15 ms·

Stanford CS enrollment increase "downright scary"

186 points by andreyf 16y ago

kenjackson 16y ago
Can't they just accept fewer students? Seems odd to get worked up about something you directly control.
- larsberg 16y ago
  I don't think they're like CMU, which has a separate school of Computer Science you have to be admitted to in order to be a CS major. If Stanford is like the University of Chicago, the only thing stopping students from majoring in CS are the registrar-imposed limits on the number of students physically enrolled.
  - natrius 16y ago
    You are correct.
  - RyanGWU82 16y ago
    Stanford doesn't even have those "registrar-imposed limits." Classes almost never fill up; they just get larger rooms or add TAs. Students don't usually register for classes until after the term has started! I was an undergrad at a more traditional school where we registered for classes months in advance. I was amazed that the Stanford system was so informal, but in practice it worked just fine. It's wonderful to be able to audit a few classes before deciding on exactly what you're going to take; you may learn that you can't stand a professor, or love a surprising subject.
    - schwap 16y ago
      Wow, as an undergrad who has endured years of stressful schedule twiddling followed by a 2-week sprint to figure out how I'm going to replace all the crap courses I naively selected months ago, that sounds like paradise.
      - cbcase 16y ago
        It's not exactly paradise. Because classes are only ten weeks total (slightly less in spring), you can't exactly spend the first week or two shopping around without doing non-trivial work for every single class you're shopping --- an approach which doesn't scale, to say the least. There's still a sprint the first few days. But still, it's nice.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Sure, but the problem is that it is a sign of the state of the economy - and another indication of a new bubble.
  - nkassis 16y ago
    Well, as the article stated, many students from other degrees end up taking CS courses as part of their program and like them enough to switch. That's not necessarily related to the current potential bubble. I know many who took computer science classes as part of a degree in biology and just ended up switching entirely.
- geebee 16y ago
  I think it reflects so well on Stanford that they are committed to making sure students have an opportunity to major in cs, even if enrollment is tough to manage. That bit about helping the geology phd reflects especially well on stanford. I attended cal for grad school, and I love it in many ways, but I just don't see as deep a commitment to every students success. Don't want to overstate this, plenty of wonderful profs and staff at cal who make an effort, and the challenges of 25k undergrads is great. But it pains me to see young smart people who stumble a bit in their first couple years bounced from a major because the dept is looking for reasons to turn students away. I thins the field loses a lot of c@reative people who would have made big contributions. Cs hasn't been impacted at cal forr a while now, thought it was when I was there. Fortunately there are other good paths for persistent students.
  - hga 16y ago
    This is one of the things you pay the big bucks for at the better private colleges. Part of their implicit contract with you is that they'll make available to you the resources necessary to complete your major in 4 years (although that can get difficult with laboratories that have highly finite sizes, e.g. a chemistry lab with N hoods) and they won't intentionally limit capacity with "weed out" courses. At the worst case some big colleges are less of a bargain than they appear since you have to take 5+ years to get into all the required courses due to capacity issues. Or take the half of the big 4 CS schools: Berkeley is like many if not most big public schools in requiring you apply to either their Engineering or "Letters and Science" schools, and you can't take EECS without getting into the former, CS without getting into one of either (or at least that's what they say on their home page, their may be exceptions of course). CMU is unusual for a private school in that you have to apply to their CS department which has a fixed per year class size of 135 (last time I checked). MIT and I gather Stanford are like most? private colleges in that acceptance allows you to major in anything you can do and to switch if you want to. If a major doubles in size "overnight" they'll move heaven and earth to accommodate the undergrads (which is a or the major theme of this blog posting, some panic that Stanford CS major enrollment is exploding). MIT, mindful of the transitory popularly of fields (e.g. look at the early '70s areo-astro crash from which the field never recovered) has never let the EECS department---the number of professors and graduate students---get "too big", which sure appeared wise after the dot.com crash which resulted in undergraduate enrollment falling by more than 1/2. That put great stress on the department when it had 40% of the undergraduates in the 80s and 90s (and which they may be returning to, with their "CS1" course enrollment exploding from 250 last spring to 380 this spring). Enough that for a long time in that period they refused to offer a service introductory programming course for non-majors, citing their overload.
- abeppu 16y ago
  Can't they just use auto-graders? I got the impression that for many of my CS courses, the TA and professor labor went mainly into creating assignments and lectures. But many of the assignments were self or automatically grading. If you have suitably lab-based assignments, then it shouldn't be too difficult to lower the cost of adding more students into the lower level courses.
  - hga 16y ago
    As mentioned in another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444557 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444557) this course, like MIT's equivalent, is very TA intensive and is using undergraduate TAs (although I should note that MIT's 6.01-2 are not suitable for non-majors). ADDED: I just found out that enrollment in MIT's 6.01 just jumped to 380 this spring from 250 last spring. As noted, you don't by and large take this course unless you're seriously considering EECS as a major.... So it looks like Stanford's experience is mirrored at MIT.
larsberg 16y ago
The same thing appears to be happening here at the University of Chicago -- increased numbers of undergraduates in the sequence as well as greatly increased Ph.D. student applications over the last couple of years. And not just money-grubbers in the undergrads as well; many refuse to interview with the previous staples for our graduates -- the finance industry here in Chicago or "big companies" such as Google and Facebook (one of them said to me during a lab, "I mean, really, PHP? Who wants to work with THAT?"). I haven't seen as many Ph.D. students from other disciplines coming through our intro sequence and regretting their current path. But, I do see quite a few juniors and seniors who only started taking CS classes as a sophomore or junior (usually because their advisor told them the classes were too hard and would make it difficult to do their Core Curriculum) and really wish they had evaluated the major earlier before they made choices that prevented them from switching majors and still graduating in four years.
- btilly 16y ago
  one of them said to me during a lab, "I mean, really, PHP? Who wants to work with THAT?" You speak as if disdain for PHP was a bad thing. I know a lot of very experienced and competent programmers who feel the same way, and it is not a slight on their competence that they do.
  - larsberg 16y ago
    I apologize if it came across that way! I was impressed by their desire to work with cool tech and on interesting problems instead of being dominated by economic fear and just going wherever they were most likely to get a big payout (whether or not joining Facebook now will get you a big payout is another question <grin>).
  - falsestprophet 16y ago
    He is also clueless if he thinks working at Facebook is beneath him because some PHP may be peripherally involved.
  - tybris 16y ago
    I used PHP for years, worst mistake of my life.
michaelochurch 16y ago
Who is coming in to the programs? And what are their motivations? You can't evaluate whether this is a good or bad change based on the numbers alone. For example, the legal profession has been swamped with excess entrants and it sucks. On the other hand, programmers tend to be job-creators more than job-takers, even as employees ("intrapreneurs") so I think this is probably a good thing.
benwerd 16y ago
Rinse and repeat everywhere, and we're likely to see an overabundance of computer scientists in three or four years. Developers: may I suggest getting a second degree?
- illamint 16y ago
  Seriously? Just because there are waves of people enrolling in an introductory CS course at an extremely high-level CS school like Stamford doesn't mean that any reasonable percentage of those students will actually end up getting degrees. I'd estimate that less than 10% of the people enrolled in the intro CS course at my university ended up getting a CS degree. Sure, there's bound to be an uptick; demand for developers is huge and all, but it's still a rigorous course of study and I think you need to be pretty driven to "get" it all. I'm not even remotely worried, because even if there were an overabundance of "computer scientists", there would still be a dearth of good computer scientists.
  - benwerd 16y ago
    You actually make a fair point: I forgot the difference between the UK education system (which I went through) and the US. In the UK, you pick your entire major over a year before you ever go to university. In fact, it depends on your A-levels, so you're effectively picking your major at age 15 or 16. Whereas, of course, in the US, you have far more room to pick and choose. Nonetheless, this uptick in interest is almost guaranteed to result in far more computer scientists. I agree that the number of good computer scientists is a fraction of that, but you'll still have far more chance of standing out from the crowd if you have a bunch of additional skills.
  - rawatson 16y ago
    The numbers which really surprise me are the +74% in CS107 enrollment and +78% in CS109. CS107 is viewed as the "don't declare CS until you take it" class, and a 74% increase definitely indicates a larger number of CS majors. That said, I do feel that some of the reason they're seeing these numbers is because these classes are all exceptionally well taught and administered. The introductory classes they offer are designed to cater to those who might be undecided as to their major. Within a few weeks of learning what "Java" is, students are playing around with GUI apps, and do things like write breakout (with sound!). All the while, the course manages to introduce the key concepts of computer programming.
zmitri 16y ago
This is a good sign! The general public is just realizing how important computer skills are, no matter what you are trying to do. A well rounded CS major can learn something new and apply those skills to something else. I think public schools and high schools need to start integrating and making CS/programming courses necessary just as basic math and science courses are required -- then once people reach university age, they can focus on different topics without having to take CS courses to learn the basic skills they require to approach those topics like a CS major would.
- agscala 16y ago
  I don't think that CS should be included in a high school curriculum. Programming is a valuable skill, sure, but I don't think that it will be applicable to 95% of students. There are such a broad range of jobs in the world, and very, very few end up doing programming, despite increasing numbers for university CS course registration.
  - noahlt 16y ago
    I don't think that calculus should be included in a high school curriculum. Differential modelling is a valuable skill, sure, but I don't think that it will be applicable to 95% of students. There are such a broad range of jobs in the world, and very, very few end up doing differential modelling, despite increasing numbers for university calculus course registration.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - younata 16y ago
      At my high school, Calc was only offered as an AP course. If I so wanted, I could stop taking math after Algebra 2 and still graduate.
      - scott_s 16y ago
        Then perhaps there's ambiguity in the phrase "included in a high school curriculum." I consider calculus to have been included in my high school curriculum, but I chose to take it.
dstein 16y ago
When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble. - Kevin Marks I fully attribute the increase to The Social Network movie coinciding with the ballooning of Facebook's market cap. Flipping tech startups is the hot new get rich quick scheme. Just like flipping houses and subprime mortgages before it.
- gersh 16y ago
  There isn't be a bubble until Facebook IPOs. If there were really a bubble, Facebook would have IPOed already.
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    Facebook hasn't IPO'd because there is no value for them to do so. They have enough liquidity on the secondary markets to keep employees happy and they are able to keep investments coming through alternative means. All an IPO would do would be to increase their paperwork.
    - wyclif 16y ago
      Don't forget an IPO would also require Facebook to disclose numbers they'd rather not while they still have liquidity. That's another major reason.
    - hga 16y ago
      Indeed, plus legal liability etc. etc. etc. The longer they wait, the better it might end up for the rest of us. The SEC suffered major embarrassment when Americans were dropped from Goldman's (?) recent Facebook investment vehicle and is at minimum looking to revise the current rules which date back to 1935. That's not going to fix SarBox, but maybe, just maybe that sort of bad attention/publicity will help.
- warfangle 16y ago
  He kind of addressed the difference between what's happening now and what happened in '99. ~10% who wanted to get rich doing it back then, versus people actually getting interested in the stuff now.
forgotAgain 16y ago
I wonder what the career counseling office could contribute to the discussion?
- hinathan 16y ago
  If so, that might mark a first.
- forgotAgain 16y ago
  So I guess my comment was overly subtle. My point was that in a time of economic stress the writer failed to investigate the most likely driver for student actions: "It's the economy stupid."
cube13 16y ago
The courses that were mentioned were all 100 level courses. Can anyone who went to Stanford(or knows the courses) comment on how technical they actually are? It's a good sign if these are actual technical courses, but if they're just Word/Excel "programming" non-technical courses, we're just seeing a lot of people padding their resume in a bad economy.
- wmf 16y ago
  Come on, you think a computer science class at Stanford is Word/Excel? Fortunately, they created a search engine that let me find the class in question: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/ http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/ It's Java programming.
  - cube13 16y ago
    >Come on, you think a computer science class at Stanford is Word/Excel? Intro, non-technical course? These are more common than you think. CS105(https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs105/Course+Syllabus https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs105/Course+Syllabus) at UIUC is a course that covers exactly that(it was 101 when I went there). It's meant for non-engineering or science students to cover a general education credit. CS101(which was 105) is in C and matlab, and that covers some more techincally difficult stuff. This is meant for technical non-CS majors. CS125 is the true intro CS course, which covers data structures, recursion, etc.
    - wmf 16y ago
      That sounds pretty sad; I wonder why that class isn't in the MIS department or something.
      - cube13 16y ago
        Keep in mind that neither 101 or 105 actually count towards a CS degree in any capacity(either major or minor), so those aren't courses that anyone getting a CS degree would take anyway.
- 16y ago
famousactress 16y ago
As someone who's been regularly interviewing Stanford students and grads for internships and full-time positions, it's worth pointing out that lots of these CS students don't want to program. I've been surprised at how many of them are getting a CS education as a platform for a career in product management, or even marketing. It makes some sense, given the makeup of the companies that are exciting to work for nowadays. I think especially if you want to join an early-stage startup, there are lots of benefits to having a technical education, even if your role isn't expressly technical.
- hinathan 16y ago
  Sounds like the not-entirely-apocryphal "You can't get a PM job at Google without a CS degree" has been around long enough to sink in.
  - Locke1689 16y ago
    It's been around a lot longer than Google. PMs at Microsoft are technical positions -- they mostly require a technical degree (how technical is dependent on your team. SQL Server PMs need to talk-the-talk with their B2B customers without confusion).
    - nika 16y ago
      Says the college student who, let me guess, never worked at microsoft. As someone who has, PMs are not technical people, at least not in that company at the time I worked there. I think ignorant college students who are not smart enough to know the limits of their own knowledge are the reason that hacker news has gone the way of slashdot. Oh, since you're probably under 20, slashdot used to have good discussion from actual engineers who were knowledgable, then it got overrun by ignorant gnu weeneis around 2001 or so-- back when you are 8.
      - Locke1689 16y ago
        I was a Microsoft SQL Server intern last summer. I got to know the SQL Server PMs very well. Every SQL Server PM had a technical degree. One of my good friends also graduated with a computer science degree last year and is now a B2B PM. Rudeness probably deserves rudeness back, but you're just so embarrassingly wrong that I don't think that I even need to say anything else.
phamilton 16y ago
At my school, CS is the 6th most popular major (out of 135). That's a big deal, especially since we aren't necessarily a tech school (BYU). They haven't had trouble placing grads yet, but they are starting to get worried too. Meanwhile, EE and CpE are pretty low. Definitely below the job market's demand.
- Apocryphon 16y ago
  What's CpE?
  - flippit 16y ago
    Computer Engineering?
  - msg 16y ago
    Computer Engineering? I think we split them this way at Utah State: Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering (systems/hardware emphasis), Computer Science (software/algorithms emphasis).
  - phamilton 16y ago
    CpE is computer engineering. In the EE department, it's called CE, which gets confused with Civil Engineering or Chemical Engineering.
ChrisArchitect 16y ago
not one mention of The Social Network movie or if a chunk of this influx is looking for a career at making iPhone apps?
pjhyett 16y ago
I know it's in vogue to throw the word bubble around, but I'd be interested to see the CS enrollment stats worldwide. The first generation of kids that spend more time in front of their computer than the TV are starting to hit college. More screen time is bound to create more people interested in how they can program the thing they sit in front of all day.
- icey 16y ago
  I think a side effect of kids growing up with computers is that CS doesn't carry the same social stigma it carried 10 or 15 years ago. It's much less common to see a programmer portrayed as a fat, slovenly nerd as it used to be.
- bad_user 16y ago
  I kind of wish for that to happen, but for children of friends / relatives that do sit in front of the computer all day I do not see it. The problem is that many things are taken for granted (normally) and there are lots of distractions available -- when my parents bought me my first computer (in 95) I only had games like Doom to play and no net available, and I got bored easily. Loved sitting in front of the computer, and there was nothing more interesting than learning to program it. Kids nowadays only stay on chat/facebook/myspace all day and/or play games, which is understandable to a certain point since there's lots of stuff to do with a PC that's attractive even to non-technical people. You don't need to program it to feel good about yourself, to show off, to have some fun or to get some work done ... that's the difference between now and the nineties.
  - hack_edu 16y ago
    I too had my first machine at a super young age in 1994 and learned to program just the same. Our only difference was that I was still on chat/IM all day back then too, a distraction, but not as big of one as doing anything on a 25mhz Mac with a 33.6kbs modem. What really made me learn to program was the NEED to figure out how to work the machine and network to be as fast as I could. I do doubt I'd be as interested in learning the innards on a smartphone or netbook...
forensic 16y ago
Who are we kidding. This is a symptom of the economy. There is money in software. What does the economy of the future look like? Millions and millions of programmers. Manipulating technology is where value comes from and software is the most efficient way to manipulate technology. I just hope we have enough robotics and computer engineering people to improve the platforms all these programmers are going to work on. The web browser is pretty limited in its ability to improve human life. We need other platforms to target.
- Retric 16y ago
  I suspect the number of programmers and admins to grow fairly slowly over time. In many ways we are still in the early days of the revolution where everyone needed to tack on indoor plumbing, heating, and AC to existing buildings. Not only are there huge gaps but all the tools suck so everything is a custom job. However, now days it's become a fairly standardized and when building from scratch you just include plumbing, heating, and AC as part of the initial design. EX: Modern auto factory robots are more capable than needed for most of their jobs but a better tool means less need to customize. PS: Consider the number of poeple projected to know HTML in 1998 vs actually know HTML in 2010.
  - SoftwarePatent 16y ago
    "PS: Consider the number of poeple projected to know HTML in 1998 vs actually know HTML in 2010." What's the answer? A lot more or a lot less?
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      The bar's certainly a lot higher. When I was in high school in the late 90s, a bunch of us high school kids got jobs as webmonkeys writing HTML for the dot-com boom. It was something you could easily teach yourself as a student. Nowadays, Google's having trouble hiring enough people with sufficient web skills. And the reason is because the web basically "grew up". In addition to HTML, you also need to know CSS, JavaScript, how to write maintainable JavaScript, DOM APIs, browser quirks, performance tricks, emerging web standards, and at least one server-side programming language. The definition of a "web developer" has shifted so that it's really a full-fledged programmer with specific domain knowledge, akin to the skill level needed to do compilers or embedded systems. And the barriers to entry have become correspondingly bigger; you don't see as many high school kids writing major websites any more.
spydertennis 16y ago
As technology becomes more ubiquitous, the people who understand technology will become more valuable. This is a symptom of more people knowing what the internet is than did 20 years ago.
troymc 16y ago
I'd attribute part of the increase to what I call the "Top Gun Effect." When Top Gun (the Tom Cruise movie) came out, there was a big increase in the number of students signing up for aerospace engineering courses and programs. The trigger doesn't have to be a movie, just something in popular culture. In this case, I think it's all the positive media around Facebook, iPhone, iPad, Kinect, Google and more (including at least one Oscar-nominated movie).
- adestefan 16y ago
  The increase in aerospace engineering was driven by the launch of the first Space Shuttle, not by Top Gun.
  - troymc 16y ago
    The launch of the first Space Shuttle happened April 12, 1981. Top Gun, the movie, came out about five years later, on May 16, 1986. Maybe the Space Shuttle launch did cause an increase in interest in aerospace programs, and maybe it didn't. I don't know. What I do know is that Top Gun did cause an increased interest in aerospace courses and programs.
juiceandjuice 16y ago
This is more likely due to a generational shift than anything. People between the ages of ~23 and ~28 are sort of the go-betweeners with roots (and maybe even parents) in generation X but firmly planted in Generation Y. 22 and younger is firmly Generation Y, transforming into Z or whatever you want to call it. Right now, people around 18 have lived their whole life with the internet, and probably half of it with broadband.
patio11 16y ago
Capitalism happens? Seriously, anecdotal fresh-out-of-school salaries for talented CS people are near $100k. Anecdotal fresh-out-of-school salaries for talented English majors are near... well, they get discounted frappuchinos at any rate. This is Mr. Market saying "Thanks, I've got enough literary criticism -- can I please, please, please have more code monkeys?"
- PakG1 16y ago
  I think he's trying to argue that there's something more basic at work here where there's a fundamental value to computing science that is finally being realized by the world, and any drops will not be due to lack of interest in computing science, nor a dip in high-tech industries. Not that I agree with him.
- thirtyseven 16y ago
  This kind of argument infuriates me. Mr. Market wants lots of things, some of them are good, some aren't. Besides, would a talented English major even want to be a full-time developer? Would you want to work with them? Not everyone lives their lives according to the principles of capitalism, just consider yourself lucky that at this moment, it's working out in our favor as developers.
  - killedbydeath 16y ago
    Kids in high school and even in early years of college have a lot to choose from. I was seriously considering medicine and econ but eventually chose a math/CS major.
  - lotusleaf1987 16y ago
    Exactly. Everyone should do what they enjoy. I'm not going to go chase some job I don't feel interested in to make 5-10% more a year but be miserable doing it.
    - deleted 16y ago
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ThomPete 16y ago
Great, that just means more gold diggers for us merchants to sell tools to.
- zackattack 16y ago
  what sorta tools you sellin, boss? :)
kyan 16y ago
I was a section leader for CS106A/B/X at Stanford and Eric Roberts was my undergrad adviser. I graduated in 08 and all through my 4 years, the number of students majoring in CS and taking CS106A/B/X was increasing rapidly. Personally, I think that it's fantastic. Programming is a great skill to be exposed to even if you're not a programmer. There's no shortage of hard problems to be solved in CS and the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned. From my experience of teaching at least 100 kids who have taken the CS106s, no one has done it for a higher salary out of college - a lot of non-CS majors take it to satisfy the Engineering GER (a requirement) and the rest take it out of interest.
- cpr 16y ago
  I only knew Eric as a TA/grad student at Harvard (I was undergrad--this is back in the Stone Age--mid-70's), but he was already then a fantastic, enthusiastic teacher. I imagine he's only gotten better.
snikolic 16y ago
I think this is cyclical, and to be expected. I had a conversation ~2 years ago with the head of a CS Dept in Boston who was anticipating this. He explained that enrollment in his department had grown by an order of magnitude (or more) during the dot-com bubble and shrank by a similar amount after the bust. Just as Lehman et al. was occurring, he was bracing for the same thing to happen again...and here it is.
- hga 16y ago
  It depends. MIT has seen something quite different, EECS enrollment from at least the '80s to the dot.com crash was ~ 400 students per class of ~ 1050. Then it crashed hard down to as low as 180 and only very recently got over 200. MIT hasn't seen anything like Stanford's increase but that probably has a lot to do with the different student bodies and the very different introductory courses (e.g. they no longer have a hard introductory course suitable for non-majors).
  - hga 16y ago
    Update: enrollment in 6.01, MIT's "CS1" course for majors, just jumped to 380 this spring from 250 last spring.
Apocryphon 16y ago
Anyone know if the life sciences ever experiences this as part of hype for a biotech boom? I'm sure they have a constant stream of enrollment for the med industry.
- itg 16y ago
  I took a few life science classes in college. I would say about 80% of the class was pre-med. Only a handful were in it for a PhD/industry.
buckwild 16y ago
Maybe there is a more simple explanation. I speculate it is just that computers (and programming) are becoming more of a required skill in many fields. I know psychologists and MBAs who use programming to data mine. I myself am a bioinformatician and heavily use programming to answer scientific questions. It could also be that kids are being introduced to programming at a younger and younger age. I started learning programming in my early teens, but I have a little cousin who has a Java class in her private school. She is about 8 now and can program Java better than I can...
reedF211 16y ago
For anyone still saying "there is no bubble"...
- jackowayed 16y ago
  There is no programmer bubble. There is a massive shortage of highly competent programmers that has very low correlation to the trend of more people taking intro CS classes. There may be an investment bubble, but I don't think the average person taking CS106A this quarter has any idea of that beyond maybe that Facebook is a bit overvalued. People are taking CS 106A (and B) because * They're humanities majors that want to fulfill their engineering requirement to graduate * Our intro CS classes are very well-regarded as fun and approachable. * It's interesting, and people see that computers are getting more and more important. Honestly, almost none of the people in A this quarter plan on using CS in their jobs. People in B are considering a CS major/minor and/or just enjoy CS. People in 107 are probably going to major or minor in CS (or EE), so there will be an increase in majors, but not a huge one. Not enough to create a bubble, at least not yet
deleted 16y ago
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jonmc12 16y ago
I graduated in '01 with an EE degree. At that point in time, engineering, including software, seemed like a field where you were ushered down a career path towards a pigeon-holed role at a large company. The advice was to get into a) technical sales, b) product marketing, or c) consulting if you wanted to start a career towards being an entrepreneur. Now, its much different - the technology is more empowering and much cheaper. I can build stuff, and if I can build stuff people want, its a direct path to starting a company. Constrained by my ability to build stuff, I committed myself over the last 2.5 years to focusing on becoming a better engineer. What is interesting, is that many of my peers that I thought were done coding have come to this same conclusion. In the last 6 months I have had 3 friends - 1 a successful consultant at a big firm, 1 a successful tech salesman and a fortune 100 company, and 1 a VP of engineering at a mid-sized firm. Each of them is coding on nights and weekends now. Why? 1) Paul Graham - 'build stuff people want' and the subsequent success of that strategy, 2) It is really hard to hire developers to build stuff, 3) Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga and other companies that used tech to change the world in insanely short periods of time. So, from what I am seeing, its not about people gold-digging (as many comments have suggested) - its that the skill of engineering has turned from a boring career skillset into an incredibly empowering tool. I imagine many undergrads are seeing it this way too.
b3b0p 16y ago
At my school the first 2 CS courses were always packed... in the initial weeks of courses beginning at least. I had a professor in one of those courses once say something like this: Look to your left, look to your right, because one of you won’t be here by the end of the year. Both these courses were considered weed out courses. They were Java based and most majors I had heard required at least one or both of them. $100k in San Francisco is less than $50k where I live. I rent a single bedroom, no debt in Oklahoma. My good friend lives in San Francisco, single bedroom apartment, doesn't even need a car. I take home after taxes, expenses, etc about 50% to 25% and I make almost half of what he makes. Anecdotal, yes. Maybe not typical, but it does show that cost of living is a major factor on salary.
ninguem2 16y ago
>A 20% rate of increase is healthy and manageable. At this rate, all of mankind will be Stanford CS students by the end of the century.
amathew 16y ago
For a person considering going back to school as a non-trad student for either a BS in Computer Science or Computational Math, is this a bad time to be getting a degree in CS?
- hga 16y ago
  Well, be sure to e.g. factor in the terrible age discrimination in the former field (I have no knowledge of Computational Math as a career). Conventional, salaried programming careers end around age 35-40 and get totally impossible at 50 unless you can go the consultant route, specialize in one of the fields that respects gray hairs (e.g. embedded to some extent) or walk on water. I had a friend who did that, finishing at about age 40 (and looking it due to premature gray hair). She never found a job, which is a terrible shame since she has "the spark" for programming which is rare in men and very very rare in women (she's the 3rd I've ever met in my 50 years on this earth---and as someone who until a year ago could pass for a college student my personal anecdotal data on age discrimination is rather solid). On the other hand, if you're going to go the YC sort of route to start your own company, weight the risks of course but go for it! You'll get a mental toolbox which will do you well when you need to tackle difficult problems, and in many ways this field is like von Clausewitz's description of war, "Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult." As Microsoft and its competitors' history shows consistently writing software that works is harder than most people think. pg commented in one of his essays that a whole lot of the dot.com bubble era's failures were technical---well, their business model also may have had no chance, but they never got to the point of trying that. Friendster lost to Facebook if for no other reason than that for too many years they didn't solve their capacity problems which made the site painful to use.
narrator 16y ago
I blame "The Social Network" movie. That was the first movie that made software development look like a fun way to party, make tons of money and get hot chicks. The Palo Alto dev house pot smoking scenes and the fictional Sean Parker antics were quite amusing in that regard. That, and there's easy money in software these days.
- hga 16y ago
  But note that the movie came out October 1st of last year, so it could not influence the first of the three Stanford "quarters" in this academic year (summer is the 4th quarter). It very well might have had a effect but in the previous academic year they'd already almost returned to their previous enrollment peak. Plus it can't explain the sharp mid or high 70s% increase in their "CS3" course CS107, since anyone inspired by the movie would right now at best be taking the 2nd course in their sequence.
tytso 16y ago
One of the problems that I see is that perhaps "Computer Science" is too broad. MIT has been mocked by some for having a "humanities" department, where Theater, Foreign Languages, Literature, etc., are all combined together, but given how complex the world has become in the world of computer science disciplines, I'd argue that a "Computer Science" degree is almost as broad. Consider the different sorts of work that a CS undergraduate might pursue: Alice could become a CPU architect, working at Intel or AMD on the next micro-archtecture for the next generation of x86_64 chips. Bobby could work on creating a new secure PHP framework that makes security exposures much less likely. Candice could on writing J2EE applets for Ford. David could become a GUI engineer. Elaine could be writing the engine for an amazing new MMORPG. Frank could be working on new compiler optimizations for the Go language. Gerald could be a product manager for an amazing new consumer electronic device that's actually not derivative of other products. Hermione might be a webmaven who can create a website using Drupal, Wordpress, or what ever else is appropriate/demanded by her clients. You get the idea. All of these require radically different preparation for a successful career, and one interesting question is where should that preparation take place? On the job? At a trade school? At an undergraduate CS program? Some CS programs focus heavily on Java programming these days. Others still have a very heavy Systems bias (although I lament that MIT is no longer requiring undergraduates to build a CPU out of TTL chips :-). Some try to spread themselves super-thin, and have a peanut-butter coverage of all of these topics, and assume that if student needs to learn the intricacies of the Java standard libraries, they can do that on the job. Others will assume the same about what Virtual Memory is. (No kidding, I was sitting in 1st year introductory CS graduate class at MIT when a student raised her hand, and asked in lecture, "I'm sorry, what is Virtual Memory?". My jaw dropped.) Similarly I think there's going to be a huge variety in salaries based on both the very wide range of talent available --- both in terms of quality, and their scope of training/skills/experience. If a company only wants the very best and brightest, asking for $100k/year even for a recent college graduate isn't insane. I've done phone screens for people who have been out in the industry for years, and they flubbed amazingly basic questions --- so much so that I wondered how/why their previous employers had hired them. My personal conclusion is that the market is extremely tight for certain classes of software engineers (for example, really good Linux Kernel engineers), and some companies react by hiring anyone they can get, and other companies react by holding the line, only hiring competent engineers, and paying more if that's what it takes.
chopsueyar 16y ago
This isn't the guy from "Best of the Best"?

186 points by andreyf 16y ago

kenjackson 16y ago

Can't they just accept fewer students? Seems odd to get worked up about something you directly control.

larsberg 16y ago
I don't think they're like CMU, which has a separate school of Computer Science you have to be admitted to in order to be a CS major. If Stanford is like the University of Chicago, the only thing stopping students from majoring in CS are the registrar-imposed limits on the number of students physically enrolled.
- natrius 16y ago
  You are correct.
- RyanGWU82 16y ago
  Stanford doesn't even have those "registrar-imposed limits." Classes almost never fill up; they just get larger rooms or add TAs. Students don't usually register for classes until after the term has started! I was an undergrad at a more traditional school where we registered for classes months in advance. I was amazed that the Stanford system was so informal, but in practice it worked just fine. It's wonderful to be able to audit a few classes before deciding on exactly what you're going to take; you may learn that you can't stand a professor, or love a surprising subject.
  - schwap 16y ago
    Wow, as an undergrad who has endured years of stressful schedule twiddling followed by a 2-week sprint to figure out how I'm going to replace all the crap courses I naively selected months ago, that sounds like paradise.
    - cbcase 16y ago
      It's not exactly paradise. Because classes are only ten weeks total (slightly less in spring), you can't exactly spend the first week or two shopping around without doing non-trivial work for every single class you're shopping --- an approach which doesn't scale, to say the least. There's still a sprint the first few days. But still, it's nice.
tomjen3 16y ago
Sure, but the problem is that it is a sign of the state of the economy - and another indication of a new bubble.
- nkassis 16y ago
  Well, as the article stated, many students from other degrees end up taking CS courses as part of their program and like them enough to switch. That's not necessarily related to the current potential bubble. I know many who took computer science classes as part of a degree in biology and just ended up switching entirely.
geebee 16y ago
I think it reflects so well on Stanford that they are committed to making sure students have an opportunity to major in cs, even if enrollment is tough to manage. That bit about helping the geology phd reflects especially well on stanford. I attended cal for grad school, and I love it in many ways, but I just don't see as deep a commitment to every students success. Don't want to overstate this, plenty of wonderful profs and staff at cal who make an effort, and the challenges of 25k undergrads is great. But it pains me to see young smart people who stumble a bit in their first couple years bounced from a major because the dept is looking for reasons to turn students away. I thins the field loses a lot of c@reative people who would have made big contributions. Cs hasn't been impacted at cal forr a while now, thought it was when I was there. Fortunately there are other good paths for persistent students.
- hga 16y ago
  This is one of the things you pay the big bucks for at the better private colleges. Part of their implicit contract with you is that they'll make available to you the resources necessary to complete your major in 4 years (although that can get difficult with laboratories that have highly finite sizes, e.g. a chemistry lab with N hoods) and they won't intentionally limit capacity with "weed out" courses. At the worst case some big colleges are less of a bargain than they appear since you have to take 5+ years to get into all the required courses due to capacity issues. Or take the half of the big 4 CS schools: Berkeley is like many if not most big public schools in requiring you apply to either their Engineering or "Letters and Science" schools, and you can't take EECS without getting into the former, CS without getting into one of either (or at least that's what they say on their home page, their may be exceptions of course). CMU is unusual for a private school in that you have to apply to their CS department which has a fixed per year class size of 135 (last time I checked). MIT and I gather Stanford are like most? private colleges in that acceptance allows you to major in anything you can do and to switch if you want to. If a major doubles in size "overnight" they'll move heaven and earth to accommodate the undergrads (which is a or the major theme of this blog posting, some panic that Stanford CS major enrollment is exploding). MIT, mindful of the transitory popularly of fields (e.g. look at the early '70s areo-astro crash from which the field never recovered) has never let the EECS department---the number of professors and graduate students---get "too big", which sure appeared wise after the dot.com crash which resulted in undergraduate enrollment falling by more than 1/2. That put great stress on the department when it had 40% of the undergraduates in the 80s and 90s (and which they may be returning to, with their "CS1" course enrollment exploding from 250 last spring to 380 this spring). Enough that for a long time in that period they refused to offer a service introductory programming course for non-majors, citing their overload.
abeppu 16y ago
Can't they just use auto-graders? I got the impression that for many of my CS courses, the TA and professor labor went mainly into creating assignments and lectures. But many of the assignments were self or automatically grading. If you have suitably lab-based assignments, then it shouldn't be too difficult to lower the cost of adding more students into the lower level courses.
- hga 16y ago
  As mentioned in another thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444557 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2444557) this course, like MIT's equivalent, is very TA intensive and is using undergraduate TAs (although I should note that MIT's 6.01-2 are not suitable for non-majors). ADDED: I just found out that enrollment in MIT's 6.01 just jumped to 380 this spring from 250 last spring. As noted, you don't by and large take this course unless you're seriously considering EECS as a major.... So it looks like Stanford's experience is mirrored at MIT.

larsberg 16y ago

The same thing appears to be happening here at the University of Chicago -- increased numbers of undergraduates in the sequence as well as greatly increased Ph.D. student applications over the last couple of years. And not just money-grubbers in the undergrads as well; many refuse to interview with the previous staples for our graduates -- the finance industry here in Chicago or "big companies" such as Google and Facebook (one of them said to me during a lab, "I mean, really, PHP? Who wants to work with THAT?"). I haven't seen as many Ph.D. students from other disciplines coming through our intro sequence and regretting their current path. But, I do see quite a few juniors and seniors who only started taking CS classes as a sophomore or junior (usually because their advisor told them the classes were too hard and would make it difficult to do their Core Curriculum) and really wish they had evaluated the major earlier before they made choices that prevented them from switching majors and still graduating in four years.

btilly 16y ago
one of them said to me during a lab, "I mean, really, PHP? Who wants to work with THAT?" You speak as if disdain for PHP was a bad thing. I know a lot of very experienced and competent programmers who feel the same way, and it is not a slight on their competence that they do.
- larsberg 16y ago
  I apologize if it came across that way! I was impressed by their desire to work with cool tech and on interesting problems instead of being dominated by economic fear and just going wherever they were most likely to get a big payout (whether or not joining Facebook now will get you a big payout is another question <grin>).
- falsestprophet 16y ago
  He is also clueless if he thinks working at Facebook is beneath him because some PHP may be peripherally involved.
- tybris 16y ago
  I used PHP for years, worst mistake of my life.

michaelochurch 16y ago

Who is coming in to the programs? And what are their motivations? You can't evaluate whether this is a good or bad change based on the numbers alone. For example, the legal profession has been swamped with excess entrants and it sucks. On the other hand, programmers tend to be job-creators more than job-takers, even as employees ("intrapreneurs") so I think this is probably a good thing.

benwerd 16y ago

Rinse and repeat everywhere, and we're likely to see an overabundance of computer scientists in three or four years. Developers: may I suggest getting a second degree?

illamint 16y ago
Seriously? Just because there are waves of people enrolling in an introductory CS course at an extremely high-level CS school like Stamford doesn't mean that any reasonable percentage of those students will actually end up getting degrees. I'd estimate that less than 10% of the people enrolled in the intro CS course at my university ended up getting a CS degree. Sure, there's bound to be an uptick; demand for developers is huge and all, but it's still a rigorous course of study and I think you need to be pretty driven to "get" it all. I'm not even remotely worried, because even if there were an overabundance of "computer scientists", there would still be a dearth of good computer scientists.
- benwerd 16y ago
  You actually make a fair point: I forgot the difference between the UK education system (which I went through) and the US. In the UK, you pick your entire major over a year before you ever go to university. In fact, it depends on your A-levels, so you're effectively picking your major at age 15 or 16. Whereas, of course, in the US, you have far more room to pick and choose. Nonetheless, this uptick in interest is almost guaranteed to result in far more computer scientists. I agree that the number of good computer scientists is a fraction of that, but you'll still have far more chance of standing out from the crowd if you have a bunch of additional skills.
- rawatson 16y ago
  The numbers which really surprise me are the +74% in CS107 enrollment and +78% in CS109. CS107 is viewed as the "don't declare CS until you take it" class, and a 74% increase definitely indicates a larger number of CS majors. That said, I do feel that some of the reason they're seeing these numbers is because these classes are all exceptionally well taught and administered. The introductory classes they offer are designed to cater to those who might be undecided as to their major. Within a few weeks of learning what "Java" is, students are playing around with GUI apps, and do things like write breakout (with sound!). All the while, the course manages to introduce the key concepts of computer programming.

zmitri 16y ago

This is a good sign! The general public is just realizing how important computer skills are, no matter what you are trying to do. A well rounded CS major can learn something new and apply those skills to something else. I think public schools and high schools need to start integrating and making CS/programming courses necessary just as basic math and science courses are required -- then once people reach university age, they can focus on different topics without having to take CS courses to learn the basic skills they require to approach those topics like a CS major would.

agscala 16y ago
I don't think that CS should be included in a high school curriculum. Programming is a valuable skill, sure, but I don't think that it will be applicable to 95% of students. There are such a broad range of jobs in the world, and very, very few end up doing programming, despite increasing numbers for university CS course registration.
- noahlt 16y ago
  I don't think that calculus should be included in a high school curriculum. Differential modelling is a valuable skill, sure, but I don't think that it will be applicable to 95% of students. There are such a broad range of jobs in the world, and very, very few end up doing differential modelling, despite increasing numbers for university calculus course registration.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - younata 16y ago
    At my high school, Calc was only offered as an AP course. If I so wanted, I could stop taking math after Algebra 2 and still graduate.
    - scott_s 16y ago
      Then perhaps there's ambiguity in the phrase "included in a high school curriculum." I consider calculus to have been included in my high school curriculum, but I chose to take it.

dstein 16y ago

When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble. - Kevin Marks I fully attribute the increase to The Social Network movie coinciding with the ballooning of Facebook's market cap. Flipping tech startups is the hot new get rich quick scheme. Just like flipping houses and subprime mortgages before it.

gersh 16y ago
There isn't be a bubble until Facebook IPOs. If there were really a bubble, Facebook would have IPOed already.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  Facebook hasn't IPO'd because there is no value for them to do so. They have enough liquidity on the secondary markets to keep employees happy and they are able to keep investments coming through alternative means. All an IPO would do would be to increase their paperwork.
  - wyclif 16y ago
    Don't forget an IPO would also require Facebook to disclose numbers they'd rather not while they still have liquidity. That's another major reason.
  - hga 16y ago
    Indeed, plus legal liability etc. etc. etc. The longer they wait, the better it might end up for the rest of us. The SEC suffered major embarrassment when Americans were dropped from Goldman's (?) recent Facebook investment vehicle and is at minimum looking to revise the current rules which date back to 1935. That's not going to fix SarBox, but maybe, just maybe that sort of bad attention/publicity will help.
warfangle 16y ago
He kind of addressed the difference between what's happening now and what happened in '99. ~10% who wanted to get rich doing it back then, versus people actually getting interested in the stuff now.

forgotAgain 16y ago

I wonder what the career counseling office could contribute to the discussion?

hinathan 16y ago
If so, that might mark a first.
forgotAgain 16y ago
So I guess my comment was overly subtle. My point was that in a time of economic stress the writer failed to investigate the most likely driver for student actions: "It's the economy stupid."

cube13 16y ago

The courses that were mentioned were all 100 level courses. Can anyone who went to Stanford(or knows the courses) comment on how technical they actually are? It's a good sign if these are actual technical courses, but if they're just Word/Excel "programming" non-technical courses, we're just seeing a lot of people padding their resume in a bad economy.

wmf 16y ago
Come on, you think a computer science class at Stanford is Word/Excel? Fortunately, they created a search engine that let me find the class in question: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/ http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/ It's Java programming.
- cube13 16y ago
  >Come on, you think a computer science class at Stanford is Word/Excel? Intro, non-technical course? These are more common than you think. CS105(https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs105/Course+Syllabus https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs105/Course+Syllabus) at UIUC is a course that covers exactly that(it was 101 when I went there). It's meant for non-engineering or science students to cover a general education credit. CS101(which was 105) is in C and matlab, and that covers some more techincally difficult stuff. This is meant for technical non-CS majors. CS125 is the true intro CS course, which covers data structures, recursion, etc.
  - wmf 16y ago
    That sounds pretty sad; I wonder why that class isn't in the MIS department or something.
    - cube13 16y ago
      Keep in mind that neither 101 or 105 actually count towards a CS degree in any capacity(either major or minor), so those aren't courses that anyone getting a CS degree would take anyway.
16y ago

famousactress 16y ago

As someone who's been regularly interviewing Stanford students and grads for internships and full-time positions, it's worth pointing out that lots of these CS students don't want to program. I've been surprised at how many of them are getting a CS education as a platform for a career in product management, or even marketing. It makes some sense, given the makeup of the companies that are exciting to work for nowadays. I think especially if you want to join an early-stage startup, there are lots of benefits to having a technical education, even if your role isn't expressly technical.

hinathan 16y ago
Sounds like the not-entirely-apocryphal "You can't get a PM job at Google without a CS degree" has been around long enough to sink in.
- Locke1689 16y ago
  It's been around a lot longer than Google. PMs at Microsoft are technical positions -- they mostly require a technical degree (how technical is dependent on your team. SQL Server PMs need to talk-the-talk with their B2B customers without confusion).
  - nika 16y ago
    Says the college student who, let me guess, never worked at microsoft. As someone who has, PMs are not technical people, at least not in that company at the time I worked there. I think ignorant college students who are not smart enough to know the limits of their own knowledge are the reason that hacker news has gone the way of slashdot. Oh, since you're probably under 20, slashdot used to have good discussion from actual engineers who were knowledgable, then it got overrun by ignorant gnu weeneis around 2001 or so-- back when you are 8.
    - Locke1689 16y ago
      I was a Microsoft SQL Server intern last summer. I got to know the SQL Server PMs very well. Every SQL Server PM had a technical degree. One of my good friends also graduated with a computer science degree last year and is now a B2B PM. Rudeness probably deserves rudeness back, but you're just so embarrassingly wrong that I don't think that I even need to say anything else.

phamilton 16y ago

At my school, CS is the 6th most popular major (out of 135). That's a big deal, especially since we aren't necessarily a tech school (BYU). They haven't had trouble placing grads yet, but they are starting to get worried too. Meanwhile, EE and CpE are pretty low. Definitely below the job market's demand.

Apocryphon 16y ago
What's CpE?
- flippit 16y ago
  Computer Engineering?
- msg 16y ago
  Computer Engineering? I think we split them this way at Utah State: Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering (systems/hardware emphasis), Computer Science (software/algorithms emphasis).
- phamilton 16y ago
  CpE is computer engineering. In the EE department, it's called CE, which gets confused with Civil Engineering or Chemical Engineering.

ChrisArchitect 16y ago

not one mention of The Social Network movie or if a chunk of this influx is looking for a career at making iPhone apps?

pjhyett 16y ago

I know it's in vogue to throw the word bubble around, but I'd be interested to see the CS enrollment stats worldwide. The first generation of kids that spend more time in front of their computer than the TV are starting to hit college. More screen time is bound to create more people interested in how they can program the thing they sit in front of all day.

icey 16y ago
I think a side effect of kids growing up with computers is that CS doesn't carry the same social stigma it carried 10 or 15 years ago. It's much less common to see a programmer portrayed as a fat, slovenly nerd as it used to be.
bad_user 16y ago
I kind of wish for that to happen, but for children of friends / relatives that do sit in front of the computer all day I do not see it. The problem is that many things are taken for granted (normally) and there are lots of distractions available -- when my parents bought me my first computer (in 95) I only had games like Doom to play and no net available, and I got bored easily. Loved sitting in front of the computer, and there was nothing more interesting than learning to program it. Kids nowadays only stay on chat/facebook/myspace all day and/or play games, which is understandable to a certain point since there's lots of stuff to do with a PC that's attractive even to non-technical people. You don't need to program it to feel good about yourself, to show off, to have some fun or to get some work done ... that's the difference between now and the nineties.
- hack_edu 16y ago
  I too had my first machine at a super young age in 1994 and learned to program just the same. Our only difference was that I was still on chat/IM all day back then too, a distraction, but not as big of one as doing anything on a 25mhz Mac with a 33.6kbs modem. What really made me learn to program was the NEED to figure out how to work the machine and network to be as fast as I could. I do doubt I'd be as interested in learning the innards on a smartphone or netbook...

forensic 16y ago

Who are we kidding. This is a symptom of the economy. There is money in software. What does the economy of the future look like? Millions and millions of programmers. Manipulating technology is where value comes from and software is the most efficient way to manipulate technology. I just hope we have enough robotics and computer engineering people to improve the platforms all these programmers are going to work on. The web browser is pretty limited in its ability to improve human life. We need other platforms to target.

Retric 16y ago
I suspect the number of programmers and admins to grow fairly slowly over time. In many ways we are still in the early days of the revolution where everyone needed to tack on indoor plumbing, heating, and AC to existing buildings. Not only are there huge gaps but all the tools suck so everything is a custom job. However, now days it's become a fairly standardized and when building from scratch you just include plumbing, heating, and AC as part of the initial design. EX: Modern auto factory robots are more capable than needed for most of their jobs but a better tool means less need to customize. PS: Consider the number of poeple projected to know HTML in 1998 vs actually know HTML in 2010.
- SoftwarePatent 16y ago
  "PS: Consider the number of poeple projected to know HTML in 1998 vs actually know HTML in 2010." What's the answer? A lot more or a lot less?
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    The bar's certainly a lot higher. When I was in high school in the late 90s, a bunch of us high school kids got jobs as webmonkeys writing HTML for the dot-com boom. It was something you could easily teach yourself as a student. Nowadays, Google's having trouble hiring enough people with sufficient web skills. And the reason is because the web basically "grew up". In addition to HTML, you also need to know CSS, JavaScript, how to write maintainable JavaScript, DOM APIs, browser quirks, performance tricks, emerging web standards, and at least one server-side programming language. The definition of a "web developer" has shifted so that it's really a full-fledged programmer with specific domain knowledge, akin to the skill level needed to do compilers or embedded systems. And the barriers to entry have become correspondingly bigger; you don't see as many high school kids writing major websites any more.

spydertennis 16y ago

As technology becomes more ubiquitous, the people who understand technology will become more valuable. This is a symptom of more people knowing what the internet is than did 20 years ago.

troymc 16y ago

I'd attribute part of the increase to what I call the "Top Gun Effect." When Top Gun (the Tom Cruise movie) came out, there was a big increase in the number of students signing up for aerospace engineering courses and programs. The trigger doesn't have to be a movie, just something in popular culture. In this case, I think it's all the positive media around Facebook, iPhone, iPad, Kinect, Google and more (including at least one Oscar-nominated movie).

adestefan 16y ago
The increase in aerospace engineering was driven by the launch of the first Space Shuttle, not by Top Gun.
- troymc 16y ago
  The launch of the first Space Shuttle happened April 12, 1981. Top Gun, the movie, came out about five years later, on May 16, 1986. Maybe the Space Shuttle launch did cause an increase in interest in aerospace programs, and maybe it didn't. I don't know. What I do know is that Top Gun did cause an increased interest in aerospace courses and programs.

juiceandjuice 16y ago

This is more likely due to a generational shift than anything. People between the ages of ~23 and ~28 are sort of the go-betweeners with roots (and maybe even parents) in generation X but firmly planted in Generation Y. 22 and younger is firmly Generation Y, transforming into Z or whatever you want to call it. Right now, people around 18 have lived their whole life with the internet, and probably half of it with broadband.

patio11 16y ago

Capitalism happens? Seriously, anecdotal fresh-out-of-school salaries for talented CS people are near $100k. Anecdotal fresh-out-of-school salaries for talented English majors are near... well, they get discounted frappuchinos at any rate. This is Mr. Market saying "Thanks, I've got enough literary criticism -- can I please, please, please have more code monkeys?"

PakG1 16y ago
I think he's trying to argue that there's something more basic at work here where there's a fundamental value to computing science that is finally being realized by the world, and any drops will not be due to lack of interest in computing science, nor a dip in high-tech industries. Not that I agree with him.
thirtyseven 16y ago
This kind of argument infuriates me. Mr. Market wants lots of things, some of them are good, some aren't. Besides, would a talented English major even want to be a full-time developer? Would you want to work with them? Not everyone lives their lives according to the principles of capitalism, just consider yourself lucky that at this moment, it's working out in our favor as developers.
- killedbydeath 16y ago
  Kids in high school and even in early years of college have a lot to choose from. I was seriously considering medicine and econ but eventually chose a math/CS major.
- lotusleaf1987 16y ago
  Exactly. Everyone should do what they enjoy. I'm not going to go chase some job I don't feel interested in to make 5-10% more a year but be miserable doing it.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]

ThomPete 16y ago

Great, that just means more gold diggers for us merchants to sell tools to.

zackattack 16y ago
what sorta tools you sellin, boss? :)

kyan 16y ago

I was a section leader for CS106A/B/X at Stanford and Eric Roberts was my undergrad adviser. I graduated in 08 and all through my 4 years, the number of students majoring in CS and taking CS106A/B/X was increasing rapidly. Personally, I think that it's fantastic. Programming is a great skill to be exposed to even if you're not a programmer. There's no shortage of hard problems to be solved in CS and the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned. From my experience of teaching at least 100 kids who have taken the CS106s, no one has done it for a higher salary out of college - a lot of non-CS majors take it to satisfy the Engineering GER (a requirement) and the rest take it out of interest.

cpr 16y ago
I only knew Eric as a TA/grad student at Harvard (I was undergrad--this is back in the Stone Age--mid-70's), but he was already then a fantastic, enthusiastic teacher. I imagine he's only gotten better.

snikolic 16y ago

I think this is cyclical, and to be expected. I had a conversation ~2 years ago with the head of a CS Dept in Boston who was anticipating this. He explained that enrollment in his department had grown by an order of magnitude (or more) during the dot-com bubble and shrank by a similar amount after the bust. Just as Lehman et al. was occurring, he was bracing for the same thing to happen again...and here it is.

hga 16y ago
It depends. MIT has seen something quite different, EECS enrollment from at least the '80s to the dot.com crash was ~ 400 students per class of ~ 1050. Then it crashed hard down to as low as 180 and only very recently got over 200. MIT hasn't seen anything like Stanford's increase but that probably has a lot to do with the different student bodies and the very different introductory courses (e.g. they no longer have a hard introductory course suitable for non-majors).
- hga 16y ago
  Update: enrollment in 6.01, MIT's "CS1" course for majors, just jumped to 380 this spring from 250 last spring.

Apocryphon 16y ago

Anyone know if the life sciences ever experiences this as part of hype for a biotech boom? I'm sure they have a constant stream of enrollment for the med industry.

itg 16y ago
I took a few life science classes in college. I would say about 80% of the class was pre-med. Only a handful were in it for a PhD/industry.

buckwild 16y ago

Maybe there is a more simple explanation. I speculate it is just that computers (and programming) are becoming more of a required skill in many fields. I know psychologists and MBAs who use programming to data mine. I myself am a bioinformatician and heavily use programming to answer scientific questions. It could also be that kids are being introduced to programming at a younger and younger age. I started learning programming in my early teens, but I have a little cousin who has a Java class in her private school. She is about 8 now and can program Java better than I can...

reedF211 16y ago

For anyone still saying "there is no bubble"...

jackowayed 16y ago
There is no programmer bubble. There is a massive shortage of highly competent programmers that has very low correlation to the trend of more people taking intro CS classes. There may be an investment bubble, but I don't think the average person taking CS106A this quarter has any idea of that beyond maybe that Facebook is a bit overvalued. People are taking CS 106A (and B) because * They're humanities majors that want to fulfill their engineering requirement to graduate * Our intro CS classes are very well-regarded as fun and approachable. * It's interesting, and people see that computers are getting more and more important. Honestly, almost none of the people in A this quarter plan on using CS in their jobs. People in B are considering a CS major/minor and/or just enjoy CS. People in 107 are probably going to major or minor in CS (or EE), so there will be an increase in majors, but not a huge one. Not enough to create a bubble, at least not yet

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jonmc12 16y ago

I graduated in '01 with an EE degree. At that point in time, engineering, including software, seemed like a field where you were ushered down a career path towards a pigeon-holed role at a large company. The advice was to get into a) technical sales, b) product marketing, or c) consulting if you wanted to start a career towards being an entrepreneur. Now, its much different - the technology is more empowering and much cheaper. I can build stuff, and if I can build stuff people want, its a direct path to starting a company. Constrained by my ability to build stuff, I committed myself over the last 2.5 years to focusing on becoming a better engineer. What is interesting, is that many of my peers that I thought were done coding have come to this same conclusion. In the last 6 months I have had 3 friends - 1 a successful consultant at a big firm, 1 a successful tech salesman and a fortune 100 company, and 1 a VP of engineering at a mid-sized firm. Each of them is coding on nights and weekends now. Why? 1) Paul Graham - 'build stuff people want' and the subsequent success of that strategy, 2) It is really hard to hire developers to build stuff, 3) Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga and other companies that used tech to change the world in insanely short periods of time. So, from what I am seeing, its not about people gold-digging (as many comments have suggested) - its that the skill of engineering has turned from a boring career skillset into an incredibly empowering tool. I imagine many undergrads are seeing it this way too.

b3b0p 16y ago

At my school the first 2 CS courses were always packed... in the initial weeks of courses beginning at least. I had a professor in one of those courses once say something like this: Look to your left, look to your right, because one of you won’t be here by the end of the year. Both these courses were considered weed out courses. They were Java based and most majors I had heard required at least one or both of them. $100k in San Francisco is less than $50k where I live. I rent a single bedroom, no debt in Oklahoma. My good friend lives in San Francisco, single bedroom apartment, doesn't even need a car. I take home after taxes, expenses, etc about 50% to 25% and I make almost half of what he makes. Anecdotal, yes. Maybe not typical, but it does show that cost of living is a major factor on salary.

ninguem2 16y ago

>A 20% rate of increase is healthy and manageable. At this rate, all of mankind will be Stanford CS students by the end of the century.

amathew 16y ago

For a person considering going back to school as a non-trad student for either a BS in Computer Science or Computational Math, is this a bad time to be getting a degree in CS?

hga 16y ago
Well, be sure to e.g. factor in the terrible age discrimination in the former field (I have no knowledge of Computational Math as a career). Conventional, salaried programming careers end around age 35-40 and get totally impossible at 50 unless you can go the consultant route, specialize in one of the fields that respects gray hairs (e.g. embedded to some extent) or walk on water. I had a friend who did that, finishing at about age 40 (and looking it due to premature gray hair). She never found a job, which is a terrible shame since she has "the spark" for programming which is rare in men and very very rare in women (she's the 3rd I've ever met in my 50 years on this earth---and as someone who until a year ago could pass for a college student my personal anecdotal data on age discrimination is rather solid). On the other hand, if you're going to go the YC sort of route to start your own company, weight the risks of course but go for it! You'll get a mental toolbox which will do you well when you need to tackle difficult problems, and in many ways this field is like von Clausewitz's description of war, "Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult." As Microsoft and its competitors' history shows consistently writing software that works is harder than most people think. pg commented in one of his essays that a whole lot of the dot.com bubble era's failures were technical---well, their business model also may have had no chance, but they never got to the point of trying that. Friendster lost to Facebook if for no other reason than that for too many years they didn't solve their capacity problems which made the site painful to use.

narrator 16y ago

I blame "The Social Network" movie. That was the first movie that made software development look like a fun way to party, make tons of money and get hot chicks. The Palo Alto dev house pot smoking scenes and the fictional Sean Parker antics were quite amusing in that regard. That, and there's easy money in software these days.

hga 16y ago
But note that the movie came out October 1st of last year, so it could not influence the first of the three Stanford "quarters" in this academic year (summer is the 4th quarter). It very well might have had a effect but in the previous academic year they'd already almost returned to their previous enrollment peak. Plus it can't explain the sharp mid or high 70s% increase in their "CS3" course CS107, since anyone inspired by the movie would right now at best be taking the 2nd course in their sequence.

tytso 16y ago

One of the problems that I see is that perhaps "Computer Science" is too broad. MIT has been mocked by some for having a "humanities" department, where Theater, Foreign Languages, Literature, etc., are all combined together, but given how complex the world has become in the world of computer science disciplines, I'd argue that a "Computer Science" degree is almost as broad. Consider the different sorts of work that a CS undergraduate might pursue: Alice could become a CPU architect, working at Intel or AMD on the next micro-archtecture for the next generation of x86_64 chips. Bobby could work on creating a new secure PHP framework that makes security exposures much less likely. Candice could on writing J2EE applets for Ford. David could become a GUI engineer. Elaine could be writing the engine for an amazing new MMORPG. Frank could be working on new compiler optimizations for the Go language. Gerald could be a product manager for an amazing new consumer electronic device that's actually not derivative of other products. Hermione might be a webmaven who can create a website using Drupal, Wordpress, or what ever else is appropriate/demanded by her clients. You get the idea. All of these require radically different preparation for a successful career, and one interesting question is where should that preparation take place? On the job? At a trade school? At an undergraduate CS program? Some CS programs focus heavily on Java programming these days. Others still have a very heavy Systems bias (although I lament that MIT is no longer requiring undergraduates to build a CPU out of TTL chips :-). Some try to spread themselves super-thin, and have a peanut-butter coverage of all of these topics, and assume that if student needs to learn the intricacies of the Java standard libraries, they can do that on the job. Others will assume the same about what Virtual Memory is. (No kidding, I was sitting in 1st year introductory CS graduate class at MIT when a student raised her hand, and asked in lecture, "I'm sorry, what is Virtual Memory?". My jaw dropped.) Similarly I think there's going to be a huge variety in salaries based on both the very wide range of talent available --- both in terms of quality, and their scope of training/skills/experience. If a company only wants the very best and brightest, asking for $100k/year even for a recent college graduate isn't insane. I've done phone screens for people who have been out in the industry for years, and they flubbed amazingly basic questions --- so much so that I wondered how/why their previous employers had hired them. My personal conclusion is that the market is extremely tight for certain classes of software engineers (for example, really good Linux Kernel engineers), and some companies react by hiring anyone they can get, and other companies react by holding the line, only hiring competent engineers, and paying more if that's what it takes.

chopsueyar 16y ago

This isn't the guy from "Best of the Best"?