Assessing and Responding to the Growth of Computer Science Undergraduate Enrollments (2018) / Chapter Skim
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The committee provides recommendations for what institutions of higher education, government agencies, and the private sector can do to respond to the surge and plan for a strong and sustainable future for the field of CS in general, the health of the institutions of higher education, and the prosperity of the nation. THE CHANGING COMPUTER SCIENCE ENROLLMENT LANDSCAPE A primary task for the committee was to address the question of whether the current enrollment increases "are similar to other cyclic fluctuations that have occurred in the past or whether they are more likely to be sustained." A review of past degree, enrollment, and employment trends informed our projections for the 1
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Although authoritative degree production data provide a helpful historical picture, degree production does not equal enrollment, which includes non-majors. Furthermore, degree production obviously lags current major enrollments by 1 to 4 years.
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Computer science and its related endeavors such as data science have produced powerful tools and software systems that are used by and affect every discipline, giving rise to exciting subfields, such as computational biology, computational economics, computational chemistry, and digital humanities, with more emerging. These subfields require expertise in the traditional domain and a general fluency in tools and methods from computer science.
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Many ongoing efforts are under way to improve diversity in the field, and it is of acute interest to understand the potential implications of increasing enrollments on these efforts. Women and underrepresented minorities make up a larger fraction of CIS bachelor's degree recipients at for-profit institutions than at not-for-profit institutions, and they are less well represented in core CS than in CIS more broadly.4 Between 2009 and 2015 the average percentage of CIS degrees conferred to Hispanic students increased somewhat, as has representation of this group among college graduates in general, from 7.1 to 9.4 percent for CIS (and 6.5 to 8.6 percent for core CS)
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According to the HERI Cooperative Institutional Research Program national survey of freshmen, the relative growth in the percentage of freshmen intending to major in CS was higher for female freshmen than for males, and intent to major in CS is also rising among underrepresented minorities. The CRA Enrollments Survey results also indicate, along with increasing enrollments overall, a larger percentage of CS course and program enrollments comprising female and underrepresented minority students among responding institutions.
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Data from the CRA Enrollments Survey and CRA's Taulbee Survey indicate that from 2006 to 2015, a period of significant growth in CS majors, the relative increase in tenure-track CS faculty at research institutions surveyed was about one-tenth of the increase in the number of CS majors. Ph.D.s represent a relatively small fraction of degrees in CS, and in recent years most Ph.D.s have taken jobs in industry.
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FINDING 5: Computing is pervasive, and its penetration is deep and grow ing in virtually all sectors of the economy, all academic disciplines, and all aspects of modern life. The broad opportunities in computing, both in the labor market and for enabling a host of intellectual pursuits, will continue to be drivers of increasing enrollments in undergraduate computer science, from both majors and non-majors.
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There is no one-size-fits-all solution for responding to enrollment increases. However, all institutions need to assess the role of computer science and related fields and make strategic plans to address realistically and effectively the high demand for courses, student interests and needs, faculty and staff workloads, research and teaching allocations, and physical resources.
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RECOMMENDATION 4: The National Science Foundation (NSF) can be especially helpful in advancing undergraduate computer science education in the context of increasing enrollments, for both majors and non-majors.
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This might include research support and doctoral fellowships for domestic computer science under raduates, g and support for incorporating teaching into computer science doc toral programs and junior faculty research. RECOMMENDATION 5: Computer science departments and the computing industry should develop new partnerships to help higher education meet workforce needs, continue to graduate well- prepared students, encourage industry to provide increased support for research funding, and allow a better exchange of Ph.D.-level researchers between academia and industry.
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RECOMMENDATION 8.2: The taxonomies and classifications for undergraduate computing degrees and jobs should be reexamined and updated, so that those used in national statistics are more easily brought into alignment, and map more directly to the current orga nization of computer science and related fields in higher education. RECOMMENDATION 8.3: In the absence of comprehensive n ational statistics, the computer science community, in collaboration with education, social sciences, and statistics researchers, should con tinue to pursue or refine effective strategies for tracking enroll ent, m retention, and graduation rates and measuring student diversity.
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