CS Enrollments on the Rise?
“Computer science enrollments continue to decline.”
This has been a popular tag line for lots of press articles on the computing field. But is it true? Here at Carnegie Mellon we’ve been insulated from the major swings in enrollments that our peers have been experiencing. Our undergraduate program caps its enrollment at 130 new freshmen each year, who are chosen out of 2,000 to 3,000 applicants. Our core computer science courses are oversubscribed. Our new graduates have 100% success in gaining either good employment or admission to graduate programs. And yet we continue to see more and more press stories about bad enrollment trends.
On the CCC Blog, Ed Lazowska has posted a provocative article on what he believes is the “real” news on CS enrollments. In a nutshell, he makes several simple points, such as: the number of graduates lags freshman enrollment by 4 years; total enrollment in CS is high relative to the physical sciences (except biology); and there is a real shortage of computer scientists. The CS4HS program, which we do here as well as at UW and UCLA, gets a brief mention.
Truth in advertising: Along with Andrew McCallum, I am acting (temporarily) as the editor of the CCC Blog and would like to see its readership grow.
Peter Lee @ July 13, 2008
Interesting. I worked at Northrop Grumman (one of the world’s largest defense contractors). At my San Diego location, we specialized in software defined avionics systems. It seemed to me that CS engineers were hard to come by. There were plenty of EE’s though. I know the need for software engineers in defense has increased over the years.