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Education Businesses Technology

Computer Science Enrollments Match NASDAQ's Rises and Fall 67

Posted by samzenpus from the long-time-coming dept.
dcblogs writes: In March 2000, the NASDAQ composite index reached a historic high of 5,048, at just about the same time undergrad computer science enrollments hit a peak of nearly 24,000 students at PhD-granting institutions in the U.S. and Canada, according to data collected by the Computing Research Association in its most recent annual Taulbee Survey. By 2005, computer science enrollments had halved, declining to just over 12,000. On July 17, the NASDAQ hit its highest point since 2000, reaching a composite index of 5,210. In 2014, computer science undergrad enrollments reached nearly, 24,000, almost equal to the 2000 high. Remarkably, it has taken nearly 15 years to reach the earlier enrollment peak.
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Computer Science Enrollments Match NASDAQ's Rises and Fall More

Computer Science Enrollments Match NASDAQ's Rises and Fall

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  • And yet 15 years later... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Monday July 27, 2015 @04:01PM (#50192527) Homepage Journal
    ... we still can't get competent editors at slashodt. Certainly there must have been someone who minored in English or Journalism who could take care of these atrocious front-page grammar and readability issues? I've seen better writing in comment sections of code written by people who learned English as a third or fourth language.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ... we still can't get competent editors at slashodt. Certainly there must have been someone who minored in English or Journalism who could take care of these atrocious front-page grammar and readability issues? I've seen better writing in comment sections of code written by people who learned English as a third or fourth language.

      Oh, the irony...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by TWX ( 665546 )
      It's kind of amusing to read a complaint about poor use of English that contains a typo.

      Slashdot's editors typically don't do much to user submissions. I'm not surprised that an otherwise language-poor summary is published.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        It's kind of amusing to read a complaint about poor use of English that contains a typo.

        There must be some law that any correspondence (comment, letter, post, whatever) about some issue about the use of English, be it spelling, or grammar, will contain that very issue in it. So if someone is complaining about a typo, inevitably, there will be a typo in it. Ditto grammar.

      • Slashdot's editors typically don't do much to user submissions.

        Who told you that? Every submission I've had accepted has been altered by more than half.

    • How about adding a coefficient of determination value (R squared) to the summary on anything claiming a correlation between two things?

  • Not surprising at all (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's not surprising at all. The NASDAQ is tech-heavy and the performance of those companies affects the job prospects for recent graduates. It's interesting, but I don't think it's particularly remarkable.

    • Re:Not surprising at all (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Monday July 27, 2015 @04:14PM (#50192587)
      Factor college-admissions as a trailing economic indicator too, where people chase what's encouraged as the hot career path, and it's not exactly a surprise to see cyclical enrollments correlating with business.

      After watching the doctom and housing bubbles, by the time the average person hears about it, it's too late to enter that trend and come out ahead. I suspect one of the next bubbles will be in health care. We see a lot of discussion of Nursing and careers below nursing on the pecking-order, and I suspect relatively soon there will be a lot of medical grads that can't find work.

      • If you saw it in other systems (say animal populations versus food supply, or elevator position versus AoA in planes) that'd support my theory that it's baked into the fundamentals of mathematics that when you get a stimulus, a response and a big delay before the effect it'll oscillate like a breakdancing porpoise.

        But that's crazy talk.

    • The delusion amongst many academics, that students enroll in programs for any reason but to cash out and make money, continues unabated. We are still subjecting people who are paying an awful lot of money to general ed requirements, when advanced and focused trade schools would probably be the right solution for the the majority of applicants. Academia is a calling, one that requires either extreme dedication or a trust fund to hear.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        People who get into programming for the money are the worst programmers. We don't need more warm bodies.
        • That describes 90% of the students enrolled in computer programming at a community college.

        • People who get into programming for the money are the worst programmers. We don't need more warm bodies.

          People that don't pursue a paycheck are destined to starve.

          Face it - we have bills to pay. There's plenty of people intelligent enough for CS but they're not taking it because they are smart enough to realize that they have the intelligence and drive to get other jobs that pay much more. Stock analysts and traders, management, etc.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bengie ( 1121981 )
            In my perfectly unbiased opinion, the two sets of intelligent and obsessed with money are very separated. If I got to choose one trait on which to guess who will be a good programmer, it would be someone who is interested in the subject.

            Intelligence isn't enough to be good, you need to be motivated and being good requires a lot of motivation. CS/Programming is very unhindered in its ability to evolve, allowing for quick changes in short time frames. Programming is one sector where maintaining status quo m

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by swb ( 14022 )

        Let's assume that the general education requirements of most college educations (ie, some smattering of English literature & composition, arts, bit of a foreign language, social studies, etc) actually does result in those students coming out slightly more knowledgeable than if they would have had even an "advanced" kind of technical education.

        It's a reach, I know, but let's say they are overall a little smarter (ie, learned some new analytical skills & strategies) and are better informed.

        I wonder if

    • That's probably true to some extent, but there's not enough statistical evidence to rule out a "rock music causes oil production" [overthinkingit.com]-type correlation.

      Unrelated things frequently peak within a few years from each other by pure chance.

    • It's not surprising at all. The NASDAQ is tech-heavy and the performance of those companies affects the job prospects for recent graduates. It's interesting, but I don't think it's particularly remarkable.

      Exactly!. I would be surprised if there was no correlation.

      Education (just like any other service) is primarily driven by supply and demand. The more companies want a particular skill, the higher they will be willing to pay for it (demand). The higher the salaries, the more people will be interested in learning that skill (supply).

      File this one under "no shit Sherlock" cabinet.

  • I graduated in 1997, just in time to watch the tech bubble inflate to full capacity and pop. I wasn't a CS grad, but wound up in IT. I did notice that a lot of people were starting CS majors while I was in school. Are there really only 24,000 undergrad CS students? Maybe they're just talking about people who finish.

    There was an NPR piece a while back about undergrad Petroleum Engineering programs being super-hot and producing grads that got 6-figure salaries at the top of the fracking boom. Cue the stories

    • Take a challenging subject, figure out what you like to do, and work that into your entry level job search plan.

      I had a roommate who spent $25,000 to learn automotive design on the West Coast in the late 1990's. During four years of school, he worked at the grocery store. After graduating from school, he still worked at the grocery store. If he haven't gotten married to woman who thought a little further out into the future than he did, he would still be working a grocery. Now he's doing warehouse logistics to pay down his student debts. He took automotive design because he likes cars. Go figure.

  • Someone managed to find two graph curves that overlap nicely, but have little else to support their theory. How unusual. *Yawn*

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by e r ( 2847683 )
      Right?

      SJW articles every other fucking day, obvious political shilling every week, and then the bunk science articles that the editors can barely form a link to...
      I really expected much better from /.
      If this kind of bullshit keeps cropping up on the front page then I'm going elsewhere for my tech news.

      Editors take note. You're killing /.

  • Butter Production in Bangladesh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ardmhacha ( 192482 ) on Monday July 27, 2015 @04:35PM (#50192731)

    And the S&P500 correlates with butter production in Bangladesh.

    http://business.time.com/2009/... [time.com]

    Correlation, causation etc.

  • Did the submitter get this off of Spurious Correlations [tylervigen.com]?

  • Supply-and-demand works, who knew.

  • "If there is constant debate about whether we are currently in a bubble, we are probably in a bubble."

  • Finally! (Score:3)

    by Tyrannosaur ( 2485772 ) on Monday July 27, 2015 @05:35PM (#50193077)

    We have found a way to get more women to enroll for CS! All we have to do is make the NASDAQ really high!

  • Sounds like bunk to me. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This might be of use to the people furiously commenting away.

    http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

  • We love to mock people who spend 4 years and rack up $120k in student loans to get a degree in Art History and end up flipping burgers for a living. We should have a certain amount of sympathy for people who (quite sensibly) get degrees in fields that at the time had good employment prospects, and then got blindsided by boom-and-bust industry cycles.

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