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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 tha

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.