The latest report uncovered a series of bright spots for an academic discipline that underwent a midlife crisis after the dot-com collapse beginning in 2000. After a wave of students came to the discipline during the Internet boom, there was an equivalent decline during the past eight years as the nation’s college students decided en masse that the future lay in fields like investment banking and financial engineering.

The Taulbee Survey, with data tables covering different time periods, also found that the number of new undergraduate majors in computer science increased 9.5 percent and that the rate of decline in new bachelor’s degrees improved to 10 percent, from 20 percent in the previous report. Total Ph.D. production grew to 1,877 for the period July 2007 to June 2008, a 5.7 percent increase over the previous period.

“The most compelling story for our community is that interest in computer science appears to have turned the corner,” said Peter Harsha, director of government affairs at the Computing Research Association, an organization representing 200 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering and related fields; 26 industrial research labs; and 6 affiliated professional societies. “We think this bodes well for efforts to change the perception about careers in computing.”

In recent years the computer science community has done a good deal of hand-wringing over fears that students increasingly saw the field as one of drudge work involving sitting at computer monitors and writing endless lines of code. Now, say Mr. Harsha and others who are following student interests, there is a sense that computing science skills are increasingly being seen as a toolkit for pursuing a number of modern careers.

“We’re seeing amazing increases in enrollment,” said Eric Roberts, a computer scientist at Stanford University. “It’s not that people have forgotten about the offshoring of jobs, but our competition isn’t what it was. There are fewer places to go, and we don’t have Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and Citibank to compete with.”