I was just looking at reddit for UBC and a thread about “Pirate CS311” caught my eye. Apparently UBC was having trouble with staffing some CS courses, so students discussed putting together a DIY course. A link in the Pirate CS311 thread led me to this student news article: Computer science classes cancelled, unavailable due to lack of instructors
I have also heard about CS staffing crises at all types of other schools, as different from one another as UC Berkeley (videos here and here) and Reed (student letter here).
Is this a problem everywhere? How widespread is it? How much is it affecting course availability, teaching quality, availability of advisors? What are some good ways for students to evaluate a department before enrolling (or applying), other than just following up on rumors? Are there schools where this isn’t an issue at all in the CS department?
Disclaimer: my kid is not planning to be a CS major, but he does plan to take some CS courses in college as part of an engineering degree.
Perhaps look at how quickly a department is growing.
May require some digging into department scheduling or student forum websitess…
From the link:
“He also noted that the number of computer science majors has increased by 45 per cent from 2018 to 2020 which “places a lot of strain on us to find teaching resources.””
Some colleges will limit enrollment upfront. Or, require a series of prerequisite classes.
They all have staffing issues but better resourced schools can hire more easily. If this is important to you, you can do two things – a) count the number of kids in the CS majors from soph to senior year, and count the number of faculty – look at what kind of faculty/student ratio they are running, and b) run through the courses that your son is interested in, and call/email the prof/department to ask how easy it is to register into that course for a non-major. We’ve done versions of these enquiries when assessing schools for my younger kid.
Usually, it is colleges which are in the upper middle to high end of admission selectivity but are not hedge fund wealthy that have issues expanding CS (and engineering) departments to allow all interested students into the major or CS courses. This typically means colleges about as selective as the more selective state flagships, where plenty of students are capable of doing CS but the department is capacity (money) limited.
Where access to the CS major is limited, expect access to CS courses for non-CS majors to be limited.
Less selective colleges may not have as many students who want to do CS (perception that it is “too hard”, or that it may actually be too hard for a greater percentage of students). CS is an open major at SFSU and UCM, even though it is very difficult to get into at CPSLO and UCLA. Of course, the hedge fund wealthy privates tend to be very difficult to get into, regardless of major.
Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned my son’s plans as an aside at the end of my post, because access for non-majors is a somewhat different issue from the question I was trying to ask. The only reason I mentioned my kid was to explain that my question isn’t really about his college plans or future. We have already investigated the policies for non-majors to access CS courses at the schools my son is considering, and I’m sure he will be OK at any of those places (he wouldn’t be taking a lot of CS courses anyway).
But we also know plenty of kids who want to do CS and who are applying to a wide variety of schools.
My question was meant to be a broader one about evaluating CS departments, and concern about the fragility of the whole house of cards for teaching CS courses with large and increasing enrollment, for example at UC Berkeley, where some pretty drastic problems and potential solutions are outlined in the two videos I linked above. (For anyone who is considering doing anything related to CS at UCB and has NOT watched the videos, you should, it is eye opening.) It makes me wonder where else is this an issue currently?
Any college that limits access to the CS major or CS courses is basically saying that its CS department is capacity (typically means money) limited. The higher the barrier (e.g. college GPA threshold) or the more competitive the admission process to the CS major is, the greater the problem of overloading the CS department is at the college.
But yes, this means lots of colleges have this issue, though how big it is varies.
I would think that a high barrier to entry in itself wouldn’t necessarily indicate a current overloading problem, if the barrier was set at the right level for the capacity of the department? If the barrier is high enough, shouldn’t it relieve the problem of overloading?
I was really struck by how similar complaints were being made by students at Reed, a small selective LAC, and at UBC, an enormous public university with moderate to high selectivity. Other than being located in the PNW, these two schools are about as different from each other as can be.
A department is likely to be reluctant to limit access any more than necessary, so departments facing capacity limitations are likely to set the entry barriers just high enough to allow the number of students that uses up all of their capacity but no more. Obviously, this leaves little room for unexpected events like instructors leaving or becoming unavailable.
But the commonality is that both have enough students interested in and capable of doing CS to exceed the capacity of their CS departments.
You can go elsewhere to find big publics like UIUC and Texas A&M or LACs like Swarthmore where CS department capacity limitations limit access to the CS major or courses. CMU is a non-LAC private school that also has CS capacity limitations.
Perhaps an indicator of whether a college is more likely to be surprised by a sudden enrollment jump in CS is how it defines admission to CS criteria.
If admission to CS is competitive for a fixed number of seats, then the department can target enrollment to capacity more predictably than if it admits anyone meeting a pre-announced GPA.
It is not surprising that UCB had issues with exploding enrollment in L&S CS before the change to direct pre-admit:
L&S CS admitted anyone with a pre-announced 3.3 GPA in CS 61A, 61B, 70.
These three courses were not graded competitively or “on a curve” – i.e. B+ and higher grades were not rationed to limit the number of students qualifying for the 3.3 GPA.
The department wanted to avoid limiting access to those three courses for undeclared frosh/soph students, so it expanded class sizes with additional TAs.
CS70 is graded on a curve. 61A and 61B are not but the grade bin thresholds are prospectively set for each class based on past performance in such a way that the class average is around B+. The problem is that when the class sizes grow a lot even a bunch of curved grades or targeted mean grades won’t control the #s.
I am a professor at a mid-sized state school. We basically can’t take non-CS majors in our courses, and cannot offer the CS minor, due to lack of space. It’s not so much that we can’t hire as much as no funds to pay them.
Students self-teaching a course could work in the sense of conveying knowledge and skills, but it wouldn’t be able to qualify towards the degree.