Computer science classrooms are overflowing at colleges and universities across the United States. Enrollments are rising quickly, not only for majors, but also for non-majors who recognize the importance of computing skills in today’s economy. This enrollment growth puts enormous pressure on computer science departments, which have not been able to expand to keep pace.

Part of the problem is that most new Ph.D.s in computer science go into industry, with relatively few people interested in teaching the next generation. Unlike the situation in conventional academic disciplines, the number of open faculty positions in computer science exceeds the number of candidates by about a factor of five. As a result, most institutions are unable to hire the new faculty they need and must instead restrict access to the computer science major and computing classes.

This web site contains links to several reports that describe these challenges and offer recommendations for institutions facing these pressures.

The National Academies report

In March 2018, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released the its 18-month study of the challenges posed by rising enrollments in undergraduate computer science. The following resources are available in conjunction with the report:

• The Consensus Study Report [html]
• The committee web site [html]
  This page outlines the charge to the committee and provides links to various materials.
• Notes from the public workshop [html]
  In August 2016, the committee held a public workshop in which we heard from a variety of senior people in academia, industry, and government. Several of these presentations are particularly valuable and certainly deserve a look.
• Annotated findings [pptx]
  I put together this slideshow to provide additional background for the nine findings included in the report. These slides include graphs and animations that reveal both the scope and seriousness of the challenges. Feel free to use any of these slides in arguing for increased capacity.

CRA Generation CS report

In February 2017, the Computing Research Association (CRA) released a valuable study entitled Generation CS: CS Enrollments Surge Since 2006. The CRA report includes extensive data analysis of surveys conducted of both doctoral institutions (through the annual Taulbee surveys) and non-doctoral institutions that are part of the Non-Doctoral Consortium (NDC). Many of the findings from the CRA study were incorporated into the National Academies report. In August 2019, the CRA Bulletin published an update covering the three years since the initial report.

• The Generation CS report [html]
• Generation CS, Three Years Later [html]

NSF-CMU Summit Meeting

Professor Tom Cortina at Carnegie Mellon University organized an NSF-sponsored summit meeting on “Addressing the Challenges of Increasing Interest in Computing at the Undergraduate Level through Institutional Transformation.” The summit website includes slides from the plenary sessions and several useful background documents.

• The website for the NSF-CMU summit [html]

Additional resources

The following resources may also be useful:

• Peter Denning, Edward Feigenbaum, Paul Gilmore, Anthony Hearn, Robert Ritchie, Joseph Traub. 1981. “A Discipline in Crisis” [html]
This report grew out of discussions at the Snowbird Computer Science Chairs Conference in 1980 and appeared in the July 1981 edition of Communications of the ACM. Many of the concerns raised by the report—most notably the critical shortage of computer science faculty at a time of rapidly rising student enrollments—sound entirely familiar forty years later.
• Kent Curtis. 1982. “Computer Manpower—Is There a Crisis?” [html]
I believe this NSF study offers the best analysis of the enrollment crisis of the 1980s. It should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the particular challenges that face academic computer science.
• John Rice and Saul Rosen. 1990. “History of the Computer Sciences Department at Purdue University.” [pdf]
This report offers an unusually detailed and candid history of the computer science program at Purdue, which is home to the oldest computer science department in the country. Purdue was ranked in the top-ten computer science programs through the 1970s, but fell significantly in national rankings after weathering several crises in the 1980s, as described in Section 4. This report makes it clear that even top departments can be damaged significantly through failure to respond to enrollment pressures.
• Eric Roberts. 2011. “Meeting the Challenges of Rising Enrollments” [pdf]
  My 2011 editorial in Inroads identified the rapid rise in computer science enrollments as a warning that the field might be in for a reprise of the impossible situation computer science departments faced in the 1980s. The paper describes the challenges caused by enrollment pressures and offers several suggestions to relieve the pressure.
• Ed Lazowska, Eric Roberts, and Jim Kurose. 2014. “Tsunami or Sea Change? Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science” [pdf]
  Ed Lazowska from the University of Washington, Jim Kurose from the University of Massachusetts/NSF, and I jointly presented our concerns about the dangers of growing enrollments at several meetings and conferences in 2014, including the Tenth Anniversary Symposium of the National Center for Women in Technology (NCWIT) and the biennial Snowbird summit for computer science chairs.
• Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). 2016. “The Case for Improving U.S. Computer Science Education” [pdf]
  This paper offers an excellent and well-researched defense of the importance of computer science education for today’s economy.
• Eric Roberts. 2016. “A History of Capacity Challenges in Computer Science” [html] [pdf]
  I prepared this history of capacity challenges for the National Academies committee. It includes background information on the enrollment fluctuations that have occurred over the years beyond what is covered in the final report.

Relevant news stories

• Jack Margarrell, “As Students Flock to Computer-Science Courses, Colleges Scramble to Find Professors,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 9, 1981. These articles from the 1980s do not appear in most Google searches because they predate the online archive for The Chronicle of Higher Education. I scanned them from the Stanford Library microfilm collection.
• Stanley Pogrow, “In an Information Economy, Universities and Businesses Compete for Workers,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 16, 1981.
• Judith Axel Turner, “Growing Demand for Computer Courses Spurs Retraining of College Teachers,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 1984.
• Colleen Flaherty, “System Crash,” Inside Higher Ed, May 9, 2018.
• Natasha Singer, “The Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting into Class,” New York Times, January 24, 2019.
• Cade Metz, “When the A.I. Professor Leaves, Students Suffer, Study Says,” New York Times, September 6, 2019. [The link to the original study is broken on the nytimes.com site, but is available here.]