Bubble Bursts, Students Learn

I happened to be reading about a program that would reinvigorate interest in computer science, as according to studies, it is in decline! If you've been around engineering academia for the last couple of years then you've probably heard of the woeful drop in computer science majors, such as the study at UCLA. Below is an image from the report.

The total incoming freshmen in computer science drops dramatically during the years 1984 and 2001 (ominously enumerated years if ever there were). The usual, kneejerk reaction is to bemoan the loss of popularity.

But reinterpret the same data as a correlation to the two of the greatest electronic media gluts: the videogame glut of 1983 and the Dot-Com bubble-burst of 2001. Look again at the graph above, but not at the troughs, instead at the peaks. It is the peaks which are the anomolies. They are abnormally high and are much less stable than their surrounding gradual climbing troughs. And their ramp coincides with the public perception's craze of their age: Videogames became pop culture starting with Space Invaders and Galaxian at the end of the 70s and Pac-Man in 1981. That is where the influx of freshmen computer scientists begins to surge. And 1994 saw the birth of the world wide web, which is when the second rise begins.

By this hypothesis, these dramatic dropoffs are nothing other than sanity checks, returns to the reality in which physical space still exists, and everything virtual must still produce a tangible benefit.

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