Computer science enrollments at my liberal-arts university are up. It had been dropping recently, but a few new faculty members and some higher profile advertising changed that. The CS department usually grabs people who are drop outs from the GaTech Regional Engineering Program (GTREP) or students from other majors who require a computer course. The department is still growing very slowly; I'd estimate 2-5% growth on a program that graduates about 20 people per year. That's not being echoed by other Universities. Computer science enrollments are down, despite efforts to boost them. According to an article I read in Network World (which I cannot find online, but it was the last-page editorial column), the total amount of computer scientists enrolled is about to drop. I disagree, but I have to explain my perception of the dot com era first.
Dot com started in 1996. The internet held huge amounts of untapped wealth, just waiting to be grabbed by the next geek with a P2 250Mhz and a weekend supply of Diet Shasta. Computer science enrollments exploded, along with the web. The stock crashed in 2001. Those students who enrolled in university during the height of the bubble (from 1999 to 2000) stuck with it, finished out their program, and went into the industry a few years ago. The students that followed behind it, who were in high school at the time, are graduating now. Soon the students who were choosing their major as the major financial backlash hit the technology community will be graduating. Most of the people in my classes have no fear of not being able to find a job, regardless of outsourcing. Current graduating CS students love computers enough that the .com burst didn't scare them away. These are the dedicated programmers; screw financial problems, screw india, screw liberal arts. And they're all going straight into web development.
These the-bubble-didn't-scare-me programmers are the ones behind Web 2.0. They take risks that older seasoned programmers won't. They never experienced the harsh realities of losing their job or being unable to find work. (Note: I graduate college in two weeks.) They do, however, remember the stories of internet millionaires, and they're thinking they can be one. With all of this new Web technology, it's certainly possible. The mistakes made in 2000 are going to be repeated because the Web 2.0 crowd wasn't around to benefit from them. It's kind of hard to care about the state of the industry when you're sitting in Data Structures learning about linked lists.
Jeff Atwood thinks we're in another bubble. I agree, to an extent. It's going to burst sooner or later, heralded by a sharp drop in Google's stock price. Then the entire economic situation will repeat itself. It's just not going to be as bad, because it's only being perpetrated by the industry neophytes. The people who have been programming for the past five to thirty-five years will keep the industry on target, but it'll involve some wrangling. Right now, the web is hot hot hot: look at Facebook and MySpace. People are turning down huge sums of money for their startups because they want more. If cash keeps flowing into the Web, more people are going to enroll in CS courses (yeah, pretty basic logic, I know). The next few years should have a huge increase in computer sciences enrollment. Then current market will crash, there'll be devaluation, then in another few years, Web 3.0 will come from the kids entering the CS a few years from now. Every industry cycles to some extent, the IT sector just does it faster. Same thing happens to university computer science enrollment. A few years of more CS students, a few years of dropping numbers.
Print | posted on Saturday, April 28, 2007 12:58 AM