Sunday, May 03, 2009

State of Computer Science in the US and Canada


Ph.D. production [in computer science] continues to climb. A total of 1,775 new Ph.D.s were awarded between July 2006 and June 2007 (Table 1). This represents an increase of 18% over last year, and follows last year’s 26% increase over the previous year. This year’s production of more than 1,700 was predicted last year, and for the second straight year tracks the departments’ own estimates reasonably well. The “optimism ratio,” defined as the actual number divided by the predicted number, was 0.95, similar to last year’s 0.94. If this year’s optimism ratio holds again next year, there will be approximately 1,900 new Ph.D.s produced in 2007-2008.

From the Computing Research Association's 2006-07 Taulbee survey of of Ph.D.-granting departments of computer science (CS) and computer engineering (CE) in the United States and Canada. There's a lot of interesting data in there -- right from bachelor's programs all the way up to the professoriat.

Here's something about women in computer science:

For the second straight year, the proportion of women among new Ph.D.s rose to 19.1% in 2007 from 18.1% the previous year.

[...]

Perhaps even more alarming is the drop in the fraction of Bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, from 14.2% last year to 11.8% this year (Table 9). The fraction of new female students is reported now to be less than 10% in many Bachelor’s programs.

[...]

The fraction of women hired into tenure-track positions rose from 19.5% last year to 23.9% this year. This is a higher fraction than the 19.1% of female Ph.D.s produced (Table 2).

2 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    I guess if it had not been for the industry the CS would probably be suffering from the postdoc crisis as the other sciences.

  2. madraskaari said...

    Completely unrelated:

    http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/05/01/for-china-a-reverse-brain-drain-in-science/

    What do you make of this article and is there a similar trend in Indian science as well?