A massive influx of computer science majors in Colorado and across the country is overwhelming college and university classrooms as students opt to gain the skills required to fill nearly 500,000 open jobs in cybersecurity, data science and machine learning.

Freshman James Schreiner said nearly all of his computer science classes at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden are full and his fellow students are brimming with optimism about what tasks and projects they will take on after graduation.

“Computer science is so variable, and you can do almost anything with it,” said Schreiner, who could earn up to $90,000 as a software developer in the first year after graduation, according to industry estimates. “Of course, I am part of a generation born in an age of technology and it’s so easy for us to connect with new ideas.”

“We are really looking forward to the future,” added the 18-year-old Lakewood High School graduate.

Schreiner is part of a wave of an estimated one in four teenagers who began filling their high schools’ STEM classes in recent years and who are needed for more than 8.6 million science-, technology-, engineering- and math-related jobs in the United States. They are filling college lecture halls and classrooms and fueling growth in technology programs. Enrollment in the University Colorado-Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science could hit 8,000 by fall 2020, double the size of the 2007 class.

“It’s really been in the last decade, where there has been a huge call for more and more high school students to get in educational pathways like STEM,” said Bobby Braun, dean of CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “We know those STEM jobs are key to this country’s economic development and national security.”

Interest in studying computer science has experienced boom-and-bust cycles, including dramatic lows following the dot.com explosion in the early 2000s. But this current enrollment surge is more sustained, forcing colleges and universities to scramble for resources, including instructors, to handle the long-term implications.

“It’s wonderful to be popular, but it is putting a strain in just about everything,” said Steve Beaty, professor of computer science at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

The number of computer science majors at Metro State has doubled in the past decade — from 300 to 600 — while the number of faculty members to handle the crush has stayed the same: eight. To keep class sizes at a manageable 30 students, professors hunt for classroom space on the Auraria campus to handle the overflow, Beaty said.

There are wait lists for computer science classes, with seniors and those with the most course credits given priority. “None of these things we relish doing,” Beaty said. “But it’s been such a crush the last two years, we’ve had to try different things to give everyone a seat in class.”

The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded nationally in computer and information science has increased 74 percent since 2009 at not-for-profit institutions, compared with a 16 percent increase in bachelor’s degrees produced overall, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

And it’s not just students with computer science-related majors who are filling up college classrooms. Students studying other fields are looking to hone their digital skills to compete in a technology-driven world.

That’s why Colorado School of Mines computer science professor Tracy Camp believes this is not a mere trend that will flame out with the next fluctuation of the economy.

“Everyone in our community feels this is something different from previous trends,” Camp said. “Computing skills have become ubiquitous in our society. Just about every engineering and science discipline needs computer skills and now they are enrolling in our classes.”

There are 400 students majoring in computer science at School of Mines, school officials said. That’s a jump of nearly 50 percent from fall 2015. And the number of student credit hours available in computer science courses has increased from 3,081 in 2015 to 6,036 in 2017, Camp said.

At least 14 faculty members handle the bulk of the teaching and their resources and energy are strained, Camp said. Mines has delegated test grading and other tasks to student assistants to allow faculty to focus on teaching, she said.

“The good news is our administration is very supportive and trying to get us the resources we need,” she said. “And everyone is working their hearts out to do a good job.”

Some institutions say because faculty and support staff is so overworked, they are taking the drastic step of capping enrollment in computer science classes altogether to better manage the rush of students. At the University of Washington, demand is so great that only one-third of students who apply to major in computer science and computer engineering are accepted into the school’s program.

Locally, university officials see keeping classroom doors open for serious students as an almost civic duty.

“We feel we have a public mission in the state of Colorado to educate workers for tomorrow, and to put a cap on a growing field that is important to our society wouldn’t be a very good way to accomplish our mission,” Braun said.

Camp agrees. “I think a lot of freshmen, when they start, have thoughts on what they want to do over the next few years and they should be able to explore their options in computer science,” she said. “I would hate to turn them away.”

Critics say higher education officials should have been better prepared for the wave of STEM students hitting college classrooms and adding faculty should have been part of the equation.

Some college administrators don’t believe the popularity of computer science is here to stay, said Eric Roberts, Charles Simonyi professor of computer science emeritus at Stanford University.

“It is clear that many people struggling to keep up with the increased enrollments are still having trouble convincing their administrators that the problems we face are real and more than a transient maximum in a cyclical pattern,” Roberts said. “It is hard for most people in universities to imagine a (career) field in which the number of open positions exceeds the number of applicants by a factor of five or more.”

Higher institutions are also often on the losing end of a bidding war for highly qualified professors in computer science fields, officials said. The median pay range for a college professor in computer science is between $86,245 and $152,756, according to PayScale and other industry estimates. The top 10 percent of people with doctoral degrees in computer science can earn more than $170,600 in the private sector. Under certain conditions, they earn far more, industry observers said.

“A lot of times someone with a Ph.D. in computer science can be paid a lot more in Silicon Valley or even right here in Boulder,” Braun said. “Hiring quality faculty has really become quite a challenge.”

More than half the people earning doctoral degrees in computer science in recent years have taken jobs in private industry, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The average increase in tenure-track computer science faculty at research institutions from 2005 to 2015 was only about 10 percent of the increase in computer science majors, the group said.

Colleges and universities must come up with better strategies to deal with the influx of students, said Susanne Hambrusch, professor of computer science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

‘While there is no one-size-fits-all answer, all institutions of higher education need to make strategic plans to realistically and effectively address the growing student demand for these courses,” Hambrusch said.

CU Boulder is using its goal of becoming one of the country’s top schools for science and technology by 2020 to create innovative programs and boost hiring in computer science faculty, Braun said.

The school’s faculty has risen from 30 to 45 in the last few years and a computer science degree was added within the College of Arts and Sciences. “Here we have students in business, arts and the media, all wanting to understand about analytics, big data and programming languages,” he said. “Knowledge of computers has permeated every aspect of our lives.”

CU Boulder is also launching an online, post-baccalaureate degree in computer science. The course is tailored to people who already have a bachelor’s degree but do not have the prerequisite coursework for graduate study in computer science.

“The new degree is part of our overall strategy to prepare the workforce that the 21st century requires,” Braun said.

The new online program will include foundation coursework in algorithms, programming languages and software development, as well as electives like information visualization and data mining. A full-time student can complete the course in one year.

The program is just as rigorous as CU’s on-campus degree programs and is taught by the same faculty, computer science professor Dirk Grunwald said. “The only difference is we focus on core computer science classes so students can complete the degree quickly.”