Continued Drop in CS Bachelor’s Degree Production and Enrollments as the Number of New Majors Stabilizes

Yet another article on CS enrollment, but this one from the Computing Research Association (CRA).

According to HERI/UCLA, the percentage of incoming undergraduates among all degree-granting institutions who indicated they would major in CS declined by 70 percent between fall 2000 and 2005.[1] Unsurprisingly, the number of students who declared their major in CS among the Ph.D.-granting departments surveyed by CRA also fell (Figure 1). After six years of declines, the number of new CS majors in fall 2006 was half of what it was in fall 2000 (15,958 versus 7,798). Nevertheless, this was only a slight decline from the 7,952 new majors reported in fall 2005, and may indicate that the numbers are stabilizing.

It’s a very short article with several enlightening graphs. I particularly like the concluding paragraph, which lends some historical perspective that seems to be lacking in almost every other article I’ve seen on this subject.

It is important to note that a steep drop in degree production among CS departments has happened before. According to NSF, between 1980 and 1986 undergraduate CS production nearly quadrupled to more than 42,000 degrees. This period was followed by a swift decline and leveling off during the 1990s, with several years in which the number of degrees granted hovered around 25,000. During the late 1990s, CS degree production again surged to more than 57,000 in 2004.[2] In light of the economic downturn and slow job growth during the early 2000s, the current decline in CS degree production was foreseeable.

Students staying away from IT majors, by Nicole Dionne, Providence Business News.

Thank you Nicole for a positive article that appears to back my bold prediction from an earlier post.

Despite the fact that high-paying technology jobs are plentiful, students have been shying away from the profession and leaving a talent gap across the country.

“We have more jobs than students,” said Hal Records, chairman of the computer information systems department at Bryant University. “In 2001, with the dot-com crash, a lot of parents lost their jobs, and everybody said technology is not a good way to go.”

At Bryant, he said, “we’ve gone from 119 graduates in 2001 to 60 last year, and we’ll probably graduate 40 this year. The irony is, the jobs never really went away. In spite of the outsourcing, the number of technology jobs is increasing. So what we have now is a massive gap between the demand for technology graduates and the supply of technology graduates.”

Amen. That’s what I’m seeing. Glad to know I’m not the only one… 🙂

Is computer science dead?

Without intending to do so, I appear to have launched a series of posts on the topic of Computer Science enrollments. I guess it’s been getting quite a bit of press attention lately, and we’ve certainly had our fair share of discussions on the subject in the CS department at BYU.

With respect to the title of this article, it’s one thing to note that there are upturns and downturns in any industry, particularly in one as volatile as ours. But it’s the “X is dead” alarmists (or the more subtle “Is X dead?” alarmists) whose arrival officially announces the popularity of issue X, whatever it happens to be. So here we are.

The author of this article leads by citing the article by Neil McBride, whom we already discussed in a previous post.

After some gloom and doom reporting of dropped enrollments, and a moving story about a young woman whose family insisted she would never get a job (but who did — wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles), the author settles into some decent analysis, culminating in some potentially encouraging (or at least pleasantly neutral) news.

“Some of the newer aspects of IT are more prescriptive; they require less innovation. Computer science is more cutting edge,” Professor Looi says.

The university offers a general IT overview in the first year of its technology degree, branching into business analysis, software development, system administration and computer science. There are 40 students in computer science, down from 200 15 years ago.

But Professor Looi still believes there is a market for purists. “There will always be a need for computer scientists or technology will stop advancing,” he says.

“It will only advance on what has already been invented. We still need people to create, but possibly not as many as we needed before.”

Or possibly more than we needed before…

Or possibly a greater diversity of professional destinations for technical people than before…

Or possibly…

At this point I’m just not buying the demise reporting. I think two issues have contributed to decreased enrollments: 1) the dot.com implosion and 2) the threat of outsourcing. I’ll hit those in greater detail in a later post.

Meanwhile it seems to me that the market is once again heating up, and employers in the Utah software industry can’t fill spots because demand is so far outstripping supply at this point. Salaries are going up to where they were 6 or 7 years ago during the paper-thin over-heated boom.

I’m going on record right now and predict that enrollments in Computer Science worldwide will begin rising no later than Fall 2008 (although my heart is screaming “2007!”). I further predict that Computer Science enrollments will exceed 2001 enrollment levels by 2015. Yes, I know about outsourcing. I’m including that reality in my prediction. I’ll try and write a bit more about that China and India and what outsourcing implies as soon as I can get to it.