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(I suggest skipping this if you’re easily offended.)
A while back, Alex pointed me to one of the most tasteless asides I’ve ever seen (I’d missed it completely while looking at the same material.)
Read this Jack Chick comic. Notice anything unusual? Look carefully at the right-hand panel of the tenth row (this one).
What does the airport have to do with the story?
Jack Chick is apparently a good deal more tasteless than his detractors will admit.
Prof. Felten’s latest blog post discusses the ‘computer science malaise’, a winter of grant contractions and declining enrollments. I can’t speak to the grant situation, but I can spout a few numbers on the enrollment situation.
Below is a table of a few key figures relating to CS enrollment at Princeton. (The registrar’s office supplied the data with the exception of the thesis information, which I pulled from the Princeton senior thesis catalog.
For reference, Princeton grants two degrees: the AB (what everyone else calls a BA) and the BSE (BS in Engineering). Computer Science is the only department that offers both degrees. Senior theses are required of all AB majors and are completed by some CS BSEs. “EE,” “MechE,” and “all eng” are the number of electrical engineering degrees, mechanical/aerospace engineering degrees, and all engineering degrees granted that year.
| year | CS theses | AB CS | BSE CS | total CS | EE | MechE | all eng |
| 1994 | 11 | 12 | 14 | 26 | 32 | 50 | 183 |
| 1995 | 14 | 11 | 20 | 31 | 24 | 55 | 190 |
| 1996 | 6 | 5 | 9 | 14 | 25 | 37 | 153 |
| 1997 | 9 | 7 | 29 | 36 | 35 | 27 | 178 |
| 1998 | 10 | 9 | 27 | 36 | 32 | 29 | 182 |
| 1999 | 20 | 13 | 28 | 47 | 31 | 28 | 170 |
| 2000 | 14 | 8 | 29 | 37 | 43 | 35 | 172 |
| 2001 | 20 | 12 | 36 | 48 | 26 | 30 | 162 |
| 2002 | 15 | 13 | 34 | 47 | 54 | 31 | 196 |
| 2003 | 11 | 9 | 21 | 30 | 45 | 31 | 175 |
| 2004 | 14 | 10 | 27 | 37 | 34 | 37 | 167 |
* The registrar calls this “1995-1995”, assumed to be a typo. Number of BSE-CS majors this year seems too small — can anyone comment?
The same data, with a few columns removed for clarity:
(The y axis shows the number of degrees (or theses) granted in a given year. Thanks to GC for pointing out the ambiguity. Update: Graph really fixed. Thanks, GC. Mea culpa. )
Certainly, the number of majors is down 23% from its peak in 2001 at 47. Certainly, this is a limited dataset. Certainly, students have to decide where they want to major years before graduating (although switching from CS to operations research and financial engineering, a popular major for pre-Wall Street types, is presumably not difficult if one took a few ORFE prerequisites). But, fortunately, Princeton has not seen the same 60% decline claimed by the study Prof. Felten mentions.
Regarding that study: the Aug. 2005 Communications of the ACM editorial by Profs. Chazelle and Arora cites a CNET News article about declining freshman interest in CS. The article cites a report claiming that interest in CS among frosh dropped 60%. I quote:
The percentage of incoming undergraduates indicating that they would 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.
(There’s a huge spike in interest centered around 1982 – can anyone speculate on what prompted that?)
A study by the same author indicates that actual degree granting rates have remained steady but warns of the ominous trend in interest figures and enrollments.
“Interest” figures are less interesting than actual graduation figures – they depend on the phrasing of the question, the news heading up to the time of the survey, the circumstances under which it was administered, and a variety of other factors. To make matters fuzzier, people believe a lot of strange things at 18. (Case in point: when I was a freshman, I voted for Al Gore.) Enrollment figures are also fuzzy: different schools require declaration at different times; some make it harder to switch than others.
Back to Chazelle and Arora’s “Viewpoint: Is the thrill gone?”:
While computing technology is thriving and extending its reach further into our everyday lives, computer science is facing a crisis in the U.S., including falling undergraduate enrollment and reduced research funding.
My 2¢? I know too little to speak about funding. As to student enrollment, with all due respect to Profs. Chazelle, Arora, and Felten, I’m not particularly worried. CS will always attract the students who will advance the state of the art: those who genuinely enjoy the field. As to those who, spurred by the dot-com gold rush, swelled the ranks in the late-00s, I wish them the best of luck, but I don’t think their departure for greener pastures (Econ? ORFE?) imperils the study of computer science.
P.S.: I’m a bit puzzled by Chazelle and Arora’s use of language:
Many ongoing efforts aim to develop new high school and college curricula that would help lead to an IT-literate work force. While supporting them, we wish to raise another enrollment issue critical to the field: attracting bright high school students and undergraduates who represent the next generation of IT researchers and educators.
IT? I’ve always used IT as a shorthand for “corporate information systems,” or “the stuff that a nerd wouldn’t voluntarily touch with a ten-foot pole”. ‘IT’ means ‘TPS reports.’ ‘IT’ means ‘9-to-5, Monday through Friday.’ I’m surprised that a pair of CS profs would lament the lack of “IT researchers and educators” — isn’t more CS researchers and educators what they want? If we’re to point fingers, it was corporate IT that sucked the ‘thrill’ out of computer science’s reputation among undergrads. (That, or Scott Adams. )If there’s anything truly opposed to the “hacker” philosophy that makes CS thrilling, it’s the reputation of corporate information technology.
(Apologies for the non-link; ACM keeps its content in a walled garden.)
Update: Mihai pointed me to an article in the PAW that shows a massive drop in CS enrollment from the class of ‘06 to the class of ‘07. The article is really about Dean Nancy Malkiel’s latest edu-engineering effort to push students out of popular departments and into unpopular ones. As an aside, I haven’t decided if I think this is a good idea. (The drop in CS enrollment might also be due to other factors – Shirley Tilghman’s Green Hair Initiative, for instance.) I’ll hold off on drawing real conclusions until ‘07 graduates — enrollment jumps around, especially when people shift between different parts of the engineering school, but graduation is permanent.
Established bus lines (Peter Pan, for instance) are clamoring for an investigation of their ultra-low-fare rivals’ apparent refusal to serve the handicapped:
Not fare! Disabled rip discount bus company after being denied access
Bus battle heats up as business rival files suit
AG targets Fung Wah bus line: Carrier accused of discrimination
Hm, what’s next? Will the AG demand buses that don’t catch fire?
The delightful Boston-area gun-nuts at mASS BACKWARDS pointed out a story in the Herald: to reassure the public of the safety of the subway system, Gov. Mitt Romney rode the Red Line from Park Street to Downtown Crossing. (For those who’ve never had the pleasure, those two (adjacent) stops are about 200 meters apart – there’s even an underground pedestrian walkway connecting them, for those who’d rather not wait for a train.)
In the midst of the journey of two thousand decimeters, he bumbled the price of a ride ($1.25) and managed to get harassed by a cat house owner – this despite his employment of a $350k/yr team to prep him for public appearances.
Of course, you could have read that in the article and on mASS BACKWARDS. I just wanted to note that Michael Bloomberg rides the subway to work daily.
Update: Oops. That was Gov. Romney, not Mayor Menino. Even worse.
Capitalism Magazine survives on donations.
(By contrast, Communist Voice is $2 per issue.)
Finally finished processing all of the photos from the eutrip, plus some others from June and July. They’re posted here.
(Apologies for the server outage last month – I think it was a DHCP issue.)
After an unpleasantly large Verizon Wireless bill arrived this morning, I decided to write a program to let me know if I’m burning too many peak minutes in a given month. If you run this script daily (as a cron job, for instance) it will let you know if you’ve gone over a preset threshhold, either by email, or by writing a message to a file (my RSS reader, feedonfeeds is hacked to display the contents of that file), or both.
If you wanted to, you could even set the email address to your vtext.com address, so the program would send you an SMS message if you went over. (You might want to run the program less often in that case, because SMS messages are billable.)
This sort of thing would be trivially easy to build into the phone, but that would interfere with the business models of cell phone carriers – don’t hold your breath.
