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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.
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.
I swear I saw this exact same thing happening in 1999.
And then a year later the bubble burst.
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.
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?
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.
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