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Computer Science Enrollments Match NASDAQ's Rises and Fall
dcblogs writes: In March 2000, the NASDAQ composite index reached a historic high of 5,048, at just about the same time undergrad computer science enrollments hit a peak of nearly 24,000 students at PhD-granting institutions in the U.S. and Canada, according to data collected by the Computing Research Association in its most recent annual Taulbee Survey. By 2005, computer science enrollments had halved, declining to just over 12,000. On July 17, the NASDAQ hit its highest point since 2000, reaching a composite index of 5,210. In 2014, computer science undergrad enrollments reached nearly, 24,000, almost equal to the 2000 high. Remarkably, it has taken nearly 15 years to reach the earlier enrollment peak.
... we still can't get competent editors at slashodt. Certainly there must have been someone who minored in English or Journalism who could take care of these atrocious front-page grammar and readability issues? I've seen better writing in comment sections of code written by people who learned English as a third or fourth language.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's not surprising at all. The NASDAQ is tech-heavy and the performance of those companies affects the job prospects for recent graduates. It's interesting, but I don't think it's particularly remarkable.
I graduated in 1997, just in time to watch the tech bubble inflate to full capacity and pop. I wasn't a CS grad, but wound up in IT. I did notice that a lot of people were starting CS majors while I was in school. Are there really only 24,000 undergrad CS students? Maybe they're just talking about people who finish.
There was an NPR piece a while back about undergrad Petroleum Engineering programs being super-hot and producing grads that got 6-figure salaries at the top of the fracking boom. Cue the stories of undergrads taking huge loans out, spending years studying a field that has reduced employment prospects when they get out. (Almost every law school grad is experiencing this now due to some of the same factors we in IT have, such as offshoring and wage deflation.)
The new grad market is ruthless and demand spikes get flattened out way faster than a typical education cycle. Remember the huge boom in the healthcare field for nurses and allied health professions? It's still there but nowhere near what it was a while back. Now with all the insurance companies merging, I'd hate to be a medical office assistant as doctors figure out they can lay off some of the billers and coders.
While it's true that it's foolhardy to "do what you love and the money will follow," students paying big bucks for education need to focus on fundamentals. Take a challenging subject, figure out what you like to do, and work that into your entry level job search plan. Shortcuts to the huge salaries/signing bonuses are only temporary. If you get caught out, and hate what you studied, you're really stuck.
I'm not bragging or trying to hold myself out as a huge success story, but slow and steady has worked well for me. I watched all the dotcom millionaires from a relatively boring, old-line job where I learned a ton of fundamental knowledge that continues to serve me well. Now we're seeing the bubble ready to pop again, complete with the Silicon Valley companies funded with imaginary VC cash catering to new grads with adult preschool work environments. Now is not the time to go into CS -- 5 years ago was the time.
Someone managed to find two graph curves that overlap nicely, but have little else to support their theory. How unusual. *Yawn*
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
And the S&P500 correlates with butter production in Bangladesh.
http://business.time.com/2009/...
Correlation, causation etc.
Did the submitter get this off of Spurious Correlations?
I'm not a cow, I'm a moose!
Supply-and-demand works, who knew.
Table-ized A.I.
"If there is constant debate about whether we are currently in a bubble, we are probably in a bubble."
Table-ized A.I.
I went back to school to learn computer programming on a part-time basis while working full time as a video game tester after the dot com bust. I couldn't get into some classes because there were too many students in 2002. That changed in 2005, where I couldn't get into some classes because there weren't enough students. My final year in school was all independent studies classes for classes that I needed for graduation but the school wasn't offering due to a lack of demand.
I'm a spherical cow. I say "roolllin' roolllin'", not "moo moo"
Table-ized A.I.
Someone had to roll all those cow pies.
We have found a way to get more women to enroll for CS! All we have to do is make the NASDAQ really high!
This might be of use to the people furiously commenting away.
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
We love to mock people who spend 4 years and rack up $120k in student loans to get a degree in Art History and end up flipping burgers for a living. We should have a certain amount of sympathy for people who (quite sensibly) get degrees in fields that at the time had good employment prospects, and then got blindsided by boom-and-bust industry cycles.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
"I'd like to see a breakdancing porpoise."
I'd rather not - the thing that comes next is a Vogon fleet to build an interstellar bypass
but are you on a frictionless surface in a vacuum?
Time to offend someone
Every time I read this, I start to believe it a little bit more.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini