From the Iowa City Press-Citizen comes this article about the declining enrollment of computer science college students in the US.
However, numbers show college students appear to be losing interest.
At UI, 358 undergraduate and graduate students majored in computer science in fall 2004 compared to 556 students in fall 2000. That’s a decline of 198 students, or 36 percent, records show.
Nationwide, the number of newly declared computer science majors has decreased 39 percent from fall 2000 to fall 2004, from 16,000 to about 10,000 declared majors, according to the Computing Research Association based in Washington D.C.
Cool. An article from home.
I’d be interested in seeing how the numbers in Electrical Engineering programs compare to these numbers. My suspicion is students who might have gone the computer sciences route a few years ago are taking the EE path rather than a purely computer sciences route. Most of the educated hard-core programmers I know are EEs.
I’ll be headed back to school myself in the next year or so. Many comp-sci programs just don’t offer the theory and depth of understanding I’m looking for. I’m not nearly as interested in OS-related stuff as I am in the underlying principles. Where I might have been in a comp-sci program five years ago, this time around, it’ll be electrical engineering.