It’s hip2b2

The department has been facing a serious problem in the last few years. This problem is basically the ever decreasing numbers of people taking up computer science as an undergraduate degree. In the Philippines, we have attributed this to the fact that students are now taking up health science-related courses because of the boom in international nurse and doctor demand.

Before, I believed that this was a solely Philippine problem. However, here is this article from a British computer school about the death of Computer Science.

We all know there’s a crisis in university computer science departments. Student numbers are dwindling - down 115 just last year. At the same time the computing unit of funding has fallen. And the onset of fees has made students think twice about joining a profession where the plethora of new jobs in the 1990s has reduced to a trickle and it’s only just looking as if employment prospects may be on the upturn.

And not only is the UK facing this problem but other countries as well …

And the problem’s global. In the US, the number of students choosing computer science dropped by 39 per cent between 2000 and 2005. In Australia, cuts in IT academic staff are the order of the day.

The article surmises that the root of the problem is that potential students do not see computer science as interesting anymore. It has lost its mystique. This school (like other schools in the UK) has resorted to creating and introducing new and exciting courses such as games programming to keep enrollment up. This is just reactionary. This is only one of the possible steps to be taken.

Old computer science curricula must now be updated (after years of stagnation). Computer sciences programs must essentially be more inter-disciplinary. They should now take into to consideration other new an emerging fields and insert computer science into them. Integrate computers into other fields. Computer science can no longer stand alone. In conclusion … computer science (as a course) has failed to evolve itself. It is now forced to adapt… or like the dinosaurs … become extinct.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Musings and Speculations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.