“I didn’t take CS50 because I didn’t want to get discouraged my very first semester,” says Lukasz Strozek ’06, a prospective computer science concentrator currently enrolled in CS51.

“I think its a very bad introduction to computer science, bad for both beginners and people with experience, because it’s busywork,” he says.

Other students say they are discouraged by the high level of knowledge expected in the introductory classes.

“I thought CS50 could have been a good introduction, but the term introduction is a bit misleading,” says Magda Kowalczykowski ’03. “It’s a good, in-depth course, but its not good for people who have never tried [computer science] before. It was just way too fast, and it was all about getting the problem sets done, not about getting the underlying concepts.”

The Economy, Stupid?

According to Gortler, the enrollment decline seems to coincide with the dot-com bust.

Lewis says he agrees.

“At the height of the dot-com bubble, a certain number of students thought a computer science degree would be a ticket to instant millions,” Lewis wrote in an e-mail. “A drop of 20-30 percent seems to me a sensible correction.”

A survey conducted by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University in the fall of 2001 found that job offers for computer science majors were down 17 percent from the year before.

Despite a tough job market, though, nine current and former computer science concentrators interviewed for this story said that job prospects were not a concern in deciding whether or not to stay in the concentration.

Some students have suggested that the problem may not lie with the introductory courses or the economy, but with poor teaching and advising in the department.

“The teaching fellows sucked,” says Kowalczykowski, who now concentrates in government. “My CS50 teaching fellow was a sophomore English concentrator who had no idea how to teach. And the advisors didn’t know anything. They just didn’t care.”

James R. Griswold ’04, a computer science concentrator, also cited poor advising as the department’s main weakness.

“I feel like I have absolutely no contact with my advisor,” Griswold says. “I’m not sure he knows my name, and I took one of his classes last semester.”

According to Gortler, the computer science department is aware that students are dissatisfied with the current level of advising.