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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?"
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I was recently "orphaned" in my program - a degree/diploma compsci/telecom course in Canada. The college providing the telecom/IT portion of my classes has dissolved their IT department, and while they'll finish any students still in classes, we're now orphans...
With everyone hearing about how the tech industry is still doing crappy overall, and how jobs are getting outsourced, it's no wonder compsci enrollment's down...
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
--lawyers
--patent lawyers
--or reality tv "stars"
Are there really any other careers in America these days?
Getting back to CS, it's a very different job landscape then 8-10 years ago. They only "safe" CS job in America is one where you get a security clearance and work on government related projects that can't be farmed out due to security constraints.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Gee, should I major in a field that is virtually guaranteed to be completely outsourced to the Thirld World in five years, or should I study something like mathemtatics, physics, or engineering that will not miasma of death associated with that field? Better yet, from a purely job-oriented point of view, maybe I should major in Dental Hygeine--hard to make an economic argument to Westerners for teeth cleaning in India or China.
After all the flood of comp sci majors realized they couldn't make $150,000 with just a degree and no ambition or geeky desire of computers, people stopped choosing that major. A lot of schools were rushing them through and dumbed down the curriculum to get them through. People just chose computer science not because they liked computers, but they thought they'd have an easy job that paid well. The job market became flooded with these people who could maybe use windows and simple programming, but not much else. I've read accounts on slashdot of people saying how many people in their classes could barely use a CLI. I'm happy there are less comp sci majors, it takes away the needless competition facing the good ones.
In my case, it would be that university professors have less knowledge than the students. Students in the computer science classes are writing their "final" programs in less than 10 minutes. Running pentiums with windows 98 first edition in the computer science lab doesn't make me want to jump up and become a computer science major, either. Maybe if the professors were a bit more qualified and had real world experience instead of learning how to program from a book it would be helpful.
http://dont.spam.me.anymore.com
I'm going into my senoir year in CS this fall at a university who has their CS degree in the engineering college. I help out with some of the college recruiting things and you wouldn't believe the number of people who want to come to a CS degree for game programming. Just because there isn't the big $$ involved all the time doesn't mean people are still coming to CS degrees for the wrong reasons.
Those that do come into the program for this usually end up dropping out or switching to a non-engineering major because they want to PLAY games all the time and not do the stuff like algorithm design and analysis that the CS degree requires.
Actually, from talking to everyday "non-geek" people, I find that they're all still under the impression that there is alot of money to be made in CS. So I bet the people leaving the field ARE the real geeks who love computers. I bet they're all waking up and realizing that if they want to survive (and afford their expensive habit if you will), they need to get a real job that pays...
I'd venture to say the poeple sticking with it are still mostly money grubbers who are going to have a very surprising wake up call when they graduate.
Maybe all the real geeks are going over to MIS...anyone compare the decline in CS to the numbers from business schools???
I'd like to see them...
I orignally wanted to do Computer Science since I wanted to make computer games. However, after taking a bunch of high level CS courses, I learned tha CS is not just programming. There is a ton of crazy math crap that I have to learn. Before college, I would have never imagined that mathmatical induction would play a vital role in computer science. All I really wanted to do in CS was just to make computer games and the more higher level courses I took, the detached the work was from game programming. I know a real programmer should know the complicated math behind it, but CS no longer appealed to me the same way it used to so I switched majors to Human-Computer Interaction since it was much closer to what I wanted than CS (now I am just minoring in CS).
"Graduate programs haven't seen the same decline yet."
When I got my masters degree in CS 4 years ago, it seemed that about 45% of the grad students were from China, 45% were from India, and the rest of the 10% of us were US citizens. Since the graduate community in this country is already overwhelmingly foreign, that might explain why these numbers have remained stable.
My school which shall rename nameless has two levels to the CS program. There is a regular undergrad with about 400 people and a professional program. Now out of those 400 people, my school looks at your grades in art, math, physics, and everything except CS courses (mostly because by the time you're applying for the pro-program you haven't taken any) and grabs the top 95.
This left me high and dry, as I had an issue with a math class. I asked the head undergrad advisor and he told me to wait a few years and enrollment in CS should drop.
Next I walked over to the Math Department and got my degree in Mathematical Science with a Computer Science focus and a Computer Science minor.
The point is, rather than basing the program on skill (currently I write software that Cisco uses in hardware diagnostics) some universities are basing it on grades. The system needs to be overhauled to judge the skill of the programmers, not their book smarts.
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I'm an IT Professional with a non-IT degree, I read psychology. It's actually come in more handy than an IT degree probably would have. Not only was it a big help in landing the job in the first place (the value of being different from the herd). The content itself has continued to be timely and useful even ten years on, be it a behavioural approach to OO systems or knowing what makes meetings more productive.
;)
I'd recommend any beginning IT professional to minor/subsid in a good psychology course, it'll last you a lot longer than some of your IT knowledge
Developer A - Architect, super-badass.. self-taught, went to MIT for 1 year but has no college degree. 2nd Youngest of bunch. (late 20s)
Developer B - Me, Senior Developer, pretty good all-around coder and designer, went to college for 2 years but didn't do much with it and has no degree. Youngest of bunch. (mid 20s)
Developer C - Developer, Masters in Psychology and some other discipline of that type (non-comp related). Pretty good developer, but not great. (2nd oldest of bunch) (Early 30s)
Developer D - Junior developer, Masters in Computer Science.. can't grasp anything bigger than a small feature, all code has to be reviewed by someone higher up. (oldest of bunch) (Late 30s)
What does this tell me? Experience and work-skill are a *lot* more important than degrees. This is just one small example, but most every company I've ever worked for, the super-badasses never had degrees, and were all either self-taught or had a little bit of college, and tended to eventually rise to the top.
-- Jinsaku
What do you expect from a country where education and intelligence is not a "High priority"? Education is competition, meaning tomorrow's educated students, who become business men could be your next big competitor. And as everyone knows in the USA people don't matter, Big business does. Yes business's would not be around if people couldn't buy their products, so they (we) get paid just enough to buy their products. And for those who can't afford it, that's what credit cards are for. We are losing a battle, not just with the rest of the world dealing with education, business, ethics(?) but a battle of bettering ourselves and giving our children a chance to survive in the future.
TruePunk | Games
While I suspect that many of these distence learning programs ARE b.s., I had to reply to this because I am a student at Univ. of Phoenix in their IT program, which is not .b.s. This school actually has a very good reputation among companies, and for the most part turns out quality students. Also, it is more difficult than any "traditional" college that I have attended (no, I have not attended juco's). This degree has a wide range of learning including management, as well as the more technical side of things (programming, large scale planning, etc.). I can definitely see your point though as I even have a few in my class who have deluded themselves into thinking they are going to jump right into management and make the "big buck". Rest assured though, there are those of us who realize that a degree like this gives us a good all around foundation to BUILD on. Those who think they should start telling more experienced people what is what with a degree like this won't last long. Sorry for the ramble, but I felt it necessary to defend what is a good educational institution :)
Starting in 2004, the Computer Science major at UC Berkeley is no longer impacted. That is, you don't have to compete to get into it, even though you're already a student. Not because the program grew, but because the demand shrinked.
:-P
Also, I did get my degree in CS because I love it, so there
While I see the overall point of what you are saying, I want to add my own nitpick in saying that programming has a lot to do with engineers.
I, too, have a Mechanical Engineering background and an Electrical Engineering Degree. I have worked on autonomous robots (which the engineers programmed, not CS students), VoIP over WDM in a telecommunications research lab (programming is required for things like OPNET, and certainly this has to do with IT. All of the people in the lab are EEs, because hardware to software knowledge is necessary), a hybrid electric vehicle (someone had to put in a vision system and program the touch-screens), and intrusion detection sensors for military use (Assembly coding is key here and no one was CS).
I suppose, though, that one could say that today's engineers are having to take on the role of programmer in addition to their design duties.
The engineering profession, at least it seems, has been fairly stable. While the engineering position can incorporate the programming position in some cases, you usually don't find the opposite true. That is why you are seeing engineers hired into positions, and CS knowledge is encouraged in many engineering programs.
That said, I am working on my masters in EE, and am switching to CS because I have had enough offers in the CS area and was invited to join an awesome program that requires CS degrees. I already have the one degree in engineering. I would like to finish the EE masters degree, but I don't feel so bad going over to CS. Like I said, I have seen job offers regardless. And that is the point. The people who need to be there will be there. The folks that joined just for the money will have to find another venture, because the dedicated and CS talented workers usually outshine the "sunshine CS worker."
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
We have 4-5% of the population, and produce 6% of the engineers. Sounds like we're well ahead of the curve there. Not mind-numbingly ahead, but decently so.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The retention rate for computer science was low even in 1998. I began with 275 computer science majors and by the next year there were only 75 remaining. The coursework is difficult and requires true commitment. Maybe it begins because people want the money, but once they see the road ahead most back out to an IST, CIS, or MIS major.
Two of the best professors I ever had for programming started out as chemists. I started out as a chemical engineer, hated it, and went to graduate school to switch to programming. Great programming is a passion, and people that love it find it eventually, even if they did not start out doing it. That is probably like alot of fields.
I think this is more a case of an apples to oranges comparison -- almost everyone coming out of Soviet universities, for example, was an "engineer". The same people in the US would be getting business or economics degrees and going on to do pretty much the same jobs. It's more a reflection of the fashions and structures of the different educational systems than of real differences in what graduates learn and can do.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Education is always good. MBA's, MCIS's, etc. are not, however, education. They're fake degrees for fake people for the sole purpose of getting fake jobs. If you want to condemn yourself to PHBness as a career ... well, that's your choice. <shrug>
I'm not arguing against distance learning per se, only against the type of people who so often seem to think it's a good idea, and the type of schools that seem to cater to them.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Those non-CS background IT programmers typically program just sufficient to make things work. They don't care about data structures, complexity (things like big-O), scalability, etc, which is important to produce efficient code, when handling huge amount of production data. This is especially true in corporate settings when they want to deploy their projects fast to the end-users.
I don't mean that programmers with CS background will always do a better job, but at least they get formal CS training over a 3- or 4-year period, which cannot be comprehensively taught by a 1-year conversion course, assuming that these non-CS background people attempted to do such a course in the first place to 'convert' themselves.
Don't discount the online schools so quickly. I have been a programmer for about 10 years, and did not have a degree. To advance into management, a degree was pretty much a requirement. For somebody like me, Phoenix was ideal. I don't have the time to go to a campus (not to mention that there isn't a good school near me), and I really have no interest in doing so. At the same time, I needed to finish my degree to advance my career. University of Phoenix fit the bill nicely. I am about to complete a degree in MIS, and that, coupled with a decade of hard software development experience puts me in a good position for the future. While I agree that simply having a degree doesn't qualify you for "IT Management", I don't think that it is fair to single out online programs. Traditional 4 year brick and mortar institutions turn out just as many (more, probably) clueless wanabees.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Personally, I don't believe a degree means an awful lot. But, in current times, you definitely need to have one. I'm currently working as a sys admin, and I'm doing my degree at the same time. I can say that I have used less than 1% of the knowledge I have learnt via my degree in my job. When I get my degree, am I going to be a better sys admin? IMHO, no. However, it will be percieved that I will be able to do my job better....
I have a CS degree and have never written a line of code(professionally). I have, however, been a Network Technician and Administrator for more than 10 years(before that I chased electrons as a technician doing R&D work for a gov't agency). CS taught me some wonderfull ideas and concepts and is\has been a great tool in planning many projects. I'm just a gear-head with a degree in something I don't really use(like so many others with degrees), I just wanted the paper, tired of going to interviews and being asked why I never graduated. I just like the challenge of troubleshooting and fixing things and playing with computers and networks. The talent was first noticed by my dad when I took our first color TV apart and 'adjusted' it at age 6, after the ass-whupping I was encouraged to ask questions BEFORE I dismantled something. That's my rant and I'm sticking to it.
How to make a flawed argument sound reasonable:
Premise: There are many reasons to avoid the CS
major a few reasons not to do so.
Supporting arguments:
Elaborate on the many(2) and dissmiss(forget)
the few(0)
Then go with personal opinion that "ALL CS I
know are worthless as programmers". Clever!
Then try to tone it down a bit to sound credible.
Are you working for FOX news?
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
... and the best in your division. Why not just start your own company instead with your affected peer group? Walk away! You get to keep your brains, they don't. If your employer was able to pay you 6 figures average, that means they were making at least probably double that off of your labor. Screw em! They want a piece of paper instead of productivity, take your productivity to your own office and take all the cash, not some of it. The proof is in the product, not the degrees hanging on the wall.
And something the petit pompous bosses aren't bingoing to yet, even though it's staring at them. First they came for the blue collars who actually produced, and everyone else sneered and laughed at them, and told them to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Now they are coming for the white collar actual producers, telling them-and you- to pull yourselves up by the bootstraps "or else". Next they-they being the billionaire globalists who could give a rats ass about anyone else except their profits are going to start eating the lower level managers and sales people, and those dudes STILL think they aren't replaceable with outsourcing overseas. Ha! Sure they aren't!
Get self employed if you want to STAY employed, no matter what field you are in. Better to be employed at 50 or less a year then unemployed at whatever you used to make. And there's no profit for your soul working for cretins like that, and it's something you can't put a dollar tag on.
Computer Science is a facinating field of study, and a great hobby. Its a rotten career.
Its like being the high school nerd for the rest of your life. There are very few companies out there that truly respect their programmers, and with outsourcing becoming more and more popular, that trend isn't going anyway anytime soon.
College Students: It may sound GREAT to have a swell job where you get free coke and code all day. Thats because you associate coding and programing with learning and new discoveries. Every programming project, every new linux distrubution, every class has been something new and interesting. When you hit the real world, that ends. It becomes the same old shit everyday. Yes, you can learn on your own, but that isn't your job. Sure, i'm "learning" C#
I myself am halfway through my masters in a different field so I can change my career. Do you really think you'll be excited about working on version 6 of the same product you've been working on for 5 years? Do you think you'll be able to switch jobs at a whim when you get bored?
I make it a part of my life to talk young people out of entering technical fields. Maybe when our society starts respecting us, instead of treating us like we're a bunch of strange teenagers, i'll change my mind.
BTW: I've made my own situation better by demanding to do other tasks at work, and again, working towards a new career in my spare time. I see so many programmers hit their early 30s and really hate their jobs. Think before you choose a career with computers.
University of Phoenix is not some fly-by-night get your deploma in 3 weeks school. It is a fully accredited school which provides working adults a viable alternative. I know several people who have graduated from there and have given them good marks for the experience and education they provide.
Not to learn how to do things. The whole key to learning is being excited about the subject. Rarely can a teacher do that. Today schools, be it university, college or high school is not about inspiring creative thought and self motivation. It's about a grade and a paper. I went to school to read literature, since I knew I would program for a living. Not that I know everything, but I knew I felt it would teach me all the wrong things. Instead I read the classics and learned about things I wasn't aware of. No teacher did this for me. A teacher's greatest job is to identify what a student is interested in and point them in that direction.
As a grad student, I was an instructor for an intro to C course. I was totally amazed at the number of students who had no idea how to use a computer. I had gone into teaching the course with the invalid assumption that most of my students were really interested in computers and that is what led them to CS - they knew the 'how' and wanted to learn the 'why'.
I couldn't have been further from the truth. 90% of the class thought computers were a 'good field' to get into. Thus, they came into my course without even knowing what computer programming was. When I tried to show them how to use gcc to compile a single-file program via a shell, I think I blew their minds. This same 90% had never typed commands into a computer before. Everything was 'folders' and 'icons'. The concept of an underlying system was so alien to them. It truly made teaching much more difficult.
My eyes were not fully opened until 2-3 weeks into the course. After class one day, I asked a pair of students why they decided to major in Computer Engineering. I was shocked when one of them said "We wanted to learn how to use computers."
Let me draw an analogy here. Consider chemical lab monkey. Their job is mixing things to make stuff, and performing any one of a batch of analysis techniques.
The most important skill for them to have is good lab procedure - keeping thing clean, labeled, and not spilling things. Also, knowing what to do if one of the above is not true.
This does not need a degree in chemistry (and I say that as a chamietry graduate). The depth of understanding required isn't that great - once you know how to do a titration, you look up the precise set of reagents to use to perform a specifc test. Compare this to a programmer, whose is much the same situation - know the basic principles for a set of techniques, and then looks up the specifics if needed.
Chemistry is very slightly older than programing / computer science. So, if you look at how the split between laboratry workers and the hardline theorists worked out, that might give some insight into how the programming field might develop, right?
Well, there are no seperate qualifications for laboratory work. The nearest thing is stopping the path to a degree before graduauation - be it after highschool, or with something that's equivelent to the first year or two of a bachelors.
Most places, however, when they want some to work thats mostly turning the handle reactions or analysis look for a degree.
For good or ill, then, I suspect that trying to split off programming and CS will come to nothing.
People seem to forget that the US has only 5% of the world's population. So if we're educating 6% of the world's engineers, we're educating 20% more engineers per capita than the average country. Still seems like a fairly low number to me, but it's not as bad as it sounds.
Forget about getting a state or federal technical job without a degree. Most require a degree to "weed people out." And the higher the degree, the more you earn, regardless of actual job duties. That's been my experience.
This is not true.
I have been interviewing and many of the places do have outsource teams but still need in house people. I myself have had to manage outsource teams. A team in Russia or India has a few drawbacks that are insurmountable. Here are some examples:
1) If you have proprietary secret methods in your code, you have to realize that you will lose the secrecy if you outsource to another country since there is effective way for you to enforce a trade secret across International boundaries because all the oursource countries have corrupt and ineffective legal systems.
2) Without your physical presence you aren't taken as seriously. It's harder to communicate exactly what you want without a whiteboard and brainstorming session. Using a one-way channel such as spec documents or using the telephone is not as good because you cannot judge reactions and see where people are, or aren't getting what you are telling them.
3) MANY companies want long term employees so that the time and knowledge they invest in them doesn't walk out the door. This is a more serious consideration than I thought when I started interviewing recently. When you outsource you are basically wasting any long term investment you have in people. Every company I interviewed with was concerned about my "staying power" because I have a bit of contract work on my resume.
It is probably ok to outsource code-monkey jobs where there is nothing new being done, but if you have any investment in actual Intellectual Property you are making a fatal mistake by outsourcing (to another country).
Be careful what you say.. I believe the computer was not invented in the USA, and a few others there are questionable. I think Canada, Scotland and the USA may claim Bell as their own. Anyhow, the US was helped to become the great superpower by many factors, one of the most important was the destruction of Europe after WWII. andrew
I'm not USA-bashing in the slightest. I love most aspects of your country (except your current administration *g*) and undoubtedly your technological contribution to the planet is extremely disproportionate to a simple population count.
But considering how much of the worlds "technological advancements" have occured in Europe and Japan/Asia, for example, I don't see why it should be surprising that European and Asian engineers can get a perfectly decent education there, rather than travelling to the US.
Remember, the number of engineers in the world educated in the US is going to be basically equivalent to the number from/in the US (which will roughly follow population - granted, population as a % of first-world nations would be the only useful metric here), plus the number of aliens who made a huge specific effort to study abroad.
In that context I'm forced to agree with the grandparent, I really don't see 6% as all that surprising.
I'd like to expand on your statement about drones and geeks. Geeks are almost never in hiring positions. The next time I'm asked by a drone "what was your biggest challenge...", this is what I'll say:
"My biggest challenge in professional life has not been professional development - I like my job and keep myself current. Nor is it technical - I've never found a problem which I could not solve given enough time and energy. My biggest challenge has been other people. If you are thinking I don't communicate well, that's only half of it. You see, the average person can not learn something without formal training; even the few who can often never take the initiative to do so. I love computer science; I keep myself current - I follow it the way a sports fan follows baseball or football or golf. But, because the hiring manager often cannot learn of their own volition, and certainly not without formal training, they naturally believe that if I haven't formal documentation of training or experience in a particular skill, I can't possibly know it, much less have mastered it. The notion of one thinking about their profession every waking moment is completely foreign to them; they cannot understand how someone can learn, and even master a skill without formal training. And sadly, they often pick someone of lesser skill and intelligence because that person happened to realize that they couldn't teach themselves; that person chose to be formally trained rather than to discover and understand."
"I would say that overcoming ignorance is probably the largest challenge that I've ever faced. The problem is two-fold; first, there is an unwillingness to learn, and second, there is an inability to understand. Yes, I can explain it to them as I've just explained it to you. However, to someone who understands only what has been formerly taught to him, my words are of no effect - you see, he doesn't learn unless in the classroom. Explaining anything to such a person won't enlighten them, but only confuse them. Such a person resists adding to their knowledge, because they themselves lack the ability to discern truth from falsehood - instead, they rely on authority to form their opinions. And since I'm not in a position of authority, they simply disregard whatever I've said, unless I happen to mention terms with which they are familiar. They understand facts, not relationships; they can grasp buzzwords, but don't understand the technology. And unfortunately, they lack the ability to think anything beyond what they immediately perceive."
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
A different kind of training is still a big distinction even if eventual careers are similar. I think it's very fair to make this comparison.
To the grandparent - you identified the wrong countries. The number 1 country generating engineering graduates these days is China, followed by - you guessed it - India. These are both countries that have an enourmous demand for engineers as they pull themselves out of the third/second world. Manufacturing engineers are particularly in demand and China especially has thousands of them employed. These engineers aren't neccesarily doing the same level of technical work as their counterparts in the west, but the massive supply of them allows china to drive down prices for manufactured goods to a point where it's almost impossible to compete. There was a really good article on this in the economist a couple months ago, do some googling for "the China Price" and you'll probably find more info.