<p>I'm new to posting, so please let me know if I did anything wrong. S1 is a HS junior and is quite interested in RPI for CS, but the decline in enrollment from their own web page is a little disturbing (link below). I have three guesses regarding this trend:
1) Apparently there are a lot of double majors engineering with CS and one post suggested that engineering must be first. The note at the bottom of the link references double majors making these numbers higher, and perhaps the policy or accounting of CS majors changed somewhere around 2005.
2) Some program within CS got moved to its own department in 2005.
3) The department is in decline. </p>
<p>I am hoping someone can explain how #3 is not the case.</p>
<p>Student Enrollment History (Troy campus)
Year BS MS PhD
Fall 2011 472 27 66
Fall 2010 478 28 71
Fall 2009 458 14 56
Fall 2008 448 14 63
Fall 2007 438 7 76
Fall 2006 474 14 80
Fall 2005 524 11 81
Fall 2004 586 14 85
Fall 2003 705 30 84
Fall 2002 748 80 73
Fall 2001 798 125 59
Fall 2000 698 121 58
Fall 1999 664 79 51
Fall 1998 525 62 43</p>
<p>1 and 2. Computer Systems Engineering Comp Sci, GSAS/ Comp sci, Physics/Comp Sci, and Math/Comp sci are all very popular at Rensselaer. (All with CS as the second major)
Also, Information Technology and Web Science got its own department, so it was split from CS.</p>
<p>Another point is that CS enrollment soared at colleges with the internet boom in the 1990s and after the internet stocks crashed, CS enrollment declined.</p>
<p>I have seen the same pattern in CS enrollment at other colleges.</p>
<p>Everything I have read and people I have talked to say CS is the place to be with all the new platforms evolving. Hardware people, academics, articles I read all say CS is growing. I was originally trying to talk my son into CpE because you get hardware and software out of it, but after enough data and him preferring CS, I am behind him. That is why I was astonished to see numbers flat the past few years and dropped before that. But splitting out IT and Web to its own department would easily explain it.</p>
<p>CS at RPI is hard… CS I wil be easy, but CS 2 (Data Structures) and CS 4 (Algorithms) are hard. Very hard… Your son can expect to put 20-40 hours of work into CS 2 with the amount of programming. Also, CS 4, is worse because the material is very difficult to wrap around. I was a Computer Systems Engineer, but I switched to Electrical Engineering because I couldn’t handle CS 2.</p>
<p>I’m not sure this is an overall trend, though. At my current university, undergrad CS enrollment has recently been increasing by ~18% per year.</p>
<p>Anyway, the numbers seem to suggest a recent <em>increase</em> in CS majors (the last two years being roughly tied), following a crash probably due to a shift in what is seen as the “money major”.</p>
<p>Not sure about the last few years, but this chart shows that Computer and Information Sciences degrees conferred increased from 30,600 in 1998-1999 to a peak of 59,500 in 2003-2004, then dropping significantly afterwards and being at 39,600 for 2009-2010:</p>
<p>Yes, it would seem rational to assume that the overall figures may have increased since 2009-2010, as this is now seen as a “money major” (even though the RPI CS enrollment figures do not bear that out).</p>