Is Computer Science Dying

The statistics do not lie, especially when they are repeated year after year. Computer Science faces a rocky future in Ireland. When other countries like India are pushing computer science in a big way, Ireland has seen numbers applying for computer science third-level courses in a freefall.

Yesterdays leaving certificate results show that, once again, the failure rates for mathematics and science are alarmingly high. They are so bad that we now have Minister for Education Mary Hanafin calling for third-level colleges to accept Foundation Level mathematics as a minimum requirement. There was a time when you needed an honour in higher level mathematics to get into many third-level courses.

Is it any wonder that numbers are falling in applications for computer science when more and more young people are lowering their aspirations in terms of mathematics achievement? If foundation level maths is accepted for the majority of third-level courses, where is the incentive for a student to study at pass level, let alone higher level? I can see students hedging their bets - dropping to foundation level maths because they have at least 6 other subjects to get their points from. Mathematics is fundamental to computer science and at a very minimum an honour at pass level should be accepted. If more and more people drop into foundation level maths - people that are capable of achieving more but are only using maths to calculate their final leaving cert points tally - then I do not see much of a future for computer science.

It may not be all doom and gloom though for the software industry in Ireland. Other courses that bridge the gap between business and computer science are proving to be popular. Courses in Business Information Systems (BIS) and Management Information Systems (MIS) do offer, over the course of a full undergraduate degree, a reasonable proportion of practical computer science subjects, such as programming, database management systems, operating systems and netwworking. That is welcome from an employers point of view, but can these graduates fill the research gap at a time when the government is pushing the notion of more PhD graduates?

Will we reach the point where we have lots of PhD computer science research programme places that cannot be filled by Irish graduates?