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I'm very curious to see the number of people start as CS and drop vs the number of people who end up as CS. I know at my school there's a lot of people who come

I'm very curious to see the number of people start as CS and drop vs the number of people who end up as CS. I know at my school there's a lot of people who come in wanting to do CS but end up dropping and a decent amount of people who end up in the CS major either via other STEM majors or just randomly. Because of this churn, the intro classes need to be a lot bigger than the rest, simply to accommodate both sets of people. And really, intro classes are the most important part of the CS degree, for motivating people, for teaching the practice of programming and for the skills that you'd actually use on the job. One potential solution is to just not hire research faculty for intro classes. While I do kind of believe in having actual professors teach undergrad classes, if schools are struggling to hire PhDs, why not look at non PhD's? It's not like having a PhD helps with teaching intro classes. If anything, it probably hurts.

mberning 8y ago
This is what I would like to know as well. These cycles tend to follow the job market pretty well. I remember when I was in school after the dot com bust our CS department really cut back on entry level classes because the interest was not there. In the end I don't think it made a large impact in the number of CS graduates.
tedmiston 8y ago
At my average small-to-mid-sized state school in the midwest, a typical CS drop rate from day 1 to graduation was ~3/4 either switched majors (mostly to business majors) or dropped out of school entirely. Technically it's probably even a bit higher than that because this is net of people switching into CS. Not sure how students who transfer schools are tracked.