Greg Bluestein writes at Associated Press :
At risk, professors say, is nothing less than U.S. technology supremacy. As interest in computer science drops in the U.S., India and China are emerging as engineering hubs with cheap labor and a skilled work force......Schools across the country are taking steps to broaden the appeal of the major.
The computing industry has a reason to be concerned about the future.The number of new computer science majors has steadily declined since 2000, falling from close to 16,000 students to only 7,798 in fall 2006, according to the Computing Research Association.
And the downward trend isn't expected to reverse soon. The association says about 1 percent of incoming freshmen have indicated computer science as a probable major, a 70 percent drop from the rate in 2000.
I would suggest there are other forces at play. The jobs losses caused by the dotcom crash was simply small compared to displacement of Americans due to corporate sponsored immigration policies.
For many technically-inclined Americans, working in a skilled trade is today a more attractive option than corporate or governmental service.
Another major factor is non-economic. H-1b expansion has made corporate and government service quite unattractive-particularly in some organizations with foreign-dominated management that are biased towards a specific ethnic or religious group.
There is considerable value in having technical workers who are actually enthusiastic about a country and its institutions. The brain-dead policies of Bush, Kennedy, and McCain have done just the opposite. They have deeply alienated some of the most skilled workers in the US - a mistake that could take years to recover from.
This is such an error of judgment that it could be literally fatal for the US - particularly if the US finds itself engaged in a technological war.
