The Continuing American Decline in CS 727
abb_road writes "America's recent dismal showing in the ACM Programming finals may be more than just a bad year; a BusinessWeek article suggests that the loss is indicative of the US's continuing decline in producing computer scientists. Despite the Labor Dept's forecast of a 40% increase in 'computer/math scientist' jobs, planned CS enrollments have plummeted from 3.7% in 2000 to just 1.1% last year. Other countries, particularly China, India and Eastern Europe, are working hard to pick up the slack, with potentially serious long-term effects for the US economy. From the article: 'If our talent base weakens, our lead in technology, business, and economics will fade faster than any of us can imagine.'"
ACM finals aren't correlated with general CS edu. (Score:5, Interesting)
ACM contest is fun but that doesn't mean that the winners are the world's best CS people. Nope.
blame academia (Score:2, Interesting)
graduate school admissions for computer science.
"oh you went to harvard and studied anthropology, sure, you're better than the kid who went to a small state school and studied computer science. okay we'll take you."
the current attitude of admissions for grad school is so bad that this is the actual truth. someone once tried to justify why harvard anthropology kid (straight out of undergrad) was better than midwest comp sci kid.
honestly, academia is behind this decline.
Honest (Score:2, Interesting)
End of story
Let's see. (Score:5, Interesting)
2. New home machines much less accessible to proto-hackers than machines like the C64? Check.
3. Popular culture that denigrates "geeks" and "nerds" and makes it a social crime to get A's? Check.
And people are confused about a decline in the number of student engineers?
Same stat as Apple Computer (Score:2, Interesting)
There are MORE college students today than 6 years ago
Apple Computer:
Marketshare is lower to flat
It's not competition (Score:2, Interesting)
On the decline of CS students... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a graduating computer science student (and long time professional), I was interviewed [broadsideonline.com] on this topic by George Mason University's student newspaper. I also wrote a little piece of my own on the declining number of CS students [swisspig.net]:
I have two perspectives on this -- one, as a veteran software engineer, and two as a computer science student.
I chose computer science because it seemed to make sense, given my job as a software engineer. However, many years of interviewing and hiring have shown me that a computer science degree is not necessarily going to be of any use to a software engineer. The position "software engineer" could mean any number of things. At my company, it requires a wide domain knowledge of different applications, almost none of which are addressed in GMU's computer science program. The computer science program teaches programming at the most rudimentary level, and is not even remotely adequate for a job that requires programming. However, a computer science degree does introduce important concepts that are necessary for understanding the underlying principles of working with computers (even if it isn't presented that way), and also teaches logic and problem solving, which are fundamental to any technical job.
As far as students not choosing computer science, I think there are a number of reasons. At GMU (and my previous university) I used to hear all the time, "oh, there's too much math required for a degree in computer science, I'm switching to a degree in information technology or business information systems, because there's not as much math." Also, when the Internet "bubble" burst, I think a stigma developed, where people don't think they'll be able to find a job in the computer industry when they graduate, or that they won't be able to get the kind of pay that they would like, or have job security.
I think it's a sweeping generalization to say that the US is lacking computer science students. What the US is lacking is individuals who are sincerely interested in developing their technical skills and solving interesting problems for their own sake, rather than people who are trying to find the easiest way into a high paying position that they care very little about -- having worked with both, I'd choose a British Literature major who does programming on her own, just for fun, over a Computer Science major who hates computers, but just wants a high paying job.
--brian
No CS Degree needed (Score:3, Interesting)
I do not know how many people I've met in my 7 professional years that either a)said they did not have any degree at all or b)said they got a degree in some other program and many of them not even in a technical profession. I think this is the larger problem. Our industry is one of a few where they want highly talented individuals, but also want a break on price. Easies way to do this is let anyone in which drives cost down because it is not specialized. For those of us that are CS Majors think how much more we could demand if someone from outside of the degree program could not come in and take our job. Also think how much more weight might be given to us in project management as well. If someone knows that this person really knows what they are talking about because of his education and experience perhaps those ridiculous deadlines might be fewer and fewer.
Re:Let's see. (Score:1, Interesting)
Bull. At a hardware level, the machines are less accessible. But there is plenty of stuff out there... Your C64 proto-hackers today have Lego Mindstorms kits, run Linux (or at least, Cygwin), and have the entire internet as an reference source.
Now you're just fishing for causes. If anything, the atmosphere is better now: gifted programs, geek/nerd culture, gaming expos, and the always inspiring tech billionares.
Re:Good -- or not (Score:1, Interesting)
Education isn't supposed to be amount $$$, but often times, it seems that's the -only- thing it's about. Schools want tuition dollars... students just want the damn diploma (worthless paper in itself)...and that's how you end up with lots of seemingly educated folks who cannot do anything... yet still have to work for 5 years to pay off their diploma.
Note that the countries mentioned as `progressive' have relatively cheap education that's mostly based on merrit and not on financial standing... Also places where a `diploma' itself has very little meaning.
Re:Let's see. (Score:3, Interesting)
4. Grade inflation, and a public-school system that rewards attendance (and effort) far, far more than actual knowledge and learning.
5. Touchy-feely political correctness which demands the elimination of all sense of competition of any kind.
6. Dumbing-down (and enlarging) classes, and brainless teachers who memorize their course, but hardly know anything else about the subject they teach.
The Best Job in America! (Score:3, Interesting)
Job growth =! Entry-level job growth (Score:4, Interesting)
There are tons of listings for sysadmin and programming jobs in Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, etc., but you almost never see any entry level positions. It took me six months to find something, and that was a fluke.
Are there any places (other than Cali) where recent graduates are quickly hired? I'm certainly not aware of any.
What do expect (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Blame it on the .com bust and hype (Score:2, Interesting)
Big companies are screwing the field as well as themselves and it will all catch up to them if CS people dont allow themselves to be whored like thay are now.
But then replace CS with Steel workers or Auto workers and it sounds exactly like every other decade where unions were formed due to changes in business.
CS, IT, IS, whatever... it's all low end worker jobs. You are grunts and will be looked at as grunts by the board room and management just like every other professional in history that carried on their backs the business revolution of that time.
Get used to it.
Re:Job growth =! Entry-level job growth (Score:1, Interesting)
As for the decline in the number of CS degrees, I'm not suprised. I have a degree in my current field and apply almost none of it to my current job. The skill set has changed dramatically and I am just now paying off my student loans from over 10 years before. Considering that many people graduate with $40K + in student loans that take 20 years to payoff I'm not surprised that people are gravitating towards fields that have better job security. Also, a whole lot of people got into CS during the dot com boom just for the money and are now washing out.
I question the value of college at a big, 4 year university. The amount of debt that one accumulates is stagering and the education is suspect. I took programming courses at the community college and they were fine. Also, I was the only white guy there. Most were Indian women.
Re:Let's see. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Its Simple - Pay CS Majors More (Score:5, Interesting)
You can surely make alot more than $25k if you really looked. For gods sake just find some kind of niche software, program it yourself in your spare time, and start selling it online. That is what I did, and I do not think that I am a rare genius. I didnt even have much freetime, but you can make $25k working part time at a factory while you are doing it.
Only people with no motivation or no skill make $25k a year for any extended period of time. You claim you have the skill, so it must be a lacking in motivation.
--
Re:Good (Score:2, Interesting)
Offshored? (Score:3, Interesting)
The latter notion reminds me of the book Bait and Switch: (The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream) [amazon.com] by Barbara Ehrenreich. In it, she fluffs up her resume and goes searching for work that pays a minimum of $50,000 with benefits. She attends workshops, seminars, coaching clinics, and other things to improve her likelihood of finding work. Months later, she fails to reach this goal and in turns calls the American Dream a pointless pursuit. I realized this is not true, but that she was just too damn picky. Nobody can realistically expect a job paying $50,000 annually without qualified skills and plenty of experience.
Is this a reality of American developers? Perhaps indicative of why fewer students graduate with CS because they are not as qualified as they could be if they graduated in other disciplines?
Re:Blame it on the .com bust and hype (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How would the A team do? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Mediocrity (Score:2, Interesting)
I am currently a Junior at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, and I feel it is the exact opposite. The school has a 'Accept everyone, graduate no-one' type mantra. My classmates are extremely good at what they are doing by now, and all the weak ones have been weeded out.
My BCOS class started out as a 200+ person class, now it is down below 50. The school does its best (through a hard course schedule) to get rid of those who are not up to the challenge.
Good idea! (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it rather amazing that there isn't already more of this. When it comes to immigration, it almost seems as though many people with real skills are lumped in with unskilled labor sneaking across the border (thus proving the U.S. commitment to the idea that "all men are created equal", I suppose). While there are some immigration programs for people of "exceptional merit and ability" and similar categories, the number of people who get in this way are a tiny fraction of the people who could truly benefit the U.S. economy.
If you're a smart, motivated person with high potential, but not already world-famous or rich, your options for entering the U.S. are limited to non-existent, practically speaking, other than getting in a line with waiting periods up to and exceeding 20 years.
One standard argument justifying this situation is the economic competition: an influx of smart workers would drive down wages for Americans. But this is a logical error, with roots in 19th century economic thinking, that drives so much immigration policy. The point, and it's worth devoting its own paragraph to, is:
Knowledge work is not a zero-sum game!
If someone's going to come up with a new invention, a new product, or a new business, where do you want those people to do that? Inside the U.S., where all the benefits of the new development accrue to the U.S. economy, or outside the U.S., where the U.S. risks ultimately becoming an importer of that thing, further increasing its trade deficit?
Up until now, the U.S. dominance in science and technology has allowed it to essentially ignore this point except in the most extreme cases, which is where that "exceptional merit and ability" immigration category comes in. But with increasing competition from highly-motivated, high-population developing nations, and major economic and technological assets being "globalized" to other countries, previous tactics won't be enough. To have any hope of retaining its competitiveness in the long term, the U.S. is going to want to start doing a better job of importing some of the cream of the crop from those competing nations.
But it seems that the combination of "democratic" egalitarianism and Republican protectionism is enough to completely block this line of thinking. The U.S. is going to have to wait until its economic ass is being kicked, but good, before it changes its policies. By then, it may be too late, and the U.S. role as world science and technology leader may finally be over.
Re:Good (Score:2, Interesting)
What might be happening here is that society is just starting to adapt to the pervasive use of computing technology. As that happens, I'd expect "computer science" as a distinct discipline to decline, but advanced computer skills to be increasingly taught within the contexts of other disciplines where they're useful.
In other words, computer science specialists might be going the way of 'scribes' -- people who were essentially professional readers and writers in societies were most people were illiterate. The US educational system isn't graduating many scribes today, but I don't think anyone views this as a major problem.
Of course, there will always be a need for people who actually specialize in computer science, rather than just using it as a tool in some other wider context. But the demand for such people will end up being much smaller if they're no longer used for pretty much any job in any field that requires advanced computer skills.
Bad market (Score:1, Interesting)
I've been a programmer for 10 years, and was a 2004 ACM world finalist and even had small contract position at NASA. I dropped out of college because I couldn't afford it, and can hardly find a job. When I do find the occasional job it's making $8 hr doing Oracle and webdesign.
You might say it's because I don't have a degree and that is somewhat true. But at the same time almost all of my friends who stayed in school and finished live at home because they can't afford to move out and 3/4 are either jobless or doing something else completely not related to programming/computers.
You want job security become a lawyer, doctor, truck driver or nursing aid. I've moved to 3 different states to find a secure job that pays more than $8 and those are the only things I see as constant.
I'm not trying to troll, but it's frustrating to be in my 20's and can't find a solid career to get into. Hell I'd go work in the mines or a steele mill.. might be crap work but they make $13+ hr, career for life, health and 401k for themselves and family.
Re:Blame it on the .com bust and hype (Score:1, Interesting)
MSwE? (Score:3, Interesting)
I work full time as a software engineer (eg, I design and write software). I graduated with a degree in CS and Economics a year and a half ago from a well-ranked state school, but my GPA wasn't very good. Getting married, getting a job, and growing up a bit has changed me a lot, though, and I want to increase my education.
I'm thinking of trying to get a Masters of Software Engineering (MSwE) from UMUC [umuc.edu]. I don't have the time or financial situation to go back to regular UMD [umd.edu] for a MS in CS full-time, much as I would like to, and I've heard anecdotes that the department doesn't like to waste time on part-time students. And, frankly, I don't really care for another two years of algorithms - that's not what I'm interested in as a professional (although, obviously, I try to keep on top of new developments).
Is this worth my time? I don't want to spend 3 years on this, and then find out that employers see it as a joke degree, and actually have it _devalue_ me. But I would like to go back and get some graduate education, even if the school is less than stellar.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
-Erwos
Not Representative (Score:1, Interesting)
The contest is actually better representative of the theory research talent we have upcoming (which is important too I suppose).
The questions given are the "ah-hah!" types. You can stare at them for hours and yield nothing, or others can do them in minutes. They're not software questions; they're math questions.
Our decline in presence here is due to a numbers of things:
1.) Time students have between jobs and activities.
2.) Lack of appeal to businesses hiring. Winning the ACM is a big "I'm smart and possibly a diva." It's not a "look, I have job experience!"
3.) Other countries ACTUALLY HAVE CS DEPARTMENTS. We should expect hard competition from them. They do make up the other 97% of the worlds population
However, the incredible decline in CS enrollment is a bad thing. Although, could be a good thing for those of us who enrolled anyway! Although it's pretty heavy competition sometimes, actually working with peers who really want to be developers; those curved classes can end up curving a bit less.
Re:Blame it on the .com bust and hype (Score:2, Interesting)
You seem to have your roles reversed on which drives who - it isn't CS that drives business - it is the other way around. A CS job can be a 'creational' job so long as it meets the purposes of business, which is time to market, functionality, etc. Ever attempted setting up a software engineering company? When you do - reply here with your experience of how 'creational' the whole thing was, when your investment (or someone else's) in the company was burning a hole through your pocket and you are trying to get it off the ground.
Where most companies seem to fail at, as one of the people who replied to you, is picking the right people to manage IT staff, as well as not following a proven process when writing software, so that it can become as mechanical as possible to turn out good software... RUP, agile, SCRUM, etc are all beneficial to this effect, however, a very small percentage of companies truly follow the spirit of these methodologies. The problem is unless everyone's on board with these methodologies, they do not work.
I could go on and on about this issue... but it isn't as simple as you just pointed out.
Re:Mediocrity (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Blah blah blah. (Score:3, Interesting)
My first starter project was to write an XML validator, so that we could compare profiles created and uploaded through FTP and those sent through web services. Unfortunately the schemas had become a bit different, so we needed a way to validate that the same data existed. I used graph theory to represent the XML documents, validate and transform elements, and create a diff log.
My next project was continuing the development of our Operations Console, which helps us monitor for application failures. While I used a number of design patterns, later we wanted our a UI filter to be a backend mechanism. That meant creating our own filtering syntax and generating custom SQL statements per user filtering statement. I created a grammer, a simple LR parser, and an SQL code generator.
I've since moved on to other projects. While a lot of work is implementation and not architecture design or algorithms, I have found my CS background to be useful. It allows me to solve problems quicker and more elegant than a naive approach. It also gives me the foundation to continue educating myself to move on to the next level, rather than just focusing on enhancing the skillset at my current level.
WTF Do They Expect? (Score:2, Interesting)
When I worked in tech support for a major OEM PC builder, one side of the mouth said, "Be sure to give the ultimate customer experience." But the other side of the mouth appended to that statement, "As long as it only takes 14.7 minutes average call time. Your ass is grass if it takes longer."
Re:Mediocrity (Score:1, Interesting)
This is the land of equality of outcomes, no matter what effort you make, the rewards must not differ.
Re:Blame it on the .com bust and hype (Score:4, Interesting)
True but they are, for example, going to great lengths to acquire long term contracts to secure critical mineral and fossil fuels reserves in the future because they have a MUCH longer view than America does. America's fatal flaw is incredible short sightedness. The U.S. also thinks market forces will solve all problems and they do in fact cause as many as the solve.
The Chinese also have a huge influx in U.S. dollars due to huge and exploding trade surpluses which gives them a lot of money to play with on the global stage. The U.S. by contrast is struggling to just borrow enough money just to keep its budget and trade deficit afloat. As that borrowing continues the interest needed to maintain it will slowly suck the economic life out of the U.S. It is almost never good to be a long term, habitual debtor.
Fascist governments suck in a lot of ways but they can be VERY good at propelling economic growth. One such government took Germany from destitution to global power in under a decade.
"They need to slash the minimum wage, make unions illegal except for a single 'state' union, slash environmental regulations, provide massive subsidies to corporations, and regularly confiscate land without any sort of due process and hand it over to corporations."
Uh the U.S. is slashing the minimum wage by never raising it even to adjust for inflation and worse by massive and governmentally condoned importation of easily exploited illegal aliens which are constantly driving down wages at the bottom end of the economy.
Environmental regulations are certainly damaging U.S. economic growth but the Bush administration has relaxed them and the Republicans will continue to relax them every time they can get away with it. There is a HUGE resurgence of the use of coal in this country, cleaner than it used to be, but still very damaging to the environment. This makes the U.S. a lot like China which is the biggest, dirtiest user of coal on the planet.
"provide massive subsidies to corporations" uh yea like the Medicare drug bill, massive farm subsidies, transportation bill to subsidize construction companies, energy bill to subsidize energy companies at a time they are posting record profits, Iraq reconstruction contracts that benefited a host of Republican friendly companies, massive defense and intelligence spending subsidizing defense contractors. The only big ticket subsidy missing is to redirect Social Security in to private accounts to buoy Wall Street.
"regularly confiscate land", the Supreme court just authorized this last year to seize private property for a drug companies new office complex. The ball just needs to get rolling to do it on a regular basis and the U.S. and China will be the same in this regard.
The U.S. and China really are a lot alike, both leaning heavily to Fascism, China is just a lot more brutal about it, but it is a difference in degree and not substance. China just has a huge advantage in that its cost of living is much lower and it has a huge surplus of workers so it can easily out compete the U.S. in a globalized world with cheap telecom and container shipping.