College Students Are Flocking To Computer Science Majors (ieeeusa.org)

Slashdot reader dcblogs writes: Enrollments in Computer Science are on a hockey stick trajectory and show no signs of slowing down. Stanford University declared computer science enrollments, for instance, went from 87 in the 2007-08 academic year to 353 in the recently completed year. It's similar at other schools. Boston University, for instance, had 110 declared undergraduate computer science majors in 2009. This fall it will have more than 550. Professor Mehran Sahami, who is the associate chair for education in the CS department at Stanford, believes the enrollment trend will continue. "As the numbers bear out, the interest in computer science has grown tremendously and shows no signs of crashing." But after the 2000 dot-com bust computer science enrollments fell dramatically and students soured on the degree. Could something like it happen again?
Mark Crovella, the chair of Boston University's CS department, notes that "the overall interest in computer science at B.U. is currently at about twice the level it was at the peak of the dot.com year." But the article points out that salaries for new grads are still rising, "which suggests that demand is real." And Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business Administration, adds "I'm more worried about the job outlook for people without these skills."

Comments

Good and bad.

[jellomizer]

While the growth of CS grads will mean a lot in the long term. With more people making new products creating more jobs.... in the short term there will be an influx of kids that we will need to deprogram the strict rules that were taught during the education.
There is a difference between accedemic theory and real life.
A lot of showing them when to break the rules and seporate yourself from the religion of OOP. And then when they should embrace the concept of OOP in a non OOP environment.

Then there is teaching them to work in a team and put their egos aside and do it the way that is said to do it, even if it seems less efficient at first.

Then I will need to go over all my arguments again.
Them: Why do it that way?
Me: I need to keep the code open for new features.
Them: What features?
Me: I don't know yet, but they are going to ask for something, and if you keep this section flexible it will prevent us from rewriting everything.
Them: You are just an old mad who doesn't want to use new technology.
Then they will do it there way.
3 months later...
Them we need to rewrite the code because of this stupid request that wasn't part of the original project spec.

This isn't news to universities and colleges

[timholman]

At my university, we've been watching the explosion of CS majors for the past few years and wondering when the enrollment curve is going to flatten out. So far it shows no signs, with CS already being the largest major in the engineering school.

We are scrambling to find instructors for the new sections that we need to open, and rooms in which to teach them. We're hardly alone - all of our peer institutions are reporting similar trends.

One thing that does concern my colleagues is that a significant portion of the students now entering CS show little aptitude or interest in programming concepts. Students who have failed or dropped the freshman "Introduction to Programming" two or three times in a row absolutely refuse to switch majors. They want that six-figure starting salary, and they will do whatever it takes to get the degree. I am guessing the same thing is happening at every other school that isn't taking some measure to push unqualified students out of CS.

Employers should be prepared to ask a lot of "FizzBuzz" interview questions over the next few years, because quite a few under-qualified CS graduates from prestigious schools are going to be hitting the job market.

Computer science is not software engineering

[blindseer]

I'm now in college for my second time now, first I studied electrical and computer engineering and now software engineering (under a CS major). Due to the large crossover between computer science and engineering I'll get to talking to some computer science students. I've also got to talk to some job recruiters in some rare moments of honesty.

One thing is that many computer science majors want to go on to write code. There's nothing wrong with that, but then they have to take the courses that teach software development. Not many do, because those courses are hard and/or not very interesting. Seems to me that either these people were lied to by their CS advisors and recruiters (as I was) or they didn't have the grades to get into the engineering programs.

I've got to talk to some hiring managers and the like and I've heard them say that they prefer engineering students to computer science. This is because engineering has a more rigorous math requirements, students are required to learn the engineering process, and anyone able to get their engineering degree can pick up a new programming language quickly. These companies are willing to send a new hire to a week long "boot camp" to learn whatever language they are using but not so willing to have to teach someone that learned every language under the sun in their CS coursework how to write good code.

Now there seems to be something of a glut of software developers, at least where I live. I'll hear hiring recruiters say I need more programming experience. I happened into work doing firmware development but when layoffs happened I had trouble finding work again, so I used my GI Bill to go back to school. Having not learned my lesson yet from my experience studying engineering I went to a local university to look at their CS program that just started offering a software engineering "track".

The advisors told me that the CS department was the "lead department" on this software engineering program, that was the first lie, and that the advisors would be helpful in choosing the classes I'd need to complete this "track", the second lie I was told. The advisors are worthless because at any university where CS is in the liberal arts college their goal is the "well rounded adult". They know how to get students to take their foreign language, history, and so forth. What they don't know is how to advise students on what courses to take on actually learning how to write code.

I wasted a year in this stupid CS program because the advisors didn't know what courses actually applied to their own course prerequisites. They pushed me to take courses from the CS department instead of equivalent courses in the engineering school. Then there's the instructors in the CS department that simply cannot help but work political commentary into their lesson plans. A classic CS algorithm called the "stable marriage problem" included a disclaimer from the instructor that it was from a time when same sex marriage was illegal. It's not that 99.9% of the population would rather marry someone of the opposite sex, it's that it was illegal that was the problem, right?

My advice to people that want to get into software development is to get a major in software engineering from a school that has an actual engineering program. Lacking that go major in some engineering discipline and get a CS minor or just take as much programming coursework you can. I found out a year too late that I could have gone to the engineering college, talked to advisors that know what software engineering actually means, and not taken so much bullshit from the liberal arts instructors. I got screwed because now I've got some bad grades in courses that I was not prepared for, and didn't even apply to my CS major, and I can't just switch to engineering any more. Had I gone to the engineering school for their advice on the software engineering program earlier, or talked to the engineering advisors first, I might not be in this predicament. I should have graduated by now but instead I'm looking to take yet another year of classes before I get the education I wanted and that piece of paper that employers want to see.