While it might not be feasible for every college to do this, my college actively tries to get more students to take CS: you don't choose your concentration unti

While it might not be feasible for every college to do this, my college actively tries to get more students to take CS: you don't choose your concentration until your sophomore year (and you're allowed to take any concentration, regardless of what you declared going in/how many others are in it), and departments' survival depends partly on students taking their courses, so they have an incentive to try and recruit concentrators. EDIT: Also, universities need to learn how to scale their courses. For CS courses, it shouldn't matter whether 10 or 100 students are in a course: you should have enough undergraduate TAs who want to work on course development, grading and hours to scale your classes up with not-too-much friction. That's how one of our intro CS courses went from having 80 students to 180 the next year, and maintained the same attrition rate. Students learn best through each other: the professor should help figure out what the course should be, then get out of the way.