And with that on my mind, I was particularly struck by a recent post on Mark Guzdial's blog reposting a keynote by Eric Roberts:
[in response to increasing CS enrolments], 80% of the universities are responding by increasing teaching loads, 50% by decreasing course offerings and concentrating their available faculty on larger but fewer courses, and 66% are using more graduate-student teaching assistants or part-time faculty. [...] However, these measures make the universities’ environments less attractive for employment and are exactly counterproductive to their need to maintain and expand their labor supply. They are also counterproductive to producing more new faculty since the image graduate students get of academic careers is one of harassment, frustration, and too few rewards.
Computer science departments have, for decades, had cyclical enrolment. The sort of oscillation in enrolments is exactly the sort of thing you see in systems analysis when you have a balancing feedback loop with a delay in it.
