The Changing Face of Computer Science

For another facet of CS education, HangingChad writes "MSNBC is carrying an interesting article on the changing demographics of IT workers and education. The upshot of the article is that older, working adults are taking IT related courses for advancement while comp sci continues to slide as a career choice in college, which the researchers in the article attribute to perception issues." From the article: "In fact, as the technology-dependent United States struggles to stay ahead of the Bangalores of the world, the Higher Education Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles found significantly fewer students at the college level -- 60 percent fewer -- wanted to study computer science in 2004 as opposed to the year 2000. "

Comments

It's not perception, it's real.

[EnronHaliburton2004]

attribute to perception issues

It's not a perception issue. It's a real issue.

90% of the people I know in the tech field have been laid off once in the last 4 years. I only know of one mid-sized technical company that hasn't laid off employees, and everyone there hates their job. I quit after 6 months.

Granted, this is just from my own perspective. But look, the tech job world is slowly creeping out of a multi-year massacre, now the tech world is being run by business people who don't know what an IP address is, but spend a million bucks because IBM said it was good (and promised a trip to Hawaii!)

Sure, there's opportunity here, but students are going to have a hard time competing with we techies with 6+ years experience.

IT != CS

[kidaxess]

I think it is important to be accurate with with our language. IT is not CS. The terms are related, not interchangeable. A graduate of Devry does serve the same function as a graduate of MIT. Sometimes it is useful to talk about fruit, and sometimes we need to differentiate between apples and oranges in order to have an intelligent conversation.

Re:Like that is a shock.....

[Spicerun]

"but actual engineers (as opposed to people who are just tangentially hitched to the IT bandwagon) are all but immune."

Heh...Dream on. I have been an electronics firmware/engineer always working in an R&D Departments, and I've got to tell you, I've seen whole R&D Departments laid off in the past 4 years (especially the engineers) while seeing the sales staff actually increase. In fact, some of my R&D engineer coworkers have been out of a job for the past 4 years. I was lucky though, I only spent 2003 without a job.

So I wonder what companies where you've been where the engineers were 'immune', because, quite frankly, I've never seen 'immune' engineers. In fact, I've seen a lot of new 'contracting' engineers who would love to have been 'immune'.