Financial crash good news for computer science studies
THE LATEST WALL STREET crash and looming recession is apparently sending students back to computer science studies in their droves.
After the "dot com" bust of 2001, fickle students scoffed at careers in IT and made beelines for banking and personal finance instead. But now they’re coming back, according to William Dally, Stanford University’s chairman of the computer science department.
Rubbing his hands with glee, Dally told ComputerWorld that students interested in technology had dropped the subject for finance because "Many thought they could make more money in hedge funds". But not too many of them are laughing all the way to the bank now.
"Economic conditions seem to impact the choice that students make" notes Jay Vegso, a boffin from Washington’s Computing Research Association (CRA). Vegso reckons students consider what majors to take by looking at current market trends and choosing subjects which seemingly provide safer alternatives for the future. Right now, for the smart kids, IT is looking like a much safer bet.
This homecoming of the prodigal nerds represents a huge turn-around for an academic subject which dropped from 14,185 students in 2003-2004 to only 8,021 last year, a phenomenon not only to do with the dot com bust, but also with outsourcing IT jobs to places like India and China.
But with a currently acute shortage of local techies, companies are starting to feel the impact and jobs in IT are once again back in demand.
The U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, for instance, reckons that jobs in network systems and data communications analysis are on the up and up, with predictions of a 53 per cent increase in 2008 from 2007. Computer software engineer jobs, meanwhile, are set to see a 45 per cent increase with computer scientists and database administrator careers going up by 37 per cent. µ
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Gee, that's nice. But if the turmoil in the American financial sector causes a full blown recession/depression, who's going to hire and pay these kids?

Better they should learn farming.

And as for the universities? Hell, all they care about is to scam enough students to make sure THEY (the professors) remain employed as professors.
We have a similar story over here too, but our student never come back...

The cause we IT people believed, is the wages [lack of, in this case] and [lack of any] future prospective. The boss over here see IT as a burden. And treat us with no respects, pays only the minimum (just enough to keep you alive). And to keep the boss more happy, the gov even help to produce more IT "professionals", and to encourage more people to become a IT guy, hence, to further lower our wages [and looses our bargaining chips, as there are many of us around, why pay you (more) for the job?]. 

After that. students never go back to the IT field. No one choose this subject anymore...

Don't let this happen to your place too! Please!
You don't need a computer science degree to fish cables through walls or drive around in Geek Squad cars to vacuum fag ash out of borked PCs.

Most of the jobs that degree will be good for are going to India, Mexico, Ukraine, etc. and when those economies improve the work will end up in Vietnam or whatever. Certainly not in North America or Europe.

On the other hand I guess we in the IT industry can be happy that the last generation of idiots went into scamm, er, um, banking instead. We're financially screwed but at least our toys still work.
Have You Noticed One Gv't taxe or one language or one religion, all breaking into infinte realtime pricing & manipulation by Sellers Agent? People are bankrupt whom believe one market, these multi nats hit in more than one market with multi brands of "ownershipt". Nothing IN=NO Loss.
drashek
There doesn't seem to be a shortage of techies round here.
Now techies that actually know what they're doing are as rare as MS trained systems managers that know what they're doing.
In a world where every office desktop has a supercomputer on it the solution is never to write another useless document about the problem.

And now we're going to get a load of muppets who though fractional reserve banking would actually work.

Binary is too good for these people!
What kind of glee did he use to rub his hands with? Would it help with the chafing I sometimes get on mine?
I know what I'm doing and I need a job. Hi, network degree student here; all that stuff about IT staff shortages must be garbage cause I've yet to see one post, bar a system builder one too many counties away and at too low a pay to warrant a move, that I could apply for.
It's all '3 years in professional this' required.

Just the same people exchanging jobs with one another, some type of timeshare system.

But yes in support of the article, I did choose it because - unless there is an entire meltdown of the current rotted system - it does have the best prospects [i]on paper at least[/i].
For similar reasons I also studied organic growing and related; but there's no jobs in that either. Anyone looking for a talented vegetarian cook, organic horticulturalist, recycler worker, system builder & repairer, network admin, and soon to be most likely setting up own business in pen testing cause there's f-all to apply for.