Computer Manpower in Higher Education — Is There a Crisis? Worse than you might think

A slightly different pattern for me: Check out the quote first, and I’ll add comments after.

Let us consider the conundrum facing the computer field in higher education first. It is experiencing an exponentially increasing demand for its product with an inelastic labor supply. How has it reacted? NSF has made a survey of the responses of engineering departments, including computer science departments in schools of engineering, to the increasing demand for undergraduate education in engineering. There is a consistent pattern in their responses and the results can be applied without exception to the computer field whether the departments are located in engineering schools or elsewhere. 80% of the universities are responding by increasing teaching loads, 50% by decreasing course offerings and concentrating their available faculty on larger but fewer courses, and 66% are using more graduate-student teaching assistants or part-time faculty. 35% report reduced research opportunities for faculty as a result. In brief, they are using a combination of rational management measures to adjust as well as they can to the severe manpower constraints under which they must operate. However, these measures make the universities’ environments less attractive for employment and are exactly counterproductive to their need to maintain and expand their labor supply. They are also counterproductive to producing more new faculty since the image graduate students get of academic careers is one of harassment, frustration, and too few rewards. The universities are truly being choked by demand for their own product and have a formidable people-flow problem, analogous to but much more difficult to address than the cash-flow problem which often afflicts rapidly growing businesses. There are no manpower banks which can provide credit.

via Computer Manpower — Is There a Crisis?.

This quote was presented by Eric Roberts in his keynote earlier this month at the NSF-sponsored Future Computing Education Research Summit (well organized by Steve Cooper).  The highlight is my addition, because I was struck by the specificity of the description.  I find the description  believable, and it captures the problems of CS higher-education today, especially in the face of rising enrollments in CS classes (discussed by Eric Roberts here and by Ed Lazowka and Dave Patterson here).

What makes this analysis scarier is that the paper quoted was published in 1982.  Back in the 1980’s, the state Universities had the mandate and the budget to grow to meet the demand.  They didn’t always have the CS PhD graduates that they needed, so some Math and EE PhDs became CS faculty.  Today, though, the state Universities are under severe budget constraints.  How will we meet the demand in enrollment?  In the 1980’s, some CS programs met the demand by raising the bar for entering the CS major, which ended up make CS more white and male (because only the more privileged students were able to stay above the bar).  Will our solutions lead to less diversity in CS?  Will we lose more faculty to industry, and replace them with MOOCs?