Enrollments up, but ...

Wow, here's a NY Times article that notes the recent trends in computing enrollments show some positive news, increasing -- there are some observations about reasons, including Eric Roberts point about the receding competition from the financial industry.

But it was not all good news, especially considering the mission of this blog; from the article:

The study, which for the first time included data from schools of information, indicated that diversity in computer science programs continued to remain poor. For example, the fraction of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women remained steady at 11.8 percent in 2008.

Our work continues.

Another Committee on Computing Education

SIGCSE 2008 is now just a month away, and we can hardly wait. In the meantime, the world of computing education continues on, adapting and re-examining issues from curriculum to the numbers of computing students in the pipeline.

I discovered today in a blog entry by Computing Research Association chair Dan Reed of Microsoft that the CRA has decided that the apparent declines in enrollments (and other issues, he has an interesting metaphor of computing education as an onion, like Shrek :-) have become important enough to address with the formation of a committee. CRA-E "... seeks to understand how the broad computing community needs to move forward in order to develop principles and philosophy underlying the computing education of the future." This committee will be led by Andries (Andy) van Dam (photo right) of Brown University (and advisor of 2008 SIGCSE award winner Randy Pausch).

This CRA-E committee seems to be similar in mission to the newly formed ACM Educational Policy Committee (EPC) discussed in a previous blog entry which will make its initial public presentation at SIGCSE 2008 as a panel session. As I stated previously, committees seem to be the bureaucratic response to a problem, but the issues are there, and any and all efforts to address these issues need to be supported (or at least heard).