Is CS Enrollment on the Upswing?
We’ll have to wait for the new Taulbee Survey results to come out (any day now), but there are a few signs here and there that CS enrollments are on the upswing. We just had our annual department Open House event, where we invite students who have just been admitted to our PhD program. The crop of 53 prospective PhD students look great. (7 more are visiting on other dates.) Everyone I’ve talked to — students, faculty, and staff — had such a great time with all the visitors. They look to be very engaged, very smart, and lots of fun. The chemistry was so good that many of the visiting students were out with our students (and one or two faculty) until 3am or even later, talking, having a few drinks, and exploring Pittsburgh together.
Of course, it’s no surprise that they are so great. They have been selected out of more than 1,400 applicants to the School of Computer Science this year — I’m not sure, but I think that’s a record number of applications for us.
And what about the undergraduates? Well, applications are up there, too, by about 11% over last year. And last year was up 13% from the year before that. About 2,600 applicants for 130 openings in our freshman CS class. It’s perhaps too early to tell if there is a real trend here, but we are steadily getting closer to the number of applicants we use to have before the dot-com bubble burst (around 3,200 or so).
In talking to my colleagues at other good departments, I’m hearing similar numbers and trends. That’s especially true for intro CS course enrollments at lots of places. Ed Lazowska has posted a graph showing the increasing intro CS enrollments at UW. It will be interesting to see if this small sample is representative of a larger trend. The next edition of the Taulbee Survey might shed some light on this.
Peter Lee @ March 9, 2009
Can you also elaborate on the 2600 figures. What I feel that undergrad enrollment in an university like CMU can never decrease because if americans stop competing for them then the rest of the world will. How many of these 2600 applicants are non americans????
P.S. Prof. Lee since your blog records our email id, so is it possible to notify the author that someone has initiated a discussion after his/her comments????
I’m not sure how many undergrad applicants are non-americans, though about 15% of our current undergrads are categorized as international students (i.e., non-citizen, non-permanent resident).
[…] latest edition of the CRA Taulbee Report has just been released, and it confirms what we have been seeing in our CS application trends here at CMU and other schools: enrollments are up, and up pretty significantly. The CRA’s official press release is […]