I’ve recently come across two perspectives on undergraduate enrollments, one about STEM disciplines, one specifically about CS. Both warrant comment.
First, there’s a recent posting on the SLATE Moneybox blog that looks at general STEM enrollments. The author, Matthew Yglesias, counterposes efforts to recruit more students into STEM undergraduate majors against the research interests of some STEM faculty and the research funding model that supports many universities. He suggests that there are STEM faculty who do not want to see enrollments grow, based on the following logic (I’ve added some detail, consistent with his picture): more undergraduates will require that more graduate students will have to work as teaching assistants, which means there will be fewer graduate students available to work on faculty research, which means research will progress more slowly, which means that faculty will have to take more time between grant applications, which means that less research money will come into the universities.
Clearly this is a very contradictory situation. We have an incredible need for more STEM majors. In particular, there is tremendous demand for CS majors, far outstripping the numbers currently graduating. We need to encourage students who have nascent interest, not drive them away. And we should not mortgage our long term research and innovation possibilities, and our ongoing ability to apply technology to ever more areas of life, because of fears about short term research slowdown. Perhaps, as Yglesias says, reviewing the financing model for research and for graduate students at colleges and universities is called for.
There’s a second enrollment related issue that’s also brewing. At some colleges and universities CS enrollments are booming. This is great news and problematic at the same time. And the picture is not uniform. Eric Roberts addressed the situation in a 2011 blog post, hypothesizing reasons for Stanford’s booming enrollments. We get a small college perspective from a recent article in the Swarthmore College Daily Gazette. In both cases, enrollments are straining the teaching capacity of the department.
The difficulties inherent in addressing rapid enrollment increase are very real and require some amount of administrative creativity, faculty nimbleness, etc. The overall gap between supply and demand in industry is quite large, and is not likely to be satisfied by a few years of increased enrollment at a few schools. However, I urge those at schools with these increases to recognize, as Roberts did in his posting, that the situation is not the same at all schools, and in some cases irreparable harm has already been done. The combination of low enrollments and a tight economic situation put CS departments on the chopping block at several institutions. We can’t expect to see those departments return any time soon. At other schools the CS major was eliminated, leaving behind minimal CS faculty and just a minor program. Some schools are just “doing okay”, modest enrollments, justifying their faculty lines, but that’s about it. Furthermore, small schools have limited ability to adjust to enrollment swings. At a small college that favors small class size and highly interactive hands-on pedagogy we cannot simply shoehorn more students into a class when enrollments go up. There simply is not room, so we rely on the willingness of faculty to teach overload sections, which is an unsustainable strategy for the long term.
I could go on at length about the vagaries of college and universities, and a model that makes it difficult to adjust staffing in response to enrollment shifts, but that would take us too far afield. Suffice it to say that the current CS enrollment picture, still uneven across the country, is complex, and nobody should draw conclusions about the whole picture based on their local situation.
Valerie Barr
CSTA Task Force Chair