

Official: Computer science graduates ‘most unlikely’ to find work - strawberryshake
http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/careers-hr/my-career/news/index.cfm?newsid=20951&utm_source=ycombinator&utm_medium=sb&utm_content=anguyen&utm_campaign=sb

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bdfh42
Good headline but the devil is in the detail as usual. The same survey also
noted (not reported in this article) that unemployment rates among male
graduates exceed the unemployment rate among female graduates by a substantial
margin. Factor that in and with an assumption (could be wrong) that men
predominate on Computer Science degrees and the differences start to look like
something other than poor quality science courses - although (anecdotally
anyway) those do exist.

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manvsmachine
As bdfh42 noted, the unemployment rate is currently higher for men than for
women (in both the UK and the US). While that fact merely correlates with the
CS grad employment rate, the two trends may share a cause: per-employee cost.

A common argument is that, in a recessive economy, women maintain a higher
employment employment rate because they tend to make considerably less than
men, given the same position and experience, therefore incurring less of a
cost to their employers. Similarly, CS (and other technical degrees), have a
considerably higher minimum expected cost - I'd guess the salary of a junior
dev to still be around 50K US. Most of the successful grads mentioned seem to
have gone into teaching or entry level jobs in the medical / financial fields,
for which fresh grads don't necessarily make as much. The exceptions would be
the doctors and lawyers, but they benefit from artificially created scarcity
due to the professional school admissions process.

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starkfist
This is in the UK - I don't know anything about the UK.

In the US, this probably holds true for everywhere outside of the main
technology hubs. Things seem great right now for me in NYC, and I get about 12
recruitment emails per day from firms in Silicon Valley, but if I wanted to
live in my home state, I'd be fucked.

