
Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class - JumpCrisscross
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/technology/computer-science-courses-college.html
======
el_cujo
>Aafia Ahmad, a sophomore computer science major at U.T. Austin, had hoped to
take an elective course in computer security this semester. But when she tried
to sign up during early registration in November, the course was already full.

I know this doesn't refute the point the article is trying to make, but it
doesn't seem that unreasonable to me that an underclassman might not get into
a highly sought after elective. A lot of the "fun" electives when I was in
school were little passion projects taught by one professor for one or two
small sections a semester (or maybe only one semester per year), and while I
agree it sucks that not everyone can take the classes, I wouldn't want them to
die out because of complaints along the lines of "if you can't accommodate
everyone, don't offer the course". Not that the article is saying that should
be the case, I just worry that too many complaints about this kind of thing
just puts pressure on the good professors who put enough effort into a class
that a bunch of people want to take it.

~~~
jandrese
I had to write a script to constantly monitor my school's class scheduling
system to get into a couple of classes. It was an interesting script because
the system was an IBM 3270 style mainframe.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
How did you test such a script?

I always thought about doing this, but since class signups only opened twice a
year (once per semester), and that was the same time I needed to actually sign
up for the classes, I concluded there would never be a time to debug and
refine such a script.

~~~
TheLoneTechNerd
I've written this type of script before - I didn't need too much in the way of
debugging. Mine (similar to GP, it seems) didn't actually do the registration,
just save the current state of known divs or even the whole page. Then it
would send me an update if that changed.

So, I didn't need to debug what happens when the class shows "open" \- I just
saved the div that said "closed" and sent myself an email/text any time it
didn't say exactly that.

~~~
jandrese
You could test it by having it sign up for undesirable classes like underwater
basket weaving that had plenty of openings. The terminal interface was kind of
gross to script, but the underlying data was pretty easy.

You basically had to just send the correct number of arrow key presses to get
the cursor to the correct field, send the digits, and then send the enter key.
Parse the data that comes back, and add the routine to cursor over to the "add
course" prompt when it says there is an availability. The script was totally
gross looking but it worked.

------
AznHisoka
"The university is looking to hire several tenure-track faculty members in
computing this year, he said, but competition for top candidates is fierce. I
know of major departments that interviewed 40 candidates, and I don’t think
they hired anybody."

That doesn't sound like fierce competition if they were able to interview 40
candidates... Did they give them all high-paying offers and they all rejected?

~~~
Wohlf
Competition must be fierce... at the level they want to pay.

~~~
electricslpnsld
95K a year for a starting professorship... or 3.5X that in total comp in
industry. Not a terribly difficult choice!

~~~
akhilcacharya
Starting professors make less at my alma mater...a lot less.

Since it's a public school you can find out how much each one makes -
[https://www.newsobserver.com/news/databases/public-
salaries/](https://www.newsobserver.com/news/databases/public-salaries/)

~~~
goobynight
Dr. Falk at Chapel Hill pulling that phat $800K base salary.

Meanwhile, the random dude sitting next to me is making more than every single
person that works at Asheville.

------
amvalo
This article is credentialism at its worst.

The best programmers I know are self-taught, because they have a passion for
it. I know people working at minimum wage, never enrolled in college, who got
decent programming jobs after a year or two learning CS on their own.

These people will always (I hope) form the core of the profession.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
This comment is elitism at its worst. Even if you completely accept the
validity of self-learning, there is still a place for formal education.

Some people can learn a lot about a complicated field on their own, but there
are still plenty of people who would benefit from some pedagogical help.

~~~
mesaframe
Can't agree enough. I am a autodidact, and am still learning. And really every
other week I wish I had a mentor/professor. Even though good books somehow
covers up for no teacher. But, you can't just read thousand of books before
solving a petty problem and there's where a Professor comes. They provide you
with a distillation of years of work and experience. and not to mention the
resources available for you at Uni

~~~
amvalo
But your mentor can just be your coworker! That's how many professions have
worked for a long time. I don't get where this idea that academia has a
monopoly on difficult skills and knowledge comes from.

------
Fenrisulfr
For all the people here that are downplaying the difficulty of getting into CS
courses or degree programs please make sure to do some research. The article
wades shallow in the details. It can be very difficult depending on the
institution. Please see this comment brlow from a CS Professor about the
difficulty of transferring into the Computer Science major at University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a former student who was getting into
computer science concepts but not in the CS/engineering program, it was
disappointing to learn learning that transferring into the program was
basically impossible by the time I hit junior year and didn't have a _stellar_
GPA.

[https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-it-to-switch-to-
the-C...](https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-it-to-switch-to-the-CS-major-
at-UIUC/answer/Jeff-Erickson)

~~~
seanfreiburg
I transferred into CS just before junior year at UIUC. The next year they
raised minimum GPA to like 3.6 and I've heard it's even higher now. This was
4+ years ago and we had overflow classes where they had lectures on a
projector because we couldn't fit into the 400 person lecture hall.

------
chrisseaton
Why do US colleges over-admit like this? In the UK you apply to do a computer
science course, and they have 50 places or whatever for that course, and so
they admit 50 people. You can't get into the college and then be told that
actually it's full. If they do accidentally over-admit it's their problem to
solve, not yours.

~~~
gumby
The US university system is quite unusual (I believe Canada also has a similar
system): at the undergraduate level you typically don't apply to a specific
program; all students are expected to take a variety of classes (confusingly
called "courses"), only some of which apply to a specific course of study.

Domain-specialized classes become an increasing proportion of your overall
classes after the first or second year (when you choose a major) though never
100%. So while the school can get some idea of demand based on what people put
on their application form, typically what you put on that form has little to
no impact on whether you are admitted and doesn't actually bind you to a
particular program.

I actually think this is a pretty good system, and was glad my own kid chose a
US university (which luckily we could afford) rather than the free university
education he could have chosen in either of his mother's or my countries. The
theory is that you can get a broad foundational education to prepare you for a
variety of possible futures, and also that there is more to education than
simply work skills. Of course the reality isn't quite as utopian. It also
means professions like law and medicine require whole additional degrees.

~~~
hoaw
I don't know about other countries, but for non-professional degrees in Sweden
a program is essentially only a guarantee to be able to take certain classes.
Otherwise you can take whatever courses you want, at whatever school you want,
as long as you in the end fulfill the degree requirements. Which usually means
half your bachelors are credits in the same subject.

~~~
hoaw
Idiots need to stop downvoting, the comment is entirely correct. You can read
for yourself e.g. here [https://www.uu.se/en/students/degrees-and-
careers/degrees/le...](https://www.uu.se/en/students/degrees-and-
careers/degrees/levels-and-degrees/) ,
[https://www.su.se/english/education/qualifications-
degrees/r...](https://www.su.se/english/education/qualifications-
degrees/requirements) ,
[https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/sites/www.lunduniversity.lu...](https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/sites/www.lunduniversity.lu.se/files/degree-
requirements-lund-university.pdf)

~~~
tlb
Complaining about voting breaks this site's guidelines.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
hoaw
The rules states that you shouldn't comment about voting because it makes
boring reading and doesn't make a difference. But it is both informative and
does make a difference if you add new information, which I did. If the
moderation team wants no comments about voting at all, they need to fix the
issues of undue voting or change their reasoning. Until then I am going to act
in the way that I think is best long term for a productive discussion. I don't
have a problem people voting down an opinion, but when something is factual
they should be called out on it. Because the people who do that are destroying
the site for everyone. I don't see what your comment adds however, which
should be the first rule of posting.

------
huffstler
I made an account just to comment on this link as I have personal experience
in the matter.

I graduated from a relatively good school with a degree in Computer Science,
yet wasn't admitted into the major until 2 weeks before graduation. I spent my
entire college career in Computer Engineering while taking Computer Science
courses and (thankfully) was able to complete the curriculum without actually
being a part of it. I lucked out as at my school Computer Science isn't locked
down like many of the other engineering majors, so anyone can take a CS course
as long as they meet the pre-reqs. It would be an understatement to say the
experience was harrowing.

~~~
alistairSH
That's so strange. If there's room in the classes (as appears to be the case),
why limit the number of majors?

My school (UVA, in the late-90s) already had recently converted Computer
Science as a limited enrollment major to get around this problem. Declared CS
majors had preference for CS courses. It wasn't quite so bad that others were
completely locked out, but if you weren't declared, you had to be quick to
register and might not always get into fun electives (the core courses were
usually larger and easier to find a seat).

Since that time, they've actually added a second CS major. They now offer the
original BS in CS through the engineering school. And a BA in CS through the
college of arts and science. The two primary differences being a foreign
language requirement for the BA students, and a heavier emphasis on math and
general engineering in the BS program.

~~~
Qworg
Very interesting! Early 2000s UIUC had it reversed - the BS was "practical CS"
and the BA was highly mathematical/theory based.

Then again, despite being a top 5 program, it only received accreditation
while I was attending.

------
cs-holder
Since when is being a software engineer a "high-status" job, as mentioned in
the first paragraph? Most people would consider a non-washed out doctor or
lawyer (which is expensive and difficult to achieve) as having higher status
than pretty much anyone working with a CS degree, unless they are a successful
founder or went into investments. Besides medicine/law, young people with some
degree of privilege and ambition seem to go into banking, private equity or
management consulting still. If they have a CS degree, they're doing something
closer to the above with it, not being ads CRUD engineer #3445. Everyone
working for a for-profit company as a software engineer and even founders and
VCs are basically dancing to the tune of one of these people holding the
purse-strings. Is this wrong or do I just have a chip on my shoulder about
this?

~~~
nwbrown
If by lawyer you mean partner and by doctor you mean a practicing surgeon,
both of those are pretty far into their careers. It's not very fair to compare
them with an entry level engineering job.

~~~
cs-holder
By lawyer I meant either hired at big law or running a profitable practice, by
doctor I meant made it into residency. This is only one, narrow dimension of
"high-status", but still. Newspapers get things wrong all the time.

------
rjf72
While the article bemoans these programs becoming restrictive, it is ignoring
a major reality. Let's take a person. This is the person that might end up
getting 'weeded out' before they've even gotten their foot in the door. They
probably have 0 or near 0 background in anything related to computing. They
similarly likely have negligible background in anything related to
science/engineering/mathematics. And keep in mind we now live in the era where
there are a million free resources online (as well as compilers/etc) meaning
the cost of doing any of this is practically 0, so they've generally _chosen_
to never pursue any of this.

Let's take this person, John Doe, and imagine he gets accepted to a computer
science program at a well regarded university. The majority of people in his
class will fail/drop out of the program before graduation, regardless of
background. How likely is John Doe in particular to make it through the
program? I don't know the exact number, but it is going to be _extremely_ low.
What these 'barriers' do is not only save people from wasting their time, but
also make room for people who stand a better chance of making it through the
program.

And furthermore rejection is hardly some death sentence. If somebody genuinely
wants into the program then they could take independent classes at a community
college, take remedial non-major classes and demonstrate excellence, or any of
a wide array of other options that could then be segued into acceptance next
year/semester. And this doesn't even necessarily have to slow them down. There
are so many core non-major classes required that you can get those out of the
way and ultimately end up graduating in about the same time as if you were
accepted to begin with. Imagine getting your calculus, linear algebra,
physics/chemistry/... pick, etc stuff all done in your freshman year. That
would've actually been AWESOME to have been able to have your schedule packed
with nothing but CS classes and maybe a few softball liberal arts requirements
for your later years.

~~~
pjc50
> The majority of people in his class will fail/drop out of the program before
> graduation, regardless of background.

Really? That sounds like a huge failure of the system, especially since
they've gone into debt for that.

~~~
tortasaur
It's not a failure of the system; students are, increasingly often, mistaking
universities for diploma mills. Some universities gradually acquiesce, others
hold their ground.

The universities that maintain their standards for graduation will typically
have droves of students dropping out, because there are droves of students who
do not put effort into learning the material.

------
gohwell
Georgia Tech's online Masters in CS appealed to me for this very reason.
Classes generally seat 300-700 and limited by the number of TAs they can hire.
There's a fair chance of getting into popular classes since their not limited
by the dimensions of a physical room.

------
kevindong
My school, Purdue, has handled the surge pretty well, primarily by being very
accommodating towards increasing capacity (when CS majors are involved) and
severely restricting non-major access to CS-major classes.

For the lower level core classes required of all CS majors, space is basically
guaranteed for CS majors. If there's not enough seats, capacity will get
increased to accommodate the students who need to take the class.

In the upper level classes, capacity will generally be increased if needed.
Sometimes, there's a handful of seats (1-10) open in the less popular class at
the beginning of the semester.

During registration (which occurs two-thirds of the way into the prior
semester), only CS majors are allowed to sign up for CS classes. All other
students (including CS minors) are required to submit a request which will be
decided on a space-available basis the week before classes start. Those
requests are only granted for students who have taken <=5 CS-major classes.
There's a very specific sequence that CS majors usually take the core classes
in. The semester a CS major would take a core class if they're on schedule is
called a "peak semester". Non-majors are completely barred from taking those
core classes during their peak semester.

------
lordnacho
Isn't CS teaching the kind of thing that ought to be able to scale?

There's no other subject that's as well covered on the internet; nothing in an
undergraduate course isn't public knowledge. There's loads of video lectures
these days.

And the coursework is incredibly scalable too, in addition to being similar to
what people actually use in industry. My brother did CS at an Ivy, and they
were just pushing repos to a server, and the UT software would check you'd
done it properly.

Couldn't you just let everyone enroll, then make sure they do their
practicals?

~~~
forgottenpass
Every topic has plenty of literature published. Scantron was founded in 1972.
Self-directed learning has always existed. CS isn't special.

A bachelor's degree once meant more than passing a sufficient number of tests.
Now that everyone treats it like a ticket to employment, it barely even means
that.

~~~
cf141q5325
I would agree, that CS isnt special here, its something common to at least
STEM. And personally I dont know why the first 1 year isnt optimized for that.
I dont think for example, that there is any reason to teach Math 1 for CS
every semester with a Prof in a room limited by how ever many students might
fit in. Its simply basic knowledge, that just doesnt change but that you need
to know as a prerequisite for understanding later stuff. There is absolutly no
reason to waste the time of Professors, or students for that matter, on that.
Instead of making admission to college dependent on prior work, why not simply
provide the necessary books and film it once. You learn the fundamentals
yourself. Admission would be a lot fairer, we wouldnt waste an incredible
amount of time of Professors and they could in turn teach actually interesting
stuff.

The whole thing got quite apparent when a former roommate of mine studying
mechanical engineering asked his father to help him study for a first year
course and they figured out, that his father used the exact same literature in
his college days as my roommate did at the time. The content hasnt changed,
yet we keep throwing time at manually repeating it or going even as far as
reinventing it with everyone writing their own script on the topic.

------
mountainofdeath
I had a professor mention that during the last bubble (circa 2001), they had
dedicated an entire building to the EECS department. Shortly thereafter, the
bubble popped, enrollment collapsed and the EECS department went back to just
the hacker type. It seems we are in another one of those cycles.

Anecdotally, when I was in university around 2012, I noticed that the same
people who would have gone to medical or law school, abruptly change their
paths to CS. When I started hiring people, I noticed the same trend in
resumes.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Yup. I know a lot of smart people who are good at _everything_ starting to
enter CS a few years ago at elite institutions like Harvard and MIT.

In all honesty, I much prefer them to the "I want to code videogames" crowd
that made up a big chunk of my undergrad class.

------
gaze
If CS is so popular right now, how can it possibly command high pay by the
time these people hit the job market? Do they all expect to compete against
each other for high paying positions? How is that a good bet? Do they expect
that there will be a ton of jobs that will all pay well?

~~~
Jtsummers
There's an information delay that causes these trends. Remember that the
people making decisions on their college majors are 16-18 year olds. They're
basing these decisions on $$$. The university encourages these decisions
because of $$$. The new students aren't looking at the job market and
recognizing that they're pushing it towards a glut (as a cohort), as
individuals they're making a sound decision in that moment with the incomplete
information and lack of forethought typical of someone that age.

Of course, that lack of forethought isn't exclusive to them. You see the same
behavior in other markets. Today I see that someone has developed X and is
making money, but the market isn't captured (lots of growth potential). So I
decide to make X (sound decision on what I know). However, 98 others also make
the same decision at about the same time. By the time we all start shipping X
we've flooded the market and now it's not profitable (getting too small a
slice of the whole, or competition drives prices too low). I'm trying to
recall the precise term in systems theory, "bounded knowledge" maybe?

EDIT: "Bounded rationality" was what I was trying to recall. It's useful in a
number of fields, I came across the term (proper, the concept wasn't new to
me) in studying systems dynamics.

~~~
droobles
I've talked about this with friends – is CS a gold rush right now? I'm sure
with the younger generation being fed that it's a cheat code to make money the
market will flood and wages will be driven down. Or, web dev jobs will be
flooded and proper system design jobs will stay the same since they have such
a high barrier of entry? We'll just have to wait and see.

~~~
IdiocyInAction
It probably is to some extent, though computing skills are becoming so
important that it might take a while for graduates to really feel the crunch.

------
michaelhoffman
So now there are _three_ hard problems in computer science.

~~~
taneq
Getting into class, naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors?

~~~
_Schizotypy
4?

~~~
strictnein
> and off-by-one errors?

~~~
_Schizotypy
yep, that was a whoosh

------
tyler-
Some universities rank those that are majoring in CS higher up in the
registration chain, than those taking it for elective, those that are minoring
in CS and those that are returning back to school. This means multitudes of
students face difficulty in getting into their 100 & 200-level courses. At my
school it isn't uncommon to have three sections of 300 students each in the
101 class and 300+ people vying for limited seats in the 200-level class. One
of the sophomore level classes expanded their seats to nearly 500 people, but
that doesn't solve the problem of getting into the upper division courses that
are capped at 150 people. Schools are leaving out a large population of
students registering for these courses, which may include first generation
students, women and minorities. Even the 100-level courses can nearly be
impossible to register for at this point.

~~~
flyingpenguin
There is also a factor with lag in budgeting. When I first started computer
science at my school it was a smaller department (maybe 2-3 intro cources of
50 people). When I was a JR, my department didn't have the budget to put out a
off schedule OS course. The budget was consumed by 13 intro courses.

As I was graduating, my program not only had 10-13 intro courses but had 4x as
many electives as it had when I started.

~~~
tyler-
Budgeting is an issue with my school as well. Our school is understaffed and
has been opening up positions for new faculty hiring, including hiring
teaching only positions (where they hire PhDs for such positions, with renewal
contracts).

I've also heard of the idea of charging a departmental fee to become a CS
major, similar to the idea that certain engineering departments have such
fees. The idea here is that this fee would go towards the department but allow
the student access to things like hacker spaces and or other resources that
everyone else in the school would be presumably excluded from. A lot of things
are trying to be figured out to address this issue.

------
kajumix
Isn't this a problem of too much coupling between credentialing and education?
People aren't seeking to sit in a room full of 400 people through a lecture
given by a certain professor at a certain time. They could probably find the
lecture video online and watch it whenever and however frequently. They are
only seeking the stamp of approval from a well respected institution.
Assessment is not the same problem as education. Even though online education
is getting some traction, it seems as if employers (and parents!) can't give
up obsessively indexing much on traditional multi-year lecture-driven
university education.

It's ironic that university engineering (especially software) departments
teach modularization, decoupling, distribution, reuse, etc. that makes
possible to scale like Google, Amazon, etc, but fail to apply these learnings
to themselves.

------
WhompingWindows
The hard part of computer science is the staggering complexity, the
abstraction, the language/framework/library learning fatigue, the stress of
trying to deliver on overoptimistic deadlines. Getting into a class is nothing
in comparison to these actual challenges.

------
tyler-
Another idea to retain or hire faculty: let them have dual enrollment at tech
companies and universities. Not sure if this is a good idea, or if it works.
But I'd certainly be interested in studying the outcomes of it. Potentially
could cause a conflict of interest in motivation of academic research vs
industry driven research to profit the company, or even be used as a way to
fast-track students to said company. Not that these things are inherently bad,
but such decisions could have undesired outcomes for the universities that do
this. But could be an idea worth exploring. Or, universities could become more
competitive with salaries.

~~~
alistairSH
I had several classes taught by adjunct faculty who had "day jobs" in my years
at UVA. Although they were all in economics, not CS.

So, it can work. But, you need a good supply of local professionals with the
aptitude to teach. Probably not too hard for entry level courses, but 3rd or
4th year courses are likely harder to find suitable adjuncts. I'm sure I could
teach CS101, but no way could I teach a senior level OS class.

------
otakucode
This presents a more interesting problem than the article realizes. Computer
Science has long suffered from overstuffed first year courses.... but only
first year. By the second year, the vast majority of students have changed
majors or otherwise left the computer science field. With even greater
overcrowding of first-year courses, it probably makes it even harder for a
person earnestly interested in computing to get in. At least when I attended
school, every single person who gave their reason for choosing CS as 'I heard
there was good money in it' was gone by the 3rd semester. I'm not entirely
sure, but I've always suspected this might be due to the fact that while you
can BS your way through an essay, you can't really do that with a compiler.
Either that or a fundamental psychosocial resistance to hard-line logical
thinking.

In any case, perhaps they should factor this in somehow and do a bit of
preparatory work to give potential students a real sense of what the work and
subject is actually going to be like before they fill up the first year
courses and just waste everyones time before dropping out?

------
pseudolus
Why the emphasis on recruiting new faculty to teach undergraduate level
computer science courses ? Does the material genuinely require the input of a
professor? It seems that universities/colleges are experiencing short-term
shortages of teaching personnel that can readily be recruited from other
sources without necessitating hiring new faculty.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
In my university a professor isn't usually newly hired for undergraduate level
CS course teaching- but the university doesn't want to hire a non-phd to be
teaching undergrads. It's not a good look for a university to be hiring non-
phd bearers for its teaching positions. However, CS PhDs can (relatively)
easily go into industry or tenure-track dependent on what their research was
about, so there's not many PhD people who are willing to take a teaching
position.

------
_hardwaregeek
I'm very curious to see the number of people start as CS and drop vs the
number of people who end up as CS. I know at my school there's a lot of people
who come in wanting to do CS but end up dropping and a decent amount of people
who end up in the CS major either via other STEM majors or just randomly.

Because of this churn, the intro classes need to be a lot bigger than the
rest, simply to accommodate both sets of people. And really, intro classes are
the most important part of the CS degree, for motivating people, for teaching
the practice of programming and for the skills that you'd actually use on the
job.

One potential solution is to just not hire research faculty for intro classes.
While I do kind of believe in having actual professors teach undergrad
classes, if schools are struggling to hire PhDs, why not look at non PhD's?
It's not like having a PhD helps with teaching intro classes. If anything, it
probably hurts.

~~~
tedmiston
At my average small-to-mid-sized state school in the midwest, a typical CS
drop rate from day 1 to graduation was ~3/4 either switched majors (mostly to
business majors) or dropped out of school entirely. Technically it's probably
even a bit higher than that because this is net of people switching into CS.
Not sure how students who transfer schools are tracked.

------
NoNameHaveI
Meanwhile, at community college, a place with NO admission standards except a
high school diploma, enrollment numbers are down, down, down. How do I know? I
teach at one. And I used to teach at a different one, WITH TENURE, but we
didn't have enough students so they let me go. A Merry Christmas that was.

------
philsnow
> Some universities now require incoming students to get accepted into
> computer science majors before they arrive on campus — and make it nearly
> impossible for other undergraduates to transfer into the major.

I was slotted into an adjacent major (applied for CS, got slotted into CSE)
when I went to undergrad at UCLA, and had to demonstrate grades etc and apply
to move into my desired at a strategic time (after enough of the cohort in my
desired major had switched away to other majors). This has definitely happened
before.

------
fokinsean
I got so lucky when I did an internal transfer to CS at UT Austin. I was an
economics major and wanted to give CS a try. At the time (~2013) all I had to
have was a 2.5 gpa and sign a transfer document.

The next year the department exploded and kids with 4.0s and previous
internships were getting denied. This was also the first year with the new
Dell-Gates Computer Science building. I didn't have a class in that building
until my Senior year!

------
s09dfhks
> It can also favor male students — because women on average are less likely
> to have taken a computer science course in high school.

How is that the school's fault?

~~~
goobynight
Step 1: frame it as an injustice

Step 2: worry about the details later

------
okaram
We appear to have a 20-ish-year boom/bust cycle in CS enrollment; Eric Roberts
(and some others in CS education) have been working on this for a while;
there's a ton of resources at
[https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/ResourcesForTheCSCap...](https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/ResourcesForTheCSCapacityCrisis/)

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
I think this is a little different. American schools now court more foreign
students than ever to populate these programs. Domestic students that would
otherwise go into EE or CE have fewer job prospects compared to 20 years ago
and are better off in CS too. Previous booms were more faddish. Now it's basic
economics.

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avgDev
Interestingly I went to an okay state school. I remember when I first transfer
from college to complete my computer science. I wanted to take 4-5 classes of
CS to get a ahead, but only two classes were available everything else was
already filled.

I literally had sign up for classes as soon as registration was open to
graduate, otherwise I would not get into courses required.

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akhilcacharya
I’m not sure if I should be glad my school didn’t have competitive admissions
or disappointed that it limited my career trajectory

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ummonk
I wonder to what extent the barriers of entry for CS programs filter out some
of the best future software engineers. Being laser-focused on getting all the
homework done and maintaining a 4.0 GPA is generally not the same kind of
personality that results in creative thinking and problem-solving skills.

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Cthulhu_
I'm reading part of the problem is getting good teachers, because the tech
industry wants them as well. Would the tech industry be willing to cooperate
with universities and help pay for teachers / make them available to give
classes? It's their future employees after all.

~~~
flyingpenguin
At my school almost all of the electives where taught by people in industry.

They either taught a 2 course long elective and offered internships at their
company during the second course (Hey you spent the last 5~ months training
these people and no you know who is a good worker), or they taught one
elective and offered internships to the students they liked at the end.

Their companies paid them to do this for... obvious reasons.

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dreamcompiler
Whoa. Don Fussell was my thesis advisor at UT Comp Sci a lot of years ago.
That was back before the Gates building, when Michael Dell was still selling
PC clones from his dorm room.

Good times.

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peterwwillis
Any teacher will work. The schools are creating an artificial floor of
requirements that have nothing to do with students leaning the subject matter.

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currymj
very stressful to try to teach under these conditions! the logistical problems
of teaching and consistent grading grow worse than linearly with the number of
students, unfortunately. if you want to have 500 people graded on the same
curve, it's a lot more work to make sure they're all treated consistently and
fairly.

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2_listerine_pls
A big problem is that the idiotic department lets softmore and juniors sign up
for senior courses.

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DrJosiah
Huh, maybe it's time to start teaching again.

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arcaster
Muh fun class. Muh world class university. Muh.

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gaius
Getting a weird sense of deja vu... colleges were oversubscribed for CS just
before the dotcom bubble burst too.

~~~
rb808
Yeah I remember Universities desperate to attract people to CS in 2003-6

~~~
Wiretrip
And before that, in the late 90s, due to the millenium bug goldrush. Now it's
'AI'...

~~~
dagw
I've spent a couple of weeks looking at resumes from people applying for a web
development position we have open and half of them mention machine learning or
AI.

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sys_64738
I was interviewed for five mins on the phone back in 1990. They asked if you
programmed your own computer at home. Not sure what they would say if you said
"No."

~~~
ashleyn
This wasn't particularly true by 1990 but early in computing history, most
engineers didn't have any computer in their house; being expensive and all.
Maybe they thought of it from that angle. There'd still be a lot of older
engineers who may not have gotten on board the PC revolution that began in the
late seventies.

~~~
sys_64738
I came in through UCCA via clearing.

