A personal view of UC Berkeley’s EECS crisis

I got a BA in CS via the undeclared major to L&S CS major route over 25 years ago and worked that reader, tutor, TA pipeline too. To be honest, I am not even sure it was a pipeline yet, based on the reactions I saw at the time.

I want to imagine that Nick is just venting over departmental politics or engaging in rhetorical brinkmanship in suggesting that the entire major could be pruned. I think it would be a shame for CS to be removed as an option for folks like me, who would never have imagined enrolling in EECS when they were in high school.

Tangentially, does anybody have links to statistics similar to https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/by-the-numbers but including prior decades? I had a sense that I was in the minority in my classes in the early/mid 90s, but I do now wonder how the trends went during prior economic cycles...

The CS-Ed Podcast has an episode that goes into detail on how UC Berkeley’s EECS undergraduate teaching pipeline works. https://csedpodcast.org/blog/season3_episode3/

“At this point, the EECS department is running an annual deficit of nearly $5 million”

“department must provide more than 7,000 student-seats per year in the upper division courses”

That’s crazy. Also amusing how the author constantly talks about scaling up as if the department is a startup.

As an international graduate student, I never considered Berkeley to be an attractive place to study a PhD: insane housing prices, expensive fees and insurance, huge bureaucracy, and all the while even the most popular departments are underfunded or barely-funded so low stipends.

I recommend watching the documentary “At Berkeley”.