The Informationist Hits the Airwaves - KQED in San Francisco, Monday 8/1 at 9 AM
Well, okay, perhaps not the Informationist per se, but Michael Krasny will host Bruce Abramson on KQED’s Forum on Monday, August 1, 2005, at 9 AM Pacific Time. More information to follow as I learn it.
Update 7/29: Now it’s official. The KQED have me listed as “upcoming” a on its website.
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I enjoyed listening to your appearance on the radio program. I did not get a chance to ask this question:
What do you think about the plunge in Computer Science enrollments in the last few years ?
According to the CRA, an analysis of results from a survey conducted by HERI/UCLA indicate that the fraction of incoming undergraduates that plan to major in CS declined by over 60 percent between the Fall of 2000 and 2004, and is now 70 percent lower than its peak in the early 1980s. Women’s interest dropped 80 percent between 1998 and 2004, and 93 percent since its peak in 1982.
http://columbiacs.blogspot.com/2005/04/cra-interest-in-cs-as-major-drops.html
I hadn’t really paid too much attention to registration statistics, but I must say that I’m not surprised. Registrations tend to move with the engineering cycle. The Internet bubble motivated many people to declare CS majors. Its deflation dissuaded such a choice. I am certain that the numbers of declared CS majors between about 1998 and 2001 are anomalous.
Beyond that, though, I have long had my differences with academic CS. I believed--and believe--strongly that the “science” of computing is a social science focused on information, not an engineering discipline. (As far as I can tell, Herb Simon and I are the only two people who have ever held this belief). I first got into CS because I wanted to understand how the ability to manipulate large quanta of information helped people make better decisions, organizations devise better strategies, and governments devise better policies. I left academic CS because it was clear that my interests were not where the field wanted to go.
As long as CS defines itself as an engineering discipline, it will follow the same boom/bust cycle as other engineering disciplines. Try tracking the number of people studying petroleum engineering between 1970 and 1990--you might find it interesting.
The flip side, of course, is that much of the work that I would locate in a CS curriculum does exist--elsewhere. Economics and biology are both much more computational than they were 20-30 years ago. Information intensive thinking is arising in many fields, and certainly across the social and natural sciences. Library science is entirely computational.
So before lamenting the decline in CS enrollments, I would have to wonder what precise, narrow skills CS majors possess that others do not. And just what is it that these non-CS majors are studying instead?
There may be a real problem here--or there may not be one. I don’t know enough to know. But my primary disappointment with CS in academia is the direction that the field chose for itself in the 1980s and 90s. I would have structured it very differently. (As just one example, back when I was a member of the CS Dept. at USC, we took a vote as to what courses we should require for our Ph.D. students. I was the only member of the faculty to vote for Probability theory).
I digress--but then again, the question was what I thought about it.
Thanks for listening and participating, though.
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