In an Ars Technica story pointed out to me by IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Joshua Romero, there is some data that suggests that the drop in university and college student enrollment in computer science has bottomed off, at least for the moment. Information gathered from the Computing Research Association shows that for the past three years, newly declared CS majors has remained in the vicinity of around 7,500 or so. This is still about half as many as those who declared a CS major in 2000.
Computer science professor Jacob Slonim from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada blames the media instead of computer science professors for some of the decline in enrollment the past few years, at least in Canada. Slonim is quoted in ITWorldCanada as saying, “Every time Nortel lays off employees, it makes major headlines. But when CGI says it’s looking for 2,500 new people, we never hear about it. The fact that I’m forecasting the need for 80,000 new IT people by 2010 hasn’t made headlines either.”
