U.S. Students Shun Computer Science, Engineering

n9fzx writes "The San Jose Mercury News reports on a study by the Computing Research Association which finds that 'Undergraduates in U.S. universities are starting to abandon their studies in computer technology and engineering amid widespread worries about the accelerating pace of offshoring by high-technology employers.' Enrollment in those fields has dropped by 19% in the past year alone." Update: 03/24 23:40 GMT by CN : jlechem wrote in with a related story: "Wired News has a story about how American companies are outsourcing not because of cheap labor but because of the American school system not being up to snuff. In a report by the AeA, they contend that American schools don't teach enough math and science anymore."

Comments

Re:On the bright side,

[Pinball Wizard]

jeez...where are some of you people going to school anyway? I'm finishing up my junior year at UNM and already I have done the following:

taken standard algorithms out of CLR and improved upon them, then wrote extensive papers on how much these were improved(quicksort, skiplists) over the published algorithms.

written a logo(you know, turtle graphics) interpreter in Scheme. A fricken 2000-line interpreter in Scheme.

written malloc(as one of many examples) in assembly language.

wrote a hash table class that fully implements the java.util.Map interface and then used it as part of my own custom spam filtering program - the spec also made it so it would work on any UNIX system with procmail.

This is but a subset of what I've had to do, and I'm not even in my senior year yet! I don't go to Carnegie Mellon or MIT either, I go to UNM. And yet I constantly read about stories such as yours where people are graduating with CS degrees without having to do much work.

At any rate, take heart - at least some of us will be graduating knowing something about CS.

(of course this may explain why even C students from here get recruited by Microsoft, IBM, HP, et. al.)