Tomorrow the House Science Committee is holding a hearing on the future of computer science in the US. They webcast all of their hearings live -- I encourage you to tune in.
There will be an interesting lineup of speakers, including John Marburger the President's science advisor; Anthony Tether, the Director of DARPA; William Wulf, the President of the National Academy of Engineering; and Tom Leighton, Chief Scientist of Akamai, member of the President's IT Advisory Council (PITAC), and head of PITAC's subcommittee on cybersecurity.
Here's an interesting bit of pre-reading: the charter for the hearing which gives useful (and fairly neutral) background information.
There was a Slashdot article today about a UC Davis CS professor who is taking a contrary position to the outcry over the pipeline issues. As you can imagine, I respectfully disagree with much of his argument. Much of what he says is just quibbling over interpretation, like the results in the ACM programming contest, where this year the Chinese did much better. No, that doesn't mean that American CS students are getting a worse education; it means that Chinese students are getting a much better one than they did previously and are becoming much more competitive with American students.
Second point: As CS and IT transform every field and every industry, that will create a huge demand for IT jobs. The US Commerce Department's own predictions suggest that we will add almost 150,000 new IT-related jobs between 2002 and 2012. (vs. 45,000 engineering, 10,000 physical sciences, and 10,000 bio/agri sciences). And that's just in the United States. This is a worldwide phenomenon. Dot-com bust aside, the demand for IT workers over the next decade far, far outstrips supply.
The third key point that people seem to be missing, is one that I raised yesterday here on my blog: there is a long lead time on the pipeline for CS. The current (staggering) drop in CS enrollments means that in 4-5 years we will have a significant shortage of domestic IT workers.
Here's the punch line: the IT work is going to get done, and people are going to pay for it. So long as demand outstrips supply, IT workers will not come cheaply -- especially since they are a very mobile workforce, and even if we put protectionist controls over foreign workers in the U.S,, the rest of the world will not. So the question is: who do we want to do the work?
The U.S. leadership in CS and IT has been a strong, positive economic force in this country for four decades. But we're not investing in it like we used to, and the rest of the world is catching up. What are we going to do about it? And don't forget, the clock is ticking, because in four year we're going to reap what we've already sown.
3:10:29 PM 
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