The disappearing Computer Science student problem

Last week I attended the Career Fair at the Johns Hopkins University, to represent Microsoft. I’ve done this nearly every year since I graduated in 2000.

Over the years I’ve read about the national decline in enrollment of students in computer science, despite the fact that the average pay is at its highest level in seven years. I don’t have the hard numbers, but this decline is noticeable.

I’m a strong believer in hiring college talent for infusions of fresh ideas and fresh perspectives. Thus, this trend is clearly not a good thing.

Of course, my perspective might be a bit skewed - in my Junior Fall Semester, the database class had nearly 200 people enrolled. There were med students, grad students from all different areas, and undergrads from completely irrelevant majors. Being that this class used to only have about 50 students, the infrastructure was simply unprepared, and the Oracle servers continually crashed. (Ask me some day about how I had to finish 2 final projects midway through the Spring semester of that year!)

Nonetheless, I hope this trend is reversed. I’m sure there are no easy solutions - there never are.

That said, there seemed to be a lot of strong talent coming from the Information and Security Institute.

I wish the Class of 2008 the best of luck!

(For those who are not graduating this year, or are still in high school, this post is a pretty good read.)