Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)

If it was true in the 80s, it was certainly true in the early 2000s when I was getting my CprE degree. I met quite a few people who were studying ComS or CprE for reasons that can be summed up as, "I built my own computer, I like video games, people said I'm good with computers, so I should be a Computer Science/Computer Engineering major!" They rarely lasted more than a semester or two, though I think the most epic flameout I knew managed a whopping 0.34 GPA his first semester...

And if the goal is "Get a degree, coast on through life with the easy money from computers," well... good luck. There are some very wide open pathways where if you're good, you can make lots of coin, but they're rare, and most tend to involve an awful lot of years of hard learning before you're competent (embedded dev and firmware/OS dev are some fields desperate for competent hires).

If you can write solid C, ring 0/EL3 doesn't scare you off, or you can figure out how to cram 10 pounds of hard realtime code into a 5 pound microcontroller... yeah, you'll go far. Come out having done the minimum, knowing Python and Javascript, well... there's an awful lot of competition for most of those positions if you're just a basic coder, not skilled at using those to accomplish interesting real world tasks ("make those images slide across the webpage" is not particularly novel or interesting anymore).

I'm struggling a bit to find ComS majors as a percent of degrees, but some stuff I've found indicates it's only in the 3-4% range or so today, so while it's double the percentage referenced in the article, it's not an order of magnitude higher by ratio (though in terms of degrees issued, probably, with college being more popular).

Achually for 10 years nothing exciting happened. Until maybe 1992 when you could install your very own Unix.