I am planning on changing my major from computer systems to computer science, but would like to know what you think the hardest about about programming/computer science is in your opinion?Explain with 200 words
Answers
If you’d like a handy chart, I graphed the growth here, with number of graduates normalized to 2005.
Note: All data comes from the Digest of Education Statistics, Department of Education.
1. Computer science is have. This is a valid observation, but it doesn’t explain behaviors on the margin. CS is a difficult subject, but it’s not the only hard major. People who proclaim that CS is so tough have to explain why so many more people have been majoring in math, physics, and engineering; remember, all three majors have seen growth of over 40% between 2005 and 2015, and they’re no cakewalks either. It’s also not obvious that their employment prospects are necessarily more rosy than the one for CS majors (at least for the median student who doesn’t go to a hedge fund). Isn’t it reasonable to expect that people with an aptitude for math, physics, and engineering will also have an aptitude for CS? If so, why is it the only field with low growth?
On the margin, we should expect high wages to attract more people to a discipline, even if it’s hard. Do all the people who are okay with toiling for med school, law school, or PhD programs find the CS bachelor’s degree to be unthinkably daunting?
2. You don’t need a CS degree to be a developer. This is another valid statement that I don’t think explains behaviors on the margin. Yes, I know plenty of developers who didn’t graduate from college or major in CS. Many who didn’t go to school were able to learn on their own, helped along by the varieties of MOOCs and boot camps designed to get them into industry.
It might be true that being a software developer is the field that least requires a bachelor’s degree with its associated major. Still: Shouldn’t we expect some correlation between study and employment here? That is, shouldn’t having a CS major be considered a helpful path into the industry? It seems to me that most tech recruiters look on CS majors with favor.
Although there are many ways to become a developer, I’d find it surprising if majoring in CS is a perfectly useless way to enter the profession, and so people shun it in favor of other majors.
3. People aren’t so market-driven when they’re considering majors. I was a philosophy major, and no I didn’t select on the basis of its dazzling career prospects. Aren’t most people like me when it comes to selecting majors?
Maybe. It’s hard to tell. Evidence for includes a study published in the Journal of Human Capital, which suggests that people would reconsider their majors if they actually knew what they could earn in their associated industries. That is, they didn’t think hard enough about earning potentials when they were committing to their majors.
We see some evidence against this idea if we look at the tables I’ve been referencing. Two of the majors with the highest rates of growth have been healthcare and law enforcement. The number of people graduating with bachelor’s degrees in “health professions and related programs” more than doubled, from 80,865 in 2005 to 216,228 in 2015. We can find another doubling in “homeland security, law enforcement, and firefighting,” from 30,723 in 2005 to 62,723 in 2015. Haven’t these rents-heavy and government-driven sectors been pretty big growth sectors in the last few years? If so, we can see that people have been responsive to market-driven demand for jobs.
(Sidenote: if we consider the pipeline of talent to be reflective of expectations of the economy, and if we consider changes in the number of bachelor’s degrees to be a good measure of this pipeline, then we see more evidence for Alex Tabarrok’s view that we’re becoming a healthcare-warfare state rather than an innovation nation.)
In the meantime, I’m happy to point out that the number of people majoring in philosophy has slightly declined between 2005 to 2015, from 11,584 to 11,072. It’s another sign that people are somewhat responsive to labor market demands. My view is that all the people who are smart enough to excel as a philosophy major are also smart enough not to actually pursue that major. (I can’t claim to be so original here—Wittgenstein said he saw more philosophy in aerospace engineering than he did in philosophy.)