Students saying no to computer science | CNET News.com is a story sent to my by Andrew Mactavish about the drop in Computer Science enrollments across the US. I wonder if this will affect new media programs?
Here is a quote from the story,
Nationwide numbers for undergraduate enrollments in computer science departments this fall were not available. But a survey of Ph.D.-granting computer science departments in the United States by the Computer Research Association found that the number of new undergraduate majors in the field dropped 18 percent last year.
Carnegie Mellon’s Lee said the recent decline in undergraduate enrollment is part of a larger trend of declining student interest in computer science over the past two decades–a tendency temporarily interrupted by the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. To him, a fundamental cause is that computer science hasn’t emphasized its grand challenges.
Rather than tout the excitement of trying to magnify human intelligence through machines, the field has focused on more practical matters, which tend to be less attractive than big questions in disciplines like biology or chemistry, he said.
“It’s hard for voice over Internet Protocol or e-commerce to compete with finding the age of the universe,” he said.
What are the big challenges of humanities computing or multimedia?