Computer programming, once the hot major in U.S. colleges and the ticket to a good job, is being shunned on college campuses today.
The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday enrollment in U.S. computer science programs dropped 23 percent from 2002 to 2003.
College students are fleeing from the major, spooked by stories of unemployed computer programmers who are afraid their jobs will be outsourced to India and Eastern Europe.
However, the U.S. Labor Department projects the number of jobs for computer software engineers will grow 46 percent by 2012.
The Microsoft Corp. in Redwood, Wash., has said it will hire 4,000 new workers during the next 12 months.
Computer science today is poised to do … amazing things, Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates told students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where computer science enrollments dropped 44 percent between 1999 and 2003.
