6 ms·

So more than 50% of Stanford undergrads are CS? Shit. Does that not sound like aa glut?

coyotebush 11y ago
No, those two statistics alone don't say anything about the total number of CS majors. Per the article, CS represents ~20% (of students with declared majors).
- 001sky 11y ago
  CS is 214 of an estimated 3500 female student body. That still seems exceptionally low. Posted this upthread but in 2010 20% of the student body was in Biology (once topical sub-specialties were aggregated). 20% of ~3500 would be closer to `700, which is 3.3x the number of declared comp sci students. Or maybe my math is wrong? I'm more interested in the actual knowledge being put in and attention being paid out than a critique of the degree naming conventions.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  Thanks, I got the numbers twisted in my head.
Jtsummers 11y ago
And if it were true, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a glut. CS is, to some extent, the new mechanical or electrical engineering. ME and EE are very broad degree programs, with students coming out of the same university with totally different specializations. They may have only taken 50% of their courses in common with each other. CS is (or depending on the school, is going) in that same vein.
ngoel36 11y ago
No. Very little of a CS degree is "coding" - CS is so much more than that. It's even beyond "engineering". A proper CS degree teaches you how to think, how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities. What separates CS from other degrees is that it does filter out those without the horsepower or fortitude on both the quant side (algorithms) and the creative side (systems, architecture). That means, that even if the SV bubble crashes, CS majors are the best equipped to handle whatever career is hot next - any hiring manager at Goldman, McKinsey, or F500 company X will tell you the same.
- wisty 11y ago
  > A proper CS degree teaches you how to think Any degree that claims it teaches you how to think should ring the snake-oil alarm. > how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities So how do they teach that? Or does that just mean they got a few group projects, where smart people bump into each other but don't really learn to solve problems in a team? Unis tend to suck at teaching teamwork. Though they tend to be pretty good at teaching algorithms and systems (which are good to know, and don't go out of date too quickly).
  - abalashov 11y ago
    Well, philosophy more or less stakes its claim to value as an undergraduate program solely on that premise. Whether it actually teaches one to think, what exactly that means, and whether it's possible to teach someone to think who hitherto didn't know how to think, are of course questions that trouble it, but they're all distinct and seemingly empirical issues.
- manigandham 11y ago
  And the other degrees don't? Life teaches you how to think, so does education in general and the problems you face in either, academic or otherwise.
- douche 11y ago
  University CS programs are kinda shitty for teaching people how to actually write code. It's not really more than that, it's math and theory and proofs instead of that. University faculty, if they ever worked in a professional environment, did it years and years ago before they got tenure. The worst course I took in my CS department was the algorithms and data structures course. Didn't write a line of code. Wrote a ton of induction proofs. Learned a lot of esoteric algorithms that have very good big O profiles, but suck bogwater because of cache coherency when they are implemented on non-imaginary hardware, or have high constant factors that got hand-waved away. I'd sign up for that course in a hot second, if it covered the same material, but instead of scrawling on a chalkboard, it was structured around writing the same algorithms in C, segfaults and all. I don't think most CS majors could hack that kind of course, however.

No, those two statistics alone don't say anything about the total number of CS majors. Per the article, CS represents ~20% (of students with declared majors).

001sky 11y ago
CS is 214 of an estimated 3500 female student body. That still seems exceptionally low. Posted this upthread but in 2010 20% of the student body was in Biology (once topical sub-specialties were aggregated). 20% of ~3500 would be closer to `700, which is 3.3x the number of declared comp sci students. Or maybe my math is wrong? I'm more interested in the actual knowledge being put in and attention being paid out than a critique of the degree naming conventions.
sliverstorm 11y ago
Thanks, I got the numbers twisted in my head.

Jtsummers 11y ago

And if it were true, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a glut. CS is, to some extent, the new mechanical or electrical engineering. ME and EE are very broad degree programs, with students coming out of the same university with totally different specializations. They may have only taken 50% of their courses in common with each other. CS is (or depending on the school, is going) in that same vein.

ngoel36 11y ago

No. Very little of a CS degree is "coding" - CS is so much more than that. It's even beyond "engineering". A proper CS degree teaches you how to think, how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities. What separates CS from other degrees is that it does filter out those without the horsepower or fortitude on both the quant side (algorithms) and the creative side (systems, architecture). That means, that even if the SV bubble crashes, CS majors are the best equipped to handle whatever career is hot next - any hiring manager at Goldman, McKinsey, or F500 company X will tell you the same.

wisty 11y ago
> A proper CS degree teaches you how to think Any degree that claims it teaches you how to think should ring the snake-oil alarm. > how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities So how do they teach that? Or does that just mean they got a few group projects, where smart people bump into each other but don't really learn to solve problems in a team? Unis tend to suck at teaching teamwork. Though they tend to be pretty good at teaching algorithms and systems (which are good to know, and don't go out of date too quickly).
- abalashov 11y ago
  Well, philosophy more or less stakes its claim to value as an undergraduate program solely on that premise. Whether it actually teaches one to think, what exactly that means, and whether it's possible to teach someone to think who hitherto didn't know how to think, are of course questions that trouble it, but they're all distinct and seemingly empirical issues.
manigandham 11y ago
And the other degrees don't? Life teaches you how to think, so does education in general and the problems you face in either, academic or otherwise.
douche 11y ago
University CS programs are kinda shitty for teaching people how to actually write code. It's not really more than that, it's math and theory and proofs instead of that. University faculty, if they ever worked in a professional environment, did it years and years ago before they got tenure. The worst course I took in my CS department was the algorithms and data structures course. Didn't write a line of code. Wrote a ton of induction proofs. Learned a lot of esoteric algorithms that have very good big O profiles, but suck bogwater because of cache coherency when they are implemented on non-imaginary hardware, or have high constant factors that got hand-waved away. I'd sign up for that course in a hot second, if it covered the same material, but instead of scrawling on a chalkboard, it was structured around writing the same algorithms in C, segfaults and all. I don't think most CS majors could hack that kind of course, however.