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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."
This might actually result in a higher quality crop of students in the next few years.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Probably won't happen. I was a freshman for the same thing 4 years ago, and now i'm lucky to find work down at the local grocery store. I suggest you switch to something more lucrative. I really don't blame the students in the article either. Its a shame too.
Ban Reality TV!
Yes, applications to US Universities are down in EE and CS, but you'll find the biggest drop was in international student applications. Recent restrictions on international students have made the US a painful choice for higher education. I think this facet of the enrollment drop has been glossed over for the most part in the media. I was unaware until I spoke with some people in my EE departement's graduate admissions office. Granted, exporting jobs causes some of this, but let's take a look at all the causes.
Should you need one to get a job doing this type of thing? Definitely not.
Should you need a CS degree to design automobile software, space shuttle software, large distributed programs, the next generation networking protocols, etc.? Yes, but you should probably have a masters/phd or a lot of proven experience in addition.
The purpose of a CS degree has been lost on me personally, I don't think most major institutions are providing what anyone really wants or needs.
The economy of the US churns out fewer jobs PER MONTH than the estimated population growth.
The census estimates indicate an estimated total growth of about 26,000,000 people between 2000 and 2010, which (assuming a linear progression, which might actually be reasonable seeing that our primary driving force behind population growth is immigration these days) amounts to 223,000 new persons per month. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics there were net 21,000 jobs added to reported payroll in Feb. (latest statistics) which is seen by most as a "recovering" figure compared to, oh, the previous eight to eighteen months.
Not to mention that changes in those reporting rules now mean that a "McDonalds Certified Culinary Engineer" is now considered an equivalent "job" to one in the skilled manufacturing sector.
I'm glad you feel very sanguine about the situation, however. Keep up the cheerleading.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
>A lot of this stuff has nothing to do with what i consider computer science.
Then you, sir, clearly haven't the foggiest clue what computer science is.
>(I have been programming for 10 years).
Programming is to Computer Science as scrubbing test tubes is to Molecular Biology. How many molecular biology majors pride themselves on how many years they've been cleaning the dishes after dinner?
>Why do I need to prove that the PowerSet of Set A
>intersection Set B is the same as the PowerSet of
>A intersection the PowerSet of B (P(A inter B) =
>P(A) inter P(B)).
Because... much of Computer Science *is* mathematics... and if you don't understand basic set theory, you haven't a prayer of surviving since all of modern mathematics is based on set theory.
You are of the, depressingly common, opinion that computer science is about writing programs. For the last and final time: this is wrong. Period.
Programming is a trade skill. Like plumbing. Its a skilled trade, to be sure, but its a TRADE... it is not a science.
Don't blame your computer science program because *you* are massively ignorant of the subject in which you have chosen to major. This is your own fault, not theirs. They are trying to teach you science, when all you want to learn is a trade.
Drop out, and go to one of the many fine trade schools out there that will teach you "C++ programming in 6 months". If all you want to learn is the craft of programming, you are simply going to be miserable in a computer *science* program.
Its rather analogous to taking a degree in Physics to learn how to operate a microwave oven.
It was insanely difficult, and as an experienced programmer whose contributed significantly to several major OS project and started two of his own, I nearly drowned. The graduation rate was 30%. Even then a lot of people who could only be described as dildos made it through.
I was *appalled* one day when a friend called me from la sierra university down the street, he was having trouble with one of his assignments, "Did I have a minute?" His assignment -- write a program that converted Celsius to Fahrenheit. Specifically, he was stuck on the algebra of the situation. He didn't understand the equation 9/5x+32.
That being said, these corporations are full of shit, these people are quickly weeded out. Look through the smoke screen. There is a pool of talented engineers working at Walmart and living with their parents, if they're having trouble finding them they aren't looking.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
It's funny, I graduate last year an Ivy League Institution with a degree CS and I would be more then happy to have that job. At least then I wouldn't have to be searching for a job in the retail sector. I have a $160,000 education and yet I can't even get a job selling computers at circuit city.
Sure, as you all can call me young, you can cite my inexperience, but you can't cite my intelegence, nor can you cite my ambishions nor my abilities.
You forgot "totally incapable of spelling".
Hooray!
Computing needs more people who refer to those who have difficulty with software as tards.
After all, it's these elite few who give us the breathtaking inscruitable syntax seen in Perl, Lisp and Haskell. I salute you!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I say that's BS. I went to high school in the 70s; it was incredibly lax. I used to make a point of doing all of my homework each day in the 25-minute study hall at lunch hour. I could do it because they just didn't give us that much work.
When I look on the news I always see people saying that we need to pile more and more work on students, and that they need to spend more time learning math and science and computers. Well, my high school had exactly one PDP-8 shared by 2000 students, and (much to my dismay) physical education was the top priority class (8 semesters required). My math and science classes were a breeze for most of the students.
I went to one of the top engineering universities in the US and graduated in the top 1%. There were plenty of others like me there who did well despite not having been subjected to a fascist K-12 regime. While I was there I often saw groups of those highly-educated foreign students huddling at tables struggling to do their studies communally. Their background allowed them to eventually crank through their work, but without much imagination or independence. In contrast, I often figured out a unique shortcut to get the work done quickly so that I could get out to happy hour.
How could this be? I think that it was because the culture in the USA promoted experimentation and self-initiative. I learned more playing around on my own with soldering irons, model rockets, home-built pyrotechnics, my teenage-punk muscle car, etc. than any high-school lab could have taught.
I think that if we're having problems cranking out good engineers today, it's because we've lost that edge in instilling self-initiative in kids. Maybe it's because everything is so pre-fab today, like the way it's hard to find a set of generic Lego bricks, and kids don't have to use their imaginations as much. Maybe it's because there are fewer areas left where a guy tinkering in his garage could make a breakthrough like the original Apple computer, so people just don't try. Maybe it's because parents don't spend as much time with their kids; I learned a huge amount of stuff doing projects with my dad. I don't know, but I sure don't think that cramming more work onto school children is going to fix it. Creating a top-notch engineer is a much more complex process than a bunch of school assignments.
You might get a job as a patent lawyer, where you'll have to adapt what you learned in your comp. sci. cirriculum to your real-life job.
I majored in math and work in IT now. I shunned all comp sci offerings while I was at school, but I loved math while I was there. I've worked at aquiring skills a typical comp sci person has straight out of school, but you know what, I've got a big advantage over a lot of them because of skills I learned studying math, logic and basic problem solving. Basic abstract reasoning skills are far more important than specialized knowledge.
I'd do it exactly the same way if I had to do it again.
This is the problem with IT anyway, and probably the reason for this. Too many people have been studying it because they can make bundles of cash when they get done.
Bzzzzt. Wrong!!! Do what you love, the money will come. Anyway, it won't matter so much if it doesn't as long as you love what you're doing.
If people are flocking away from engineering and comp sci in droves, I say GOOD, since they're probably the ones pricipally motivated by the perceived economic advantage of it anyway! Maybe we'll get someone to come out with a degree in one or the other that cares about something other than the paycheck for a change.
Education should be and end in itself, not a means to an end.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
Logic, abstract reasoning, problem solving, and mathematics are the "specialized knowledge" taught in CS. Heck, CS is basically a branch of applied mathematics.
I think you're mistaking CS with Software Engineering. Either that, or your uni's "comp sci offerings" were really Software Engineering courses in disguise, which isn't all that uncommon, unfortunately.
What's interesting is the lack of these basic skills in so many people I've encountered with CS degrees in my working life.
It's downright shocking, even, how unadaptable some of these people are. Many BS in CS people I've worked with spent all their time learning (insert programming language of choice here) and failed to learn the basic lessons programming teaches. It seems like a lot of these people missed the forest for the trees, which is part in parcel to the point I was driving at.
As for loving what they do, in my IT department of ~50 people, I'd say a scant 15% of them are interested enough in what they do for a living to work on something related but outside the scope of their actual 9-5 required teching. I couldn't be happier that I've found something I like enough that when I hang it up for the day at the Windows shop, I want to go home and mess with my Debian box, or hack an XBox, or read advisories on www.cert.mil, or post on /. or whatever.
Seems like most of my colleagues can't punch out fast enough so they can forget about tech for another day.
It's lame, and sort of sad.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
I went to one of the top engineering universities in the US and graduated in the top 1%. There were plenty of others like me there who did well despite not having been subjected to a fascist K-12 regime.
I want to applaud you for your creativity and your development of skills even when put in a lax system. But let me tell you that that's not the case for everyone. Many people in the US are losing their teenage years doing shit when they should be using the scholastic system of the state for their education and skills. I blame the lax education system of the US, extreme individualism of students, lack of respect towards teachers, lack of understanding of the importance of education from the parents' part, and (this one is personal) the people that argue all the time with the teacher (I say STFU and learn, then talk).
For example, the math they teach in Korean highscools surpasses that which is taught in US highschools by far. The fact that there are highschool students struggling with the mathematic problems in the SATs is a sad reality. I lived in Korea for 9 years and I sucked at math (btw, I still suck at it)... I probably got some of the lowest scores in my class. Still the SAT math was very easy for me. My classmates in Korea saw the SAT's math part and couldn't believe that this was the level of math required in the US to enter college.
If you take the average GPA of a student from the US and that from one from Asia (I'm getting too general here), the US student might have a higher score. But you have to be aware that the content learned in Asian highschools is extremely advanced. The competition in their system is just mindblowing. Competition is necessary to screen who can make it to the best universities, who can make it to a university in the city(i.e. Tokyo, Seoul), and who has to go to the crappy outer universities.
I'll take the example of Korea one more time... Students go to school from 7am to 9pm during weekdays(some schools till 11pm). Many students have to go to academic institutions to study more after they get out of school at night. Many get back home after 12am to wake up 6 hours later. On Saturdays many have to stay in school till 6pm. Some schools even make students come on Sundays. Most highschools make students go to school during the vacations. It doesn't matter if it's raining, snowing, hailing(?), or even if they're in war... a student's duty is to go to school to get educated. You might think this is an exaggeration; it's not. The average number of subjects a student has to take a year is over 12. They have to excel in all their subjects to make it to a good university. I don't want to talk much of the crap they have to go through in class... but just to list a few things that happened while I went to school; teachers hit students, they can use sticks (hockey sticks, pool sticks, brooms) or simply punch you, punishments are crazy, you'll be sorry if you're a smoker and get caught smoking, no questions are asked in class, you're dead if you yawn in front of the teacher, you eat lunch in the classroom, you clean up your classroom... I could go on forever. All of this is done to 'discipline' students who 'don't know what's right'. The punishments and the hitting are slowly disappearing.
I'm not trying to say that the Korean or Asian way is better or that it is 'good'. And not everyone in the Asian schooling system turns out to be a genius. Many people simply can't endure the mental and physical whiplash imposed on them. But, I'm just trying to say that there's a whole different world out there getting their brains fried with education. So, if you want to compete in the future, you better get those kids of yours a *real* education.