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Education IT

Interest in CS as a Major Drops 839

Posted by CowboyNeal from the bad-raps dept.
Dasein writes "The Computer Research Association says that the popularity of CS as a major among freshman has dropped in the last four years. Why is obvious to anybody working in the field. They conclude by saying 'With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.'"
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Interest in CS as a Major Drops More

Interest in CS as a Major Drops

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  • Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Flexible Typhoon ( 836555 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:39AM (#12322725)
    You simply can't take statistics from one university and apply it universally. All the data on TFA [google.com] comes from UCLA.

    All it proves is that number of Freshman interested in studying CS at UCLA is dropping.

    Instead of admitting that the quality of their CS courses are dropping, these guys are trying to show a general trend.

    This is not news for nerds! This only news for the clueless masses (R)(TM)

    • No, it's true everywhere, including here. There's a perception among freshmen even at Brown that when we get out it'll be quite hard to find well-paying work.
      • But it's not!

        I'm about to graduate with a CS degree. I had two well-paying offers from two well-known companies. My friend had 3. Everyone I know in CS either has a job or is staying for grad school (and not because they had to, because they want to).
        • >> I'm about to graduate with a CS degree. I had two well-paying offers

          Perhaps you have something that sets you apart? Excellent marks, a body of previous work, good networking? All of those things? If you are skilled and passionate about what you do, you'll succeed.

          I believe it when people say demand for IT grads is down. I wouldn't suggest anyone change majors, though, unless they have poor abilities to start with. - The marginal grads are the ones who will end up on the sh*t end of things..

          • Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)

            by penglust ( 676005 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @12:03PM (#12323328)
            This is as it should be. The industry is a pretty screwed up place for a number of reasons. One of them being so many project fail because they are late and over budget.


            Its a two fold problem. First there have never been enough good engineers and there are a lot of pretty so-so engineers. I have worked on too many projects where I was trying to design and do major coding while trying to hire and mentor new people.


            Second, often this was complicated by my boss dictating that would have a particular number of people wether I needed them or not. Mostly so he or she looked good. The result was, as with so many companies, we got bodies.


            I did my best to train them but programming, as with most engineering types, does require some natural ability and INTEREST. Those without it are of very little help down to a real drain on the rest of the project.


            Any project of any size needs a leader, some top notch talent and a few worker bees. Too much at any end does not work. They must also each one be capable and willing to do the work.


            Companies think they beat the problem by throwing cheap bodies at it offshore. Most of the projects will fail for the same reasons outlined above. They are mostly still just bodies.
            • Mod this guy up.. ..he's got it right.

              Projects get headcount and too often headcount means warm bodies, with or without interest or ability. We seem to keep hiring these people that got into IT for the cash. They typically have decent marks in school and present well, but once it's time to actually work things suck.

              My favourite new-hire quote: "I don't really like programming. I plan to be a manager."

              The new guy had been given his first "welcome-to-the-corp-lets-see-what-you-can-do" assignment a few d

        • Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)

          by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:17AM (#12323001)
          You might want to define "well paying". I have talked to alot of CS majors who just came out of undergrad programs from top schools, their salary is an insult.

          I also know alot of excellent grad students, also out of top schools, who have to settle for intern like positions. They are so overqualified, companies seriously don't know how to fit them in. Companies want young guys coming in fixing bugs, not architecting major projects.

          My ultimate advice in the new millenium is get a "real estate" related degree. Work for a construction company. Forget grad schools unless you are highly devoted to a research position. There is enough software in the world now to run for the next 10 years.

          • Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)

            by jkabbe ( 631234 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:22AM (#12323035)
            Companies want young guys coming in fixing bugs, not architecting major projects.

            No offense, because maybe you're a genius - but most young people are really only qualified to fix bugs and work on small portions of a project. If a 22-year-old with a CS degree is qualified to architect major projects all I can say is run hard and fast to get another degree, because the party's over.

          • Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Mustang Matt ( 133426 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:31AM (#12323099)
            Would you be willing to say that these people shouldn't have been in CS to begin with?

            I've interviewed a lot of people with CS degrees from various universities and some of them gave me the feeling that CS was not right for them.

            I'm not saying that's true about everyone with a CS degree that can't find a decent paying job but out of the people that I interviewed the ones that I felt didn't fit in CS the most were the ones asking for insane amounts of money.

            The ones that I actually hired were willing to work for reasonable amounts of money and they clearly were more knowledgeable and more skilled than the rest.

            • Two types of CS grads ... (Score:4, Interesting)

              by AHumbleOpinion ( 546848 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @01:50PM (#12324021) Homepage
              In my experience, both with my undergraduate and graduate classmates, and with those I interviewed for programming positions, there are two types of CS grads. The first is the CS grad who got into the field because they have an inherent interest in programming. The second is the CS grad who got into it because they were told it was a good career path. The latter group is not necessarily bad. A lab partner once surprised me with poo poo'ing the idea of getting a MS CS, he said he would rather get an MBA. My naive reaction was oh god, the dark side. Now he went on to start his own software business, not a dot-bomb - a business that developed and sold an actual product, and he did quite well. He didn't need to be the best coder around, but having a decent technical background was invaluable for his business.

              Unfortunately my former lab partner is the exception not the rule. When hiring I look for those with an inherent interest in coding. One metric is to ask what they did outside of class assignments. I don't care how goofy or stupid their homebrew project was, and getting them comfortable enough to tell me about it can be challenging, but the fact that they sat down in front of a computer on their own time and coded something that worked merely to satisy their own curiosity or desire is telling. The CS grad who can only tell me about his/her homework assignments goes to the bottom of the pile.

              Another way to get off the bottom of the pile is to do some kind of internship or co-op job.
          • I also know alot of excellent grad students, also out of top schools, who have to settle for intern like positions. They are so overqualified, companies seriously don't know how to fit them in. Companies want young guys coming in fixing bugs, not architecting major projects.
            I can tell you this... I've interviewed lots of guys who are coming out of university with a masters/PhD but no real-world work experience.

            I can see the research work they did in university and it's always something very esoteric. I m
            • I can see the research work they did in university and it's always something very esoteric. I most certainly *do not* want them architecting major products.

              That's the dilemma with doing a Ph.D. You are required to do three things:

              1. Produce at least 2 or 3 papers during the duration of your stay. The last paper will typically be produced while your are writing up your thesis.

              2. Produce a thesis demonstrating new, original and unique research.

              The problem is that between (1) and (2), if you do anything

          • Salary is the Problem (Score:4, Interesting)

            by LighthouseJ ( 453757 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @12:00PM (#12323305)
            That's the thing, fresh college grads expect to make the crazy money right out of college, but the market simply cannot support that concept. I'm going to graduate in 2 weeks and I have no expectations about making a job in my field (computer engineering) at the average starting salary for grads ($52k). I expect to enter into a ladder-style career. Yeah, I may get a crap job that I'm overqualified for, but I can get the experience the job gives me, then I can shoot for the moon and get the great job later after I've spent some time in the working world.

            On a more grand scale, this phenomena is why the US is outsourcing and it's not even bound to college grads either. Teenagers these days want to make the easy cash or not even try and jobs go unfulfilled. Employers can't afford to pay the kind of money these people want so they find someone who will work for the money, enter foreigners that have a lower cost of living. There's just no honor in the afterschool McDonalds job anymore.

          • In engineering, the higher paying jobs seem to go to EE majors working on difficult integrated circuits. At least that's what the job ads indicate. Programming jobs earn 1/2 to 2/3 as much.

            I agree about forgetting grad school. Grad school is for people who really care, not for people who just want another line on their resume.

          • Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)

            by jimfrost ( 58153 ) * <jimf@frostbytes.com> on Saturday April 23, 2005 @01:25PM (#12323864) Homepage
            I also know alot of excellent grad students, also out of top schools, who have to settle for intern like positions. They are so overqualified, companies seriously don't know how to fit them in. Companies want young guys coming in fixing bugs, not architecting major projects.

            Not to put too fine a point on it, but almost nobody coming out of school is qualified to do much at all. Schools rarely teach the things you most need to know in business -- even simple things like "using a version control system" and "scheduling", to say nothing of making significant changes to multimillion-line codebases without busting things.

            It used to be much worse since even a decade and a half ago even the basic software tools used by business were typically not the tools students would have been exposed to. Thankfully broad availability of Windows and Linux and related tools has at least helped in that regard.

            But strong knowledge of the kinds of things you find in a university environment is still not proper preparation for an architect role in a major project where you'll likely be piecing together a variety of proprietary technologies, many of which a university couldn't realistically afford to expose you to. So those graduates are not "overqualified" by any stretch of the imagination.

            So business does more of an apprenticeship kind of thing: You come in working on shit projects and if you do well you'll get more and more interesting stuff to do -- and in the process of doing those crappy tasks you'll learn application structure and process that aren't taught at university.

            How fast the move from lousy stuff to interesting stuff happens depends a lot on the kind of company you work for, but it's been my experience that the talented people shine so bright that they're hard to miss. So long as they aren't stuck-up assholes who are hard to work with (unfortunately you get a lot of that right out of school, especially from postgrads, until they figure out they don't know everything) people want to pull them into projects. There's more work to do than people to do it, always, in software.

            If I were to give advice to an upcoming graduate, my advice would be to look at the company rather than the job. Good-paying jobs right out of school are probably going to be with larger companies who need to attract talent with money because the work is no fun. Challenging, fun jobs tend to come with smaller companies who don't have a lot of money and attract talent by doing cool things -- and these are the same companies that will advance you rapidly if you're capable because they can't afford to have talent sitting around doing makework.

            The drop in CS degrees is coming about because people no longer believe it's easy money. But, really, it never was easy money, no matter the impression a lot of people got during the tech boom.

            • I agree with you whole-heartedly!

              I have many years of IT experience and recently finished an MBA. I really like operations management, but it's a real stretch to take my IT experience and make it look like operations.

              I finally took a major pay cut (now just $17/hour) to work temp at a great company. While I have a great theoretical basis to undertand things from, I have tons to learn and really didn't know squat about how things really work in the industry.

              My first few months have been pretty un-exciti

        • Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Stween ( 322349 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:54AM (#12323271)
          Very true. Here at Glasgow, there have been groups looking at just why the numbers are falling. It's not as obvious as it seems. There's a downfall in numbers when the whole .com thing fell on it's arse, but there's a further downturn in numbers from people being less aware of what computing science actually is these days; schoolkids often equate computing to ICT, which is simply not the case.

          Likewise, the job market is picking up again, but it's a lot more sensible now; companies just aren't throwing money around quite like how they used to any more. Perhaps it's worse in the States than elsewhere, or perhaps the Slashdot crowd are still in broken-record mode.

          I too am not short on job offers, and I'm far from sending off my CV to any investment bank looking for the next batch of graduates. Perhaps it'll all hit something of an equilibrium; fewer jobs available across the board than 5 years ago, but also fewer good graduates to fill the positions available which are appropriate for them.
      • That is interesting because at my university, the opposite is true. I think that the number of enrollees in the computer science department has seen a significant increase.

        Personally, I think a lot of it has to do with the perception of the quality of a program. Our CS program is seeing a drastic increase of the number of students enrolling, and one part of our program has a hefty waiting list. Right now, that part of the program has 100% placement and, I believe, the statistics I was told Friday was t
        • I looked your school up. Your CS numbers are increasing, and doubled in 2003 and increased again in 2004.

          However, your numbers are VERY small relative to most universities, and almost any school could make those kinds of gains provided they're willing to make certain compromises.

          What you don't see is that the number of applicants to your program are not up. I would independently argue that Oklahoma public university trends are far from the national norm. In fact, outside of TX, CA, and NY, where populatio

    • Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Informative)

      by shizzle ( 686334 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:49AM (#12322820)
      You simply can't take statistics from one university and assume that they're not indicative of a universal trend either. I teach computer engineering at a major public university in the midwestern US, and we are seeing trends exactly like UCLA. If you follow the link in TFA to the Taulbee survey [cra.org], which encompasses all of North America, you'll see that the data there is consistent with UCLA's findings.

    • Re:Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Qzukk ( 229616 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:50AM (#12322826) Journal
      The singular of ancedotes may not be datum, but when you have multiple ancedotes, you start to get a trend.

      Add in common sense, and its pretty obvious that when everyone predicts doom and gloom in IT in the US as India and China take over the world, nobody's interested in sinking $100,000 into a university degree for a career that may not exist when they get out.

      The big question though, is whether interest in these degrees are returning to pre-.com era days, or if they're dropping even lower.

  • Well... (Score:2, Funny)

    by BluhDeBluh ( 805090 )
    There's still the entire population of India ready to take the jobs of western IT workers...

    • IT != CS != Biology/Chemistry/Engineering/Etc. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by raehl ( 609729 ) <raehl311.yahoo@com> on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:53AM (#12323259) Homepage
      The real problem is that an undergraduate CS degree is a fairly useless thing to have on it's own. People need to realize that IT (fixing networks) is not the same as software development. And people also need to realize that being good at CS is not good enough for software development - you sould be good at CS, *AND* good at whatever you're developing hte software for.

      Does your software model chemical reactions? Then you should be someone who is good at chemistry who can also write software. Does your software lay out gates? Then you should be an electrical engineer who can also write sfotware. Does your software do people's taxes? Then you should be an accountant who also can write software.

      Do you make sure the routers, print servers, and various computers all talk and play togetehr nicely, and that people's computers don't get infected with viruses? Then you're a network tech, and a CS degree was a waste of time. (Or you're a waste of a CS degree.)

      The thing is, MOST people don't need a CS degree to be someone who is good at something else AND can write software. Many already know how to write software by the time the get to college, and those that don't would better spend their time becoming an expert in the field they're going to be writig software in than being an expert in software writing.

      Might their software not be quite as fast as software written by a CS expert? Maybe not. But it will still probablybe overall better, as the person doing the programming will have a much ebtter understanding of what the program should do.

      Anyway, if you're an IT worker (routers, printers, and no viruses) and you saw this article about CS majors and posted something about your job, you should be modded -1 Offtopic. This article isn't about you.

  • graphics whores (Score:5, Funny)

    by cipher uk ( 783998 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:41AM (#12322747)
    The Computer Research Association says that the popularity of CS as a major among freshman has dropped
    Maybe thats because all these freshmen are playing cs:source instead... oh.

  • Anecdotal confirmation (Score:5, Informative)

    by l33t-gu3lph1t3 ( 567059 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `61legna_hcra'> on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:42AM (#12322749) Homepage
    The University of Guelph (Southern Ontario, Canada) normally has 200 students entering its Bachelor of Computing (honors) program every year. This year the entrance class had 66 students. My own program at Guelph-Humber (degree/diploma in computing/telecom) has a nominal class size of 60, but we've not had a full class in the 3 years we've been running. According to my prof, the only University in Canada whose compsci department hasn't suffered is Waterloo's.

  • What a bunch of bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:42AM (#12322753) Homepage
    Most of the girls that try our program leave because they just don't like it. They don't like to write code. More power to them, let them find what they want to do. Most of the freshman going in have no idea how much work will be expected of them in their junior and senior years and when they get a taste of that, they quit for easier majors in the liberal arts, social sciences or business school. It's more a problem of laziness than anything else.

    • Re:What a bunch of bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ladybugfi ( 110420 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:32AM (#12323106)
      If writing code is all the CS program expects from majors, I'd encourage both men and women to leave immediately. While algorithmic thinking and coding is essential to a computer science degree, there's so much more to it that even people who don't like to code should find a niche there. No wonder women leave if the program emphasizes CS==coding.

      I've got a MSc from CS and after the novelty wore off I have found coding boring. But I'm a respected professional in my area, security.
      • If writing code is all the CS program expects from majors...

        Fortunately it's not, and the previous poster didn't suggest that it was. It's logically incorrect to jump from "programming exists" to "programming is all that exists".

  • Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:43AM (#12322758) Journal
    They conclude by saying 'With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.'"

    By raising the price, it's basic economics. So this is a good thing for all you CS grads out there.

  • Good! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theonetruekeebler ( 60888 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:43AM (#12322759) Homepage Journal
    The field has been bloated with get-rich-quick degree-seekers for too long, the way engineering was in the 1980s. I plan to stick around, so the odds are better for me to get a job instead of somebody taking it out of a love of money rather than a love of the work.

    Besides, if there's a an employee shortage, salaries are more likely to stay high.

    With the offshoring of certain types of work, I must wonder if the number of IT jobs in the U.S. is actually going to shrink---at least in relative numbers, rather than increase over then next decade. It'll all be interesting, I'm sure.

    • Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by theonetruekeebler ( 60888 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:51AM (#12322828) Homepage Journal
      That said, I think women are seriously underrepresented in our field. I'm actually seeking my CS degree right now, and there aren't very many women in my classes. The ones who are here are 70% foreign nationals, many of whom I expect will be returning to their home countries when they finish.

      TFA showed about 27% of BSCS degrees going to women---down from 37% in 1982. OTOH, the number of overall bachelor's degrees going to women is currently 58%---and has been above 50% since 1981. I guess the moral of the story is that the women are getting smarter, and guys are getting dumber, and that the guys who are getting smarter are going to be working for women.

    • Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by eyegor ( 148503 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:51AM (#12322834)
      Kind of like all of those MCSE-holders that thought they were going to get rich? Most of them aren't geekworthy (like the fool I worked with who thought he'd save disk space on a Win 3.x machine by setting up the swap space on the server).

      I've worked with a lot of people who got CS degrees that have absolutely no apptitude or desire to excel in the field.

  • "Freshman" CS Majors? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:43AM (#12322764)
    A "freshman" CS major is as reliable as a freshman "pre-med" major.

    (Although in the first case, the designation is usually picked to land a high-paying internship, where the second designation is picked to get laid.)

    Unless you're looking at people enrolled in 3xx and 4xx level courses, this article doesn't mean much.

  • ($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dTaylorSingletary ( 448723 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:45AM (#12322775) Homepage

    I don't think that just because CS Degrees are in decline that it means there will be any less programmers on the field. Programming is context-oriented, and sure a CS degree can help a lot of people in programming, but at what cost?

    Sometimes I feel that majors in the humanities, in communication, literature, critical thinking, psychology, philosophy, linguists, and financial planning are better qualified as developers, because they understand what is most often to be coded these days: interfaces to information, with the ability manipulate, display, and interact with said information. That information has context.

    The closer a programmer is to context, the more likely they'll get it right the first time.

    Not to say a CS degree isn't useful -- it is, obviously for the more hardcore programming and understanding of the bigger picture.

    • Re:($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SQL Error ( 16383 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:07AM (#12322941)
      Sometimes I feel that majors in the humanities, in communication, literature, critical thinking, psychology, philosophy, linguists, and financial planning are better qualified as developers, because they understand what is most often to be coded these days: interfaces to information, with the ability manipulate, display, and interact with said information. That information has context.

      Yeah, right.

      While psychology, lingustics and financial planning are serious subjects and teach skills useful to programmers, they don't teach programming.

      Communication, literature, "critical thinking", and almost all philosophy courses are pure fluff.

      Give me an engineering graduate - civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical; I don't really care - any day. At least they understand maths and have learned that there is such a thing as a wrong answer. The concept of a wrong answer is anathema to most humanities students.

      I'm sooo glad my job doesn't involve hiring programmers anymore.
    • While I'm not going to say you're wrong, as managers can be terribly short sighted, I have to ask a question. Have you ever tried to maintain code written by somebody that wasn't well trained in software engineering? While there are plenty of people with CS degrees that have no clue, there are very few people without direct computer science background that know what structures to use where in code, much less how to keep it clean and maintainable.

      Proper project structure, data structures, access methods, com

      • Double major, if you can (Score:4, Interesting)

        by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:38AM (#12323138) Homepage Journal
        The best programmers for any job will be the ones who are experienced both in programming and in the domain. So if somebody is smart enough and willing to work hard enough to double-major, I encourage them to do some other field of interest as well as CS.

        The best code is written by CS grads, it's true, but I'm not sure it's because of the CS degree. All of the best programmers I know were top-notch programmers before entering college. College gave them experience, and knowledge, but they had developed their craft from a young age, like any other artist.

        Programming really is an art form when done properly, and good programmers rely on an aesthetic sense to avoid "hackish and ugly" code. So if the non-CS people are producing it, it may be because of the reason they avoided CS in the first place. It's the same reason I avoided majoring in art: I'm just not any good at it and didn't expect them to train me well enough to make it worth my time and theirs.

        I'd like to see more CS majors at least minor in some other field of interest. There will be those who wish to do CS for its own sake, usually academic: HCI research, automata theory, networking, etc. But for CS majors who want to program computers for a living, and that's a majority of them, I think that they should learn something besides computers. Science, history, business, English: anything that will give them some idea of what it is that the people who are tasking them want.

        If necessary, you hire one of those guys to be project lead, and hire cheaper, less experienced programmers to just bang out the code, but I think it all works better if the entire team can both code and develop a real understanding of the requirements, because the spec is never going to quite cut it. A programmer's job isn't to work with computers; otherwise we'd just write a spec-to-software compiler. The programmer's job is to interface between the computer and the client. That works best only when the programmer speaks both languages.

    • Re:($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:26AM (#12323058) Homepage
      Not to say a CS degree isn't useful -- it is, obviously for the more hardcore programming and understanding of the bigger picture.

      My first year Intro to CS instructor put it this way:
      "Computer Science is to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press"

      Too many people think of a BS in Comp Sci as a degree in programming.

      • Re:($CS-- != $programmers--) (Score:4, Insightful)

        by globalar ( 669767 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @12:28PM (#12323490) Homepage
        "Too many people think of a BS in Comp Sci as a degree in programming."

        At most schools, as I have seen, this is in fact the case. Students partially get this view from the way the school has set up their programs.

        For example, software developing classes are advanced CS and graduate courses, for example. So you have to take CS to get into these useful programming classes. The only place you learn serious programming (i.e. practical) is in CS classes. Programming is not well integrated into other courses (generally they focus on specific applications, a real danger IMO), or if it is, it's the 101 tutorial of how to use the base API. In other words, not enough to entice the would-be programmers and near-useless for people who have a specific field they want to focus on (ex. physics, economics, biotech, etc).

        This sends the wrong message about computer science and programming in general, but schools pushed this trend and now they need to rethink it.
      • [i]"Computer Science is to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press"[/i]

        I've also heard this stated as, "Computers are to computer science what telescopes are to astronomy".

        [i]Too many people think of a BS in Comp Sci as a degree in programming.[/i]

        Too many colleges think they can throw a bunch of programming classes together and call it Computer Science. ;)
      • I have heard this statement over and over, and it is subtly misleading. The error is typically made by those who don't understand the basic operators of formal logic.

        If you ask most people what "Computer Science is to programming as mechanical engineering is to operating a drill press" means, they might say "Well, it means that Computer Science doesn't teach you to be a masterful Programmer".

        What it ACTUALLY means (or what it should mean, if most nascent Computer Scientists didn't misunderstand it) is:

  • Why aren't you checking IT Majors? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Xoder ( 664531 ) <slashdot@xoder.f ... .fm minus distro> on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:45AM (#12322777) Homepage
    TFSummary says that a drop in CS students will lead to a shortage of IT workers. Most CS students I know do not want to do IT. They want to code, either academically or commercially, but they do not want to do IT. IT is for IT majors (or Cisco/A+/MCSE certs), not for Computer Scientists

  • What about other IT majors (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jbplou ( 732414 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:45AM (#12322778)
    I don't know the stats but I would imagine that majors like Information Systems, MIS, BIS and similar ones to those would be syphoning off some of the computer science majors. Just because you want to work in IT doesn't mean you need Computer Science. Lets face it to work on internal tracking systems you hardly need to know complier design but some businss\IT integration classes may help. Many Universities now offer atleast one Info System type major and one CS type major. Combine the IS majors becoming more common with the perception that tech jobs are a bust now and its easy to see why CS enrollment is dropping.

  • Are college students getting smarter? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TrekCycling ( 468080 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:45AM (#12322779) Homepage
    Seriously. We bemoan the state of education, but I'd have to say, having the foresight to NOT choose IT is pretty insightful and intelligent. Of course, I say that as someone who's in IT. I love the work, the actual act of maintaining systems, working on networks, servers or programming. I've been doing it for 8 years now, after studying English in college and I've always loved the work. But to be frankly honest, I haven't liked many of the actual jobs. The hours are often absurd. The demands on your time, especially your free time, are very high. And you are often put into riduculously high pressure situations by ineffectual and incompetent leadership. So it's sad, in a way. I love the work. I love working with other developers and learning and growing as a professional. But sometimes I honestly hate the actual jobs and the companies I work for. That's a hard thing to find out, so if college students are figuring that out before they find themselves 40lbs. or more overweight, with blood pressure, etc. then bully to them.

  • Computer Science Not Surprising (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:45AM (#12322782)
    What I find surprising is the spike in Biological Science. Since that includes medical professions, is everyone attempting to capitalize on the aging baby boomer population?

    • I would say yes. That's why I laugh at these "good, leave the jobs to the real geeks" folks. There are people that pile into every "hot profession". Big deal. Live with it. They are jobs, after all. Find one you enjoy and then try to enjoy your free time. I'm not saying this to you, but some of these other posters who inevitably turn up to slam anyone who entered the field for the wrongs reasons. As if that's never happened before and never will again. The blame should be placed on people who couldn't tell

  • Sexual Suicide (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) * on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:46AM (#12322790) Homepage Journal
    Something that's been bothering me a lot throughout my career as a computer programmer is the attitude of the "leading luminaries" to the fundamentals of life for programmers (and engineers in general but most intensely for programmers) -- most specifically reproduction. People like to joke a lot about "nerds getting a date" but when you compare what Western society did to the reproductive rates of its engineers, particularly since the advent of the microprocessor, to the reproductive supports provided Asian engineers -- especially Indian engineers -- you can easily see why engineering is being exported to Asia.

    A critical exemplar of these of those "leading luminaries" is someone with whose work most digerati are undoubtedly familiar:

    George Gilder

    What I see as George Gilder's primary failure is his inability to connect his work on "Men and Marriage" (aka "Sexual Suicide") with work regarding the high tech industry. The major result of this failure is his lack of credibility regarding outsourcing and guest worker visas for high technology.

    Basically it boils down to this:

    During Gilder's watch, what has been the cost of reproduction of a young American engineer vs the cost of reproduction of a young engineer from India?

    My experience, working side-by-side with young H-1b visa employees during the latter part of the 1990s was that there is virtually no comparison:

    While both a young engineering from India and a young engineer from the US must focus on his studies, career -- living like a virtual monk -- while working in the male-saturated ghettos that surround the engineering profession, only the Indian engineer has a social support network and the social status, frequently called "sexism" in the US (including arranged marriages), that provides him with a wife of similar background (crucial to reproduction in a larger sense) and the security to raise children within a marriage to such a wife.

    Something Gilder should have done was figure out what a comparable marriage and family would actually cost a young US engineer.

    Indeed, the reproductive costs, as well as resulting fertility rates and mating quality among US engineers are statistics that needs to be studied carefully if we are to come to any sort of understanding of the outsourcing phenomenon.

    The strategy of encouraging women to go into programming makes sense from a few angles:

    1) Corporations tend to discard programmers as they age. This means a woman, about the time her biological clock is kicking in, can exit to a second career as mother. This fits with lowering the cost of reproduction for programmers. Indeed, many Japanese companies have had a policy for sometime of encouraging young women, rather than young men, to enter software careers precisely because they are open about their "agism" in hiring programmers and saw this "second career as mother" as an honorable way of dealing with their employees who were programmers.

    2) Since engineering is a male-saturated profession, it females entering the profession will have a lot less difficult time meeting a viable marriage partner of comparable background than will males entering such a male-ghetto.

    3) Although many men "go gay" during stays in prison, and many may be cajoled into doing so during their stays in the male-saturated ghettos of western engineering, it really isn't a good way to run technological civilization to base either your penal system or your technology creation on "turning out" your most problematic _or_ your most valuable members.

    4) Universities are increasingly female. Indeed, the University of Illinois, origin of the a lot of the key technologies going into computing, networking, the Internet and the web specifically, has gone from a male-saturated engineering school when I was working there to a much more female environment. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that young men simply are dropping out of society at a much greater rate but whatever the cause the fact

    • Re:Sexual Suicide (Score:3, Insightful)

      by eddeye ( 85134 )
      Indeed, the reproductive costs, as well as resulting fertility rates and mating quality among US engineers are statistics that needs to be studied carefully if we are to come to any sort of understanding of the outsourcing phenomenon.

      Stop, my head hurts; I can't take anymore. American engineers aren't "dying off" because they can't reproduce. Your theory requires that

      1. Engineering is genetic
      2. These genes are located on the Y chromosome
      3. Only or primarily engineers carry and pass on these so-called "engi

  • Popularity of computer science. . . (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kfg ( 145172 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:46AM (#12322793)
    . . . as a major among incoming freshmen has dropped. . .

    Oh thank God. It's about bloody time.

    I don't suppose this means that the colleges can once again start teaching computer science to those who are actually interested in the subject and leave the application and HTML "programming" training to the private trade schools where it belongs?

    Or would that effect their bottom line?

    KFG
  • While having more women in IT would be a Good Thing, the statement "it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level" is specious. Other ways to fill demand would be:

    • Let in more foreign immigrant CS workers
    • Conduct more training on the job rather than at universities.
    • As demand shrinks, wages will rise, luring more people into the field. That's what's known as "suppply and demand."

    That's just off the top of my head in a couple of minutes. I'm sure the reason the Computer Research Association found it "difficult to see" these reasons are that none of them are in the Computer Research Association's financial interest to promote as alternatives.

  • Personally (Score:3, Insightful)

    by keesh ( 202812 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:48AM (#12322813) Homepage
    I switched from CS to joint CS/Maths (and I might just end up doing applied maths) because CS was becoming less and less computer science and more and more software engineering.

  • That's fine by me. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blcamp ( 211756 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:49AM (#12322821) Homepage

    There's plenty of work for those of us already (or still) in IT... and plenty of competition as well.

    Unlike many who saw the bursting of the ".COM bubble" as the arrival of apocalypse... I saw it as simply a time to separate the wheat from the chaff. Seems to me there were a lot of people who were in IT in 1999-2000 who had no business being there. I can't tell you how many times I heard fresh grads say "You mean I have to actually PROGRAM?!"

    Not trying to knock anyone here, but if someone is trying to enter a field simply because they think there's money in it, they won't be there very long. Maybe that's what's going on here now.

    Just my $0.02...

    • It's funny that you say this, but my personal experience has been that the .com boom resulted in a glut of inexperienced and ineffectual leaches on the programmers more than a glut of bad programmers. The chaff, in my opinion, are the managers who don't know diddly about project management OR IT. The chaff are the executives that pitched horrible ideas and then cost the jobs of others down the road. I hate these posts that inevitably blame people for trying to better there lives by finding a good line of wo

  • Cause and effect. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by scruffy ( 29773 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:52AM (#12322847)
    Outsourcing. Be available 24/7. When you're 40, get packing. Dealing with PHBs. Yes, it's a wonderful opportunity in a Walmart world.

  • women? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sootman ( 158191 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @10:58AM (#12322876) Homepage Journal
    "...it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level."

    Um, wouldn't it work to just get male enrollment levels back up to where they used to be? What logic is there in saying "Less men are signing up, so the solution is to get more women interested." WTF? I mean, it's not like they're soldiers and they're dying and once they're gone they need to be replaced with women.

    And no points for making easy jokes like "But getting more women into CS will attract men to the field! LOLOMGBBQ!!!11"

  • Computer science and IT workers (Score:5, Funny)

    by xiaomonkey ( 872442 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:04AM (#12322917)
    Most people working in IT probably won't benefit from computer science degrees. Moreover, someone really interested in IT, should probably transfer to their university's school of business and, if possible, enroll in whatever their equivalent of an "Information Technology" degree is. Such programs usually have a number of IT classes, e.g. databases & networking (both with a much more applied slant then you would get in a typical CS class on the same topic), but also provide students with enough knowledge of business that they'll be able to more effectively interact with the high ups in the company when it comes to such things as policy making and infrastructure planning. Alternatively, there are also some two year programs that strictly focus on IT skills.

    Why? Well any CS program worth its salt doesn't focus on teaching people how to admin Windows Server 2003, or Oracle administration. Rather, it focuses on teaching people about theories computation, algorithms, and, on the more applied side, best practices in software engineering. This kind of training will make some one a better programmer or software engineer, but it wouldn't necessarily be even that the relevant to the individual deciding which routers to buy or even the one installing set routers

    <rant> Okay, so maybe I am little bit peeved when people ask me how to do such and such in Microsoft Word or Windows XP, and the looks they give me when I tell them I don't know. It's like they think it's so inexplicable that I don't know since some of the core classes for CS majors *must* be esoteric document formatting in Microsoft Word, and Windows XP - Why sometimes it can't connect to the network printer. </rant>

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:04AM (#12322918)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • This is a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pegasustonans ( 589396 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:09AM (#12322951)
    Now maybe the majority of CS majors will actually be people who like and think it's fun instead of people looking for a quick way to cash in. I used to know a ton of people who didn't know a thing about computers and they decided on CS as a major because they thought they could make big bucks. It's good to know this trend might be changing.

  • CS degrees are becoming irrelevent (Score:3, Insightful)

    by leathered ( 780018 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:17AM (#12322995)
    I work as a BOFH at a university's CS department. We too are suffering from the overall decline in interest in the subject.

    The problem is that the whole concept of CS is becoming increasing irrelevent as IT is such a diverse field. If you study chemistry, you graduate as a chemist, a mathematics graduate is also entitled to call himself a mathematician. But what about computer science? How many job ads have you seen that are calling for computer scientists? A degree that specialises in programming, networking etc would be far more valuable as the student would not be labelled a 'jack of all trades' which is exactly what we are turning out now.

    Personally even though I don't have a degree I'm in a far better position with regards to my employment prospects than most of our graduates. My experience, together with a CCNA and MCSE (don't laugh, an MCSE backed up with experience is still valuable), puts me in greater stead than someone who has only studied a wide range of concepts and quite frankly, has mastered none of them.

    All the employers we liase with talk about is a candidate's experience and not what pieces of paper they may possess. The job advertisements I now see reflect this too, very few seem to call for CS degrees and the ones that do only see it as a benefit, rather than a requirement of employment.

  • A Story of a Recent CS Graduate (Score:5, Insightful)

    by $criptah ( 467422 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @11:27AM (#12323063) Homepage

    Hi there. I graduated with a degree in Comp. Sci. a couple of years ago. Like many other people, I started CS because I liked computers and I was pretty darn good with them. I participated in different computer clubs, learned how to program and do other fun things at an early age. Given that and the fact that IT provided stable and well-paid careers in the past, it was a no brainer! But had IT sucked in terms of pay, I would have never gotten into it to begin with. You heard me correctly. If I had to choose a major in 2002, Comp. Sci. would not be on my list.

    See, I was poor all my life. I could not major in Liberal Arts or English because I had to support myself and think of supporting my parents and relatives in the future. I had to choose something that I liked and that paid good. This is a fucking no-brainer and I know that 90% of you would do the same thing. Would you study your ass off to find out that your jobs are moving to India and that you get shit for pay? I highly doubt that.

    Comp. Sci. was a perfect major for me. I thought of going to a medical school, but my parents could not afford that. I thought of doing science, but then I saw what most of research specialist brought in terms of income and I said "fuck that." Business and Economics were okay; however, I did not like them as much as I liked Computer Science and that is why I majored in it. After four years of pain, I got out of college with no job, a butt load of loans and no chances to find a good job. It took me a while to find one and I went through a lot of pain to get where I am right now. Not everybody can do that.

    Anybody with more than two brain cells saw that IT got fucking smashed and that it was harder to get jobs in the field. With that in mind, who wants to take a risk? How many people would like to study one of the hardest fields and then end up without a job and a load of student loans? It is not pretty; take my word for it. For some people it does not make sense to get into a field if they can't earn good money. This is just a rational thought because there are individuals, believe it or not, who want to be financially secure. Why would I pay to go to college if four years down the road I am going to be unemployed?

    Of course, there are people who can afford doing what they like regardless of financial benefits. I know a person who pissed through four years of Ivy League education majoring in some useless crap that can't get a her a job that pays more than $25K/year. She can afford loving what she does for living (whenever she has a job) only because her daddy supports her. In theory, she does not even have to work to be well-off. For me, it was not an option. It was either boom or bust. I had to choose a discipline that satisfied three criteria: a stable career and income while being interesting at the same time. If a career did not fit any of those three parameters, I'd pass. Would not you?

    I assume that Comp. Sci. can no longer fit people in my situation; hence we have a drop in enrollment.

    • I don't understand. You keep talking about majoring in CS, but then working in the IT field. Those two things have very little to do with each other, so why do you mention them in the same breath?
    • You find CS to be one of the HARDEST fields? I find that claim dubious. On what grounds do you make that judgment? As someone who did his undergrad and Master's in CS and who is switching to math for his Ph.D., I'd say that I consider CS to be a relatively easy field in comparison to many of the others (math, engineering, physical sciences, etc).
      • I'd say that I consider CS to be a relatively easy field in comparison to many of the others (math, engineering, physical sciences, etc).

        Most students don't take these as majors either. True, CS is easy compared to the pure sciences and math, IMHO. But compare it to the crap most college students really take: medical, communications and business students are everywhere. Those of us in the tech/science field are fairly few in the overall scheme of things.
  • my CS class at JMU '93 graduated with only 24 (out of over 2000 graduates per year). Being so small we were told of stories of how they used to have over 200 graduates in the CS program back in the 80s (the original micro-computer boom time, when computers were popular).

    years later, by '98 (the second computer boom-time thanks to the 'net) the CS classes were back up to over 200 / year.

    now, they're dropping again.

    i would put it that the reason is that there's no major "popularity" in Computers right now. they're just there, rather than being full of new and interesting things. the two peaks of CS student-hood were at times when there were tons of new things to do and discover. related to that was the idea that if one was into it at the time, one could get a guarenteed high-paying job fresh out of school.

    the valley i was in was at a time of staticness. DOS hadn't changed in 5 years, windows was unheard of, "IBM-compatibility" was taking over the world, the mac was too expensive to become a hacker box, and most people getting into CS had never heard of "unix" before (much less VMS or the AS/400s where the real work was still being done). at the time, nothing looked like it would change. many in my class got into CS from other degree programs (physics in my case) because we discovered we were decent programmers first once exposed to real hardware.

    today we're in another valley. the 90s saw a ton of good stuff and a ton of junk get made in a very short time, but right now there's little being done that a high school grad could recognize and go "hey, that's something i could be doing in 5 years". yeah, there's lots of stuff in XML -- but would a high school kid really know what it was or how it was useful to them?

    its kinda like getting into open-source programming: having an itch to scratch, a peek of curiosity. the peaks of CS student-counts happen at times when there's so much going on that's obvious to anyone outside of the industry, enough to get kids to go "i wonder how they did that?" and get into the degree program to find out.

    the valleys like now or like the late 80s to early 90s happen when what is going on in the industry is really only of interest to those within the industry.

    we're back into a gadget world (digital cameras, mp3 players), and gadgets are known for being "black boxes" outside the industry. contrast that to the early micro- world where everybody had "BASIC", or the internet world where anybody could hack together a page of html, gifs, and perl scripts. you can't look at an iPod and go "i could make my own" the way you could some trendy web page or early 6502 game.

    so really the downtimes comes down to being in a time where you can't see what you would do with a CS degree, compared to other times where it seemed obvious what you could do with one.

  • Who really needs CS majors? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @12:50PM (#12323657) Homepage
    Many employers would like to have computer science majors, but how may really need them? In particular, how many need CS majors with advanced degrees?

    Xerox PARC is gone. DEC SRL and DEC WRL are gone. HP Labs is dead. Interval Research is gone. Bell Labs is a shadow of what it once was. Sarnoff Labs doesn't do much. IBM Almaden is being dismantled. SGI is in tatters. Apple R&D is very limited. And DARPA is going to stop funding CS research.

    Who's doing advanced work? Google and Microsoft seem to have the only big remaining CS research labs in the US.

  • The cycle continues (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @02:19PM (#12324176) Homepage Journal

    It's not surprising. It's a repeating cycle in the computer professions. We are now near the end of the doom and gloom phase. CS enrollments drop, less new IT professionals enter the field. Salaries stabilize. IT spending goes up, shortage of IT workers drives salaries up. Freshmen read about high salaries in IT and flock to CS. HR depertments hire any warm body to fill IT positions, then wonder if being dead might be OK if the mortition did a good enough job.

    The party phase lasts a year or two. With salaries about as high as they will get, companies resort to other benefits to get enough IT workers. Suit and tie required becomes just try to make sure the holes in your shorts don't show the naughty bits and wash your flip-flops occasionally. Have a manicure and a massage!

    Then the bubble bursts again. Queue massive layoffs. The corpses and warm bodies wash out of the field again. The swollen ranks of CS majors graduate at just about the worst possable time. Freshmen hear about the out of work graduates and choose nearly any other major.

  • Who cares? As a programmer, I think it's funny. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by crazyphilman ( 609923 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @02:43PM (#12324315) Journal
    It is completely natural that far fewer people are studying computer science. The corporate jobs have gone overseas, and what they haven't offshored they've hired H1-Bs and L-1s for. An entire sector of employment has evaporated here in the U.S, just as it did with the steel industry, the garment industry, the automotive industry... And the kids can read the writing on the wall. Good for them! I hope they find something they can be successful in.

    I remember when the mechanical engineering field collapsed, back in the nineties. Auto manufacturing had gone overseas and thanks to NAFTA, to Mexico and Canada, so there weren't many jobs available. On top of that, the defense industry in California dried up, putting hundreds of thousands of experienced engineers out on the street. At that time, Mech.E was being called "the new liberal art".

    Computer science is going through that right now. The computer science major is now just like an art or physics major -- no prospects. The only people who'll study computer science nowadays are people who LIKE it, career notwithstanding.

    Think about art majors, for example. They know they're not going to get a corporate job or make a lot of money. They know they're pretty much in for the whole "starving artist" thing, that they'll end up working some joe job to pay for their materials, and that the likelihood of their making it big is pretty minimal. They do it anyway, because they see majoring in art as an end in itself rather than a career path. If they hit something just right, they might make it big. Even if they don't, they'll probably be able to make a little money on the side here and there and supplement their income.

    It's going to be exactly the same for computer science majors, with one (beneficial) difference: computer science majors will usually be able to find a computer-related job that pays their bills, and they MIGHT be able to score something in civil service or academia and even be successful.

    This isn't that important. It's mostly going to be used by corporations to justify increased outsourcing, and by colleges to justify increased advertising and the pursuit of federal grants.

    It's bullshit in other words, not in the sense that enrollment ISN'T dropping (it IS) but in the sense that they claim it matters (when it doesn't).

  • CS is not understood (Score:3, Insightful)

    by soldack ( 48581 ) <soldacker@yLIONahoo.com minus cat> on Saturday April 23, 2005 @04:47PM (#12324988) Homepage
    I have a BS in computer science and am in currently getting my masters. I have worked in the industry for 9 years or so and I love it. I find that people don't seem to understand what working as a computer scientist means. They also don't understand the infinite variety of things you can work on. I have lead a varied life for a programmer I think. Everytime I think I have done it all something new comes along and I am interested again. They don't understand the amount of creativity that can be involved. In some cases art can be involved. In some ways I think that computer science is the ultimate mix of art and science, creativity and logic.

    If people really do feel that a shortage of computer scientists, electical engineers, and information technology folks is coming, they should do something about it! I feel that schools don't offer nearly enough grants for these areas. I also feel that years of success in industry have drained away many of the good teachers.

    People who work in these fields need to try to spread the word about just what is that we do. I know folks who make software for video phones, rc cars, navy ships, stock traders, and massive computer clusters. There are so many things that you can do in this field. Many of them help people (like medical products) are innovative (music/video players), artistic (video games/web sites), etc.

    I think if people really understood what is done in these fields more would be interested in it.

    As for salary...I know quite a few software and hardware engineers and they all seem to be doing pretty well. CS is like any other field where you have to work hard to do well and move up.

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