Fighting yesterday's battle

In Wired this week: Darpa: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

The reason for the concern:

According to the Computer Research Association, computer science enrollment dropped 43 percent between 2003 and 2006.

Hm. Why might that be? There is a great paper by Richard Freeman that makes a strong case that year-to-year fluctuations in enrollments in various majors are strongly influenced by the relative prospects in the field at the time of major selection.

Students typically choose their majors in their first or second year of college, and it takes 4-5 years to graduate. Students graduating in 2003 would have made the choice to major in CS near the peak of the dot-com bubble - a time when things looked pretty good for CS majors. In contrast, the class of 2006 made their choices around 2003, not long after the crash that followed. So it's no big surprise that enrollments dropped.

Since 2003, things have gotten a lot better in the IT world, and it would be quite surprising if enrollments hadn't picked back up again. It's likely that the problem has already solved itself.

CS in particular offers some quite attractive career options these days. There's a whole world of people doing contract work in Ruby on Rails, AppEngine, Django, etc. who are able to work for themselves or with a small group of friends, choose their own hours, and get paid quite handsomely (I know all too well because I've had to hire some Rails contractors recently). One big downside: buying health insurance as an individual can be pretty tough if you're someone who ever has to use it. It's entirely possible that health insurance reform would do as much for encouraging more CS grads as anything DARPA is proposing.