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Comment by illamint | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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