I am currently a senior in high school planning to major in computer science. Recently, I have noticed that the amount of students that want to pursue a computer science degree is proliferating. Would this have any impact on the job market by the time I graduate (2020)? I am just worried that I won’t be able to find a job as a software engineer because they are all taken. Also, if there are so many students that go into computer science, wouldn’t the salary decrease because of the demand for them?
The uses of computers continue to increase, too. Your most likely issue isn’t a decline in the need for CS majors, but instead competition from off shore resources. But CS is a hard major, too. A lot of students drop out due to the coursework difficulty.
No one course of study guarantees you employment for you whole career, IMHO. At a minimum, you need to actively learn in new areas and build new skills continually throughout your career to help weather economic downturns and changes. Your degree is just the start of this, although not all college students realize this. If you are truly worried, pick up a minor in something else that might prove useful.
Honestly, even many of the CS majors believe this now. There are reasons (like the increase in CS diplomas becoming exponential recently) to back it up so hmm…
Anyways, no one knows the future.
In fact, what could be THE major could in 3 years be just the opposite. The truth is, if something is already known to be a good major, more or less likely, it could have already passed its peak.
Ehh, what am I saying. Anyways, no degree prepares you for a whole career. In fact, the reason that liberal art majors like pure math, english, etc. exist is cause of this. Cause more than likely, you have less than 24% chance of working on your job (that directly correlates to your major) and that percentage will only exponentially fall after getting your first job.
And… off shoring is a real problem.Yes, intparent dropped the word “off shoring”. And honestly, I think the issue now becoming to real to overlook. But on the flip side, hey, at least the problem isn’t currently to the point in which CS looks that bleak. It’s just that many IT companies have been laying of hundreds of thousands of workers in the States recently due to offshoring.
<And before anyone says foreign workers (from offshoring) have inferior education, go look at the disproportionate amount of those with Asian ethnicity in top colleges. Quite frankly, majority of the top students in my class have almost always been Asian and the recent pHd candidates are almost all Asian (from my point of view). Add in the lower wage in different countries and why wouldn’t you offshore? Even if the average worker is inferior, if the minimum wage in a country is like a dollar or 2, giving 8 dollars an hours will give you a much better worker than here in the States since in the foreign worker’s point of view, he/she is getting 4x the minimum wage. (and you can get around with paying only 5 dollars an hour in this case cause you are still paying like 2.5x the minimum wage which is still a better deal than in the States in which that’s just the minimum wage itself). All simple math ^^
Btw, isn’t the States ranked like 27 in education? Add in the fact that many of the countries above that ranking have much lower minimum wage and… why wouldn’t you offshore? IT work just needs computers and stuffs which can literally be placed anywhere 
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@intparent Is it possible to major in computer science and minor in electrical engineering?
Sounds grueling to me… you have to see what is offered at your colleges, too. What about a business minor?
Most of the workers employed by WiPro, Infosys, etc are NOT IIT material. The issue with Indian education is it’s too based on route learning and there isn’t much application. It is all reading the book and taking the test. This is one of the main reason why so many pursue grad school over in the states. For Indian University grads, a US grad degree is much more beneficial than for Americans. Because in a grad program, you’re education goes beyond just taking exams. You get much more hands on training.
Keep in mind many Americans don’t pursue a grad degree in CS or Engineering because there is no need for it to get a job in their field. They have done quite a bit of hands on learning.
I have worked for a major offshoring companies before and the work is extremely mediocre. I am not saying all offshore workers are bad, however, the good ones left the offshoring firms a long time ago. The good programmers in India will cost as or almost as much as an American Programmer.
It’s not the quantity of programmers, it’s the quality of programmers. Hiring more programmer won’t always give you a return on value. When you have to hire others to fix the poor work of cheap coders, it ends up costing more. Plus, you have language and time barriers. This is why trying to offshore anything beyond low level tasks is usually a disaster.
US High Schools are ranked 27 in education, but that gap closes at the college level. U.S. universities are much more application/hands-on based. Look at the QS World Rankings…it’s dominated by US and British Universities. I believe the highest ranked IIT is #179. Look at the QS rankings by subject, not a single Indian school is ranked in the Top 50 for CS. Keep in mind IIT’s and IIS’s are top schools and a very small minority of people at the Offshoring companies.
In the Shanghai rankings, I don’t even think they’re ranked. IIT’s are hard to get into, but again that based on a test score. Nothing else about the candidate is looked at.
OP, keep in mind, it depends on your location. The culture and job market in Silicon Valley is going to be totally different than in Nashville. In many of the Southern, Midwestern and Mountain states job opportunities are extremely good. The mentality is to hire domestic.
Also, Computer Science is quite versatile. I have seen people from my CS program go into a number of non-software development fields where they used their problem solving or technical skills (e.g. sales engineer, patient attorney, product manager, actuary, finance, consulting, etc.).
There is a reason that CS graduates should prefer to stay out of IT (which is typically a semi-technical “business” function in most companies) and go for jobs designing and developing the company’s core intellectual property (which is much less likely to be outsourced).
A large percentage of immigrants from Asia come on F-1 visas for graduate study in the US, and may eventually work here with H-1B* visas and perhaps gain permanent residency. Their kids will grow up in homes headed by highly educated parents, which makes them more likely to achieve highly in school.
*Note that these H-1B visa holders with US graduate degrees tend to be employed directly by companies and get paid very well, but they are only a minority of H-1B visa holders, since the low-end outsourcing companies hog most of the H-1B visas for their employees with bachelor’s degrees from foreign schools you never hear of (way below IIT level, of course).
@ucbalumnus What would you consider to be IT? Would some software development, like ASP.net web development fall under IT? And what would you consider to be ‘core intellectual property’?
Just curious.
You cannot minor in engineering at any ABET school. Double majoring may be possible but you won’t complete your degree in 4 years.
IT means the management of computing resources, as opposed to design and development. Core intellectual property is what the company designs and develops that is its reason for existence (i.e. what is unique about its products or services that others are willing to pay for).
Some actually do offer engineering minors.
That’s not how the term is used in the real world. In many companies, the IT group includes the company’s software engineers, database developers and administrators, and those who set up and maintain computing resources. Other companies make a distinction between the software engineering group and the IT group, with the latter referring primarily to the database group.
In my real world experience, the management and administration of computing resources is sometimes under the product software development group (usually when the organization is small), but not the other way around.
If you are interested in both CS and Electrical Engineering you could consider Computer Engineering. If you are in the College of Engineering pursuing a degree it is sometimes possible to obtain a minor in another engineering discipline. For example, you could major in EE and minor in CS. Other options may include minors in Engineering Science and Mechanics, Biomedical Engineering, Naval Engineering etc depending upon the university.
The general trend I’ve seen is that while CS majors seldom find themselves unemployed, they could very easily find themselves doing commodity grunt work (coding a website for $12/hour) in a bad economy or if they aren’t particularly good at finding jobs.
No major will give you a lifetime worth of employment, but demand for software engineers most certainly won’t collapse horribly in just 4.5 years. It’s a solid major for finding employment.
@NeoDymium So you are saying that even though so many students are going into computer science, demand for Software engineers are still high? Also, @intparent , what type of advantages would a minor in business give me for computer science?
Any company has to make money. Understanding the business side of what is going on in your company and with your clients can only be an advantage.
2001-2003 was a really bad job market with high unemployment for those looking for jobs that CS graduates tend to seek.
That much is true, especially if you want to work in what passes for the “tech industry” companies (i.e. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and friends). But it’s all relative - numbers suggest it was something like 7% in those years. Which is weak and probably suggests high degrees of underemployment, but it could be much worse.
At the moment they’re high (not ridiculous or bubble-like but they’re doing pretty well compared to most other majors), and four years of engineering school is a pretty significant barrier to entry, though that doesn’t mean that salaries will be high four years from now. If it’s what you want to do, it isn’t what I’d call a high-risk (for unemployment) major. But know that there’s definitely low-tier grunt work in CS that I doubt you’d really be too interested in doing.