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Comment by benwerd | Hacker News Reader

Rinse and repeat everywhere, and we're likely to see an overabundance of computer scientists in three or four years.

Developers: may I suggest getting a second degree?

Seriously? Just because there are waves of people enrolling in an introductory CS course at an extremely high-level CS school like Stamford doesn't mean that any reasonable percentage of those students will actually end up getting degrees. I'd estimate that less than 10% of the people enrolled in the intro CS course at my university ended up getting a CS degree.

Sure, there's bound to be an uptick; demand for developers is huge and all, but it's still a rigorous course of study and I think you need to be pretty driven to "get" it all. I'm not even remotely worried, because even if there were an overabundance of "computer scientists", there would still be a dearth of good computer scientists.

You actually make a fair point: I forgot the difference between the UK education system (which I went through) and the US.

In the UK, you pick your entire major over a year before you ever go to university. In fact, it depends on your A-levels, so you're effectively picking your major at age 15 or 16. Whereas, of course, in the US, you have far more room to pick and choose.

Nonetheless, this uptick in interest is almost guaranteed to result in far more computer scientists. I agree that the number of good computer scientists is a fraction of that, but you'll still have far more chance of standing out from the crowd if you have a bunch of additional skills.

The numbers which really surprise me are the +74% in CS107 enrollment and +78% in CS109. CS107 is viewed as the "don't declare CS until you take it" class, and a 74% increase definitely indicates a larger number of CS majors.

That said, I do feel that some of the reason they're seeing these numbers is because these classes are all exceptionally well taught and administered. The introductory classes they offer are designed to cater to those who might be undecided as to their major. Within a few weeks of learning what "Java" is, students are playing around with GUI apps, and do things like write breakout (with sound!). All the while, the course manages to introduce the key concepts of computer programming.

Stanford's graduation rate for undergrads starting in 2004 was 78% after four years and 95% after six years. That doesn't consider by major, though, or students switching to easier majors. This is certainly higher than the rate at many schools, but I suspect not unusual for top-tier schools.

http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2010.html

I recall colleges complaining that not enough people were majoring in CS just a few years back. All of our jobs were going to be done in India soon, anyway.

This sort of thing goes in cycles, just like startups and the economy. Jobs in the Bay Area for CS majors are in high demand now, so that's where people are majoring. The situation will change and then there will be newly minted CS grads wishing they had majored in something else.

And then there's this counterpoint: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/campus-overload/2011/03/why...

Maybe the Stanford situation isn't going on all over?

The same thing happened ~10 years ago and you're still programming. Just because there's an uptick in the number of people majoring in a field, it does not mean there will be an uptick in the number of professionals in that field.

Not going to happen. All these students who are after money will change majors within 2 years. CS is one of the hardest majors, there's a lot of math. I don't know about your school, but at the college I went to the CS dropout rates by the 4th year were like 80-90%. We had 4 people in some senior level classes.

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