Dive Brief:
- While interest is growing in computer science, students are not taking a comprehensive offering of classes in high school or early in college to prepare for a career in the field.
- Costs of growing computer science departments often conflict with academic budget management, and enrollment trends. This negatively impacts efforts to recruit higher numbers of female and minority students to the major.
- Experts suggest developing more teacher education modules for the computer science major and creating incentives for computer science students to stay and complete degrees.
Dive Insight:
Making computer science attractive to students isn't the hard part — it is helping students who may not be prepared for the academic rigor and requirements that makes retention and proper development of students a challenge. Colleges and universities can do a much better job of recruiting high-caliber talent from competitive high school STEM programs while seeking out private and corporate support to hire faculty and cultivate resources to aid in remedial development for other interested students.
The nation's STEM imperative can't wait for the best and brightest students to become interested and trained from high school through graduate school. Institutions must become far more aggressive in assessing the needs of their surrounding cities and regions and cultivating youth pipelines in the discipline with an eye towards building the workforce.