College Students Are Rushing in Record Numbers To Study Computer Science (nytimes.com)

Lured by the prospect of high-salary, high-status jobs, college students are rushing in record numbers to study computer science. Now, if only they could get a seat in class. An anonymous reader shares a report: On campuses across the country, from major state universities to small private colleges, the surge in student demand for computer science courses is far outstripping the supply of professors, as the tech industry snaps up talent. At some schools, the shortage is creating an undergraduate divide of computing haves and have-nots -- potentially narrowing a path for some minority and female students to an industry that has struggled with diversity. The number of undergraduates majoring in the subject more than doubled from 2013 to 2017, to over 106,000, while tenure-track faculty ranks rose about 17 percent, according to the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit that gathers data from about 200 universities.

Economics and the promise of upward mobility are driving the student stampede. While previous generations of entrepreneurial undergraduates might have aspired to become lawyers or doctors, many students now are leery of investing the time, and incurring six-figure debts, to join those professions. By contrast, learning computing skills can be a fast path to employment, as fields as varied as agriculture, banking and genomics incorporate more sophisticated computing. While the quality of programs across the country varies widely, some computer science majors make six-figure salaries straight out of school. At the University of Texas at Austin, which has a top computer science program, more than 3,300 incoming first-year students last fall sought computer science as their first choice of major, more than double the number who did so in 2014.

Comments

Glad to see I'm in the thundering horde..

[bobbied]

After being out of school for 25+ years I just started my masters in CS. Should be done in about 28 months.

This explains why the classes are ALL 100% full with students sitting on the floor.

Re:Deja Vu

[tlhIngan]

Y2K was mostly a non-problem. Some companies expended a lot of effort, and avoided problems. Other companies did absolutely nothing, and they didn't have any problems either.

The story was, that to save memory, programmers would store the year in two bytes instead of four. But this was mostly nonsense. In the olden days programmers would store the year in ONE binary byte, and add it to 1900. So the real crash will happen on January 1st, 2156.

False. Lots of companies expended lots of money fixing the issue, making it a non-problem. People that didn't, often only seen minor issues (year 19100, computers that wouldn't boot because the BIOS wrapped, etc). There were plenty of real world non-computer Y2K issues as well, often with date fields that pre-populated "19" in the year.

And also false that one binary byte was used - dates are almost always stored in a form of BCD. This is exceptionally true if you had a mainframe computer because BCD was its primary mode of operation. In fact, Y2K issues cropped up in the 70s, because banks tried to issue 25 year mortgages and found out their computers gave errors trying to arrange the mortgages. So the financial industry was long aware of Y2K issues for decades before everyone else and they often had them fixed well before everyone else heard of them. Even industries like insurance would've ran into issues in the early 90s when term insurance started extending into the 2000s.

About the only issues were infrastructure and utilities who had little need for long term planning in their computer systems and thus would run into things only in real time. But they managed to survive, mostly because the issues lay within the billing and logging systems and not generally within control systems. This was also pre-smart meter era so even if the billing computer said you haven't paid in 100 years, they wouldn't cut your electricity off automatically.