Lots of students, especially in this post-baccalaureate program, have been drawn to computer science due to the attractive financial outcomes this field presents graduates with, especially in recent years. Indeed, BLS asserts that the field will grow by 22% from 2020 to 2030, much faster than average with a median salary of over 6 figures. For those of us who are neurotic, this raises the following question: How long will the good times last? Will the market be good to us CS graduates for the foreseeable future?
Although I can’t make any crystal ball predictions about the future, I can discuss what caused disruptions in CS employment in the past. By assessing how booms and busts happened in the past, we can see if the conditions that brought about disruptions apply to the current situation.
The first drop in CS enrollment is in the 1980s. Purely by looking at undergraduate enrollment, one could hazard a guess to think that enrollment fell due to decreasing demand. However, this was not true; the 1970s and onwards was a time when demand for computer scientists was on the upswing. In 1981, Joseph Turner, a CS faculty member from Clemson university remarked that it was impossible to find faculty members to teach the burgeoning demand for computer science. Indeed, for every 7 open faculty positions, there was only 1 Ph.D new grad back in the 1980s as per ACM’s June 1981 publication.
The lack of open spots in undergraduate enrollment was evident in the selective nature of CS undergraduate majors back in the mid 1980’s where students needed to have a4.0 GPA to be admitted to the major as per Eric Roberts, a Stanford CS faculty member in article CS capacity. Indeed, the Chronicle of Higher education’s July 1984 publication noted that 400 faculty members from non CS backgrounds were being retrained to teach undergraduate CS classes.
Coming back to the present, we can see that a lot of the blockers that existed in 1980s have been ameliorated by technology. Undergraduate courses are no longer constrained by faculty numbers as they were in the past. Indeed, faculty often oversee courses that have over 200 students for one course as a result of technology acting as a force multiplier by making asynchronous education possible. Therefore, it is unlikely that if there is an abrupt decline in CS enrollment this will not be due to the same forces that were present in the 1980s; rather, it will be due to a fall in demand from employers.
