editor’s letter
DOI: 10.1145/1592761.1592762
Moshe Y. Vardi
is the image crisis over?
When Communications relaunched in July 2008,
the issue included a “Viewpoint” column by Rick
Rashid, entitled “Image Crisis: Inspiring a New
Generation of Computer Scientists.”
Has anything changed in that re-
gard in the last 17 months?
Let us first recall what the “im-
age crisis” was. The computing field
went through a perfect storm in the
early 2000s: the dot-com and telecom
crashes, the offshoring scare, and
a research-funding crisis. After its
glamour phase in the late 1990s, the
field seems to have lost its luster. This
has resulted in a precipitous drop in
North American enrollments in un-
dergraduate computer science pro-
grams. The Computing Research As-
sociation’s Taulbee Survey traced how
U.S. computer-science enrollments
started dropping in 2001, reaching
50% of the 2000 level in 2005, and then
staying flat through 2007. It seemed
that high-school students made a col-
lective decision that computing is not
a promising career, and simply voted
with their feet.
The enrollment plunge led to the
establishment of the Image of Com-
puting Task Force in 2005 as a U.S.
response to “lead a national coordina-
tion effort to expose a realistic view of
opportunities in computing.” In 2008,
the U.S. National Science Foundation
funded a joint project with the WGBH
Educational Foundation and ACM
to “research and design a new set of
messages that will accurately por-
tray the field of computing.” Then, in
March 2009, the 2007–2008 Taulbee
Survey came out with data indicating
that freshmen CS enrollments grew by
almost 10% between 2007 and 2008.
So, is the “image crisis” over?
Taking a longer-term view of CS en-
rollments, one notices that the enroll-
ments drop of the early 2000s came
after a huge rise in enrollments in the
late 1990s. In fact, CS enrollments
have always been cyclical. The lat-
est boom-bust cycle was triggered by
the “Internet revolution,” but an ear-
lier boom-bust cycle, in much of the
1980s, was triggered by the “PC revo-
lution.” It is not clear what a “normal”
level of CS enrollments would be. Was
the “crisis” a real crisis?
There is no doubt that CS enroll-
ments are hugely affected by the eco-
nomic environment. The most recent
rise in enrollments is probably tied to
the recent economic crisis. While fi-
nance looked like a promising career
two years ago, that gleam is clearly
tarnished. A career in computing sud-
denly seems much more promising
than a career on Wall Street. The rise
in CS enrollments will probably con-
tinue to rise for the next few years.
We should not, however, let a
good “crisis” go to waste. From it we
learned that the image of our field is
important and that the image of our
field is not necessarily a positive one.
Trying to change that image is a noble
goal, though I doubt nothing short of
a massive marketing campaign, at the
probable cost of tens of millions of
dollars, can add more color to the pre-
vailing picture.
What we did not seem to learn is
that the image of our field may be re-
lated to the reality of our field. We are
woefully ignorant about the reality
of computing careers. According to
the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there
are close to four million information
technology workers in the U.S. that
span across several job categories.
(Analogous information about the
rest of the world is very difficult to
obtain.) What we do not know is how
computing graduates fit in this pic-
ture. We do not know how to measure
the career outcome or value of a com-
puting degree. How are CS graduates
distributed across various industry
sectors? What are their career trajec-
tories? Peter Freeman and William
Aspray’s 1999 report The Supply of In-
formation Technology Workers in the
United States, studied the supply of
and demand for IT workers in the U.S.
at a macro rather than the individual
scale in an effort to better understand
these issues. Yet today we still do not
know how to determine the quality
of computing careers, say in terms of
lifetime income, job stability, auton-
omy and self-direction, promotion
opportunity, and the like, compares
to other careers, say, in electrical or
chemical engineering. Moreover, we
clearly do not know how to change the
image problem of our field as viewed
by women and most minorities.
These, I believe, are huge gaps in
our knowledge. I do not see how we
can develop messages that will accu-
rately portray the field of computing,
if we ourselves do not have an accu-
rate portrait of the field. Before the
“image crisis” completely fades away,
let us not let it go to waste.
Moshe Y. Vardi, EDITOR-In-CHIEF
