The opening talk of the CS Education Summit this week considered the challenges facing CS education in a time of surging enrollments and continued concerns about the diversity of the CS student population. In the session that followed, Eric Roberts and Jodi Tims presented data that puts the current enrollment surge into perspective, in advance of a report from the National Academy of Science.

In terms of immediate takeaway, Eric Roberts's comments were gold. Eric opened with Stein's Law: If something is unsustainable, it will stop. Stein was an economist whose eponymous law expresses one of those obvious truths we all seem to forget about in periods of rapid change: If something cannot go on forever, it won't. You don't have to create a program to make it stop. A natural corollary is: If it can't go on for long, you don't need a program to deal with it. It will pass soon.

Why is that relevant to the summit? Even without continued growth, current enrollments in CS majors is unsustainable for many schools. If the past is any guide, we know that many schools will deal with unsustainable growth by limiting the number of students who start or remain in their major.

Roberts has studied the history of CS boom-and-bust cycles over the last thirty years, and he's identified a few common patterns:

Limiting enrollments is how departments respond to enrollment growth. They must: the big schools can't hire faculty fast enough, and most small schools can't hire new faculty at all.





The number of students graduating with CS degrees drops because we limit enrollments. Students do not stop enrolling because the number of job opportunities goes down or any other cause.



After the dot-com bust, there was a lot of talk about offshoring and automation, but the effects of that were short-term and rather small. Roberts's data shows that enrollment crashes do not follow crashes in job openings; they follow enrollment caps. Enrollments remain strong wherever they are not strictly limited.

After the dot-com bust, there was a lot of talk about offshoring and automation, but the effects of that were short-term and rather small. Roberts's data shows that enrollment crashes do not follow crashes in job openings; they follow enrollment caps. Enrollments remain strong wherever they are not strictly limited.



When we limit enrollments, the effect is bigger on women and members of underserved communities. These students are more likely to suffer from impostor syndrome, stereotype bias, and other fears, and the increased competitiveness among students for fewer openings combines with discourages them from continuing.

So the challenge of booming enrollments exacerbates the challenge to increase diversity. The boom might decrease diversity, but when it ends -- and it will, if we limit enrollments -- our diversity rarely recovers. That's the story of the last three booms.

In order to grow capacity, the most immediate solution is to hire more professors. I hope to write more about that soon, but for now I'll mention only that the problem of hiring enough faculty to teach all of our students has at east two facets. The first is that many schools simply don't have the money to hire more faculty right now. The second is that there aren't enough CS PhDs to go around. Roberts reported that, of last year's PhD grads, 83% took positions at R1 schools. That leaves 17% for the rest of us. "Non-R1 schools can expect to hire a CS PhD every 27 years." Everyone laughed, but I could see anxiety on more than a few faces.

The value of knowing this history is that, when we go to our deans and provosts, we can do more than argue for more resources. We can show the effect of not providing the resources needed to teach all the students coming our way. We won't just be putting the brakes on local growth; we may be helping to create the next enrollment crash. At a school like mine, if we teach the people of our state that we can't handle their CS students, then the people of our state will send their students elsewhere.

The problem for any one university, of course, is that it can act only based on its own resources and under local constraints. My dean and provost might care a lot about the global issues of demand for CS grads and need for greater diversity among CS students. But their job is to address local issues with their own (small) pool of money.

I'll have to re-read the papers Roberts has written about this topic. His remarks certainly gave us plenty to think about, and he was as engaging as ever.