One of the problems that our department has struggled with over the past seven or eight years is the massive decline in student enrolments in our Computer Information Systems applied degreee and our Computer Science university transfer program. Since the height of the dot com boom in 2000, are numbers have declined by about 75%, or about 50% in comparision to our pre-boom numbers of the mid 1990s. One of the consequences of this drop in student numbers is that we've had to make our first-year courses easier in order to maintain enough numbers to make a viable third-year cohort.

The Information and Communications Technology Council of Canada has recently released a report which describes and assesses these recent trends in computer science in Canadian universities and finds that a similar drop occurred at pretty much every college and university in Canada. The report examines five frequently-suggested explanations for this decline: public perceptions surrounding the dotcom bubble burst in 2000-2002, and parental and student perceptions about likely employment opportunities; public perceptions and lack of understanding about the field of computer science as it is today; the failure of many university computer science programs to adapt to changed circumstances; the ubiquity of computers, so that general purpose computing is now, literally, commonplace; and deficiencies in the high-school environments in the preparation of students for IT education and careers.

You can view this report youself: Outlook on IT enrolments.pdf (4.49 mb)