CS Enrollments Are Up, According to Latest CRA Taulbee Report
The 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 available here. The NY Times did an article on this as well. (This year, the CRA has sharpened up its communications function, hiring a PR firm and reconstituting a communications committee to help put information such as the CRA Taulbee Report into a form that is much friendlier and more useful for media outlets. It’s good to see the press responding already.)
I think it will take a bit of time to understand the reasons for this upsurge in interest. I’d like to think that it isn’t just about jobs, but that some of it is due to our messages about how interesting and intellectually deep the field is. We’ll see. And, while we have seen a small increase in the percentage of women applying to CMU CS, nationally it appears that the numbers are steady and continue to be low — definitely something that the computing community needs to keep working on.
Peter Lee @ March 17, 2009
“Interesting and intellectually deep the field is” as compared to Economics, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Law, Philosophy, Linguistics, Sociology, etc?
No, it is about the jobs. It is always about the jobs.
Young women are especially tuned to career paths and future salary, that is why they reached 50% of medical school and law school applicants many years ago. If we want to attract women we have to show them a viable career path, one that leads to $150K/year by age 40.
Computer science does not pay that much. I am sure a CMU prof makes that much, but your average code monkey does not. Furthermore, whatever she learned in school is largely obsolete 10 years later.
More press coverage from Network World:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/031409-computer-science-majors.html?hpg1=bn
Jane, yes, jobs are important. Very important. But in my experience, many of the most talented math/science students are in it just as much, if not more, for the (perceived) beauty and depth of the field. At least that’s true for many of the students we see here.
As for $150K/year, well even during the height of the dot-com boom when dreams of millions or more were not only plausible, but real for many, we saw huge enrollments but still a relatively smaller percentage of women.
That is my point, the perceived beauty of CS cannot compete with the real beauty of Physics, Math, Economics, Philosophy, Art, etc. You and I think CS is more beautiful than Physics, but that is only because we’ve studied it for years, and not physics.
As far as salary, women are much more risk averse than young men. A .001 chance at being a billionaire means nothing to a young woman. However, a 100% chance at $150k/year (minimum) that an MD or JD gets you means a lot to them. It means kids, it means a house, it means vacations with the family, it means having a life.
Then, even if she does get a job in software, she has to keep learning new skills, on her own time, just to stay relevant. This leaves her with no free time, no life.
As a side not, I just noticed that on the PhD front we set a new record low, only 9.4% of new CS PhDs got tenure-track positions. Wow.
Re risk aversion: This is a good point.
Re beauty: I’m not sure the perceptions can be overcome any time soon, but I think in reality CS is every bit a beautiful as the other fields you’ve listed.
Prof. Lee I donot understand one thing that why every one in US is running after girls to encourage them to study cs. If they are not interested then why should we dole out so many goodies to them (Women@SCS etc…) I am no sure no one runs after boys in the field of humanities. First of all america is fair country which treats males and females by the same law then why have special benefits for girls in CS. It does not make sense to me at all!!!
Jane is right, its all about jobs. I donot know about america but indians prefer cs because that is the easiest way to get a good job. I can understand that grad students love cs that is why they are taking advanced courses in cs, but how can an undergrad who is 17 years old find out his real interest. At the age of 17 most of them want to be movie stars or astronauts and not software developers.
If CRA wants cs enrollment to increase it simply has to show to the common public that cs jobs are easiest to get, are secure and you can manage a life doing them (And I personally think that all of this is true)
Jane, I don’t think you’re making a fair comparison. To even become a doctor, you need to have many years more education (and debt from student loans) than the average “code monkey”. Once you’ve finished your residency, you’ve spent more time training than it takes to get a PhD in CS. Also, being a surgeon is one of the most stressful jobs in the world.
And then, even when you’re an established doctor, you always have to worry about the liability of being sued. Even the most accomplished (and richest) doctors can lose everything from a malpractice suit! I know people who’ve been there and gone from riches to rags overnight. Last time I checked, no one was suing us for memory leaks and buffer overruns (or else Microsoft would be out of business).
Furthemore, do you know how many students who study the biological sciences in their undergrad with the intent of being pre-med never even make it into medical school? I don’t have the exact numbers, but empirical evidence tells me it’s pretty high. As far as undergrad degrees go, CS beats the socks out of going pre-med or pretty much any other degree out there in terms of immediate employability. If job security is the most important thing to women, then the job prospects in CS should not be the crippling factor (true, you might get laid-off, but finding a job with a CS degree is much easier to begin with than with other majors).
And making 100K after a few years with a CS degree is not that hard, even if you’re just a code monkey. Just like any other profession, you have to be good at what you do to make the big bucks. In medicine, the bar of entry is higher, so you have a smaller range of salaries. But as I said, it’s not a fair comparison. What’s the average salary of CS students who go on to get an MBA?
Of course, professional degrees will always hold an advantage that other degrees don’t. In certain cultures, just becoming a doctor or lawyer carries a certain level of prestige that other disciplines don’t. In general, it’s not the money…it’s the prestige and cultural value that draws people in. And these are ideas that have developed over hundreds of years, so goodluck changing them. But it’s also I think why you see more people from the East going into engineering/CS/math. Their values are different, and these disciplines carry more respect back home.
But in short, I don’t think any of this is what we need to focus on to improve gender ratios. You can’t tell me that the majority of young women out there are only thinking about job prospects when they choose their major, and certainly not more so than men. Otherwise, English and Drama would be all-male majors. And we’re selling ourselves short if we think the only way we can draw people in is with promises of $$$.
The biggest problem with CS, the pink elephant sorta-speak, is that it’s not an intellectually diverse field!
The comment above by Anonymous asking why we even bother going after women (and saying that we shouldn’t because men aren’t pushed to learn humanities) extolls the continuing denial of this fact. In my opinion, the lack of physical diversity we see in CS is merely a symptom of a much larger problem.
I should state that I consider myself to be a little bit of a Renaissance person. I’m extremely passionate about CS, maybe even more so than other subjects, but I also have a ton of other interests. My big goal in life is to learn as much as I can about how the world works, and I’ve just chosen to do that by looking through the prism of how machines work.
But at the same time, I can’t talk to most of my CS friends about Dickens or Camus. All they know is that 1+1=0. In fact, that’s probably why I don’t have that many friends in CS to begin with.
And I’ve seen one too many CS students who can write good C++ but not a single English sentence that will compile. Of course, basic literacy should be a minimum standard, not our benchmark in terms of the breadth we’d like people in our field to have.
Computer science is itself an intellectually deep field, in theory. But most of the people I see going into the field are too narrow in mindset to see beyond the first two layers of that depth.
“But at the same time, I can’t talk to most of my CS friends about Dickens or Camus. All they know is that 1+1=0. And I’ve seen one too many CS students who can write good C++ but not a single English sentence that will compile.”
Are you in some imaginary world. I have not seen any computer science student (Phd, masters, undergrad) who is like something you have mentioned in your post.
Also, boys are creative and they donot need the so called “creative aptitude” of the girls to make the department of CS a better place to work in. Having more girls would not hurt and the department should encourage that, but going out of the way to make them join cs is wrong.
Great article very informative . Thank you