Monday, March 1, 2004

Dave Winer: Yeah, you kill all the competition and then the talent pool dries up. People were choosing computer science as a career because they hoped to be the next Bill Gates, not because they wanted to work for Bill Gates. [Scripting News] Like other temptingly neat "explanations" of complex social trends, this one may be a small part of the reason, but by no means the whole reason for the drop in students majoring in computer science. If you plot enrollments since 1990, you'll see that this year's are around 1995's or 1996's. This graph is quite informative. The previous peak in graduations was in 1986, indicating a corresponding peak in enrollments in 1982. The precipitous drop after 1982 could not have been caused by the death of competition. In fact there is a parallel between the mid 80s and the late 90s: there were huge expectations of growth for computing businesses, backed by very large venture investments, creating an unusual diversity of new businesses, most of which could not be sustained. Back then was the microprocessor, Unix, and their consequences — the PC, the desktop workstation, LANs. Also, enrollment numbers do not tell the whole story. Informal observations suggest the average quality of the incoming class has gone up even as numbers have gone down. This is not surprising: at the peak, many students were enrolling because of the buzz, not their real interest and aptitude for the subject. In general, technical majors are pretty demanding of time and focus relative to other majors, and the same goes for careers. The real question is not what happened to the bubble-associated peak, but how to sustain an increasing flow of talented, prepared, committed students into computer science and other scientific and engineering fields. It starts much earlier than college, and it must focus on teaching students how to think rigorously and take risks with challenging open-ended problems, instead of the memorization, template matching, and half-informed guesswork that ace multiple-choice tests. 8:25:33 AM