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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday July 26 2017, @07:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the everybody-wants-to-be-a-techie dept.

The bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000 prompted students to reject computer science programs. Enrollments plummeted with the crash. But colleges are now scrambling to keep up with the major's year-after-year enrollment growth.

Take Stanford University. In the 2007-08 academic year, Stanford had 87 declared undergraduate computer science majors. That was near the trough of the great decline in computer science enrollments.

But since then, the number of declared majors at Stanford has grown in each year and by the 2016-17 academic year, Stanford counted 353 majors. This is now the school's top undergraduate major.

Stanford is not alone. Dartmouth College's computer science program has quadrupled, but that doesn't tell the entire story. Many students, who are pursuing a variety of undergraduate degrees, are making computer science part of their study. These students now consider data analytics and coding as fundamental parts of their field.

"I don't think anybody expected what we are seeing now," said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and chair of the department at Dartmouth.

By the time they graduate, 75 percent of Dartmouth's students have either taken an engineering or computer course, said Farid. An introductory computer science course teaches a student how to code in Python. Students also study data structures to learn how to represent and manipulate data, as well algorithmic analysis that teaches them how to assess whether one algorithm is better than the other in terms of runtime complexity.

"I can tell you that 50 percent of accepted students to Dartmouth have expressed some interest in computer science – that's insane," said Farid.

This increasing demand for computer science education is nationwide.

Source: http://insight.ieeeusa.org/insight/content/policy/775982


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @08:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @08:22PM (#544844)


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