Computer Manpower in Higher Education — Is There a Crisis? Worse than you might think
January 24, 2014 at 1:44 am 7 comments
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.
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?
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: BPC, higher education, jobs, public policy.
1.
education | January 31, 2014 at 1:07 am
yap! ill definitely take advantages of your given information,may i go there in for admission after completing my bachelor degree.
2.
Study finds increased STEM enrollment: Taking from education and business | Computing Education Blog | August 10, 2014 at 9:35 am
[…] The ComputerWorldK agrees. They claim that the smart students were going into business, then Wall Street collapsed, and now they’re going into CS and that’s why we’re having sky-rocketing enrollments. […]
3.
What Computing Education Research does that Engineering Ed and Physics Ed Research doesn’t | Computing Education Blog | October 12, 2014 at 12:19 pm
[…] on CER that Steve Cooper organized (paper to appear in CACM next month — it’s where Eric Roberts gave a keynote that I wrote about here), Carl Wieman was the opening keynote speaker. He talked about the hot issues in physics education […]
4.
Adjunct Faculty are Unionizing | Computing Education Blog | October 26, 2014 at 8:58 am
[…] that will change higher education. The job of being faculty is becoming harder, especially in CS as enrollments rise without a rise in faculty numbers. Adjunct faculty are particularly put upon in universities, and unionizing is one way for them to […]
5.
NPR When Women Stopped Coding in 1980’s: As we repeat the same mistakes | Computing Education Blog | October 30, 2014 at 8:19 am
[…] times in his keynote at the Future of Computing Education Research workshop in January 2014, which I blogged about here. What to do with the burgeoning enrollment and no additional resources? Caps were put into place, […]
6.
A new explanation for tech’s pathetic gender diversity: The personal computer | Computing Education Blog | November 15, 2014 at 8:35 am
[…] were multiple things that happened at once. The PC also led to a boom in enrollment, which (Eric Robert argues) led to a raising of standards to reduce load on teachers, which had an inhibitory effect on gender […]
7.
The capacity crisis in academic computer science – guest blog post by Eric Roberts | Computing Education Blog | March 14, 2016 at 8:06 am
[…] shared Eric’s insights into computing enrollments in the past (for example here and here). With his permission, I’m sharing his note after the recent SIGCSE 206 […]