Declining Computer Science Enrollment

I had a chat with the Undergraduate Dean of Mathematics last week in which we talked about the decline in enrollment and increase in attrition in the Computer Science faculty at the University of Waterloo. I've had a peaked interest in CS over the last few months, and this news concerned me. There was talk earlier this year and last year about the increasingly decreasing trend in students switching from CS to other courses of study, often mathematics. Bill Gates himself even touched on this subject recently also.

Here's my outlook on the situation, in terms of what it means for CS students at UW. First, it is not a cause for alarm. Your class sizes are not growing, and that is a good thing. There is not a lack of funding for the faculty, not at all. This should mean, ceteris paribus, good job prospects when graduation rolls around. Baring another dot-bomb, and that is a big assumption considering the news that fills the pages of TechCrunch there will be a similar number of CS related jobs available when we graduate, and likely more.

To get a better idea of the actual numbers I've made another rather pretty graph using the Office 2007 Beta 2 version of Microsoft Excel. The data comes from one of the many open databases of student statistics that the Univesity of Waterloo maintains. Low points are the Summer terms, high points are the Fall terms.

How low will it go? We will soon see.

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