Harvard University
Computer Science Colloquium Series
33 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138
Colloquium
The Crisis in Computer Science: What can we do?
Lenore Blum
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lblum
Thursday, March 15, 2007
4:00PM
Maxwell Dworkin G125
(Ice Cream at 3:30PM - Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area)
Abstract
The Crisis. According to the 2004-2005 CRA Taulbee survey, the number of
new undergraduate computer science (CS) majors in the U.S. has dropped
by more than 30% since 2001-2002. More alarming, the Higher Education
Research Institute at UCLA reports a precipitous decline (70%) in the
proportion of college freshmen listing CS as their probable major
between fall 2000 and 2005. Enrollment in AP courses has increased in
all disciplines except CS which has seen declines of 6% in 2004 and 7%
in 2005. The percentage of CS bachelor’s degrees awarded to women is
just 15%. And in 2005, less than 8% of CS degrees were awarded to
African American and Hispanic students.
What to do? I posit that the root cause of this crisis lies with our
community (not the dot-com bust or fears of outsourcing) and so does the
potential solution. Our failure to communicate the depth and breadth of
the field or to pay attention to K-12 education has perpetuated the
popular image of computer scientist as nerd and computer science as
programming with little intellectual content. I will discuss several
efforts to positively change the image and culture of computing, both at
the K-12 and the university levels. In particular, I will report on the
CS4HS project to help high school CS teachers incorporate computational
thinking into their classes and a program for increasing the
participation of women in computer science at Carnegie Mellon.
Host: Professor Michael Smith
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