ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has released the highly anticipated report "Retention in Computer Science Undergraduate Programs in the U.S.: Data Challenges and Promising Interventions"(pdf)
[...] The computing field is experiencing exponential growth, both in terms of current and projected job openings, as well as students majoring in computer science (CS). Recently, the U.S. Department of Labor projected that between 2008 and 2018, ¼ million computing jobs opened in the U.S. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, however, in 2015-2016 only 64,405 students received computer science degrees. the main source of preparation for these jobs. Additionally, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that employment in computer and information technology occupations is expected to grow by 13% in the next decade.
The interest in computing is also reflected in the numbers of incoming students pursuing Bachelor degrees in computing. A report by the Computing Research Association (CRA) highlights that US undergraduate enrollment in computer science is higher today than at any other time. Additionally, the CRA report outlines a 185% increase in CS undergraduates at large institutions since 2006, and a 216% increase of CS majors at smaller institutions during the same period.
Despite these trends, the challenge of retaining more women and people from underrepresented minorities (African-American, Hispanic, Native American) has been a persistent challenge in the field for decades. According to the National Science Foundation's Engineering and Science Indicators for 2016, despite the fact that women earned 50% of the Bachelor degrees in science and engineering, they accounted for only 17.9% of Bachelor degrees in the computing sciences. Additionally, data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) shows that for CS Bachelor degrees granted at doctoral-granting institutions in 2015, only 8.4% of degree recipients were Latino and only 4.3% were African-American.
[...] it is an economic imperative for the United States to have a large and diverse tech workforce. Better solutions are developed by teams with a diversity of people and perspectives. Retention in college computing programs is foundational because if we are not attracting and retaining a diverse population of students in Computer Science programs during the students' academic careers, we will not see a diverse workforce in computing emerge.
The article enumerates several areas of interest:
- Data Collection and Analysis
- Promising Interventions
- Give Students a Better Understanding of CS
- Meet Students' Varied Backgrounds
- Increase Helpful Collaboration
- Increase Sense of Belonging and Build a Safe Learning Culture
The report concludes by emphasizing that there is no silver bullet than can transform an institution into an inclusive and equitable learning environment for all students, and that the work to create an inclusive environment is not a temporary effort. The ACM Education Board Retention Committee notes that because these constructs change very slowly, issues of equity will continue to be pressing in all fields -- including computing -- and therefore will require continued vigilance and determined effort.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:48PM (5 children)
Most of these so-called "CS" jobs are just basic business logic to automate someone's workflow.
Adolescent boys (and maybe a few girls) can pick up this skill almost naturally just by playing around with computers, and can do for society what society needs without ever really understanding anything that CS departments find valuable.
I know. I know. It's hard to hear, but that's the truth.
Plumbers earn a lot, and yet most of them don't even know why they do certain things. That's the way of the world; just get it working.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @10:28PM
I wish I was a plumber. I didn't want to get my hands dirty, and here I am with PHP... FML.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @12:48AM (3 children)
What kind of jobs do people with CS degrees get, and what is their work like?
I'm an EE and with one notable exception, every single person I've worked with knows how to program, in any language you put in front of them. Most know a lot about things like data structures and some even know about Big O notation, although the types of software that you usually write as an engineer is for simulation testing or a few dozen lines of code to control your piece of the widget.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @01:06AM (2 children)
Programming is the easy part. Most CS students where I'm from are expected to pick that up as a consequence of personal study while they deal with questions such as memory models and error handling philosophies.
A real CS guy should be an architect of cutting-edge systems, not a codemonkey punching the Perl button for his next caffeine shot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @08:13AM (1 child)
Yeah, but is this what most CS graduates do? How many cutting edge systems are there? I've been involved in the design maybe a dozen or so systems, all of which is boilerplate, or at least data sheet implementation. If you want more than this, you're probably working for samsung or apple on chip design and even then on a small team of a dozen or so.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday December 05 2018, @11:05PM
The code cutting stuff is a means to an end. Its the start to get to that architect of cutting edge systems. Getting a CS degree doesn't just land you an architects job and rightfully so. One of implicit reason you want to start at the bottom is to also learn about the problem domain, be it banking, real-estate, food & beverage, etc. A good architect understand their domain - a CS degree doesn't teach you that. Even in a very technical/sciency domain like aeronautics or pharma you really need to learn the domain.
Unfortunately a lot of CS degree students coming out doesn't really understand that and they get stuck cutting code waiting on tech BAs to hand them requirement on a platter.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:53PM (4 children)
This is an easy one..
Uh..I dunno, maybe get rid of the H1B (and L1, and whatever else) Indian import programs so our grads know that there are good long term stable jobs with benefits and good working conditions at the end of the study slog that they can build a long term career with?
This would also enable good salaries again like the 90s used to have (=enough to live in the area the jobs are in at what has historically been known as 'middle class' living standards, and not living in a the back of a truck in the Google parking lot..). Oh and working conditions... tired of the 60 hour weeks and 2AM phone calls to Bengalore every other night (and weekends) in phone meetings where you cannot understand most of what is being said in supposed 'English'... yup, get rid of that too..
i.e. if the conditions were better, you'd get more people.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:04PM
Alternatively, teach them COBOL [soylentnews.org] - that's the only way to make sure the distant past will continue well into the future.
While only 9% of the business need it, it's the 9% which have the money to pay good wages but not enough money to risk the code brought into the present.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:19PM
Yes. I wonder, is this a plan for more code monkeys, to keep pay down?
Seems a lot of businesses want to use smart people, but won't respect them, instead viewing them with a blend of jealousy, contempt, and hatred. It's as if college is only a brief escape between the persecutions and gaslighting that the in-crowd dishes out to nerds in high school and the job place. For the latter, Dilbert is an excellent representation.
Now go draw some red lines with a green marker.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @01:48AM
The future is indeed unpredictable for both the IT field and one's career. Past patterns are not always a good guide to future patterns. IT has been a lucrative field for the past 15 years, but there are too many variables to say that will continue.
While programming can make decent money out of college compared to other fields, one also plateaus early compared to other careers. Worn out fingers (RSI) and general burnout are common, as you have to constantly learn new fads to avoid looking dated. If you can move up into management, that's great, but not everybody is cut out for management. Competing against cheap foreign labor with fresh fingers during recessions can take its toll.
Then again, ANY career is a gamble. Stability is dead and change is the only constant. I take that back, it appears to be accelerating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @02:44AM
I kind of like Trump's plan, where people paying H1Bs the most go to the front of the line, and everyone else gets none. If you really, really, REALLY need that one dude with a PhD in applied leapfroggery, you will pay through the nose and smile. America will benefit. If you want Ashok Cheap and Ahmed Cheaper, you can pound sand. And America doesn't have any great urgency related to bringing them over.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday December 04 2018, @10:06PM
You can't increase retention in a field that appeals to only a small percentage of people. Not by much, anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @10:25PM
How many of those 60,000 graduates are but Micro$oft monkeys?
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @10:44PM (4 children)
If you want to retain undergrads, teach them programming instead of requiring them to take women's studies.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:13PM (3 children)
In the typical 4-year BS CS degree with 120 credits, you get:
1 year (30 credits) of computer science
1 year (30 credits) of vaguely related stuff that could possibly be useful: physics, calculus, statistics, discrete math, linear algebra, chemistry...
2 years (60 credits) of bullshit propaganda, indoctrinating you on what to think (not "how to think", as the excuse goes). The weak-willed idiots may actually believe all they are fed, but everybody else just feeds back the bullshit or stubbornly flunks out. There are 72 genders, but gender is a social construct. Women and blacks are capable, but they need special hiring preference and safe spaces. Every prior attempt at communism, killing 100 million people, wasn't "real communism" and of course communism will be utopia if we do it right. Women and LGBT rights are important... we should import Muslims who couldn't possibly disagree. Orange man bad.
That is a bum deal. It wastes 3 years of your life. That is like killing 1/27 of the population.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by exaeta on Wednesday December 05 2018, @12:49AM (1 child)
Donno why this is rated troll. It's quite close to the truth.
But I'd say 1 year of propaganda and 1 year of useless crap like music appreciation.
The Government is a Bird
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @12:56AM
It's rated troll by someone who finished a CS degree with honors in SJW studies. At least half of the sheep here believe the women-are-equal, Muslims-are-friendly, genders-are-fluid nonsense they teach in school these days.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday December 05 2018, @06:09PM
A trade school is probably a better fit for those of you who are so desperate to remain ignorant of the world around you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:19PM (1 child)
What about whites in professional basketball? Can we get some affirmative action for that?
What about women as smokejumpers, coalminers, and roofers? Can we get some affirmative action for that?
What about men as daycare providers, nursing consultants, maids, and natural family planning instructors? Can we get some affirmative action for that?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday December 06 2018, @01:18AM
What about men as wet nurses? Can we get some affirmative action for that?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @01:04AM (5 children)
Computer Science is basically a specialised subset of discrete math. If you live for finite state machines, correctness proofs and discussions about Goedel, this is where you want to live.
If you want to make real-time raytracing a practical system for your AR goggles, CS won't hurt, but Software Engineering is where you want to live.
But back in reality, universities aren't even getting that right. One advertised a course in "programming paradigms" - well, great! We'd learn about machine code, assembler, stack machines, procedural and modular and object-oriented languages, aspect-oriented and flow control and functional and paral .... oh, wait. It's a Java course.
Just Java.
Fuck that noise. I could have taught a better class than that.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @04:51AM (3 children)
Only looking back can I see how lucky I was with my selection of college to go to 30 years ago. The Comp Sci department there was strictly an offshoot of the Comp Eng dept. That meant we had required courses on designing and building circuits, with required lab work. Best prof I ever had taught a course in microcoding -- the code a CPU internally runs to actually do something with the machine code that was compiled from the programmer's code. When I got out of there I knew how computers worked down to the metal.
Quite a few times in my career I managed to shine by troubleshooting a problem that no one else could solve, because I could figure out what the computer was really doing, rather than what it was supposedly doing. None of the other application programmers had that kind of background, so they didn't think that way.
These days when young people ask me about becoming a programmer, I steer them towards being a plumber or electrician. You get reasonable pay, you get exercise on the job, and no one in Asia can do the job remotely.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 05 2018, @12:29PM (2 children)
The irony is programmers need to be self taught or their career will be less than a decade, so they don't need a degree and the tools required to do the work are so cheap they don't need corporate support to write android apps or whatever as a hobby or part time job or side biz. I mostly live off investments but I make beer money off the android ecosystem all on my own.
There's a lot of (intentional?) confusion in the USA about the difference between what you are, how you make money (including side gigs), and your education. It seems that the model from 1950 of those should all be identical just doesn't work pragmatically in the modern world.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday December 06 2018, @01:33AM (1 child)
My wife dropped English to take a Fortran course, and ended up becoming a doctor. This was around 1970. Worked then!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday December 06 2018, @01:40AM
Whereas I got a PhD in computer science around the same time and ended up being the parent at home. Go figure. That's how a modern family works. Two of my children are now computer programmers, another is an occupational therapist.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:08PM
I took a programming paradigms course at my college. It taught Haskell, Prolog, Ruby, etc., or more specifically functional, logic, etc. programming paradigms. Not continuation passing unfortunately.
Machine code, assembler, etc. were in the systems courses.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 05 2018, @02:24AM (1 child)
The article's apparent subject is retaining qualified people within the field of computer science. Then, they go astray with
They may or may not be concerned with finding and keeping qualified people, but they are willing to throw qualified people onto the altar of political correctness. Doesn't matter how they camouflage their insanity, they're still insane. I once told Aristarchus that there is a fine line between sophistry and faggotry. These people dance on both sides of that line.
"We need people, but we don't want any hetero white males, especially if they are Christian!"
The hatred is strong in them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @02:39AM
Man, you got these people all wrong.
They just want to help the industry bend over for that hot SJW CoC.
Me, I'll be off in the corner selling CoC lube. But not to the SQLite folks. Those froods have it figured out.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday December 05 2018, @12:23PM (2 children)
Could someone check the proofreading on the propaganda? Not trying to be harsh but someone typo something.
The argument seems to be that a quarter million IT jobs opened per decade, and 64K students get a degree per year so we have a "problem". They're trying to convince us that 250K is larger than 64K so we have a big problem but obvious 250K per decade is about 25K per year vs 64K per year I'm not seeing a problem?
Sounds more like the K12 Education degree in the state I live in, where they graduate roughly twice as many kids as there are jobs because they make a lot of money off edu, so who cares if half the kids can't get a job?
Then there's a long weird rant about how everyone knows human biological differences exist WRT various intelligence measurements along with the "g-factor" and IQ in general, but we can't talk about that under PC censorship, so we'll pretend that we're totally mystified why given the average IQ in Tanzania is 72 that they don't produce as many if not more programmers than the hated white males produce. "I donno why high cognitive load jobs that only whites on average can do, are on average mostly staffed by whites, its sooooo confusing almost like how weird it is that the average basketball player is really freakn tall for no apparent reason"
Also you'll note they carefully don't mention Asian men who are also very high IQ on average and generally nice people to work with, and that's because their stats wouldn't fit the narrative of white male hate. Google indicates 5.6% of the usa population is Asian, so you'd predict 64K*5.6% or 3584 CS grads to Asians. Some place named datausa.io has a CS degree section reporting 4959 Asian CS diplomas earned in 2016. Must be those fucking white males discriminating against and holding down our yellow brothers, oh wait, shit, their quota seems to be 3584 but they achived 4959 which is a vast over-representation. Huh maybe the whole SJW narrative is complete bullshit after all...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:45AM
The big question here is whether the reported national IQ levels are real or an artifact of cultural bias in the IQ tests. I found a study ( https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0969594X.2016.1194257 [tandfonline.com] ) that appears to be aware of these issues and investigated whether there might be better tests than the traditional so-called western ones.
And perhaps the Tanzanian culture inhibits the kind of learning experience that enables success with western IQ tests.
They came up with "dynamic" tests, which seem to measure learning ability rather than already learned abilities. Although there was too much information for me to conclude much in an unfamiliar field of study, it did seem that these dynamic tests provided better outcomes than the older static tests. I didn't get the impression that they accounted for the entire depression of IQ scores from 100 down to 71, but they did suggest that the situation isn't as dire as that statistic indicates.
Still, overall economic outcome depends on achievements and not potentials. Changes in cultural patterns, such as better education, may improve the situation markedly. How markedly remains to be seen. I probably won't live long myself enough to see the outcomes decades hence, but some of you may.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 06 2018, @05:28AM
The problem is not just new jobs, but also backfilling old jobs and leaving room for expansion, plus all the people who end up not working in the field. Once you reconcile that, 64K isn't really that great.
Mind you, they'd probably get a lot further by establishing computer tech field apprenticeships (apprentice coder, journeyman DBA, apprentice networker, master sysadmin, and so on and so forth) but the universities would never ever suggest anything that would remove their aura of special or their delicious subsidies regardless of how closely their courses resemble trade schools.