Why do so few people major in computer science?

I have a CS degree from a small liberal arts school.

I've only had to do a handful of interviews, but they've always been extremely mellow (my last one took place on a chairlift) and I've been practically begged to take each job. Then again, I'm in Wyoming, not Silicon Valley so that may have something to do with it.

What interesting things are going on in the field of CS from a scientific POV?

From my experience, the main reason for the low number of CS majors is simple: most students don't know what Computer Science is. At the university where I teach, half of the CS majors arrived on campus not knowing they would major in Computer Science simply because they didn't know what CS was. Only after taking a first year engineering sequence where they sample different aspects of multiple engineering disciplines do many of these students realize CS is an attractive and interesting field to study.

Moreover, I have taught a variety of introductory to computing courses to non-CS majors (ie. humanities and business) and what I've found is that a number of students (particularly women) really enjoy the computing classes and say they wish they had majored or minored in CS, but they didn't know what it was until they took the class. A few actually do switch into a computing related major afterwards, though not necessarily CS.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but while many people know how to use computers and technology, many people don't actually understand how it works. Because of this, Computer Science is a mystery to most people and so they don't consider it. This is in part why I am excited about the CS4All movement at the K-12 level... simply exposing Computer Science or computational thinking will go a long way in attracting more people to the major.

Alternatively, another reason why you don't necessarily see a growth in CS majors is because programming is not restricted to Computer Science. Most science and engineering disciplines involve programming now and many curriculums will have programming courses. This is even true in humanities (ie. digital humanities) and business (ie. data analytics) where coding is becoming a desirable skill. If you had a deep interest in say economics and needed to develop some programming skills to simulate models or evaluate data, you can gain these skills and knowledge outside of the CS major and I think that is a good thing.

With this in mind, I think a lot of CS departments will need to consider the shift from being a "destination" major to a "service" major where a significant portion of the teaching load is to non-CS majors who want a minimal core, but not all of CS. A flat growth in CS majors does not necessarily mean a lack of computing or programming education in general.

Finally, I would say that in my department, we have seen record growth in the past few years (from 50 a few years ago to 150) and that is caused a number of problems. This is not restricted to our university as noted in "Generation CS" from CRA:

http://cra.org/data/generation-cs/

So for us, the challenge for us is not growing the number of majors but how to manage the surge in a sustainable manner.

> The number of grads for difficult degrees and the quality of grads seems to be another story.

This is why I never believed the "There is no STEM shortage" stories. They were mostly based on the assumption that all STEM grads were qualified to work in STEM. That's not true in any field where you can complete a degree with a C or D average.

I find it unfortunate that some of the larger software companies filter out applicants based on the school they graduated from, but I understand it. The companies have to have some sort of filtering mechanism, because many colleges clearly do not.

Well, "artist" is a little farther away than the other two, but I would submit that most of the people who have what it takes to be a median accountant or lawyer probably also has what it takes to be a median programmer. For all the discussion of how we "think differently", I honestly don't think there's that much separation. Maybe when you get to the higher levels, but that separation is as much within the profession as between professions. There are programmers who have whatever the wiring is that makes them want to sit down in their free time and write a new kernel, and there are programmers who are reasonably content cranking out Wordpress installs on a 9-5 schedule.

And for what it's worth, I suspect that if most people were willing to put in the time and effort to learn how to create art, you'd find that many more people can create reasonable art than you would otherwise believe, because we've talked ourselves into a model of artistic talent that seems to hold that it's a binary switch, rather than something like any other skillset, where some people are more talented, but where almost anyone can develop some ability in it if they put in time and effort. I'm not a naturally talented basketball player, but I can run and play defense and hit a reasonable jumper in a pickup game, because I've spent a lot of time over several years learning how to play and then playing a bunch of games.