Issues in Information Systems Volume 19, Issue 4, pp. 87-95, 2018 87 STILL TEACHING COBOL PROGRAMMING – UNDERLYING REASONS AND CONTRIBUTING FACTORS Azad Ali, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, azad.ali@iup.edu David Smith, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, david.smith@iup.edu Andrea Morman, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a.d.morman@iup.edu ABSTRACT This paper discusses and analyzes the reasons for continuing to teach the COBOL programming language despite the many opposing factors. The paper focuses on the case of a particular department in Computer Science at a university located in Western Pennsylvania that has been teaching COBOL for years and intends to teach it for the foreseeable future. The paper reviews literature and debates in favor for and against teaching COBOL in today’s curriculum. It will then shift the focus on the market and discusses the reasons that the market continues to use COBOL despite the mounting pressure to replace it. The case of the department of computer science and their justification for continuing to teach COBOL is presented last. Keywords: COBOL Teaching, Legacy Teaching, Programming Language, Mainframe Teaching INTRODUCTION The crisis in college and university COBOL education is becoming more acute as time passes. The reduction and total elimination of COBOL courses, declining interest by both faculty and students, and low visibility of new commercial applications being developed using COBOL are commonplace. Yet many practitioners are well aware of the billions of lines of existing, operational, revenue-producing lines of COBOL code that continue to provide the mainstay of many commercial enterprises. (Roggio, Comer & Brauda, 2003, p. 3). Although the above quote was written more than fifteen years ago the same argument surrounding the discussion of teaching COBOL still exists. The landscape of programming languages is in a state of constant change and the number of new programming languages and related technologies are on the rise (Ali & Smith, 2014). At the same time, some older programming languages (termed as legacy) have slowly diminished in the industry and vanished from academic courses. Khadka et al. (2014) listed some of these legacy languages (e.g. RPG, VB, and PLI) that were once popular but now they have all but disappeared from computing curriculum. Other programming languages (like Ada, Pascal, Fortran and others) are hardly mentioned in terms of uses at academic and professional settings (Parker, Ottaway & Cho, 2006). Yet COBOL has been resilient within industry for decades and it remains in the curriculum of some academic institutions as a course within a program. One of the universities that keeps teaching COBOL is located Western Pennsylvania. The department of Computer Science (CS) at this university has been teaching COBOL in one of their programming courses for over forty years and intends to continue teaching it in the foreseeable future. The department has their own reasons and justifications that contribute to their decision for teaching COBOL and these reasons are explained later in this study. However, some background information and review of literature is necessary in order to fully understand this case, thus this paper intends to present the current role of COBOL in industry and reasons for and against teaching it in a computer science program. The remainder of this paper is divided into the following: - The paper begins with an explanation of the reasons that stand against the teaching of COBOL. - The second section talks about the opposite side of the coin. It explains about the factors that stand in favor of teaching COBOL. https://doi.org/10.48009/4_iis_2018_87-95