BY WAYNE WEI HUANG,
JONATHON GREENE,
AND JOHN DAY
OUTSOURCING AND THE DECREASE OF
IS PROGRAM ENROLLMENT
Students must learn to Exposed to this news and the massive IT
accentuate the positive in order job downturn resulting from the dot-com bubble bursting, students of information
to eliminate the negative systems (IS) and computer science (CS)
perceptions of career became quite concerned about their job prospects after graduation, understandably
opportunities in IS. fearing unemployment. These events created an impetus for IS/CS students to
change their major and caused students
considering IS/CS to reconsider, leading to
a significant decrease in enrollment in IS
and CS majors in recent years. For example,
by the end of 2004, the enrollment in the IS
program at the University of Florida had
decreased 66% from its peak. In the computer science program at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, the decrease was
60%, and at Ohio University it was 71%.
Nationally, IS enrollments in recent years
are down between 15% to 75% [ 3].
The gravity of the situation faced by IS
The impact of outsourcing IT jobs to low-wage economies has attracted significant
public attention in recent years, particularly during the last Presidential election
campaign. Some predicted that IT outsourcing would escalate at the rate of over
50% in the subsequent two years with a
total of $7.8 billion shifted toward offshoring. Indeed, industry research firm
Gartner Group estimated one out of every
10 IT jobs would be outsourced overseas
by the end of 2004 [ 2].
