Each year, the Computing Research Association does an enrollment survey of US-based, PhD-granting academic computer science programs. For the last five years, the number of undergraduate students involved in these programs has been plunging. Fans of CS should take heart, however—the latest survey shows that the declining numbers may have finally leveled off.

Those figures were extracted from a survey performed by the Higher Education Research Institute. The CRA's take on the numbers is pessimistic, noting that the hangover from the recent lack of interest in CS has caused a continued drop in the total number of people that have chosen it as their major. But that drop hides a difference in the 2007 data: for the first time since the dot-com bubble burst, more students chose computer science as their major than in the previous year (although the increase is less than a percent).

New enrollments of CS majors had peaked in 2000, with 16,000 freshmen nationwide picking a major that, at the time, seemed to promise challenges, excitement, and the possibility of retiring young. As the bubble burst, that number dropped slowly for a couple of years, then dropped quite a bit faster as the decade wore on. By 2005, less than 8,000 new students were opting for CS degrees; due to the lag between declaring a major and graduating, the total number of degrees granted peaked in 2004, but dropped by over 40 percent in the past three years.

Since 2005, however, the number of new students entering CS programs has been remarkably stable at around 8,000 per year, so total students and degrees granted should also stabilize over the next few years. It's possible that the field has been narrowed down to those that are actually interested in it as an intellectual pursuit. Whether this represents a true turnaround, or just a temporary reprieve will take a few years to sort out. Still, there is good reason to expect that any stability in the population of CS majors is temporary. A separate bulletin from the CRA reveals that the field has seen two boom/bust cycles since the 1980s.