Universities Can’t Accommodate All the Computer Science Majors — from insidehighered.com by Johanna Alonso
High interest in the field has led to overcrowded classes and other issues. Now some institutions are adding requirements to help force students out of the major.
Before this year, if you wanted to major in computer science at the University of Michigan, your only barrier was getting accepted to the university.
But a new model requires all students who want to study computer science—whether they are incoming or already enrolled—to apply for the major separately.
Michael Wellman, Michigan’s chair of computer science and engineering, said that the university has worked for years to try to accommodate everyone who wants to study the subject, hiring as many as six faculty members annually in recent years and even building a new computer science facility. The number of CS degrees awarded rose from 132 in 2012 to 600 in 2022.