Slashdot Mirror
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/
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.
about 75% of the worlds lawyers. maybe that why sco in such a pickle
Supply and demand, no?
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
This is a no-brainer. Most people in computer science got into it because they heard there was money in it - not because they had a love for it. Now that it's become clear that compsci's not a crap shoot when it comes to getting a high-paying job, they're jumping ship like there's airborne HIV on board.
Only the true geeks (the ones who love the stuff) will stay with it even when it gets rocky.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
- The press reports explosive growth in an industry
- The press reports that there are not enough workers in a particular industry
Both of those items imply a higher salary. This is not new. Students who don't have a true interest in something before they get to college will nearly always opt to go where the money is. When the expected salary dries up, they look elsewhere. It's happened over and over in the past and, I expect, will continue. Those are the students who do have a true interest in the computer field before they get to college. Again, this is not new, and virtually every job segment has people like this.Speaking as an employer, I'm very happy with this trend. The quality of graduates with programming degrees has been absolutely terrible for years now.
What really woke me up was their statement that only 6% of the worlds engineers are educated in the USA.
I'm not sure why this is seen as surprising. This is actually pretty good, given that Americans make up less than 5% of the world population. America isn't particularly known for its long line of fine engineers (although there are many, I'd admit), or its large scale industry, being known better for the development of the service industries. I'd like to see the figures, but I'd put money that there are significantly more engineers coming out of industrial stalwarts like France, Germany, or Japan (which have large manufacturing sectors).
The article is followed by a bunch of ads for distance degrees, in which the University of Phoenix features prominently. Has there ever been a greater curse on the CS field than people getting degrees from places like this in the middle of the dot-com boom? The worst aspect, I think, being how many of these degrees are in "IT management" or some such garbage, thus turning out a whole bunch of apprentice PHB's who think they're qualified to tell people with real educations what to do. If the current decline in enrollment trims the fat by getting rid of those people, it won't bother me a bit.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What really woke me up was their statement that only 6% of the worlds engineers are educated in the USA.
This shouldn't be surprising. Since engineers are naturally capable people, they tend to be the type to start their own businesses and create with an education of their own appetite. Just because someone doesn't have a formal degree doesn't mean that they aren't "educated".
What about the proverbial millionaire/billionaire who dropped out of college to start [insert successful company here]. I know several.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I make my living as a programmer and database designer, though my formal education is in German literature and fine art.
Among the many great computer people I've worked with in the last 11ish years, about half had computer science (or for that matter engineering) degrees.
My brother writes insanely complex software for NASA, and his degrees are in aerospace engineering, not CS.
We all "played computers" back in the 70s, and now many of us work with them. Seems pretty natural to me.
TFA is really a FA (at USAToday? gasp!) in that it draws a scary picture based on very little real information.
Of course CS and related enrollment is down.... for the same reason it was up during the dot-comedy. These are perfectly normal cycles, and have precious little to do with the actual talent pool.
If you want to blame the lack of interest in engineering and science on something, blame it on the miserable quality of public schools in the US.
This Like That - fun with words!
with the outsourcing thing going on shouldn't we be expecting this?
in the mid-late 90s having a CS to a lot of people ment lots of money. they thought it was a secure job that paid well. now however it seems you actually have to want to program for a living to go into CS.
i have nothing wrong with that. the college i went to 70% of the undergrads changed majors by their sophmore year.
I find this a bit arrogant. The USA population doesn't even represent 5% of the world population. That's nothing compared to countries like India.
I knew lots of *amazing* programmers and IT professionals who had non-IT degrees
I knew lots of *amazing* programmers and IT professionals who had NO degrees. Desire for self-study combined with a willingness to take on resposibility went father than a whole room of antisocial PHDs.
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.
That said, I wish I had gotten a comp sci degree. I think it would have been much more "hands on" than my poli sci degree and would have been equally as interesting. As it was, I learned programming by myself, motivated by the many luminaries who said that many great hackers are self-taught. Nevertheless, I would have appreciated a general OS class, an algorithms class, or learning how to make a language with accompanying compiler. I'd love to learn how to make a runtime like Java or Python. I can code in Java and Python, but I want to understand the guts of it.
These are a few examples of things I think one would learn with a comp sci degree.
CS doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. To some, it's a computer degree. To others, it's a science degree.
At my school, there are three options:
1. Computer Applications - Learn how to use programs
2. Management Information Systems (MIS) - Learn how to write programs
3. Computer Science and Engineering - Learn how to write an operating system
You don't need a computer-related degree at all to be able to do any of these. I started programming when I was about ten years old, using the Apple IIe from my elementary school. By middle school, I was writing bulletin board door games and by high school I was writing my first applications.
In college, I was bored in the few programming classes I took (three weeks to learn conditionals?!) and started taking self-directed courses because I could teach myself better (with the aid of Google) than most of the profs I could take classes from.
Oh, and I was a Japanese major. Go figure.
It's not like us mechanical engineers had a sudden influx of phonies and money-grubbers in the dot com bubble.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
Implying that an MCSE is a path to a career in programming or computer science is like saying that a certificate in oil and air filter changing from Micks auto shop is a stepping stone into car engineering and design! Sorry , I'm not trying to be anti MS but MCSEs are just mickey mouse qualifications (and frankly a lot of other companys in house certs arn't much better). Learning to do A,B or C if X,Y or Z happens is NOT computer science!
If you want a well-rounded education where they teach you how to think, and focus on wisdom, rather than straight up knowledge which will be obsolete on graduation day anyway, go to a university.
"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.
I'm sorry, but there is a huge difference between a software crash course and a proper computer science or computer engineering degree.
A good CMPSCI or CMPEN program doesn't teach programming languages; they teach how to program in general and how to reason about programs. Once you master this, you can apply it to any language.
Too many people with these crase course certificates only care about getting something working, whereas understanding why it is working will always be better for the project in the long run.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
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
I'm in the middle of interviewing candidates right now to fill a junior network admin position, and the overwhelming vast majority who shout out their list of certifications loudest at the tops of their resumes, trying to look impressive, are proving to be the least knowledgeable of the whole bunch. All they know how to do is memorize a study booklet or braindump full of quick answers long enough to take a test. No thanks. The MCSEs are the worst. Even the Cisco CCNA's are getting to be just as bad. Part of my interview questions involves asking the candidate to write down a simple cisco extended access list to filter out all inbound connections except inbound http to a specific host, and only one had gotten it right (it's only three farkin' lines for crying out loud!!!) and he's not Cisco certified either. He's only got hands-on experience. That's what I'm looking for... EXPERIENCE. Paper certs be damned. The only problem with the good candidate is that he's not a citizen and needs company sponsorship to stay in the US. My company refuses to sponsor any more foreigners, having been burned too many times in the past by those who just stayed long enough to get some experience to put on their resumes, then bailed out on us to move back home when we could least afford to lose them.
Your sample size is so tiny, at best you can form a hypothesis (i.e. not a conclusion)! I guess you'd need a much larger workplace to actuallly carry out the experiments that could support or disprove your hypothesis.
... hence the nit-picking ...
Okay, I'm admittedly in the middle of preparing lectures for first-year science students
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
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.
as kids get into CS when there seems to be interesting things to do with computers.
The early PC boom of '81-'85 is one example, where JMU had about 200 CS majors. By the time the IBM-PC took over the world ('89), the general feeling was static, of things not really changing, not being interesting, not being worth a career. JMU's CS class of '93 (my class) was only 24 graduates -- and those of us who were programmer-hackers tended to prefer hanging out on the Unix boxes or the Vax/VMS system over the stoic IBM-PC (which we only went over to for playing games).
5 years later, in the midst of the internet and dot-com boom, things looked interesting and promising and people were really doing "new" things (in spite of what the granted patents of the time would tell us) and CS seemed an interesting thing to get into again. JMU's CS graduates got up to about 125 / year.
So now, the rush to do "new" stuff of the dot-com era is gone, people are back to just doing work for businesses that pay, which is rarely interesting, and the military has slowed down its spending on software in order to pay for the replacement weapons we've been detonating all over the mid-east. Add the outsourcing demonstrated by the dot-bomb fallout and it leads people to think that CS and the software industry is just business and not interesting (or lucrative) enough to bother with.
something will arrive in a couple of years which nobody would have predicted (hint: it isn't Longhorn, and like Netscape it WON'T come from Microsoft) and will spin the cycle round again.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Their are two kinds of computer professionals in the world; those who truly enjoy the tech (geek) and those who simply do their job (drone). The drone will do what is required, but only what is required. He takes no joy in his profession and marks time until he can leave it.
The geek on, the other hand, is the far more desirable employee. He'll keep up to date without prompting and will even educate himself on his own time. While work can be a grind, the satisfaction of doing it well is often enough compensation to keep him going. He'll even occasionally work for a lower paycheck if he finds an environment to his liking.
Unfortunately, while these two species can easily recognize each other on site, outsiders have a harder time differentiating. In an interview, the successful drone has a disconcerting ability to mimic the geek, casting a cloud of confusion around their true skill level. Conversely, the geek may not adequately convey their skill level to those not conversant in reading the signs.
I now see fewer drones than in years past. If this is a sign they are dying out, I welcome it.
For the record, I'm an Oracle DBA / developer with a BS in English Lit. The best geeks are, as always, self taught.
I think a lot of open source projects are proof that Comp Sci degrees are almost pointless.
:-).
I just graduated with CompSci degree and instead of being taken seriously at my new job, I am the new guy fresh out of college. I've been programming since I was 4 years old (Commodore 64), and I can confidently say I know more and code better than the guy who's been at this company for 10 years.
Experience is really the key. You have to know your stuff and be prepared to tackle tough problems. You have to be a great problem solver.
True, Engineering courses at school help you learn how to solve problems better, but those were only 5 really helpful courses and then there is the rest of liberal arts easy A stuff
... 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.
I think it is a good thing that there isn?t as many CS Majors as in the bubble. I was in the CS Major (doing the classes to get my major) from 1999-2001. During that time the bar of excellence was lowered repeatedly because a great number of the majors were doing it for the money and not the love of tech or computers. It was quite annoying to work hard and get a good score on a project or something like that, let?s say a mid A and then to have the proff slide everyone up, lets say a D to a C+. My grade couldn?t go up anymore but all of a sudden my knowledge of some material was equivalent to another that it wasn?t! I also got tired of the people who could barely get through high school algebra in the Major because they have repeatedly taken math up to what, the Calc I required and squeaked into the major. I can go on, but I think my point is made. Back in the bubble there were many people getting a CS degree for reasons other than the love of computers/tech and many people getting degrees in CS who should have been flipping burgers at McDonalds. The bursting of the bubble was a good thing, now the industry will be filled with better qualified, my passonate workers.
Nuttles
Christian and proud of it
First a disclaimer- one of my undergrad degrees is in CS, I did 3 years of a CS PhD program, and taught undergrad CS. My feelings on CS are colored accordingly
Could someone please explain to me why this is a bad thing? The economy cannot support the current numbers of IT professionals, as evidenced by the unemployment statistics. Further, outsourcing isnt entirely to blame for this, though I do see it mitigating job growth. Fewer CS majors means we will have a higher "signal to noise ratio", our universities will output higher quality CS grads, and the economy will have a better chance of supporting them with job opportunities.
The vast majority of people fleeing CS at the moment are doing so because they have no interest in the subject matter other than fiscal. Most of my freshman CS majors fell into this category in 2000-2001. Does this mean that we might miss the next Turing? Possibly, but truely great minds will find a way to enrich our society regardless of the field of study they pursue. If anything, these numbers are further evidence that the dot com bubble burst was a return to sanity.
As someone (dijkstra? soustroup? one of those guys with a funny name) said, computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Knuth said in his lectures on theology that he was not the person to ask if you had problems getting lotus 123 working. Computers are very useful to computer scientists in that they can perform the algorithms computer scientists study.
Why don't we change the name of computer science to something more appropriate. Algorithmics? Computational theory? (that one still comes too close to the word "computer") Symbolic processing? (and that one may just be my Lisp background showing through.)
I don't know. But I'm both amazed and saddened by how many job postings I see saying something like "need a cold fusion developer. Bachelor's in CS required." That's idiotic.
Computer science is not programming, though programming is a skill that most computer scientists need to ahve. Ditto networking, hardware troubleshooting, etc. But that's also true of physicists and chemists. Computer scientists study efficient means of transforming sets of symbols and numbers. Why don't we just sever the imagined link between that discipline and writing the crappy string transformation routines that make up most of development today?
All's true that is mistrusted
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.
In the US, we value money and power. We absolutely despise knowledge and intellect. This is why academic research in CS is 5-30+ years ahead of the industry. Why can't we do a better job programming? Because people refuse to learn why things went/go wrong and what can be done to prevent them in the future. Those are social factors that will end up causing the US to sink to the bottom. We may have invented this profession, but if we continually fail to properly educate people, we will end up the lowest cost workers in the world.
You will see dozens of anecdotes here claiming that the best programmer at their shop never got a degree. As a result, everyone in the industry ends up reinventing the wheel. The plural of anecdote is NOT data. Yes, there are some smart people who never got edumacated; they would have been even better people if they had been. You wouldn't go to a self-taught doctor. Why would you trust your business to a self-taught IT worker?
The vast majority of people fleeing CS at the moment are doing so because they have no interest in the subject matter other than fiscal.
Lets hope so.
A couple friends and I had a term for these people when we were CS undergrads from 1997 through 2000:
CS Mercenaries.
The goal of these folks was to gain a degree so that they could make lots of money. They generally did as little work as possible to get through. They were not interested in writing good code (or any at all for that matter), or gaining knowledge and insight into how a computer works.
This attitude struck us as very similar to that of someone who would kill for the highest bidder. They were simply trying to find the program that paid the highest starting salaries that they thought they could actually graduate in.
Lets hope that those who have a true love for computing are the folks that are still majoring in computer science. I certainly will not shed any tears over the lack of CS Mercenaries enrolling in (leeching) CS programs.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!