U.S. IT SKILLS SUPPLY TO REMAIN TIGHT

Undergraduate Interest in IT Major Lowest Since 1995

Posted on 7/24/2008 on Staffing Industry Analysts

A recently updated survey of U.S. college undergraduates indicates that the number of students declaring computer science as their major is running about the same as it has for the last three years, a continued sharp drop off from the Internet boom years and the lowest level of production since 1995. Based on the level of declared IT majors in each of the last four years, we project production of IT graduates to continue to fall through 2010.

The Taulbee survey
Computer Research News' annual "Taulbee Survey" counts each year how many undergraduates have declared computer science as their major. The latest results show that the numbers, which had been falling precipitously the past few years, have stabilized. Some 12,195 undergraduates in the United States declared computer science/computer engineering as their major for the 2007-2008 academic year. This is slightly down from 12,783 declared majors in 2006.



In 2003, declared computer science majors nose-dived 23% from 23,033 in 2002 to 17,706 in 2003 and then plunged 21.4% plunge from 15,950 in 2004 to 12,532 in 2005. These declines in declared computer science majors imply like declines in computer science graduates four academic years later.

Our projection
The sharp drop-off earlier reported in computer science enrollments is only beginning to play out in terms of current production of computer science graduates. As can be seen in the chart below, production of computer science BA graduates may be expected to decline through 2010. This implies a continued tight IT job market.

* The chart shows actual number of computer science graduates from 1966-2006 on the left axis with the number of computer science/computer engineering-declared majors, adjusted forward for four years to reflect the length of an undergraduate degree on the right axis. So, for instance, the two 2004 data points represent, on the left axis, actual computer science graduates in 2004 and, on the right axis, declared computer science/computer engineering graduates in 2000.



Employment trends
The employment growth rate in computer science and mathematics jobs was a remarkable 3.7% in 2007. Over the past several years, total computer and math employment has grown at a rate roughly four times that of total U.S. employment. From 1999 through 2006, computer and math employment rose a cumulative 17%, versus a 4% increase for total employment generally. Current sources of supply include graduating students, immigrants on H1-B visas, technicians completing non-academic certification programs and/or on the job training, and professionals returning to IT employment.





Considering that employment has been growing in IT, and that salaries are at the high end of the spectrum, it is a mystery why schools are not able to attract more graduates in this field. We recently talked to Stuart Zweben, professor of computer science and engineering at the Ohio State University and the chair of the survey committee for the Computing Research Association, which conducts the Taulbee survey annually. Following are some excerpts of the conversation in which Zweben talks about the findings of the Taulbee survey and the responsibility of the industry, academia and media to increase enrollments for computer science programs. 

Q: What stands out most for you from the latest Taulbee survey?
Zweben: The trend in computer science declared majors among undergraduates has been pretty steady in the past three years; it has been flat. So, that's the good news. From the time of the dot com crash, it was difficult for graduating students in the computing field to find jobs because companies were going out of business or they were downsizing. And all of this hit at a very bad time -- it was exactly the time when there were a peak number of students graduating from our programs.

Q: Can you elaborate on that?
Zweben: The dot-com bust happened in 2000-2001 and companies were letting go of a large number of experienced people at that time. So you had a large number of people going into the workforce who had a lot of experience in the computing field. And it was exactly the same time you had the peak of the new students coming out with bachelors' degrees. So you had this large number of collective people going into the workforce at the same time and the market couldn't handle that. First of all, it was a somewhat depressed market and even in a regular market it would have been a shock for the system.

So there were a couple of difficult years until the market sorted itself out. During that time it became evident to media, to parents, to students who were graduating from high school that computing jobs were hard to find. So students went looking for other programs to get into where they could get a job. So you can see that the number of students going into the field dropped off at exactly the same time after that peak production started.

Q: How long do you think this will continue?
Zweben: The market has stabilized and for the past two or three years it's been very good. What people need to understand is that the market is good and the forecast is good. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources that try to project the number of jobs available in the foreseeable future, all are saying that the computing jobs have the largest growth opportunity of any job category. It takes a couple of years for everyone to see that the market has stabilized before they start thinking about going into that field. 

Also there is another part of the story here. What we track in the Taulbee survey are just the computer science students. What these numbers don't show are other computing students that didn't exist 10 years ago. There are other programs in information technology that we don't take into account, and I don't know if there is anyone tracks that kind of data.

Q: The employment growth rate in IT is high. So who is getting these jobs if we are not producing the IT professionals?
Zweben: There are people coming from different places. There are people coming from outside the U.S. The whole H1-B situation is a part of this bigger story. Then you also have other people who have been educated in other fields who get IT training from their companies, but they don't get formal degrees. They are not necessarily in higher skilled jobs, but they are there.

Q: Among the degreed-students do we have a sense of how many are foreign students?
Zweben: At the bachelors level most of the students are domestic students. At the graduate level it's a different story.

Q: So what is the next step? How can we increase the enrollments in computer science programs in the United States to help ease the tight labor market? 
Zweben: I think we all have a role to play. The industry needs to make clear that jobs are plentiful. Yes, we might have increased outsourcing, but we are not outsourcing the preponderance of our jobs, or anything close to that. We need to make sure that the average student understands this is not going to happen.

From the media's perspective, I hope that they will be reporting about the good job opportunities and the good forecast for jobs we have for this field. We don’t have the worries that we had five years ago about what the future of this field will be.

Those of us in education are also not absolved from this. We need to think how we teach our computing programs to make them more attractive and be more responsive the needs of the business community.

When I talk to employers, they tell me there are three category of skills that they want the graduate to have. One is strong technical skills and that has not been an issue with our programs. The other is softer skills such as communication and team working skills. I think we have become a whole lot better in this part of our education and we are doing a better job on this. But the third category is what they call business acumen – how business works, how to sell a technical idea from a business perspective, how to create a business plan around it, how project management works. That kind of understanding helps you in going a long way in the business world. And this applies to other engineering programs as well, not just computing.

Many programs have tried to react to this. There are more cross disciplinary programs now. We have at Ohio State started a program at the undergraduate level to become involved in entrepreneurial activities. That is part of their undergraduate educational experience. In our college of engineering we are creating an engineering leadership program that is a hybrid program between what you would call an MBA and a disciplinary masters. We also have a business minor for undergraduate students. These are some things that we have done and I think the educational community as a whole needs to do a better job of this.