It would seem, at least among the very best computer science undergraduate programs in the country, that computer science is becoming a very hot major again. We are finally seeing the return of enrollments that are approaching numbers that are becoming reminiscent of the Y2K era. While this is fantastic news for those of us that teach this discipline, I cannot help but to wonder why I am not reading more about how we are not going to repeat the past problems in higher ed. We saw a dramatic decline in enrollments between 2001-2005. The numbers stayed depressed, causing a large number of departments to struggle in order to stay in existence. Many programs that failed to find their niche in the post Y2K era, and folded. Some CS departments merged with others to survive. (It happened at my alma mater -- SUNY Albany. Thankfully, they survived and are doing well.) Many struggled to figure out how to reach a very different student body than what represented their own experience in learning CS. They tried (and continue to try) to embrace many new approaches to teaching computer science in an attempt to lure more students. A large fraction of these techniques involved introducing media- and game-based approaches to solving problems. Many found this difficult, and frequently yielded students that lacked a depth in abstract concepts required to do well in the more difficult concepts. (A topic for another time.) Regardless, this continued until around 2009-2010, when we started to see a slight incline in enrollments. And now, here were are today -- the press has once again taken notice of us! Just as the Whos shouted from Whoville, "We are here! We are here! We are here!"
Alas, we are becoming the saving grace of colleges and universities nationwide. Soon we will have the opposite problem: rapidly increasing enrollments. How can we handle this? It is a good problem to have, except when it isn't. I strongly advise and encourage department chairs to remember the past! During the Y2K glut in enrollments, many departments were forgetting the importance of maximizing student learning, because they were up to their foreheads in enormous paperwork and other infrastructure management issues trying to deal problems such as teaching introductory computer science classes that had 400-500 students!
My opinion is that the increase in interest is a very good thing. Let's try to find a balance between embracing this surge of interest and not adding more students to our program with no thought of managing the long-term growth and sustainability of our programs.
There are very few entities out there that can experience unprecedented growth without a correction of some sort. It happens with the stock market. It happens with individual business. And, it happens in higher ed, and in the job market. Without controlled, managed growth, the reinforcement required to support infrastructure that manages the growth will surely fail. It happens every time. All bubbles eventually pop.
Let's see if we can keep this good news lasting as long as possible. Let's remember why we are here. We are not here to increase our enrollment numbers in order to keep our programs surviving and our pockets loaded with cash. We are here to maximize the learning among our students, which will yield the very best computer scientists that our country has seen to date. We want them to not only find excellent jobs, but also be well prepared for graduate school. Yes, perhaps many will argue that it would be nice to graduate the next Jobs, Zuckerberg, or Gates from our departments. But, how about we embrace a bigger challenge among us: Let's ask ourselves what we can do to graduate the next Dijkstra, Hamming, McCarthy, Knuth, Liskov, etc. -- those that have set remarkable milestones in computer science. We do not need more people with their minds set on padding their pockets with multi-million dollars, nor do we need more people that bend toward every whim of the shareholder. We need people that can think about the science of computing itself, and dream big.
