Communications of the ACM
The Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting Into Class
Don Fussell, chairman of the computer science department at the University of Texas at Austin, says top programs nationwide are competing with tech companies to keep their professors and hire Ph.D.s.
Credit: Joanna Kulesza / The New York Times
On campuses across the United States, from major state universities to small private colleges, the surge in student demand for computer science courses is far outstripping the supply of professors, as the tech industry snaps up talent. At some schools, the shortage is creating an undergraduate divide of computing haves and have-nots—potentially narrowing a path for some students to an industry that has struggled with diversity.
The number of undergraduates majoring in the subject more than doubled from 2013 to 2017, to over 106,000, while tenure-track faculty ranks rose about 17 percent, according to the Computing Research Association, a nonprofit that gathers data from about 200 universities.
At the University of Texas at Austin, which has a top computer science program, more than 3,300 incoming first-year students last fall sought computer science as their first choice of major, more than double the number who did so in 2014.
"The demand is unbounded," says Don Fussell, chairman of the university's computer science department. The university is looking to hire several tenure-track faculty members in computing this year, but competition for top candidates is fierce. "I know of major departments that interviewed 40 candidates, and I don't think they hired anybody," he says.
Although the problem has been building for years, a recent boom is straining resources at institutions large and small.
From The New York Times
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