10 ms·

Campus College of Letters and Science plans to limit high-demand majors

81 points by kvee 4y ago

lacker 4y ago
This article doesn't describe the problem very directly. I found this op-ed by a student to be more informative. https://www.dailycal.org/2022/04/08/a-personal-view-of-uc-berkeleys-eecs-crisis/ https://www.dailycal.org/2022/04/08/a-personal-view-of-uc-be... Ten years ago, the department graduated roughly 400 students with Bachelor’s degrees in EECS or computer science. This year, the number will probably be 1400, or roughly 15%, of all undergraduates. Almost all of that growth is in the College of Letters and Science CS major. and more specifically: The campus provides departments $50 per student-credit per hour to pay for both lecturers and TAs. A student in a 4-unit class contributes roughly $200 out of the student’s overall tuition for these expenses. Yet the actual cost to a department is more than $350 per student for that 4-unit class, forcing departments to find additional funds to cover the upward of $150 per student gap. [...] The EECS department is running an annual deficit of nearly $5 million. At a high level, this problem is "growing pains" rather than "falling backwards". Computer science is booming at Berkeley, and they can't hire enough TAs to keep up when they are paying so badly. I hope they simply start paying CS TAs better.
- bhaney 4y ago
  > I hope they simply start paying CS TAs better. Impossible. Students definitely don't pay more than $50 per credit hour in tuition, so there's nowhere for the university to get the additional funds from. Edit: This was sarcastic
  - learndeeply 4y ago
    UC Berkeley has a $6 billion endowment. It's not impossible, but improbable.
  - apengwin 4y ago
    the government and taxes presumably. I think higher education is a wonderful public investment with great returns.
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  There's a great deal of missing information in that accounting. With what they've provided, it's not clear that they need to pay TAs more.
- forrestthewoods 4y ago
  What a sad and embarrassing state of affairs. :( Tuition is $14,000 for in-state and and a laughable $44,000 for out-of-state. And they can’t find an extra $150 per student? Fire one worthless administrator and the $150 gap is completely covered. Voila!
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I'm sure the typical student takes 280 credits per year...
- jxramos 4y ago
  Aha, that makes more sense now. I was almost going to say is this really news? I thought the concept of an "impacted" major was a pretty old definition--it basically means there are more applicants than there are spaces. But this other bit of information about a growing slice of the student body pie electing for a hot and lucrative major.
- murphyslab 4y ago
  This reminds me of my alma mater. The provincial government previously had funded $X/student. Then they changed it to a fixed grant. Meanwhile, enrollment continued to expand; the institution saw the expansion as serving the public. Soon enough, the government cut back the university's funding, which cut the operating budget. Eventually the Faculty of Science was looking at a $10 million shortfall; the equivalent of an entire department's budget. So they cut back on student spaces to the old $X/student allocation. One would hope that the public would notice and speak up in response, asking their politicians to properly fund education.
- elipsitz 4y ago
  Correction— the author of the op-ed, Nicholas Weaver, is a former lecturer in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. And a personal insight, as a former uGSI (TA) in the department, the problem isn’t paying TAs enough. The pay is actually quite high for a student job (especially when you factor in the fact that in-state tuition is paid for). But the course budgets simply aren’t high enough to hire the sheer quantity of TAs that would be required to handle all of the students who want to take the classes. I was involved in hiring some semesters, and there were always more people we wanted to hire than the budget would allow. I believe the situation has only gotten worse since I left.
  - lacker 4y ago
    That makes sense. So as a system we need to be spending more money on TAs, but not to raise their hourly pay, per se, mostly just to hire more TAs. You are also correct that the author is a former lecturer. Too bad it's too late for me to edit the comment.
- anu7df 4y ago
  Can I ask what it is that costs $350 per hour per student? There is one professor lecturing and a few TAs who work 20 hours a week at max. There are 60-100 students in all the major classes, 20-30 in more advanced ones. What exactly is the cost that leads to $350 per hour per student? Compute and infrastructure costs amortized over many students per year can't be it. Then what?
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    maybe he meant "credit hours" which is a different thing, I think a 4 credit course means that classes meet 4 hrs a week, but the $350 is for the entire semester or the quarter.
  - elipsitz 4y ago
    The largest classes (CS 61A and CS 61B) have roughly 1800 and 1600 students respectively during peak semesters. A 20 hour TA is paid ~$2250/mo for approximately 4.5 months per semester, plus ~$7000/semester in tuition remission (so ~$17k). $350 is the total cost for the whole semester per student. 17k/350 is about 50 students per TA, which sounds about right (and even that is a higher than ideal ratio). There are other costs too, but these are the some of the highest.
    - idontwantthis 4y ago
      Are the TAs grad students? I got $10/hour and nothing else as an undergrad TA.
      - elipsitz 4y ago
        Some are, almost all in the introductory classes (including me) and many in the upper division classes are undergrads. (u)GSIs at Berkeley are paid particularly well compared to other schools, I think in large part due to the TA union (UAW 2865).
        idontwantthis 4y ago
        Man, my university cost twice as much too.
vhiremath4 4y ago
If my tax dollars go anywhere, I would rather encourage students study multiple high-demand majors than provide loan forgiveness to societally unproductive majors (gender studies, literature, etc.). I don’t see why we should use tax money to prop up anything other than proven productive fields of study. Society should get something back, and I’d rather get back a smart physics/econ double major.
- trs8080 4y ago
  People are really out here thinking that arts and critical theory haven't advanced human civilization... and that science and technology exist in a cultural vacuum.
  - nightski 4y ago
    Most people aren't going to college for academic research, which is a big part of the problem. They are going for careers unfortunately.
    - Balgair 4y ago
      In California it's a bit different. According to 'The Master Plan', UCs are designed for research and post-grad work and some professional careers. Only the UCs give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). CSUs are designed for professional and teacher education and cannot give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). So, as an undergrad thinking of grad school, a UC is a better place to go to as they have the grad labs and classes on campus, while the CSUs mostly do not. Your chances of getting into grad school are a bit higher. Berkeley, being a UC, is more geared toward research than Chico, a CSU. I mean, Cal even has a nobel prize parking lot. https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/content-analysis/academic-planning/california-master-plan.html https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...
  - greatpostman 4y ago
    Middle iq people have no business taking on huge debt to study critical theory
buildbot 4y ago
University of Washington does a full on application with nearly all engineering majors, including Computer Science and Engineering, which is weirdly split between college engineering and college of arts and sciences. It is awful for everyone who experienced it. Hopefully it is different now, it really limited peoples choices. Tangent rant - Some time ago I was rejected 4 times from CSE, ended up getting admitted to EE. Which hilariously, now has changed its name to… ECE, electrical and computer engineering. They offer an different Computer Engineering degree now!!! The buildings are literally linked floor by floor and they won’t work together, haha. Got a great education in computer engineering even without the name.
- brewdad 4y ago
  It's not. HS students are direct admitted to the CoE but not their major. Allen School is a separate path and the only reasonable path to the Allen School CS is a direct admit from HS that is incredibly competitive. We are OOS, so he would have had an easier time getting into MIT than into Allen as a HS applicant. I think they took 4 OOS/Int'l students out of 400 total admits. After you accept that fact, 96% of rising sophomores in the College of Engineering got their first or second choice of major and only 4 majors had to reject anyone who wanted it as their first choice. If you took your first year seriously, you are almost certainly exactly where you hoped to be when you first applied coming out of HS. My son just got accepted into the new ECE program. He plans to follow a path that gets him closest to the Allen school degree while adding in some additional hardware knowledge that those students don't necessarily get.
  - buildbot 4y ago
    That is sad to hear about the Allen school, but it sounds like the CoE has figured out a good way forward. Goodluck to your son though with the new ECE program! It was a great program even before the name change with a lot of very good professors and lecturers. I especially recommend any class by Scott Hauck.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      Thanks. I'll let him know. He's had a great experience one year in and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend UW to anyone considering it but understand that you basically get to apply twice for any desirable major. Once to get into the school and again for whatever major you want if it is capacity constrained. Ironically, my cousin's daughter opted for Berkeley over UW this fall. She's on a non-STEM track though.
Svetlitski 4y ago
This was a long time coming. I graduated in 2021, and while the UC Berkeley computer science program is still absolutely stellar, it was starting to collapse under its own weight. While it scaled admirably, there are limits. I TA’ed operating systems (CS162) my last two semesters, and the office hours queue would fill up immediately upon starting, and due to an ever-shrinking number of course staff due to budget limitations, we were never able to get to everyone who wanted help. We’re talking several hundred students with less than a dozen TAs. This situation was not uncommon across other courses. The absolute smallest non-graduate-level CS course I took had around 100-150 students.
- ecuaflo 4y ago
  I was in a 40-person CS course: compilers. I cannot imagine that went up much
tsumnia 4y ago
Its unfortunate, but almost inevitable. Eric Roberts wrote about CS' latest rise 6 years ago [1]. Looking at its prior "peaks", its always come down to a resource issue - there's simply not enough space for everyone. As a consequence, schools started to do several things: A) Limit enrollment to the better prepared; B) Increase retraining for other STEM instructors/teachers to teach CS; or C) increase enrollment to unmanageable standards (my Intro to AI course has grown in the past 3 years from 45, to 80, to 120 next spring). Each has their own downfalls - higher enrollment requirements limit lower socioeconomic students, retraining programs cost money and can produce subpar instructors (2 month retraining PD vs a 2 year), and increased teaching loads make becoming an instructor unattractive. It doesn't help that CS PhDs are highly sought after by large tech corporations, pay MUCH more, and with less work (maybe). We haven't really solved how to teach CS, problem solving is still a difficult thing for humans to learn and we don't really have a better way to teach it. Even if we include all the current "soft skills", at the end of the day problem solving is the trait many companies want. If history repeats itself, the CS bubble will burst. Not necessarily plummeting, but new students seeking STEM careers will pick programs without as many barriers of entry or low quality instruction. I don't really have a solution to the problem, just acknowledging that the issues the domain will face as enrollment continues to increase. [1] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity/ https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity/
Blackthorn 4y ago
Does Berkeley make the intro classes brutally hard as weed-outs? I know some other schools do that for high-demand majors.
- neodypsis 4y ago
  Why do that?
  - tejtm 4y ago
    reduce noise is increase signaling
  - dagw 4y ago
    Because it is hard to judge who will make a 'good' computer scientist based solely on SATs and high school grades. Letting everybody take a real computer science course and exam and then judging future potential based on those results should give a much stronger signal
  - Blackthorn 4y ago
    TFA is literally about how there's not enough room for everyone.
- romanhn 4y ago
  When I was there 20+ years ago, the intro course (CS61A) was definitely known to knock the unprepared/uncommitted out of the running. Back then it was taught with Scheme out of SICP.
- tejtm 4y ago
  When I went (early dotcom to not-berkeley) they would milk the poor saps for a couple of years knowing they would never make the cut. I think weeding earlier would be kinder.
- aoki 4y ago
  The previous CS major declaration standard was roughly the median grade (B+) over three intro courses. The intro courses have standard "grade bins" to prevent sections from turning into the Hunger Games. In recent years, far more students were getting into L&S CS than into EECS. So they were clearly not optimizing for weed-out.
wanderingmoose 4y ago
As a mid-90's graduate who started in chemistry and accidentally found my way to computer science... Oof. The promise of a well rounded education where you can explore and find out for yourself what you enjoy and where you want to study no longer exists. I took CS classes because I wanted something fun to do outside of what I was officially studying. About the time I finished up, UCB was already limiting upper division classes to CS majors only. And this was thirty years ago. I ended up in my career because I married the thing I thought I wanted to do (chem) with the thing I really enjoyed and was good at (programming). I met a lot of grad students who wanted help programming and I got to do a lot of cool work with different research groups in chem/phys/bio that did protein folding, data visualization, etc. I ended up getting a job at Industrial Light and Magic because I had a lot of experience programming OpenGL on Irix(SGI). Where is the room for that kind of experience now? You need to test into the major before you even enter campus? I guess the college experience is getting a piece of paper stating that you can jump through a set of hoops. This is disappointing. I've been fortunate enough to work in an industry that combines art and tech and know the benefits of working with people who come from a variety of backgrounds and expertise. I want to live and work in a world where you don't need to match an algorithm to have a chance. And unfortunately, many people conflate a university degree with that chance.
- Cu3PO42 4y ago
  > You need to test into the major before you even enter campus? That's how it works in Germany and I believe a majority of other European countries as well. You don't apply to a given school, you apply to get into a specific program at a given school.
  - dagw 4y ago
    Works like that in Sweden as well. However once you are in, there is nothing stopping you from applying to courses outside of your program. For example I was in the mathematics program, but took 'extracurricular' courses at the philosophy, economics, computer science and electrical engineering departments. It is also possible to apply to change program once you are in.
diebeforei485 4y ago
They need to have weeder classes. At the same time, have a non-majors version of Intro to CS that isn't a weeder class.
dqpb 4y ago
If only there was some technology that could deliver education to a massive number of people in parallel...
throwaway239543 4y ago
Alternative pathway. * High school GPA of 2.5, so obviously university was out of the question :) * Enroll into local Junior college * Couldn't balance jr. college classes with no car, full time work (+ freelancing when primary job didn't cover rent) -- also didn't make sense to pay for material I already knew, and the CS department wouldn't let me test out [1]. * Already knew programming & CS fundamentals from pure curiosity * Enrolled into Hatchways :) [2] * Now work as full time SWE [1] From my understanding, California actually made required prerequisites illegal (limited to Math and English only), not for bogus CS prerequisites which is a shame. Prerequisites are courses that are required but do not count towards major/degree/program satisfaction. [2] https://www.hatchways.io/ https://www.hatchways.io/
yes_really 4y ago
The UC system has 170 billion dollars in assets and an endowment of 20 billion dollars. How come they can't afford to put students in a lecture room and pay TAs a few hours of work?
filereaper 4y ago
How times have changed, in 2006 when I enrolled into Undergrad CS everyone was saying all coding jobs would be offshored to Bangalore. All the cool kids went to Finance or Quant.
- vhold 4y ago
  It's really nuts, computer programming has this gigantic language translation component to it, so asking somebody to translate from English, to another human language, then to a computer language, is fraught full of peril and basically fails most of the time. The only teams that can pull it off have people who are really talented in the company's native language, and computer programming, and communicating with non-native language people. Those people are super rare and are not paid nearly enough to encourage more people to seek out that niche.
- rafram 4y ago
  Yeah, but then 2008 happened, finance got sketchy, FAANG CS jobs started to pay more than quant, and all the salary-minded undergrads realized they wanted absolutely nothing more than to write software for a living.
kepler1 4y ago
How will the UC Berkeley administration prevent its head from exploding from cognitive dissonance, if they start requiring people to successfully complete lower courses to get into the program? Think of all the injustice and inequities this will produce. The privileged just get more privileged.
HereIGoAgain 4y ago
Why?

81 points by kvee 4y ago

This article doesn't describe the problem very directly. I found this op-ed by a student to be more informative. https://www.dailycal.org/2022/04/08/a-personal-view-of-uc-berkeleys-eecs-crisis/ https://www.dailycal.org/2022/04/08/a-personal-view-of-uc-be... Ten years ago, the department graduated roughly 400 students with Bachelor’s degrees in EECS or computer science. This year, the number will probably be 1400, or roughly 15%, of all undergraduates. Almost all of that growth is in the College of Letters and Science CS major. and more specifically: The campus provides departments $50 per student-credit per hour to pay for both lecturers and TAs. A student in a 4-unit class contributes roughly $200 out of the student’s overall tuition for these expenses. Yet the actual cost to a department is more than $350 per student for that 4-unit class, forcing departments to find additional funds to cover the upward of $150 per student gap. [...] The EECS department is running an annual deficit of nearly $5 million. At a high level, this problem is "growing pains" rather than "falling backwards". Computer science is booming at Berkeley, and they can't hire enough TAs to keep up when they are paying so badly. I hope they simply start paying CS TAs better.

bhaney 4y ago
> I hope they simply start paying CS TAs better. Impossible. Students definitely don't pay more than $50 per credit hour in tuition, so there's nowhere for the university to get the additional funds from. Edit: This was sarcastic
- learndeeply 4y ago
  UC Berkeley has a $6 billion endowment. It's not impossible, but improbable.
- apengwin 4y ago
  the government and taxes presumably. I think higher education is a wonderful public investment with great returns.
TigeriusKirk 4y ago
There's a great deal of missing information in that accounting. With what they've provided, it's not clear that they need to pay TAs more.
forrestthewoods 4y ago
What a sad and embarrassing state of affairs. :( Tuition is $14,000 for in-state and and a laughable $44,000 for out-of-state. And they can’t find an extra $150 per student? Fire one worthless administrator and the $150 gap is completely covered. Voila!
- aidenn0 4y ago
  I'm sure the typical student takes 280 credits per year...
jxramos 4y ago
Aha, that makes more sense now. I was almost going to say is this really news? I thought the concept of an "impacted" major was a pretty old definition--it basically means there are more applicants than there are spaces. But this other bit of information about a growing slice of the student body pie electing for a hot and lucrative major.
murphyslab 4y ago
This reminds me of my alma mater. The provincial government previously had funded $X/student. Then they changed it to a fixed grant. Meanwhile, enrollment continued to expand; the institution saw the expansion as serving the public. Soon enough, the government cut back the university's funding, which cut the operating budget. Eventually the Faculty of Science was looking at a $10 million shortfall; the equivalent of an entire department's budget. So they cut back on student spaces to the old $X/student allocation. One would hope that the public would notice and speak up in response, asking their politicians to properly fund education.
elipsitz 4y ago
Correction— the author of the op-ed, Nicholas Weaver, is a former lecturer in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. And a personal insight, as a former uGSI (TA) in the department, the problem isn’t paying TAs enough. The pay is actually quite high for a student job (especially when you factor in the fact that in-state tuition is paid for). But the course budgets simply aren’t high enough to hire the sheer quantity of TAs that would be required to handle all of the students who want to take the classes. I was involved in hiring some semesters, and there were always more people we wanted to hire than the budget would allow. I believe the situation has only gotten worse since I left.
- lacker 4y ago
  That makes sense. So as a system we need to be spending more money on TAs, but not to raise their hourly pay, per se, mostly just to hire more TAs. You are also correct that the author is a former lecturer. Too bad it's too late for me to edit the comment.
anu7df 4y ago
Can I ask what it is that costs $350 per hour per student? There is one professor lecturing and a few TAs who work 20 hours a week at max. There are 60-100 students in all the major classes, 20-30 in more advanced ones. What exactly is the cost that leads to $350 per hour per student? Compute and infrastructure costs amortized over many students per year can't be it. Then what?
- fsckboy 4y ago
  maybe he meant "credit hours" which is a different thing, I think a 4 credit course means that classes meet 4 hrs a week, but the $350 is for the entire semester or the quarter.
- elipsitz 4y ago
  The largest classes (CS 61A and CS 61B) have roughly 1800 and 1600 students respectively during peak semesters. A 20 hour TA is paid ~$2250/mo for approximately 4.5 months per semester, plus ~$7000/semester in tuition remission (so ~$17k). $350 is the total cost for the whole semester per student. 17k/350 is about 50 students per TA, which sounds about right (and even that is a higher than ideal ratio). There are other costs too, but these are the some of the highest.
  - idontwantthis 4y ago
    Are the TAs grad students? I got $10/hour and nothing else as an undergrad TA.
    - elipsitz 4y ago
      Some are, almost all in the introductory classes (including me) and many in the upper division classes are undergrads. (u)GSIs at Berkeley are paid particularly well compared to other schools, I think in large part due to the TA union (UAW 2865).
      - idontwantthis 4y ago
        Man, my university cost twice as much too.

vhiremath4 4y ago

If my tax dollars go anywhere, I would rather encourage students study multiple high-demand majors than provide loan forgiveness to societally unproductive majors (gender studies, literature, etc.). I don’t see why we should use tax money to prop up anything other than proven productive fields of study. Society should get something back, and I’d rather get back a smart physics/econ double major.

trs8080 4y ago
People are really out here thinking that arts and critical theory haven't advanced human civilization... and that science and technology exist in a cultural vacuum.
- nightski 4y ago
  Most people aren't going to college for academic research, which is a big part of the problem. They are going for careers unfortunately.
  - Balgair 4y ago
    In California it's a bit different. According to 'The Master Plan', UCs are designed for research and post-grad work and some professional careers. Only the UCs give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). CSUs are designed for professional and teacher education and cannot give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). So, as an undergrad thinking of grad school, a UC is a better place to go to as they have the grad labs and classes on campus, while the CSUs mostly do not. Your chances of getting into grad school are a bit higher. Berkeley, being a UC, is more geared toward research than Chico, a CSU. I mean, Cal even has a nobel prize parking lot. https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/content-analysis/academic-planning/california-master-plan.html https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...
- greatpostman 4y ago
  Middle iq people have no business taking on huge debt to study critical theory

buildbot 4y ago

University of Washington does a full on application with nearly all engineering majors, including Computer Science and Engineering, which is weirdly split between college engineering and college of arts and sciences. It is awful for everyone who experienced it. Hopefully it is different now, it really limited peoples choices. Tangent rant - Some time ago I was rejected 4 times from CSE, ended up getting admitted to EE. Which hilariously, now has changed its name to… ECE, electrical and computer engineering. They offer an different Computer Engineering degree now!!! The buildings are literally linked floor by floor and they won’t work together, haha. Got a great education in computer engineering even without the name.

brewdad 4y ago
It's not. HS students are direct admitted to the CoE but not their major. Allen School is a separate path and the only reasonable path to the Allen School CS is a direct admit from HS that is incredibly competitive. We are OOS, so he would have had an easier time getting into MIT than into Allen as a HS applicant. I think they took 4 OOS/Int'l students out of 400 total admits. After you accept that fact, 96% of rising sophomores in the College of Engineering got their first or second choice of major and only 4 majors had to reject anyone who wanted it as their first choice. If you took your first year seriously, you are almost certainly exactly where you hoped to be when you first applied coming out of HS. My son just got accepted into the new ECE program. He plans to follow a path that gets him closest to the Allen school degree while adding in some additional hardware knowledge that those students don't necessarily get.
- buildbot 4y ago
  That is sad to hear about the Allen school, but it sounds like the CoE has figured out a good way forward. Goodluck to your son though with the new ECE program! It was a great program even before the name change with a lot of very good professors and lecturers. I especially recommend any class by Scott Hauck.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    Thanks. I'll let him know. He's had a great experience one year in and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend UW to anyone considering it but understand that you basically get to apply twice for any desirable major. Once to get into the school and again for whatever major you want if it is capacity constrained. Ironically, my cousin's daughter opted for Berkeley over UW this fall. She's on a non-STEM track though.

Svetlitski 4y ago

This was a long time coming. I graduated in 2021, and while the UC Berkeley computer science program is still absolutely stellar, it was starting to collapse under its own weight. While it scaled admirably, there are limits. I TA’ed operating systems (CS162) my last two semesters, and the office hours queue would fill up immediately upon starting, and due to an ever-shrinking number of course staff due to budget limitations, we were never able to get to everyone who wanted help. We’re talking several hundred students with less than a dozen TAs. This situation was not uncommon across other courses. The absolute smallest non-graduate-level CS course I took had around 100-150 students.

ecuaflo 4y ago
I was in a 40-person CS course: compilers. I cannot imagine that went up much

tsumnia 4y ago

Its unfortunate, but almost inevitable. Eric Roberts wrote about CS' latest rise 6 years ago [1]. Looking at its prior "peaks", its always come down to a resource issue - there's simply not enough space for everyone. As a consequence, schools started to do several things: A) Limit enrollment to the better prepared; B) Increase retraining for other STEM instructors/teachers to teach CS; or C) increase enrollment to unmanageable standards (my Intro to AI course has grown in the past 3 years from 45, to 80, to 120 next spring). Each has their own downfalls - higher enrollment requirements limit lower socioeconomic students, retraining programs cost money and can produce subpar instructors (2 month retraining PD vs a 2 year), and increased teaching loads make becoming an instructor unattractive. It doesn't help that CS PhDs are highly sought after by large tech corporations, pay MUCH more, and with less work (maybe). We haven't really solved how to teach CS, problem solving is still a difficult thing for humans to learn and we don't really have a better way to teach it. Even if we include all the current "soft skills", at the end of the day problem solving is the trait many companies want. If history repeats itself, the CS bubble will burst. Not necessarily plummeting, but new students seeking STEM careers will pick programs without as many barriers of entry or low quality instruction. I don't really have a solution to the problem, just acknowledging that the issues the domain will face as enrollment continues to increase. [1] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity/ https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity/

Blackthorn 4y ago

Does Berkeley make the intro classes brutally hard as weed-outs? I know some other schools do that for high-demand majors.

neodypsis 4y ago
Why do that?
- tejtm 4y ago
  reduce noise is increase signaling
- dagw 4y ago
  Because it is hard to judge who will make a 'good' computer scientist based solely on SATs and high school grades. Letting everybody take a real computer science course and exam and then judging future potential based on those results should give a much stronger signal
- Blackthorn 4y ago
  TFA is literally about how there's not enough room for everyone.
romanhn 4y ago
When I was there 20+ years ago, the intro course (CS61A) was definitely known to knock the unprepared/uncommitted out of the running. Back then it was taught with Scheme out of SICP.
tejtm 4y ago
When I went (early dotcom to not-berkeley) they would milk the poor saps for a couple of years knowing they would never make the cut. I think weeding earlier would be kinder.
aoki 4y ago
The previous CS major declaration standard was roughly the median grade (B+) over three intro courses. The intro courses have standard "grade bins" to prevent sections from turning into the Hunger Games. In recent years, far more students were getting into L&S CS than into EECS. So they were clearly not optimizing for weed-out.

wanderingmoose 4y ago

As a mid-90's graduate who started in chemistry and accidentally found my way to computer science... Oof. The promise of a well rounded education where you can explore and find out for yourself what you enjoy and where you want to study no longer exists. I took CS classes because I wanted something fun to do outside of what I was officially studying. About the time I finished up, UCB was already limiting upper division classes to CS majors only. And this was thirty years ago. I ended up in my career because I married the thing I thought I wanted to do (chem) with the thing I really enjoyed and was good at (programming). I met a lot of grad students who wanted help programming and I got to do a lot of cool work with different research groups in chem/phys/bio that did protein folding, data visualization, etc. I ended up getting a job at Industrial Light and Magic because I had a lot of experience programming OpenGL on Irix(SGI). Where is the room for that kind of experience now? You need to test into the major before you even enter campus? I guess the college experience is getting a piece of paper stating that you can jump through a set of hoops. This is disappointing. I've been fortunate enough to work in an industry that combines art and tech and know the benefits of working with people who come from a variety of backgrounds and expertise. I want to live and work in a world where you don't need to match an algorithm to have a chance. And unfortunately, many people conflate a university degree with that chance.

Cu3PO42 4y ago
> You need to test into the major before you even enter campus? That's how it works in Germany and I believe a majority of other European countries as well. You don't apply to a given school, you apply to get into a specific program at a given school.
- dagw 4y ago
  Works like that in Sweden as well. However once you are in, there is nothing stopping you from applying to courses outside of your program. For example I was in the mathematics program, but took 'extracurricular' courses at the philosophy, economics, computer science and electrical engineering departments. It is also possible to apply to change program once you are in.

diebeforei485 4y ago

They need to have weeder classes. At the same time, have a non-majors version of Intro to CS that isn't a weeder class.

dqpb 4y ago

If only there was some technology that could deliver education to a massive number of people in parallel...

throwaway239543 4y ago

Alternative pathway. * High school GPA of 2.5, so obviously university was out of the question :) * Enroll into local Junior college * Couldn't balance jr. college classes with no car, full time work (+ freelancing when primary job didn't cover rent) -- also didn't make sense to pay for material I already knew, and the CS department wouldn't let me test out [1]. * Already knew programming & CS fundamentals from pure curiosity * Enrolled into Hatchways :) [2] * Now work as full time SWE [1] From my understanding, California actually made required prerequisites illegal (limited to Math and English only), not for bogus CS prerequisites which is a shame. Prerequisites are courses that are required but do not count towards major/degree/program satisfaction. [2] https://www.hatchways.io/ https://www.hatchways.io/

yes_really 4y ago

The UC system has 170 billion dollars in assets and an endowment of 20 billion dollars. How come they can't afford to put students in a lecture room and pay TAs a few hours of work?

filereaper 4y ago

How times have changed, in 2006 when I enrolled into Undergrad CS everyone was saying all coding jobs would be offshored to Bangalore. All the cool kids went to Finance or Quant.

vhold 4y ago
It's really nuts, computer programming has this gigantic language translation component to it, so asking somebody to translate from English, to another human language, then to a computer language, is fraught full of peril and basically fails most of the time. The only teams that can pull it off have people who are really talented in the company's native language, and computer programming, and communicating with non-native language people. Those people are super rare and are not paid nearly enough to encourage more people to seek out that niche.
rafram 4y ago
Yeah, but then 2008 happened, finance got sketchy, FAANG CS jobs started to pay more than quant, and all the salary-minded undergrads realized they wanted absolutely nothing more than to write software for a living.

kepler1 4y ago

How will the UC Berkeley administration prevent its head from exploding from cognitive dissonance, if they start requiring people to successfully complete lower courses to get into the program? Think of all the injustice and inequities this will produce. The privileged just get more privileged.

HereIGoAgain 4y ago

Why?