Between the Information Economy and Student Recruitment: Present Conjuncture and Future Prospects

Between the Information Economy and Student Recruitment: Present Conjuncture and Future Prospects Fionn Murtagh∗ Director, Information, Communications and Emergent Technologies Science Foundation Ireland Wilton House, Wilton Place, Dublin 2, Ireland Email: fmurtagh@acm.org March 4, 2022 Abstract In university programs and curricula, in general we react to the need to meet market needs. We respond to market stimulus, or at least try to do so. Consider now an inverted view. Consider our data and perspectives in university programs as reflecting and indeed presaging economic trends. In this article I pursue this line of thinking. I show how various past events fit very well into this new view. I provide explanation for why some technology trends happened as they did, and why some current developments are important now. 1 The Downturn in Academic Computer Sci- ence Undergraduate Student Recruitment The student recruitment crisis of Computer Science and Engineering (CS and E) has been seen as one where there is over-provision of supply relative to demand. A response has been sought in more public outreach and in restructuring course provision. I am completely at one with this important work. In this article I want to look at this context of discomfort and indeed of crisis from a very different vantage point. I will argue that we can view the swings of fortune in CS and E student recruitment as a prism with which to view large ∗Fionn Murtagh is also Professor of Computer Science in the University of London. De- partment of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, England 1 arXiv:0809.0874v1 [cs.CY] 4 Sep 2008 scale underlying technology and economic trends. I will illustrate this argument in various ways. In an ideal world we could step back and just note that student demand has gone elsewhere, assuming relatively unchanging demographics. Maybe we would even retool our expertise, by changing research discipline for example. But there has been very great fluctuation in student demand and reacting overly hastily to the ups and downs of fortune is rarely a good idea. In this article I will look closer at this fluctuation in student demand for CS and E. I will reverse the usual view of trying to explain student demand in terms of deep-lying economy needs. Instead I will present the view that major fluctuations in the economy can – up to a point – be interpreted and understood by the available data on student demand. The fit with a wide range of important technology trends is very good, as I will exemplify. Between technological upswings I will present the view that one should pre- pare well for the next upswing. In regard to how we prepare for the future, one point to be noted is that our perspective will be a cloudy one if traditional eco- nomic categories like manufactured goods and services dominate our thinking. See section 2.5 for further discussion here. Relatively interchangeably in this article I will use the terms CS and E, and ICT or information and communications technology. The latter is preferred when the industrial, commercial and market aspects are strongly represented. 2 The Information Society and the New Econ- omy Periods of Spectacular Growth There have been two major ICT-led economic booms in recent times. In both phases, the communications aspect of computing was hugely prominent. Figure 1 shows an educational reflection of what happened and when. I use North American data a number of times in this article because it is of high quality and collected in a consistent way over many years. Twice, we find major upswings in attractiveness of the science and technology. Figure 1 relates to incoming student intentions. Like business confidence surveys vis-`a-vis the economy, Figure 1 expresses the pulling power of the discipline (or the generally perceived tight cluster of disciplines associated with CS and E). We see, well- mirrored in Figure 1, a massive take-offof, and interest in, computerization. By the late 1980s, this was in free-fall. Growth was ratcheted up in the 1990s. By early 2001, the economy was slipping fast (see e.g. [30] in support of the downturn starting in late 2000). I will look at these two massive technology upswings, well expressed by the bumps in Figure 1. In line with what they have been often called, I will use the respective terms of Information Society and New Economy periods or booms. As a synonym here for boom, I will use the term upwelling. In ocean processes, upwelling is heat- and gravity-engendered. Upwelling events have important implications for biomass and later parts of the food chain. The 2 upwelling metaphor is an apt one. 2.1 The Information Society Boom Periodizing the earlier Information Society boom may be helped by Figure 1 and this note from [36] that “between 1980 and 1986, undergraduate CS production nearly quadrupled to more than 42,000 degrees. This period was followed by a swift decline and leveling offduring the 1990s”. The first g

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