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Stanford's Most Popular Major Is Now Computer Science
- aristidb 14y agoBubble?
- hexagonal 14y agoBubble. No way are all those kids going to be real programmers.
- catch23 14y agoThis happened during the first bubble. Everyone became CS majors when companies started giving away cars if you knew Java. I remember helping out psychology majors switching to computer science, who were failing their first CS class.
- vlad 14y agoIt would be interesting to know how many applicants got interested in Computer Science from watching Stanford's excellent iOS courses on iTunesU. Additionally, it would be interesting to learn how many students declare Computer Science before they enroll and how many students switch into Computer Science because "all their friends are doing it" now that it's the most popular major.
- BadassFractal 14y agoOr how many people went into CS after seeing The Social Network. vvv - luckily programming polices itself. Those who are not seriously motivated will unlikely survive a serious CS gauntlet.
- heretohelp 14y agoshudder This is a caveat of trying to popularize programming. Sometimes I wish it was still purely for 'nerds'.
- azylman 14y agoWhy should you care why people got interested in computer science? As long as they're capable of doing it (and if they graduate from a place like Stanford, they probably will be) why should you care about their motivation? I personally think anything that makes more people interested in technology is "a good thing".
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- hkmurakami 14y agoIf people pursue a discipline because "the industry is hot", rather than because of genuine interest in the subject or enjoyment of learning / improving, bad things happen to them when the industry inevitably cools down. I think about the CS majors during the times of the .dom boom, or the architecture majors during the housing/construction boom, and wonder how many students were stuck with a degree that was difficult to find a job with, and were not inherently interested about in the first place.
- cluda01 14y agoThe approach to problem solving you acquire from any rigorous scientific endeavor will benefit you for the rest of your life. These benefits will probably still apply regardless of whether or not you go on to be a practitioner. I suspect we can find more than a few data points here.
- bootload 14y ago"... the new focus on X, for the moment, suggests how much faith we’re putting — for our careers and our overall future — in the Y world. ..." Replace X with engineering or book binding and Y with steam powered or printing and it looks similar to other eras of technological growth.
- rodly 14y agoWhat are the implications of this popularity for us non-Ivey league current Computer Science majors?
- SafeSituation 14y agoI would say that the only difference that you have to overcome is the tight-knit community of alums. As a CS/OR major from a Top 4 school, I haven't ever gotten an internship offer simply because I was at the school I'm at. Stanford especially is good at fostering connections in the startup community for their students, but Princeton has NY and Harvard has Boston.
- sopooneo 14y agoWhat is an OR major please? Google didn't help.
- ayla 14y agoI don't know about Stanford, but in several other schools, it stands for Operations Research.
- SafeSituation 14y agoYep, ayla has it right, Operations Research. A bit similar to applied math.
- miguelv 14y agoAnd how many of them "reach the end"? How many of them are women?
- guelo 14y agoThe funny thing is most of those kids probably just want to learn how to make iphone apps and pretty websites but before they realize it they're stuck figuring out sorting algorithms and regex theory.
- basugasubaku 14y agoAt Stanford, you don't declare your major until your 2nd or 3rd year, and can change it after declaring. Students declaring CS will have already taken a number of CS courses, including the fundamentals of CS.
- Jach 14y agoSorting algorithms are high school material, I think they'll handle it. Especially if the professor is kind enough to say "...And never use these out of the classroom without a good reason to (and there is no good reason to use BubbleSort). Just use the built-in sort()." Actually using regexes seems a lot more common in the working world than in academia; as for the theory the basics of finite state machines are about as hard as sorting algorithms. (Or do most CS programs these days cover even more ways to implement a regex parser? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4194707 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4194707 I have no idea what most CS programs do other than produce BigCo BigLang employees, Stanford's sounds better than that from all I've read and heard.) So no, instead of sorting algorithms, maybe they'll give up at suffix tries or Haskell Monads or Lisp macros or relational databases or garbage collectors or JITs or Bayesian networks or operating systems or... And while I don't know much about iPhone apps, I think Android apps are at least as hard as InsertionSort() and probably more frustrating. You even have a consulting business around them--does anyone have a business around sorting algorithms? Who knows what their motivations are? Someone at Stanford should do a poll. I'd bet the same amount on "want to make something easy-sounding and specific like phone apps", "want to make lots of money doing who knows what" (maybe even as concrete as working for BigCo or doing a startup), and "because it sounds interesting/friends are doing it/other social reasons". If we're going to imagine them as fairly dim, it's easier to imagine they have no concrete goal in mind. (Edit: and according to my sibling comment, since majors aren't declared until later we probably shouldn't be imagining these students as dim.)
- capkutay 14y agoLuckily, many people can major CS but only the competent can pass...given its a respectable program.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoThis isn't a zero-sum game. More programmers equals more software projects in existence, better support for existing projects, more co-founders to choose from for your new startup, and an acceleration of human progress.
- giardini 14y agoIt's Stanford! Like medical school, once you're in, _nobody_ fails. If you need tutoring, money or a sympathetic shoulder, there's plenty available.
- mukaiji 14y agoOh, people do fail. They just withdraw, keep attending the course, and retake it for a grade the quarter after. As long as they get the subject eventually, it's all that matters, right?
- samstave 14y agoWhat was the most popular prior?
- abi 14y agoHumBio (Human Biology) for quite a few years and I think before that, it was either International Relations or Economics. HumBio is really popular because of pre-meds and other people who want to get into bio-related jobs/grad programs.
- SiVal 14y agoHumBio also tended to be the major of no major, the major people declared and the classes they took when they were required to declare a major but hadn't yet figured out what they wanted to major in. The first couple of years of classes were considered relatively easy yet still mostly applicable to many other majors.
- suresk 14y agoI cringe a little bit in some of these education threads. On one hand, students who chose to major in something that isn't very marketable right now are lambasted for making a poor decision based on what sounds interesting to them, and they get blame heaped on them for being in debt and having nothing to show for it. On the other hand, when people choose CS - a field that has very good earning prospects right now - their intentions are immediately questioned and we ask "Are they just doing it for the money?" It must kind of suck to be someone entering college right now without natural interest for and aptitude in a STEM field.
- aphexairlines 14y agoWhat's wrong with people choosing CS for the money? The more people become literate in our field, the better off we are as a society, probably.
- newsoundwave 14y agoWhile that's true, I feel like there's going to be plenty of awful programmers in the group that's just in it for the money (although that's not to say there won't be passionate programmers who are also awful - they're just more likely to want to improve themselves). With much of CS and programming being so collaborative, those that just don't have the talent or the heart for it generally cause more hassle and grief for the rest of us. Of course, I'm also not assuming that I'm not an awful programmer myself, but I really do love CS and try to improve myself all the time.
- taskstrike 14y agoCS weeds out the bad programmers so they never graduate. If you can pass Stanford's CS program you are probably pretty smart.
- jianxioy 14y agoThis is totally untrue.
- svsaraf 14y agoRecent Stanford alum here. I think it's difficult to parse out exactly why CS is becoming popular at Stanford now. I would argue that the principal reason for the popularity of CS is because of the amazing teaching in the introductory courses, not the recent tech acquisitions or news coming from Silicon Valley. Very few departments at Stanford put in the kind of effort to bring students along that I've seen in computer science (most prominently, the use of an army of qualified undegraduate students to serve as TAs for the introductory courses). Almost every engineering student I know has taken an intro CS course, and an easy majority of everyone else has at least attempted to do so as well. They're fun, easy, and accessible. I would be interested to see the same sort of effort put into say, introductory physics or chemistry. The now-second most popular major, Human Biology, also represents a very big effort to reach out to students.
- vishaldpatel 14y agoThat is amazing because most universities tend to have the dullest CS teaching crew. I mean, serious insomnia treatments.
- Heinleinian 14y agoI'm amazed there could be negative reaction to this. Just think of it this way: every year there are literally armies of smart young people, who are fully capable of being top-notch programmers or engineers, who graduate and become lawyers or go to wall street. Many of them spend their time on things that add _negative value_ for the economy. Every single one of those people who goes into engineering is an entire career that helps the US economy instead of hurting it. (Note: if you like, read "western capitalist democracy economies" instead of "US economy").
- mukaiji 14y agoMehan Sahami. Eric Roberts. Julie Zelenski. Jerry Cain. (bonus: keith schwarz). Look no further for explaining the rise in popularity and quality of the Stanford CS intro course. I had the privilege of sitting in the class of each of these guys and they were all respectively the best professor/teacher I ever had. Period.
- robyates 14y ago“A quarter of all undergraduates and more than 50% of graduate students [at Stanford] are engineering majors." I can attest Stanford really feels like a tech school in disguise, especially at the graduate level.
- mukaiji 14y agoActually, I was surprised that the number is that low... but maybe it's because i'm around techies all day and tend to consider the fuzzies as cute, inconsequential thingy that hang around our campus like butterflies do around a pond :)
- mkramlich 14y agoI think the rise in CS at Stanford is due to a confluence of several factors, not any single one thing: * The Social Network & The Death of Steve Jobs (capitalized for a reason) & The Rise of Elon Musk, Mr. PayPal-Tesla-SpaceX & the other software billionaires doing exciting things getting media coverage * the software/startup "bubble" -- the perception of it anyway; the crazy big acquisitions of young one soft-product companies with low/no revenue and only 1-3 years old, etc. * crappy job market right now for 18 year olds, or even a twenty-something graduate with a non-STEM degree * iOS & Android app development, the tutorials, how easy it appears you can make money at it. iPhones as a gateway drug leading in that direction for some percentage of it's more ambitious users. Rise of Apple in general and the Mac, an additional vector leading in this direction. * the recent rise in online "courses" by Stanford, etc. * the high pay and perceived higher job security of this field, at least right now * more serious people (or those with smart advisors) who sense the future trend of greater software automation, mobile apps, robots, drones, embedded logic, etc. It's probably a mix of the above, different for each person. All adds up.