New Approaches to the Development of the U.S. Computing Work Force Eric Roberts Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University Co-chair of the ACM Education Board Assessing the Issues American Association for the Advancement of Science San Francisco, California February 19, 2007

Student Interest has Plummeted Source: Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 2005 A UCLA study of students entering college shows that the number of students listing CS as a possible major has declined significantly in recent years. The total number of students is now below the pre-boom plateau and continues to fall rapidly. The number of women choosing CS majors is at an all-time low.

The Decline Has Attracted Media Attention ON a sunny May afternoon, Brian Harvey’s introductory computer science class at the University of California convened for the last time before the final exam. By the time Dr. Harvey was full tilt into his lecture, reviewing recursive functions and binary search trees, the cavernous hall was lightly peppered with about 100 students, backpacks at their sides, a few legs slung over the backs of empty seats. Sparse attendance is, of course, an end-of-semester inevitability. Many students viewed the lecture by Webcast, if at all. But more significantly, just 350 students signed up for the course this spring, in striking contrast to enrollment in the fall of 2000, when the same lecture hall was engorged at the start of the semester with 700 students sitting and standing in every available pocket of space.... Today, empty classroom seats, like the vacant offices once occupied by high-flying start-ups, are among the unmistakable repercussions of the dot-com bust. At the height of the Internet boom in the late 90’s, computer science talent was in such demand that recruiters offered signing bonuses to students who agreed to drop out of school. Now, spooked by layoffs and disabused of visions of overnight riches, many undergraduates are turning away from computer science as if it were somehow cursed. Computing’s Lost Allure By KATIE HAFNER Published: May 22, 2003, Thursday May 27, 2005 Student Interest in Computer Science Plummets Technology companies struggle to fill vacant positions By ANDREA L. FOSTER Students once saw computer-science classes as their ticket to wealth. Now, as more technology jobs are outsourced to other countries, such classes are seen as a path to unemployment. New data show students’ interest in the discipline is in a free fall. The number of newly declared computer-science majors declined 32 percent from the fall of 2000 to the fall of 2004, according to a report released this month by the Computing Research Association, which represents computer scientists in industry and academe. Another survey, from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, shows that the number of incoming freshmen who expressed an interest in majoring in computer science has plummeted by 59 percent in the last four years. Students’ waning enthusiasm for the field worries technology companies that must work harder to fill vacant positions, as well as researchers who need a steady supply of intellectual talent to fuel scientific breakthroughs. Computer scientists are already struggling to maintain basic research despite sharply reduced financial support from government agencies.

The Crisis in Computing Education CRA estimates that computing enrollments have fallen between 40 and 50 percent since This decline has been even more rapid among women and minority students, reducing diversity as the pool shrinks. At present, countries throughout the developed world are training far fewer people needed to fill the available positions. In the United States, there are now more jobs in the IT sector than there were at the height of the dot-com boom. The factors that lead to declining enrollments are complex and highly interconnected. There are no silver bullets. Increasingly, institutions are reacting to bolster short-term enrollments at the expense of long-term employment needs. That there is currently a crisis in computing education is not in doubt. McGettrick et al., SIGCSE 2007 —

Why this Decline is Relevant to AAAS Though the information technology- powered revolution is accelerating, this country has not yet awakened to the central role played by computational science and high-end computing in advanced scientific, social science, biomedical, and engineering research; defense and national security; and industrial innovation. Together with theory and experimentation, computational science now constitutes the “third pillar” of scientific inquiry, enabling researchers to build and test models of complex phenomena—such as multi-century climate shifts, multidimensional flight stresses on aircraft, and stellar explosions—that cannot be replicated in the laboratory, and to manage huge volumes of data rapidly and economically.... While it is itself a discipline, computational science serves to advance all of science. The most scientifically important and economically promising research frontiers in the 21st century will be conquered by those most skilled with advanced computing technologies and computational science applications. But despite the fundamental contributions of computational science to discovery, security, and competitiveness, inadequate and outmoded structures within the Federal government and the academy today do not effectively support this critical multidisciplinary field.

Reasons for the Decline Students fear insecurity from the dot-com bust and offshoring.1. CS curricula are seen as unexciting and lacking in flexibility.2. Most images of computing work (and workers) are negative.3. Introductory courses have become substantially more difficult.6. Teaching computing in high school faces enormous challenges.5. Students have changed in ways that decrease the appeal of CS.4.

Maria Klawe President, Harvey Mudd College (at the time, Dean at Princeton) Employment Myths are Persistent Contrary to popular belief, career opportunities in computer science are at an all-time high. We’ve got to spread that message among students from a rainbow of backgrounds, or risk becoming a technological backwater. Blue Skies Ahead for IT Jobs BY MARIA KLAWE December 1, 2005 All this talk about “Blue Skies” ahead just can’t hide the stark fact that Americans who don’t wish to migrate to India and/or some other off-shore haven are going to have a difficult career. Why would any smart American undergrad go into IT when companies like IBM and HP are talking of stepping up their off- shoring efforts in the coming years? They want cheap labor, no matter the real cost. I have been very successful in IT, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it today to anyone except people who are geeks.... I think the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Labor are not correct.

Myths about Offshoring All IT jobs will soon be outsourced to India and China.1. Good IT workers will be easy to find in the new “flatter” world.2. Companies will always seek the lowest-priced labor.3. The ACM report on Globalization and Offshoring of Software refutes these myths, but the misinformation persists.

Employment Growth Remains Strong Although there was a slight dip in IT-sector employment after 2000, recent data show that this trend has reversed and that there are now more computing jobs than at any time in history. Projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate strong growth over the next decade: Computer and information systems managers Computer specialists Computer hardware engineers Total, all professional-level IT occupations Total, all occupations % 3,0464, % % 3,4034, % 145,612164, % % change Projected Employment (in thousands) Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monthly Labor Review, November 2005 Money magazine identified “software engineer” as the #1 job, anticipating employment growth of 46% over the next decade.

Projected Job Growth is Highest in Computing

The Gap in Computing Degree Production

Employment Patterns by Discipline Fraction of professionals with degrees in that discipline: Fraction of disciplinary graduates employed in that profession: SOURCE: National Science Foundation/Division of Science Resources Statistics, SESTAT (Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System), 1999, as presented by Caroline Wardle at Snowbird 2002

Reasons for the Decline Students fear insecurity from the dot-com bust and offshoring.1. CS curricula are seen as unexciting and lacking in flexibility.2. Most images of computing work (and workers) are negative.3. Introductory courses have become substantially more difficult.6. Teaching computing in high school faces enormous challenges.5. Students have changed in ways that decrease the appeal of CS.4.

Changes in Student Attitudes Students have adopted over time an increasingly instrumental attitude toward education. For many students, opportunities for wealth are more attractive than security of employment. A factor analysis by my colleague Mehran Sahami revealed an 88% correlation between the number of CS majors at Stanford and the average level of the NASDAQ the year before. In boom years, computing disciplines attract those who focus on these opportunities for wealth, often ignoring the intellectual side of the field. The focus on wealth makes computing majors less attractive to other students who do not share those goals. With the rising excitement around Web 2.0, interest is picking up this year at most U.S. schools.

Google Buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion A profitless Web site started by three 20-somethings after a late-night dinner party is sold for more than a billion dollars, instantly turning dozens of its employees into paper millionaires. It sounds like a tale from the late 1990’s dot-com bubble, but it happened yesterday. Google, the online search behemoth, agreed yesterday to pay $1.65 billion in stock for the Web site that came out of that party—YouTube, the video-sharing phenomenon that is the darling of an Internet resurgence known as Web 2.0. YouTube had been coveted by virtually every big media and technology company, as they seek to tap into a generation of consumers who are viewing 100 million short videos on the site every day. Google is expected to try to make money from YouTube by integrating the site with its search technology and search-based advertising program.. But the purchase price has also invited comparisons to the mind-boggling valuations that were once given to dozens of Silicon Valley companies a decade ago. Like YouTube, those companies were once the Next Big Thing, but some soon folded. Dot-Com Boom Echoed in Deal to Buy YouTube By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN Published: October 10, 2006

Reasons for the Decline Students fear insecurity from the dot-com bust and offshoring.1. CS curricula are seen as unexciting and lacking in flexibility.2. Most images of computing work (and workers) are negative.3. Introductory courses have become substantially more difficult.6. Teaching computing in high school faces enormous challenges.5. Students have changed in ways that decrease the appeal of CS.4.

CS Faces Huge Challenges in High Schools People who have software development skills command high salaries and tend not to teach in high schools for very long. In many schools, computing courses are seen as vocational rather than academic. The NCAA, for example, no longer accepts computer science courses for academic eligibility. Students who are heading toward top universities are often advised to take courses other than computer science to bolster their admissions chances. Because schools are evaluated on how well their students perform in math and science, many schools are shifting teachers away from computer science toward these disciplines. Teachers have very few resources to keep abreast of changes in the field.

CS is Losing Ground The Computer Science exam is the only Advanced Placement exam that has shown declining student numbers in recent years.

CS Is Tiny Compared with Other Sciences

Reasons for the Decline Students fear insecurity from the dot-com bust and offshoring.1. CS curricula are seen as unexciting and lacking in flexibility.2. Most images of computing work (and workers) are negative.3. Introductory courses have become substantially more difficult.6. Teaching computing in high school faces enormous challenges.5. Students have changed in ways that decrease the appeal of CS.4.

Complexity and Instability Complexity. The number of programming details that students must master has grown much faster than the corresponding number of high-level concepts. Instability. The rapid evolution of the field creates problems for computing education that are qualitatively different from those in most fields. The number and complexity of topics that entering students must understand have increased substantially, just as the problems we ask them to solve and the tools they must use have become more sophisticated. An increasing number of institutions are finding that a two-course sequence is no longer sufficient to cover the fundamental concepts of programming. Computing Curricula 2001 —

The March of Progress 266 pages 274 pages 911 pages 1536 pages

The Pace of Change The pace of change—particularly in terms of its effect on the languages, libraries, and tools on which introductory computer science education depends—has increased in recent years. Individual universities and colleges can’t keep up. In a survey by the Computer Science Teachers Association, high-school teachers cited the rapid pace of change as the most significant barrier.

Positive Initiatives The National Science Foundation sponsored four regional conferences on Integrated Computing and Research (ICER) and has recently launched a new Computing Pathways (C-PATH) initiative. Several ACM Education Board projects are proving helpful: –A brochure for high-school students –The CC2001 series of curriculum reports –The Computer Science Teachers Association –A community effort to develop Java tools (the ACM Java Task Force) There are many interesting ideas in the community that are showing promise: –Mark Guzdial’s “media computation” course at Georgia Tech –Stuart Reges’s “back to basics” strategy at the University of Washington –Jeannette Wing’s “computational thinking” concepts –Interdisciplinary curricula at a variety of schools

What the ACM Plans To Do Develop a comprehensive report on the enrollment crisis and the factors that contribute to it. Continue our efforts on the broad range of problems we face. Encourage experimentation in curricular strategies. Develop tools and materials that can be used “off the shelf.” Improve distribution channels for best practices. Promote interdisciplinary curricular connections. Welcome the participation of other groups in this effort. Press government and industry to support computing education.

The End

IT Salaries Remain High Continuing a pattern that has been evident for decades, recent bachelor’s and master’s engineering graduates and computer science graduates at the bachelor’s level are more likely than graduates in other fields to be employed full time after graduation, and upon entering the workforce, they are rewarded with higher salaries. Source: National Science Foundation. InfoBrief, December 2005 Among science graduates, the median annual salaries of computer and information sciences (CIS) graduates were the highest as of October CIS graduates with bachelor’s degrees earned a median annual salary of $45,000, and those with master’s degrees earned a median annual salary of $60,000. Source: Computing Research Association, December 2005

Sobering Thoughts There are more public methods in the java and javax package hierarchies than there are words in Jensen and Wirth’s Pascal User Manual and Report. The amount of text once deemed sufficient to teach the standard introductory programming language is thus no longer sufficient for a full index of the operations available today. Given the scale of modern software systems, it is typically impossible for students to develop projects as extensions to existing code frameworks. An academic term is now sufficient only to understand what is already there, leaving no time for further development. —Don Knuth, October 11, 2006 If I had had to learn C++, I would have majored in music.