23% Fewer Computer Science Majors This Year!

Slashdot reports on a USA Today article saying that there fewer Computer Science Majors. They cite a 23% decline in enrollment in North America. Here’s one comment about the article:

Most engineering schools are reporting declines in enrollment. This is hardly surprising since most engineering curriculums, including CS, are difficult compared to other fields of study. Without the prospect of a good job waiting for them, many college students are veering away from these majors.

Update: Yuhong correctly points out that this is mostly at the undegraduate level. Graduate schools are finding enough students, at least according to Yuhong. I think this is expected: if job prospects are bad, people won’t enter the system but once they’ve entered it, they will stay in it longer if jobs are scarse.

Published by

Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

One thought on “23% Fewer Computer Science Majors This Year!”

  1. That news may be too early :), one month before the semester starts, or just talk about under graduates. As I met new grads yesterday, we experienced high enrollment this year in UNB. It is still affected by job market.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

To create code blocks or other preformatted text, indent by four spaces:

    This will be displayed in a monospaced font. The first four 
    spaces will be stripped off, but all other whitespace
    will be preserved.
    
    Markdown is turned off in code blocks:
     [This is not a link](http://example.com)

To create not a block, but an inline code span, use backticks:

Here is some inline `code`.

For more help see http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

You may subscribe to this blog by email.