Last Tuesday, NYT science commentator John Tierney discussed how Congress has recently ramped up enforcement of Title IX among universities’ science departments. Will a “quota system”–an idea Tierney floats in the third paragraph of his piece–be an outcome of Title IX enforcement?
So far, the increased enforcement has only consisted of periodic compliance reviews, which had been long-neglected by the NSF, Department of Energy, and NASA, according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office report. These reviews are intended to make sure grantee departments are not discriminatory.
Of course, since some fields like computer science have many more men than women–both among students and faculty–there is concern that the government might start considering everyone “discriminatory” using the yardstick of proportionality and quotas. For athletics departments, such rigorous Title IX enforcement has led to a huge increase in the participation and achievement of women athletes, but at the expense of some male sports.
The sciences are not necessarily in the same boat as sports: although most would agree that women face an uphill battle in the sciences, how much of the gap can be explained by discrimination remains an open question. “60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s” are women, raising the possibility that more women simply prefer other fields, as psychologist Susan Pinker argues.
Another possibility is that if discrimination is having any effect, most of it happens before girls reach college. One study suggests that differences at adolescence explain different outcomes 20 years later.
For now, though, the compliance reviews haven’t rocked any boats. But the threat of a Title IX bludgeon hanging over departments’ heads is sure to add urgency to debates about the shortage of women in fields like computer science and what to do about it.
Voters ballots may be more partisan than ever, but the vast majority of Americans can agree that we need to invest in science and technology, according to a recent poll.
71 percent of polled voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who is committed to making sure the federal budget invests in scientific research. And a whopping 86 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate committed to public investments in science and technology education.
Such investments have majority support among democrats as well as republicans (and independents, too), demonstrating the broad bipartisan consensus behind funding for science.
Hat tip: Gene Spafford
Ed Lazowska, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium, has a passionate post today on the CCC Blog about what the latest numbers from CRA’s Taulbee Survey really mean. The news is not, he points out, that computer science bachelors degrees show another year of decline — that was completely predictable from the enrollment statistics for freshman CS majors published four years ago in the survey. The real news (as we noted back in March) is that for the first time in many years, freshman interest in CS as a major increased and enrollments have stabilized — indicating that perhaps we may have turned a corner. What’s responsible for the turnaround? According to Lazowska:
[B]y far the most important factors are (a) the job market (or peoples sense of the job market), and (b) the level of buzz associated with the field.
Lets start by considering graduate enrollment, rather than undergraduate enrollment. For the past 15 years, the number of Ph.D.s granted annually in computer science has been in the 900-1100 range. Suddenly, though, in the past 2 years, it has climbed to 1800. Why is this? The answer is totally obvious:
- In 2001, lots of startup companies went bust.
- This dumped onto the job market a number of the best bachelors graduates from a few years before, who now had two or three years of experience under their belts.
- This made it hard for some excellent new bachelors graduates of 2001 and 2002 to get the super-exciting jobs they had anticipated they were competing with people whose academic records were every bit as good as theirs, but who also had 2 or 3 years of experience working at a hot startup.
- Because these great new bachelors graduates couldnt get exciting jobs, they went to graduate school instead.
- And, mirabile dictu, 6 years later, theyre emerging with Ph.D.s.
This is not a news flash it didnt take a genius to predict, a few years ago, that it was going to happen, and it doesnt take a genius to explain it, either.
Similarly for bachelors degrees. Starting in about 2002, there was lots of news about the tech bust. Tech was no longer sexy. Jobs were no longer plentiful. Subsequently, there was a lot of misleading information about the impact of offshoring. And the newspapers never bothered to report that by late 2004, US IT employment was back to the 2000-2001 level we had fully recovered from the bust somehow that wasnt considered newsworthy. So its not surprising that interest in bachelors programs decreased sharply, and that 4 and 5 years later, the number of degrees granted precisely mirrored this decline.
Also, its not surprising that things are turning around. Google is hot. Tech in general is hot. There are startups everywhere. Its clear to anyone that there are plenty of jobs. (By the way, given the incredible state of todays bachelors job market, it doesnt take a genius to predict that the number of Ph.D. graduates in 2014 will show a decline. When you read the scary headlines 6 years from now, remember that you heard it here first!)
Ed also talks about the experience at his institution, the University of Washington, tries to put the “crisis” in computer science in perspective by offering up some comparisons to the other science and engineering disciplines, and emphasizes the bright outlook suggested by various Dept. of Labor workforce projections (pdf). In typical Lazowska style, it’s a forceful but accurate refutation of the standard story on CS enrollments we’ve seen for the last few years. It’s definitely worth a read (and comment!) over at the excellent CCC Blog (Disclaimer: CCC is an activity of CRA, but that doesn’t make it any less awesome.)
From the CCC Blog
- DARPA Issues PERFECT Solicitation Erwin Gianchandani
- Microsoft Announces New Policy-Focused Internship Program Erwin Gianchandani
- NAE Elects its Class of 2012 Erwin Gianchandani
- NIST to Fund Pilot Projects Advancing Trusted Identities Erwin Gianchandani