

1. Teaching general principles rather than specifics, preferably
within an open source context, or at least not a college equivalent of
"dot net for dummies".

2. A reasonable chance of employability at the end of it.  By that I
mean some chance of getting a job provided she has a reasonable
portfolio of projects from both within and outside of her course, a
job that will be enough to get her started with a career in IT.

I couldn't find any reviews of courses on the web that approximately
fit the two criteria above, I did find a discussion from the CLUG list
from 2000 but it focused on undergraduate courses and I presume things
have changed somewhat since then.

Personally I do have some doubts about the utility of these type of
courses, but hey, she's an arts student and she's going to have to do
some sort of course to get employable, and it seems like most
employers do require qualifications of some sort to start off on the
career ladder (this seems to apply across all disciplines).

The reason I'm taking so much interest in her future education is I'm
going to cover some of her fees...

If anyone has any useful information or links to hand about the
usefulness of these courses, or a more appropriate forum that this
question could be posted to, or any general opinions on this, I'd
really appreciate it.

Profuse apologies if this is considered to be off-topic (but I accept
that grovelling won't make this post flame-retardant...).

Thanks,

Thomas Bibby.