The Continuing American Decline in CS

abb_road writes "America's recent dismal showing in the ACM Programming finals may be more than just a bad year; a BusinessWeek article suggests that the loss is indicative of the US's continuing decline in producing computer scientists. Despite the Labor Dept's forecast of a 40% increase in 'computer/math scientist' jobs, planned CS enrollments have plummeted from 3.7% in 2000 to just 1.1% last year. Other countries, particularly China, India and Eastern Europe, are working hard to pick up the slack, with potentially serious long-term effects for the US economy. From the article: 'If our talent base weakens, our lead in technology, business, and economics will fade faster than any of us can imagine.'"

Comments

Re:blame academia

[brpr]

someone once tried to justify why harvard anthropology kid (straight out of undergrad) was better than midwest comp sci kid.

Because (all else being equal) they're probably more intelligent. Graduate tutors want the best students, and the best students aren't always those who happen to have previous experience in the field. If graduate programs close their doors to anyone who hasn't gone through the comp sci treadmill, they're missing out on a lot of talent. Now, there are maybe some subjects where this isn't the case. Maths or physics, say, because you just need to know so much stuff before you can even get started on research in those areas. But comp sci is still a relatively small field, and (especially if you're doing applied stuff rather than theoretical) it's still feasible to start from scratch.

I can only assume you have some sort of irrational predjudice against people who study anthropology at Harvard. That Harvard anthropology kid might be a talented hobbyist programmer who's brilliant at maths. The Midwest state school kid might be a perfectly intelligent but fairly average student, who has a head start but ultimately isn't going to achieve as much.

How would the A team do?

[amightywind]

America's recent dismal showing in the ACM Programming finals may be more than just a bad year

Duke sends a bunch of ill-prepared, second stringers to a programming competition, gets crushed, and I am supposed to worry about the decline of CS? I think an A teams from one of many elite US institutions would do better. I also would like to remind people of some outstanding recent domestic achievements. Maybe things aren't that bad.

CS from the inside

[xeeazgk]

I'd say it has something to do with all the professors believing that there is gold buried up their asses. I've been in CS at a major state university for 4 years now and the professors are worse than the American Idol crowd. Just the smugness. Especially the ones from MIT. God I want to smack them.

Also, CS is a really hard degree. Especially after that rush of students in 2000 right before the bubble burst. CS departments all over the country rushed to think up new "weed-out" classes to make sure the "right" people got into CS. Rather than expand their programs to provide the number of CS graduates that the US needs, they got all xenophobic and tried to turn CS back into the SooperNurdzClub like it was for the past 40 years.

I've got news for nerds. CS matters. But not in the way you want it to. No one cares if you can do reduction proofs, they want CODE. They want APPS. They want UI that is easy to use. Why not break CS into two or more branches, like physics. I reccomend a Theoretical CS specialization a sooperNurdzClub for the smug MIT grabasses. Then a couple of different practical application specializations like Application Programming, Network Computing, Bioinformatics, etc.

Take out the 5 semesters of math and trade them for 2 semesters of CS specialized math courses instead of the generalized ones from the math department where we only really need two chapters of the book we're covering for CS.

Take out the EE and logic and combine it into one circuit logic class that freshmen have to take. Add some classes that focus on using computers in other disciplines as electives. Boom. US CS has a new lease on life and a much friendlier atmosphere for those of us who don't like to smell our own farts. F*** MIT.