Stanford’s Most Popular Major Is Now Computer Science (#CSedWeek Fact)

The last paragraph of this is interesting.  Yes, Engineering and Computer Science (in particular) are booming, but not everywhere, and it’s not evident to everyone.  I was just at Tufts on Monday, where some Engineering students were asking me if Computer Science was growing in enrollment anywhere.  Well, there’s Stanford…

Now? According to three stats buried in a press release from the university’s engineering school, Computer Science is the most popular major at Stanford. More students are enrolled in it than ever before (even more than at the dot-com boom’s height in 2000-2001). And more than 90 % of Stanford undergrads take a computer science course before they graduate.

Stanford is Stanford, and its stats aren’t necessarily indicative of academia at large: Countrywide, the most popular major is business. But the school’s computer-heavy numbers reflect its existence, both as a member of what candid college administrators call the Big Four (the other three are Princeton, Harvard and Yale), and as a school nestled close to Silicon Valley’s elite.

In a lengthy feature from earlier this year, the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta revealed that, even beyond Stanford’s CS department, “A quarter of all undergraduates and more than 50% of graduate students [at Stanford] are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are 4 and 10%; at Yale, they’re 5 and 8%.”

via Stanford’s Most Popular Major Is Now Computer Science.