Can anyone help me understand these statistics on UIUC website:
https://cs.illinois.edu/about-us/statistics
For example: if 207 students are enrolled in the “Math + CS” degree in 2014,
does the number of undergraduate degrees granted seem appropriate with the number of
undergraduates enrolled in that degree program?
I don’t understand your question.
The 207 students enrolled in 2014 include freshman-senior students.
The CS+ x program wasn’t available until starting fall 2013, though I am not sure how there could have been graduates prior to that. Maybe it was like a “build-your-own” program.
The 23 students that were awarded a Math +CS degree in 2014-2015 started college in 2011 or earlier.
Maybe what is confusing is the 207 # of students. I would think normally one could divide by 4 (freshman-senior years) to get a rough idea of how many student per year. Obviously there would be more freshman then less as the years went on because of attrition. So 207 divided by 4 = 51 ish. per year. I would guess (SWAG) say maybe 65-70 starting freshman then maybe 40 seniors. I’m purely GUESSING on distribution.
it is still a relatively new program. So the degrees awarded are going to be lower initially as the program builds.
Look at the difference between 2014 and 2016 enrolled for Math + CS: 207 vs 307.
the 307 divided by 4 = 76ish per class
Thanks for posting this link. I was wondering about the statistics for the CS + x programs.
One more thing, if you have a lot of AP credit, which most CS majors do, you can come in with higher than freshman standing. Standing is only determined by credit hours so that’s why the stats will skew heavily towards seniors. E.g. I’m in my 4th semester but I have senior standing.
I emailed someone at the Dept of Computer Science at UIUC this morning and this is his reply to my question:
“Anything I say is going to be speculative, but I have some theories and I’m pretty confident they’re accurate. First of all, more Math & CS students transfer out of their major than CS-Engineering majors. It used to be that quite a few of them actually transferred to CS-Engineering, though that has become more difficult in the last year or two. In the last few years, too, a number of Math & CS admits had actually been denied admission to CS-Engineering and had put Math & CS down as their second choice. Many of them did just fine, but some of them actually ended up being not quite as strong as the CS-Engineering students. And I think the upper-level Math classes can actually be more difficult than the upper-level CS classes. Again, I don’t have any actual input to back all this up, but from having advised so many of the students, this is the sense I get.”
Math+CS (and Stats+CS) actually have existed for quite a few more years than the other CS+X programs.