other hardware companies. “For every popular trend in computing there’s a spike in interest,” says Harsha, citing a similar boom-and-bust cycle that happened with the rise of the personal computer during the mid-1980s. Also, Harsha says, students may finally have realized that the stereotype of computing as a lonely career in which you sit in a cube and write code is not true.

“We all owe a non-trivial debt to companies like Google and Apple, who do cool work on cool products and don’t look like your stereotypical guys in flannel suits,” says Lenny Pitt, a UIUC computer science professor.

Mark Stehlik, assistant dean for undergraduate education at CMU’s School of Computer Science, has a different historical comparison: the space program of the 1960s, which fueled the imaginations and ambitions of a generation of schoolchildren. “There was such an enterprise built around it,” he recalls. Of course, to go to the moon, you had to be a rocket scientist. “And what if rocket science wasn’t your thing?” Computer science majors, on the other hand, have a variety of career options to choose from once they graduate. “You can do software development across such a wide range of sectors,” notes Stehlik, as nowadays almost every industry has computing needs.

In spite of recent gains, the supply
of CS graduates is still dwarfed by the
projected number of jobs. According to
the BLS projections, there will be more
than twice as many new computing jobs
per annum in the next eight years than
the current level of 50,000 computing
graduates will be able to fill. Nor can
computer science departments, many
of whom had trouble dealing with the
influx of students in the late 1990s,
expand as quickly as companies and
universities might like. “We currently
have about 775 undergrads, and we can
add another couple hundred without a
problem,” says UIUC’s Rutenbar. “But
we need to do some soul searching if we
want to grow larger than that.”

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software engineering
alone is expected
to add nearly 300,000
jobs in the u.s. in
the next eight years.
the international outlook

The job prospects for computer science graduates in the United Kingdom, China, and India vary widely as does each country’s educational and economic situations.

According to the United Kingdom’s
Higher Education Statistics Agency
(HESA), 17% of 2009’s CS graduates
were unemployed six months later—
more than any other discipline. Indus-
try watchers caution that the figure
should be taken with a grain of salt,
however, since the category includes
students who studied softer subjects
like human-computer interaction and
information development as well as tra-
ditional CS majors. “Higher-level things
like software and systems design are a
different picture,” says Bill Mitchell, di-
rector of the British Computer Society.
“They are very much recruiting these
types of people.”
Research institutions like the Univer-
sity of Southampton, which placed 94%
of its computer science graduates in
2009, echo Mitchell’s sentiment. “Com-
panies still need people with really good
skills, who have been exposed to dif-
ferent languages and platforms, who
are confident and can code,” says Joyce
Lewis, communications manager for
the University of Southampton’s School
of Electronics and Computer Science.
And while the University of Southamp-
ton and other members of the Russell
Group—an association of 20 universi-
ties that’s often referred to as the U.K.’s
Ivy League—have no trouble filling spac-
es in their computer science programs,
educators are nonetheless concerned by
a massive nationwide drop in interest in
the field. “Enrollment has dropped by
nearly 60% over the past eight years,”
says Mitchell, who is working to reform
the national IT curriculum and reverse
the trend. “Companies tell us they have
to bring people in from Silicon Valley.”
Recent computer science gradu-
ates in China are also struggling with
a demanding job market. According to
a study conducted by the MyCOS Insti-