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

Deja Vu

[Spy Handler]

I swear I saw this exact same thing happening in 1999.

And then a year later the bubble burst.

Re:Deja Vu

[DickBreath]

> I swear I saw this exact same thing happening in 1999.

1980 by my recollection.

People rushing to learn about these new fangled computer thingies because you can get paid big money by pushing buttons on these things.

The problem in 1980, as in 1999, as now, is there are plenty of posers who can't program their way out of a paper bag. You could show someone a few statements of a simple programming language, and they could memorize them. But they couldn't put together the logic of a routine to calculate the sum of the numbers from 1 to 1000. Today the FizzBuzz test is a better example as the first-level sieve to weed out the incapable.

I seem to recall the 100 Best Jobs in America and Software Developer was number 1. No surprise unskilled talentless hacks are rushing to it.

Remember those books of the genre: "Learn ${LanguageX} in 24 hours!". How about changing that to Learn LanguageX in only Ten Years!

Re:Deja Vu

[jellomizer]

There was the popping of the Tech bubble, mostly because Y2k fixes have been applied, or most organizations have upgraded their systems to newer ones.
But what else was the Clinton Administration opening the H1B Visa which had begin to flood the market with Cheap IT workers too.
This created a double whammy. A lowering demand in IT goods and services with a rising supply of IT workers. This really caused the bubble to pop.

Back in the late 1990's Front Page "Web Developers" were being paid 70k a year, and real programmers were getting paid 6 digits out of college.
Tech workers were at the C table suite, with power and authority.... Then it kinda just popped, so as their pay lowered because there was so many more options and less demand, their power rolls have decreased too.

Tech jobs started to pick up around 2009 or so, while the economy is recovering, tech was needed to work smarter and with less resources. Which made tech workers one of the few Middle class jobs. No where near like it was in 1999 but a good solid career.

So now that the old guard boomer tech workers are retiring, we are seeing a new generation wanting a decent quality of life studying classes that will bring them there with rather clear job paths.

Re: Deja Vu

[ShanghaiBill]

If you have a decade of experience, it usually only takes about 24 hours to learn a new language well enough to get shit done in it.

That is only if the new language is a "normal" computer language that consists of statements executed sequentially, with loops and branches, and the only new thing is a change in syntax.

If the new language, such as Prolog or Verilog, doesn't fit that paradigm, many programmers will struggle, and the "years of experience" can actually be a detriment. Some will never "get it".

Re: Deja Vu

[ShanghaiBill]

Verilog isn't even a programming language though.

Verilog is Turing-complete and can do anything any other programming language can do. The difference is that it doesn't do stuff in sequence. It all happens at the same time.

Whereas Verilog is a hardware description language.

Verilog can be run on a CPU just like any other language. That is usually how it is initially debugged and tested. Even when deployed, most Verilog programs run on FPGAs, not custom hardware.

The inherent parallelism requires a different mindset. Many programmers have a hard time with that, or even with GPGPU programming in C, or writing shader pipelines. Ascending the learning curve is going to take more than 24 hours. It is a lot more than new syntax.

Many rushing in but...

[steveb3210]

How many are dropping out when they find out whats involved with the major or don't make it through the weeder classes? I got my degree in 2002, at the time UMass had about 300-400 incoming CS majors and graduated 50 students a year.

Many many people who come in without pre-existing self interest and self exploration find the subject too dull or too hard to make it.

Re: Many rushing in but...

[TimMD909]

People who are good at computers will be good at it even without schooling. The degree is just putting a bow on a person dedicated to learning. You can't buy dedication.

Re:Echos old times

[Drethon]

Back when I went to college, there was a similar rush - to the extent that one college I applied to, said I couldn't get in because the CS major I had chosen was full! Lucky that wasn't my first choice, but it was a big state school so it was quite a surprise as that was one of the backup choices...

Hopefully this is a more sustained rise in CS interest, which does need good people that understand most CS principals.

And hopefully it is actually learning CS principals of logical math and algorithms, rather than just learning how to compile Java/C#/Python/whichever the most popular language is. Rushes like this concern me a little that the schools wont take the time to teach properly.

Re:Echos old times

[hierofalcon]

Learning principles would be even better.

I smell bullshit

[rsilvergun]

kids aren't that dumb. Those jobs have been outsourced and "insourced" (e.g. replaced by H1-Bs) non stop for 20 years. Go into medicine kids, Folks want to see their doctor in person.
br. Then again maybe this is folks gunning for jobs that didn't used to need a college degree because companies use degrees as leverage to get H1-Bs and skip training costs.

High status?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, I'm supposed to be high status? As in people are supposed to look up to me, or listen to what I have to say?

The reality seems more like I'm just an "IT Guy", which apparently some kind of code monkey or help desk guy. Either that, or I'm just born with all the knowledge of the whole IT world in my brain, and if I don't know something, I'm somehow an idiot.

But this status thing sounds nice. Like I'm a doctor or lawyer, and have reached some kind of god-like level. When does that come into play?

Re:Echos old times

[lgw]

I once heard one of my own CS teachers say the only reason they agreed to teach Java, besides the mandate from higher ups, was because it didn't require teaching the students about memory management. I.e. RAM usage and and making sure you have enough allocated memory to flush working data to disk safely if the system craps itself.

Java is a quite reasonable langues to start teaching in. My school started with Scheme, for mostly the same reasons (pre-Java), though the department did have a hard-on for functional programming.

I don't have any problem with students learning to program in Java. What causes problems is students only learning to program in Java.