Fewer Computer Science Majors

skrysakj writes "USA today reports that there are fewer undergraduate students choosing computer science related majors in the USA. What really woke me up was their statement that only 6% of the worlds engineers are educated in the USA. Before there was a dot-com bubble to burst, I knew lots of *amazing* programmers and IT professionals who had non-IT degrees, so how is this new trend any different than before?"

Comments

Get a degree but not in tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically this post can be summed up in a few sentences:

I knew lots of *amazing* programmers and IT professionals who had non-IT degrees
You need to BS boots rather than a BS degree. It sucks but you have to play the game play - say things like sir, thank you, and yes I can develop 2.57 billion lines of code this month all with zero defects fully tested delivered signed and sealed. Let me say that if you don't have a degree today, you have closed a lot of doors yourself. Very few will hire you without a degree - why should someone unless there is nepotism. Get a degree where you work closer to the money and make tech a secondary skill.

43% of computer science and engineering recipients are non-resident aliens
Our government is making it a little harder to float into the country. Now the schools are whining about loosing revenue - tuition must be cheaper here than overseas (hard to imagine)?

computer science and computer engineering majors in the USA and Canada fell 23% vs. the year before
Students of today are not stupid. Would you choose the tech field today? You would be better off getting a MBA and if you like the tech stuff than you can still assist with it but you have to be closer to the money or your at risk of someone else making your life decisions.

Re:Get a degree but not in tech

[tarunthegreat2]

It is most certainly not the tuition that's sending people to USA. It's the hope that the student visa gets turned into a work visa which gets turned into a green card, which means that some day 17 years from the time of getting your student visa, you may be an American, provided you aren't murdered for being a no-good-foreigner-living-off-the-fat-o-the-land, and that your boss doesn't fire you when the going gets rough. There's that and the fact that in my country at least(India), it's exactly 15,000 times harder to get into a local college, considering the size of our population. The hardest b-school to get into in the entire world is IIM Ahmedabad. Compare that to the Admissions Page for Stanford. The same is true for engineering schools...We're leaving India for a lot of reasons, and one of them is the past few generations' high fornication (and fertility) rate. That's one of the reasons why there are so many non-resident aliens in yer schools